Transphobia is the Western influence we should be afraid of

The last decade has seen a rise in violence and harassment of anyone that falls outside the conventional gender binary in Bangladesh, with specific vitriol aimed at transgender people – those whose gender does not match their sex assigned at birth. Alongside poorly aimed policies to determine gender status which rely on invasive medical practices and outdated modes of thinking about bodily autonomy, there has been a sharp increase in outing transgender people, doxxing, and co-ordinated attempts at denying their access to education, healthcare, housing, and basic civil liberties. There has been a noticeable uptick in transphobia during the tenure of the interim government, whose chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, reaches for performative allyship when his pseudo-liberal brand needs to be seen to be doing the right thing in the West rather than him actually doing the right thing in Bangladesh. The tacit silence of Yunus and his advisers on this matter amounts to state-sponsored bigotry, which Western neoliberal imperialism would be proud of.

The populist narrative is that transgender identity is an insult to Bangladeshi culture, which concerned citizens are defending on behalf of society by calling out the evils of Western neoliberal imperialism vis-a-vis transgender rights. Questions around citizens’ access to basic safety and constitutionally protected rights have become part of the wider discourse of who is allowed to belong in Bangladeshi society. But while transphobes would have the wider public believe that they are simply defending local values from foreign invasion, a look at their strategy shows a sinister similarity with what is happening in the USA and the UK – the originators and arbiters of so-called immorality. The forms of bigotry and their justifications, from deadnaming to the religious vitriol, were made in the USA and the UK, to further the imperial cause. 

Both the USA and the UK have seen an unabated shift to the conservative right since the turn of the century. Progress made in the 2010s by judicial decisions which protected marginalised rights has been undone by toxic social rhetoric tantamount to hate crime rising unchecked, politicians and high profile figures regularly dehumanising minority groups with impunity, and recent court cases providing legal cover for bigotry and prejudice. Transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse communities have been among the most viciously targeted for abuse. In the UK alone, recorded instances of transphobic hate crimes rose from 313 in 2011-2012, to 4,780 in 2023-2024. These are just the crimes that were recorded as transphobic, meaning that they not only had to be reported by the victim, which is exceedingly rare in a country that remains institutionally queerphobic, but that transphobia had to be recognised as the main motivating factor. 

Fuelling this spate of violence is the glee with which politicians, journalists and commentators use queer communities as cannon fodder. After a recent mass shooting in the USA was traced to a shooter who may be transgender, media outlets across the land of the free started discussing whether civil rights for all gender-diverse individuals should be curbed. The White House and the Department of Justice have begun looking into laws that might restrict firearm ownership for transgender people, a shocking instance of Republicans considering any sort of gun control. All of this is happening in spite of the fact that there were 297 other mass shootings recorded in 2025 as of September 7th, none of which had a perpetrator who was even potentially transgender. A similar effort at stoking anti-trans sentiment after the Charlie Kirk shooting was only abandoned after the identity of the shooter was revealed – though some media outlets are still trying to find out if the assailant had any transgender friends.

In the UK, the unhealthy focus on bathroom usage is the most visible symptom of everyday transphobia. Positions taken by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC, the UK’s national human rights body), the Health and Social Care Minister, the governing Labour Party and opposition Conservative Party, national sports bodies, educational rights groups, and the shamefully high number of so-called gender critical activists (including far too many prominent individuals who remain liberal darlings of Bangladeshi elites, such as J. K. Rowling) are all aimed at making life untenable for the country’s transgender population. By undermining rights across the board – access to healthcare, right to education, protections for privacy and personal security, access to public spaces, freedoms of speech and expression – it becomes impossible for a transgender person to simply exist. At the same time, transphobic speech and actions are increasingly being protected as part of the right to offend and the right to openly say unpopular opinions, creating a narrative whereby transphobes are not simply saying things but doing so in brave defence of the social fabric.

This concerted effort is being aimed at a demographic that constitutes 0.55% of the British population (as per the latest census) and no more than 1% of the US population (based on informed estimates). Minority groups make for excellent scapegoats, after all. It is exactly that same type of prejudicial and opportunistic targeting that has happened with transgender rights in Bangladesh, and it is distinctly un-Bangladeshi. On a historical level, criminalisation of queer identity is a British colonial remnant, whereas the existence, acceptance and even celebration of queer identities, including in Islamic settings, has historical precedent in what is today Bangladesh. While it would be disingenuous to try and paint pre-colonial South Asia as a queer utopia, what can be said with certainty is that there was a wider diversity of queer expression that was largely accepted as part of everyday life. These communities did face hardships and prejudice, but there was no systemic definition of them as a legal and political other until the British penal code took hold.

Section 377 is an oft-cited example, but there is also the Criminal Tribes Act, which framed entire communities as having criminal proclivities and, thus, justified their mass imprisonment based purely on their identity. The Act included hijra and gender non-conforming individuals, and is the basis for the legal discrimination of those communities (and others, such as some castes and indigenous tribes) across South Asia today. Incidentally, many of the adibashi and indigenous tribes who are still targeted by modern legislation and police codes, have far more progressive views towards queer and trans rights – a source of common ground that is often overlooked when building solidarity. It is also important to remember that the first known use of Section 377 during colonial times was against a hijra – not for engaging in any sexual behaviour, which is what the letter of the law criminalised and continues to criminalise, but for singing in public. The colonial laws and their modern counterparts have never just been about discouraging so-called immoral behaviour; they have always been a means to police basic existence.

The past informs the present. Just as the colonisers imposed social constructs on the local population, to divide and rule, the postcolonial populists, devoid of original and indigenous thought, plagiarise from the former masters’ far right coteries and present it within a pseudo-local framework. White, Christian arguments are thus imposed as brown, Muslim arguments without a hint of irony by Islamists opposed to Christendom. The religious arguments they forward subscribe to eugenics, which has become resurgent in Western far right ideology despite being thoroughly discredited. This slavish devotion of transphobes to their Western masters, born of intellectual dishonesty and a resistance to decolonising their minds, is keeping imperialism alive in Bangladesh. Like any good imperialist, their Bangladeshi agents assume a divine right to superiority that they can use to control and rule. Wrapping their bigotry in majoritarian Islamism to give it a local flavour has the added benefit of appealing to a piety and obedience they demand of the populace. Moreover, they use their beliefs to decree suppression of cultural expression, spaces and practices. These have not only historically and celebratorily been intrinsically queer, but perpetual and indissoluble in Bangladeshi traditions, while seeking to outlaw and control them have always been explicit in imperialism’s mission statement.

Bangladeshi bigots are not simply picking up Western transphobia serendipitously. Just as British colonialism used collaborators to ensure its longevity, including tapping into wells of queerphobia and sexism in South Asia, modern US imperialists are happy to directly export their brand of freedom to other countries. For the USA, their grand moralising mission comes cloaked in evangelism, replacing British Victorian Christianity as the driving force. Groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – which has a global operating budget of more than $11.5 million and has affiliated headquarters in Europe, Africa and South Asia – take particular issue against queer rights. They have directly funded court cases in the USA that are aimed at reducing transgender youths’ autonomy, given legal advice to UK politicians trying to prevent further transgender rights, and provided lobbying and financial support to cases introducing anti-sodomy laws in Africa.

Uganda’s notorious 2023 anti-LGBTQ+ law was largely funded by evangelical money and successive UK governments (both Conservative and Labour) who have refused to introduce unconditional bans on conversion practices because they might protect transgender people, have been guided by US evangelical advisers. They also continue to carry an outsized influence in the USA, with many Republican politicians and even a few Democrats either being members of evangelical lobbying bodies or receiving large donations from them. One of the lobbyists who helped Donald Trump’s selection of three Supreme Court Justices (all of whom are notoriously against transgender rights) was a board member of the ADF, and both the White House and the wider Republican party are happy to misquote scripture when making anti-LGBTQ+ policy decisions. Notably, evangelical funding is not restricted to groups that practice their specific brand of Christianity. They have openly stated that they are willing to work with groups from other religious backgrounds – including Islamists – as long as they have aligned goals of “protecting family values”, the en vogue phrase of imperial moralising. This is probably why some of the most vocal Bangladeshi proponents of Islamism-motivated transphobia online, especially those who run dangerous campaigns to dox transgender individuals, have explicit links with the Republican party and associated evangelical groups, despite not having any commonalities in their religion.

Furthermore, it must be noted that the current wave of Bangladeshi transphobia is not the only attack on marginalised communities in the country. Just as transphobes in the West happily support racism, homophobia, and anti-abortion movements, transphobia in Bangladesh is coinciding with the suppression of civil liberties for other marginalised and minority communities. There has been a steady rise in misogynist hate crimes, especially towards women from religious and ethnic minorities. Adibashi rights are being stripped away because they are not considered Bangladeshi enough to be protected by the constitution, never mind their indigeneity to the land. The widespread attack on marginalised rights brings a chilling reminder of the 2010s in Bangladesh, when killings and violence against many minority groups went unchallenged and without the targeted groups being able to build coalitions of support. While the current situation is perhaps less explicitly violent, it is following the same pattern of othering and dehumanisation garbed in religion that took place then, and has regularly taken place in the West.

Transgender existence, history and celebration are indigenous to Bangladesh, and as historically irrefutable as the fact that its suppression is a product of imperialism. The laws that are used to justify transphobia are the result of Christian moral policing finding a home in Islamism, and the funding and modern tactics used to spread transphobia are the result of US evangelism. If the goal of Bangladeshi transphobes is to remove Western influences, perhaps they should start by looking at the actual history of the culture they claim to protect. They might finally realise that they are the very oppressors they purport to stop.●

Ibtisam Ahmed is a Bangladeshi academic specialising in utopianism, decolonial history, and queer theory.