Category: human rights

The Decline Before the Fall

Reagan, Trump, and the Decay of the US Empire

Published on the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death, and in memory of my friend Kate Doolan, who was an enthusiastic student/author of US and NASA history.

Those of us who lived through the 1980s might remember them fondly despite ourselves. It was the decade when hippies became yuppies, when “greed is good” stopped being a punchline and started being a philosophy. The stock market report appeared on the nightly news for the first time, as though share prices were suddenly everyone’s business. A fictional teenager named Alex Keaton — conservative, ambitious, briefcase-toting — became one of the most beloved characters on US television, and audiences on both sides of the Pacific adored him.

The actor who played him, Michael J. Fox, also played Marty McFly — a kid who travels back to the 1950s and finds it charming, wholesome, and full of promise. Back to the Future was the highest-grossing film of 1985. It also contained one of the decade’s quieter jokes: when Marty tells Doc Brown, living in 1955, that the President of the United States in 1985 is Ronald Reagan, Doc Brown reacts with comic disbelief. An actor? President? Impossible.

US audiences laughed, then went home to a country where it was true.

What neither Marty nor the decade’s nostalgia registered was what else the 1950s contained: McCarthyism, segregation, the systematic exclusion of women and other marginalised groups from public life, and a conformity enforced by fear. The past looked wonderful only once you’d edited out everyone it had harmed. That selective memory wasn’t a movie plot. It was a deliberate political choice.

The mood crossed oceans: Thatcher caught it in Britain; Jeff Kennett in Victoria caught it too, dismantling public services with the same breezy conviction that government was the obstacle rather than the solution. Reagan didn’t just reshape the USA; he exported a worldview: one built on the promise of restoring a greatness that had somehow been stolen and could be reclaimed. Versions of Reaganomics surfaced elsewhere: Thatcher in Britain, Mulroney in Canada, Kennett in Victoria, and Rogernomics in New Zealand, each advancing the same conviction that government was the problem and the past held the answers.

This piece asks what that worldview cost. Not to fight old battles or mock the people who found it genuinely hopeful — many did, reasonably — but because the bill from those choices is still arriving, and it helps to understand who is paying for it.

The Myth Before the Reckoning

Ronald Reagan’s presidency is often remembered as an era of renewal: the optimism, the rhetoric, the promise of a “shining city on a hill.” But the reality beneath the mythology tells a different story. His administration marked a decisive turn in US life, away from collective responsibility and toward a politics built on deregulation, moral panic, religious nationalism, and the erosion of public institutions.

The consequences did not end with the 1980s. They shaped the economic, cultural, and political landscape that produced the crises of the twenty‑first century, culminating in the rise of Trumpism. This is the story of how decline begins long before anyone notices it happening.

When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, the obituaries were reverential. The New York Times described him as a leader who “restored the nation’s confidence” and embodied a uniquely American optimism. The Guardian called him “the great communicator,” a president whose genial style reshaped the political landscape. Across memoirs and retrospectives, Reagan was celebrated as the man who won the Cold War, revived the economy, and rekindled national pride.

Even his critics often conceded the power of his image: the Hollywood polish, the reassuring voice, the fantasy of a country made whole again — a sentiment that would later return in a cruder form under a different president. Over time, Reagan became less a political figure than a national myth, invoked by those who longed for a simpler, more certain America.

From Hollywood to White House (Art by CoPilot AI)

But mythology is not memory. And the record beneath the glow tells a different story. Behind the rhetoric of renewal lay policies that reshaped the country in ways that were less visible at the time but far more consequential: the dismantling of public institutions, the rise of moral panic as governance, the retreat from civil rights, the fusion of religion and politics, and the elevation of ideology over evidence.

This article looks past the eulogies. It examines the structures Reagan weakened, the movements he empowered, and the long tail of consequences that stretched far beyond the 1980s — consequences that shaped the crises of the twenty‑first century and helped pave the way for Trumpism. To understand the present, we must first look clearly at the past, without the soft focus of nostalgia.

The Economic Pivot That Broke the Middle Class

From the 1940s through the 1970s, the United States built a broad middle class through strong unions, high taxes on the wealthy, public investment, and a robust social safety net. Inequality shrank. Mobility rose. Life expectancy climbed.

By the late 1970s, the economy faltered — and voters turned against the postwar consensus.

Reagan promised renewal. What he delivered was decay.

He slashed taxes on the rich and corporations, gutted regulations, weakened antitrust enforcement, and championed supply‑side economics — the idea that prosperity would “trickle down.”

It didn’t.

To be fair to Reagan’s supporters, the stagflation of the late 1970s was real and painful. Carter-era interest rates crushed small businesses and family budgets. Something had to change, and the argument for deregulation and tax cuts was not irrational given that context. The tragedy is not that people believed it, it’s that the evidence since has been so consistently disappointing, and the promised correction never came.

Recent analysis underscores how deep this rupture ran. As The Atlantic observes, the broad middle‑class prosperity of the mid‑twentieth century was not organic or inevitable; it was the product of deliberate New Deal structures that “made the middle class possible.” Those foundations began to erode in the late 1970s and were aggressively dismantled under Reagan, accelerating a shift toward a winner‑take‑all economy. What followed was a slow, measurable collapse in mobility, wage stability, and shared prosperity — a trajectory that continued across subsequent administrations and helped create the political volatility that later defined the Trump era.

Inequality soared. Living standards stagnated. Life expectancy fell behind peer nations. No other advanced economy pivoted so sharply to free‑market ideology, and none experienced such a dramatic reversal in mobility and public health.

A child born today in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than a child born in the United States.

Reagan’s economic worldview did not stop at US borders. Through the influence of the IMF and World Bank, it became the backbone of what economists later called the Washington Consensus: a global program of deregulation, privatisation, weakened labour protections, and shrinking public sectors. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, these policies were imposed on developing nations as conditions for loans and debt relief, reshaping economies from Latin America to Eastern Europe. The result was a worldwide shift toward market fundamentalism whose social consequences — rising inequality, fragile public institutions, and declining mobility — echoed the trajectory already unfolding in the United States.

This was not an accident. It was a choice — and it reshaped economic realities.

The Educational and Civil Rights Retreat

Reagan’s hostility to public education was ideological, not fiscal. He viewed schools as battlegrounds for moral instruction, not engines of equality. His administration pushed for a return to “traditional values,” aligning with organisations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council.

He attempted to dismantle the Department of Education entirely — a department originally created after the Civil War to educate formerly enslaved people, and revived in 1979 to enforce civil rights and equal access. Historical documentation confirms this origin and purpose.

Reagan’s administration:

  • undermined desegregation orders
  • opposed affirmative action
  • intervened in court cases to dismantle busing
  • weakened federal civil rights enforcement

In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights accused the administration of deliberately retreating from the nation’s commitment to educational equality. Commissioner Clarence Pendleton warned that Reagan’s policies would “lead us back to a separate‑but‑equal society.” He was right.

The Human Cost Reagan Ignored

Reagan’s response to AIDS cannot be separated from his administration’s broader hostility toward LGBTQ+ people. The Religious Right had already framed queer existence as a moral threat (Britannica overview), and the White House absorbed that framing through silence and omission. By the time Reagan first mentioned AIDS publicly in 1985, thousands of gay men had already died (ACT UP timeline). Funding was delayed, warnings were dismissed, and public health was subordinated to the culture‑war belief that some lives fell outside the nation’s moral concern — a belief rooted in Christian nationalism and the New Right coalition that shaped the administration’s moral priorities.

Reagan’s presidency unfolded against a widening social divide. His administration cast poverty as a matter of personal failure rather than structural neglect, attacking welfare programs while cutting the supports that kept millions afloat. His cuts to mental‑health funding deepened the emerging crisis of homelessness, shifting care from hospitals to the streets and, eventually, to prisons. The rhetoric of “welfare queens” and “dependency” hardened public attitudes and narrowed the nation’s moral imagination. By the mid‑1980s, homelessness surged, child poverty rose, and the social ideals that had defined the postwar decades began to fray.

The administration’s “Just Say No” campaign reduced addiction to a matter of personal virtue, treating drug use as a moral failure rather than a public health issue. It ignored structural causes — poverty, trauma, lack of treatment — and reinforced the punitive logic of the War on Drugs (DEA historical overview). The irony grew sharper as Reagan himself began to show signs of cognitive decline, later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease (New York Times), while Nancy Reagan’s reliance on prescription medications was widely discussed in Washington (Washington Post). The rhetoric of purity masked a reality of dependency and deterioration. What the campaign offered was not policy but performance: a moral narrative that justified punishment while deflecting attention from the social conditions that made addiction a crisis in the first place.

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

As AIDS spread through communities already pushed to the margins, the White House remained silent. For years, tens of thousands died without acknowledgement from the president. Public health agencies were constrained. Funding lagged. Activists begged for action while the administration treated the crisis as a moral problem rather than a medical one.

“By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.” — ACT‑UP

Writer and activist Larry Kramer captured the fury of those years with devastating clarity. In a 1988 speech, he said: “Our government has the blood of thousands on its hands. Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than any president in history.” (Village Voice)

It was not until April 2, 1987 — deep into his second term — that Reagan finally addressed AIDS publicly. Even then, he used the moment not to mobilise resources or acknowledge the scale of the crisis, but to moralise:

“How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government… AIDS information can not be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons.”

This was the truth about his presidency: suffering was a moral failure, public health was a matter of personal virtue, and government intervention was suspect unless it enforced traditional values. The result was predictable and devastating. A generation was lost. Trust in public institutions collapsed. And the administration’s silence became part of the tragedy itself — a political choice that allowed a preventable catastrophe to deepen unchecked.

The Rise of the Religious Right and the Culture Wars

Reagan’s presidency cemented the alliance between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity. He recognised the growing electoral power of the Religious Right and aligned himself with its agenda. In return, he championed:

  • opposition to abortion
  • prayer in public schools
  • “traditional family values”
  • the moralisation of public policy

The most influential of these groups was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979. It mobilised millions of conservative Christians around a narrative that framed social change as moral decline. Alongside the Southern Baptist Convention and the broader
New Right coalition, it provided the organisational machinery that powered Reagan’s rise and reshaped the Republican Party.

This movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It was built on the demographic realignment produced by the
Southern Strategy — a political shift that drew white evangelicals into the Republican coalition through appeals to cultural grievance, states’ rights, and racialised moral panic. Together, these forces created a durable political bloc that fused religious identity with conservative governance.

Reagan often grounded his politics in explicitly religious terms. He praised the Ten Commandments as superior to “millions and millions of laws,” presenting them as the foundation of legitimate governance. This was not a neutral appeal to heritage; it was a declaration that public policy should reflect a specific religious morality.

This was not a neutral appeal to tradition. The Ten Commandments, examined objectively, are a narrower moral framework than the civil and human rights principles democracies have spent centuries building through careful, methodical debate and reason. Invoking the Ten Commandments was a political claim about whose values counted… and whose did not.

This merger of religion and conservative politics laid the groundwork for the culture wars that define US politics today. Attacks on LGBTQ+ people, bans on teaching Black history, and the policing of gender and sexuality all trace their lineage to this moment. Reagan mainstreamed a form of
Christian nationalism that would later become a defining force in the Republican Party.

The culture wars did not begin with Trump. They began with Reagan. His moral politics reshaped the nation’s cultural landscape, and the consequences of that ideology soon collided with science, engineering, and public safety — with catastrophic results.

This moralised worldview extended into foreign policy. Reagan cast global conflict as a struggle between righteousness and evil, solvable through willpower, military spending, and technological spectacle. The Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly nicknamed “Star Wars”, promised a missile shield that physicists warned was unworkable. It glamourised Hollywood‑style sci‑fi militarism and absorbed billions of dollars that could have strengthened social programs hollowed out by budget cuts. SDI functioned less as a defence system than as an ideology: a belief that US ingenuity could override scientific limits. The diversion of resources and attention into an unworkable fantasy reflected the same confidence in story over evidence that would soon collide with the realities of engineering and risk.

Reagan, Abortion, and the Politics of Selective Morality

Reagan’s stance on abortion is one of the clearest examples of the selective moral framework that defined his presidency. As governor of California, he signed the 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act — at the time one of the most liberal abortion laws in the United States. Yet by the early 1980s, he had become the political figurehead of the anti-abortion movement.

This shift was not theological; it was strategic. It aligned him with the Religious Right and the broader
New Right coalition, which framed abortion as the central moral crisis of modern America. Reagan’s 1983 book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, became a foundational text for the movement. In it, he argued that abortion represented a national abandonment of moral responsibility — a claim that mirrored the rhetoric of the Moral Majority and the Southern Baptist Convention.

The contradiction was stark. Reagan defended the sanctity of “innocent life” while supporting the death penalty, a position that exposed the selective nature of his pro-life stance. Life was protected only within certain moral boundaries; outside them, the state retained the right to kill. This was not a universal ethic but a political theology shaped by the
Southern Strategy and the rise of
Christian nationalism.

The anti-abortion movement that Reagan championed was never solely about the protection of life. It was a mechanism for defining who counted as morally legitimate, and who did not. This narrowing of the moral circle would have profound consequences for public health, civil rights, and the federal response to emerging crises. It set the stage for the administration’s catastrophic inaction during the AIDS epidemic and shaped the culture-war politics that followed.

January 1986: The Challenger Disaster and Reagan’s Denialism

Challenger mission patch (NASA photo)

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart just 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. That evening, President Reagan addressed the nation, closing with a line from John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s wartime poem High Flight: they had “slipped the surly bonds of earth… and touched the face of God.”

What Reagan did not acknowledge was the context behind the tragedy. Engineers at both NASA and Morton Thiokol had warned that the freezing temperatures made the launch unsafe, with the O‑rings at risk of catastrophic failure. Their concerns were overruled by management under schedule pressure and political expectations.

Reagan framed the disaster as an act of fate rather than the result of ignored science. He did not address his administration’s broader pressure on NASA to maintain an aggressive launch schedule, nor the culture that prioritised political optics over engineering judgement.

His refusal to confront the systemic causes of the disaster foreshadowed a larger pattern: the elevation of ideology over evidence, the sidelining of experts, and the denial of responsibility. The Challenger explosion became a grim metaphor for the trajectory of his own nation: a system pushed beyond its limits, warned repeatedly, and ultimately undone by choices its leaders refused to face.

The Challenger disaster was not an isolated failure. It was an early warning of a political culture that would, decades later, embrace conspiracy, reject expertise, and elevate ideology over evidence.

This is perhaps the most politically neutral tragedy in Reagan’s record, because it transcends ideology. The engineers who raised alarms were not liberals or conservatives; they were professionals doing their jobs, and they were overruled by institutional pressure and schedule politics. Any honest conservative who believes in competence, accountability, and getting things right should find the management failures here as troubling as any critic does. The Rogers Commission report, which Reagan himself commissioned, confirmed everything the engineers had warned. Credit where it is due: he ordered that inquiry. But the culture that silenced those engineers predated the disaster and outlasted it.

What Reagan Got Right — And Why It Makes the Failures Harder to Accept

Before tracing that long tail of consequences, honesty requires a pause.

Reagan restored a genuine sense of national confidence after the malaise of the late 1970s, and that mattered. His rhetorical optimism was not purely cynical — many who knew him personally attested to his sincere belief in America’s promise. The Cold War did end on his watch, and while historians debate how much credit he deserves, his willingness to negotiate directly with Gorbachev in his second term showed more pragmatism than his rhetoric suggested. These things are real.

Which is precisely why the failures cut so deeply. A presidency with genuine strengths that nonetheless chose to ignore the AIDS crisis, silence its own engineers, and build an economic model that hollowed out the working class it claimed to champion… that is a more troubling legacy than simple villainy would be. Villainy is easy to dismiss. Wasted potential is not.

It is because these genuine achievements existed that the longer legacy demands such careful examination — because a presidency capable of real vision was also capable of choices whose consequences are still unfolding.

The Long Tail: From Reagan to MAGA and RFK Jr.

Reagan’s legacy is not confined to economics or education. It extends into the collapse of public trust, the rise of conspiracy culture, and the erosion of democratic norms.

His administration normalised:

  • distrust of government
  • hostility to expertise
  • suspicion of science
  • the elevation of private wealth over public good
  • racial dog‑whistles
  • anti‑intellectualism

Reagan’s own relationship to science was uneasy. After the 1981 assassination attempt, Nancy Reagan began consulting astrologer Joan Quigley to advise on the president’s schedule, travel, and public appearances, a practice later confirmed by former Chief of Staff Donald Regan in his memoir and reported widely in the press. Decisions about timing and security were sometimes shaped not by intelligence briefings or expert risk assessments but by astrological charts. It was an early sign of a political culture willing to subordinate evidence to belief; a pattern that would deepen across the decades and culminate in today’s conspiracy‑driven attacks on science and public health.

By the time Donald Trump entered politics, the ground had already been prepared. Trump did not invent this worldview. He inherited it.

The modern anti‑science movement — antivax conspiracies, climate denial, attacks on public health — is part of this lineage. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee U.S. health policy is not an anomaly. It is the predictable outcome of decades spent undermining expertise and elevating ideology over evidence.

Reagan set the direction. Trump revealed the destination.

The Anti‑State Doctrine: From Reagan’s Smile to Trump’s Hostility

Reagan entered office declaring that “government is the problem,” a line that reshaped American political identity. His administration weakened regulatory agencies, cut public services, and framed civil servants as obstacles rather than guardians of the public good. This rhetoric did not merely shrink government; it delegitimised it.

He reinforced this worldview through appointments designed to undermine the missions of their own agencies: James Watt at Interior, Anne Gorsuch at the EPA, Clarence Thomas at the EEOC. Their mandate was not stewardship but dismantling. Legal scholarship documents this strategy.

Trump inherited this anti‑state doctrine and intensified it. Where Reagan weakened institutions through policy, Trump attacked them directly: the “deep state,” the FBI, the CDC, the courts, the press. Inspectors general were purged, scientific agencies pressured, and loyalty demanded over competence.

The result is a nation where public institutions are no longer seen as shared assets but as partisan battlegrounds; a political culture that began with Reagan’s casual distrust and matured into Trump’s open hostility.

This attitude resurfaced a generation later when Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and cut foreign aid on the false grounds of corruption and fraud, continuing the same anti‑state narrative Reagan had normalised.

The Information War and the Rise of the Leader‑Cult

Reagan mastered the art of media control. His administration restricted access, staged photo opportunities, and bypassed critical journalists through friendly outlets. The press was framed as elitist and out of touch — a soft war waged with charm and discipline.

Trump escalated this into open conflict: “fake news,” “enemy of the people,” banned reporters, and disinformation as strategy. Where Reagan cultivated distrust, Trump weaponised it.

Reagan also pioneered the modern Republican personality cult. His image — the cowboy, the optimist, the father‑figure — became a political brand. The “Reagan Revolution” was not just policy; it was identity.

Trump inherited a party already primed for leader‑worship and amplified it into a movement defined by personal loyalty rather than principles or institutions. The shift from party to persona — from ideology to identity — began with Reagan’s mythmaking and culminated in Trump’s grievance‑driven cult of personality.

The Legacy: From Reagan to Trump: The Downfall of the USA

Reagan claimed credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, a superpower that ultimately fell under the weight of its own internal decay rather than any external triumph. In doing so, he overlooked the uncomfortable truth that he had set his own nation on a similar path.

The United States did not collapse suddenly. It declined through a series of deliberate choices: to deregulate, to defund, to divide, to moralise, to privatise, to forget.

Reagan accelerated the shift. Trump completed it.

The downfall was not a moment. It was a trajectory — one that began with a president who preached morality while ignoring suffering, who dismantled the institutions that held the country together, and who empowered a movement that would one day turn against democracy itself.

The consequences are now visible: a nation fractured, mistrust entrenched, public health weakened, and a political culture defined by grievance, conspiracy, and fear.

By Emile Prisse (1878) , digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

The United States built something remarkable in the mid-twentieth century: broad prosperity, rising life expectancy, a growing middle class. That was not a left-wing achievement or a right-wing one. It was a national one. The argument here is simply that the choices made from the 1980s onward eroded it — and that naming that clearly, across partisan lines, is the first step toward rebuilding it.

The thought was already forming in my mind in 1988, while visiting Britain, standing among the remains of a late‑Roman villa dating from the early fourth century — the final decades before Rome withdrew its legions and left its provinces to fend for themselves. I tried to imagine the villa’s last occupant watching the departing ships, knowing he lived on the edge of an empire collapsing from internal decay. Then and there, I recognised the same pattern across the Pacific: a modern empire beginning its own long decline for many of the same reasons — rot from within, and a trajectory no individual could likely alter.

Reagan promised a shining city on a hill. Then he began to extinguish its lights.

References:

© 2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri‑Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared. Research/editorial assistance from Copilot AI and Claude AI.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride Month and a History Still Unresolved

“Take us out of nowhere Kakuma.” — Trinidad Jerry.

Pride Month takes its timing from the United States. The Stonewall uprising in June 1969 became the basis for an almost-global calendar. Although the cause spread quickly, the history did not. Many Commonwealth countries had already begun dismantling their inherited criminal laws before Stonewall, and others have moved further and faster since. The spread of Stonewall as the common narrative is itself a form of cultural dominance, mirroring how earlier British laws spread across the Commonwealth and still shape homophobia today.

Artwork by CoPilot AI

Across the Commonwealth, the picture is old and uneven. The laws that still shape queer life in dozens of member states were written in London and exported outward as part of the administrative machinery of what was then a racist, sexist and homophobic empire. Their origins are detailed by the Human Dignity Trust and legal historians tracing the reach of the 1533 Buggery Act and the Indian Penal Code Section 377. Pride Month, seen from here, is not a celebration of a single uprising but a reminder of the afterlife of that empire: what was imposed, and what each country has chosen to keep.

Colonial Origins

The legal architecture that still shapes queer life across much of the Commonwealth did not originate in the countries that enforce it. It was built in Britain, refined through Victorian anxieties, and exported outward through empire. The 1860 code created the category of “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” a phrase that travelled across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. A further Victorian offence (“gross indecency”) was broad enough to criminalise letters, gestures, or implication.

Art by CoPilot AI

The British Empire spread these statutes around the world. They were imposed on societies with their own histories of gender and intimacy. Pre‑colonial records across Africa and Asia show diverse understandings of gender and sexuality, documented by ILGA World. The downfall of the Empire and eventual independence of its colonies did not undo the damage. Many emerging nations kept the inherited codes because they were already embedded in courts, policing, and legal ethics.

Diverse Commonwealth Paths

United Kingdom. The UK exported the criminal codes that shaped the Commonwealth, then dismantled them at home: partial decriminalisation in 1967, followed by Scotland (1980) and Northern Ireland (1982).

Australia. Australia inherited British criminal law and enforced it harshly. Decriminalisation occurred state by state from 1975 to 1997, summarised by the Digital Classroom. Marriage equality arrived in 2017.

Uganda. Uganda shows how inherited colonial laws can be intensified rather than dismantled. The Victorian “unnatural offences” provisions became the platform for successive legislation, culminating in the far harsher 2023 Anti‑Homosexuality Act, encouraged by religious influences in the UK and the USA.

Some other Commonwealth members exhibit more hope. Botswana’s courts dismantled colonial statutes through constitutional reasoning in 2019 and 2021 (High Court; Court of Appeal), while Dominica’s High Court struck down its colonial‑era provisions in April 2024 (Dominica ruling).

Activism and the Tradition Defence

Trinidad Jerry, a young LGBTQ refugee killed in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, lived and died under a legal environment shaped by colonial statutes and contemporary hostility. Four years later, Emanuel Muhayimana was killed in the same camp, underscoring how little had changed.

Art by CoPilot AI

Legal reform across the Commonwealth has been driven less by parliaments than by activists, lawyers, and community groups working through the courts. In India, the petitioners in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India argued that Section 377 violated Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution. In the Caribbean, cases were brought by citizens who lived under the laws.

The work has also been carried by individuals whose names rarely appear in political speeches but whose risks have reshaped the legal landscape. Caleb Orozco in Belize, Jason Jones in Trinidad and Tobago, and Rosanna Flamer‑Caldera in Sri Lanka challenged the laws in their own courts. In Uganda, David Kato’s advocacy — and his murder in 2011 — exposed the dangers faced by those who confront inherited statutes; Frank Mugisha continues that work under constant pressure. In the United Kingdom, Peter Tatchell’s long‑running campaigns helped expose the colonial origin of the laws Britain exported.

Courts in Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, and Dominica have all stated explicitly that the criminal provisions were imposed by colonial authorities and do not reflect indigenous culture. Dominica’s 2024 ruling noted that the Sexual Offences Act provisions were “inherited from a colonial legal framework,” as highlighted by the Human Dignity Trust.

Leaders in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana often frame criminalisation as cultural defence and LGBTQ identities as foreign. This reverses the historical reality: the criminal laws were imported by Britain, while the constitutional rights used to dismantle them are home‑grown. A recent cross‑continental study on women’s rights in Africa found the same pattern: governments defending “traditional African values” while enforcing legal frameworks inherited from external colonial rule.

The Road Ahead

Art by CoPilot AI

Next likely reformers. Sri Lanka has signalled willingness to amend Sections 365 and 365A. Mauritius has active litigation. Namibia — not a Commonwealth member but a parallel post‑colonial jurisdiction — struck down its sodomy laws in 2024.

High‑risk states. Uganda’s 2023 Act remains the most severe example. Ghana’s proposed “Family Values” bill threatens to expand criminalisation. Nigeria continues to enforce the 2014 Same‑Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act.

Courts will continue to lead. In most jurisdictions, the next major reforms will come through litigation rather than legislation.

Activism and visibility. Legal reform follows visibility, community organising, and sustained advocacy. These movements are local, not imported.

Geopolitics. Some states use decriminalisation to alignm with democratic partners; others use criminalisation to align with conservative blocs.

The work continues.

Across the Commonwealth, legal change has come from citizens who challenged the laws that governed their lives; people stepping up when politicians often fear to tread. Their cases, risks, and losses form the quiet impetus beneath every reform.

Their footsteps fall where Commonwealth leaders frequently fail.

Bibliography

Human Dignity Trust — Criminalisation Maps and Legal Histories

ILGA World — State-Sponsored Homophobia Reports

NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project — Stonewall Documentation

Digital Classroom — Australian Legal History

BBC — Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023

The Guardian — Colonial Legal Frameworks and Women’s Rights

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Editorial and artistic assistance: Copilot AI.

Dangerous Visions, Safe Stories

Star Trek, Harlan Ellison, and the Politics of Progress

~ ~ Published on 27th May, the birthday of Harlan Ellison ~ ~
If you’ve ever wondered why Star Trek feels bold in theory but cautious in practice — especially this year — the answer begins with Harlan Ellison, a writer who never let the future off the hook.
Art by Deep AI

“Before Dangerous Visions, American science fiction largely policed itself: no sex, no politics, no race, nothing that might unsettle the comfortable status quo. Writers conformed to conservative norms, producing safe, bland, predictable stories in which Campbell’s straight, white American heroes inevitably saved the day. It was this status quo that Dangerous Visions put on the endangered list…”

— Paul Kincaid, 2026, p. 21

Young Ellison fanzine art style by CoPilot AI
Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions was a direct challenge to science fictional conservatism, inviting writers to confront the very subjects that US science fiction had spent decades avoiding (for example, see Weil & Wolfe 2002; Wolfe 1979; James & Mendlesohn 2003).

Kincaid’s exploration of Ellison as the enfant terrible of conservative US science fiction (and Ellison’s efforts to push the genre’s boundaries) resonates beyond the literary realm. Ellison came out of the literary side of the field, the part that treated science fiction as an exploration of the world, not an escape from it. Ellison earned that reputation by dragging sex, politics, race, and taboo subjects into a genre that had spent decades pretending they didn’t exist. Sixty years ago, Ellison penned a script for Star Trek, which he fought to keep intact against rewrites he considered inferior. That struggle between literary and media science fiction endures today, shaped by Western culture wars and the ongoing saga of the Star Trek franchise.

Ellison’s push for honest and provocative storytelling extended beyond the pages of his books. He was outspoken about the limitations and failures of television as a medium. He once explained:

“I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known. It could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I’ve now come, after ten years in the business, five of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme viewpoint. I think television itself is bad.”

— Harlan Ellison (quoted in Bly, 2002)

For Ellison, this wasn’t just a complaint about television; it was a statement about the limitations of network‑era media science fiction: a form constrained by advertisers, censors, and studio caution, and therefore often resistant to the moral exploration and imaginative freedom that literature allowed. Later productions, including Babylon 5 (where Ellison served as creative consultant), would demonstrate that filmed science fiction could carry that weight once it was freed from those constraints.

Ellison’s clashes with the industry were not simply the product of a difficult personality; they were structural and publicly documented. His concept for The Starlost was rewritten and budget‑cut until he sued the producers and won, later having his Writers Guild Award withdrawn when he disowned the aired version (Weil & Wolfe 2002; WGA Award Records). His pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird” became a recurring protest against network censorship and producer interference across multiple series (Ellison 1985; The Comics Journal #53). His newspaper column The Glass Teat was cancelled after political pressure over his criticism of police brutality and the Nixon administration (Ellison 1970; Bly 2002). Even his dispute over The Terminator resulted in a settlement and a retroactive screen credit (Los Angeles Times, 1985). These were not personality clashes but evidence of an industry that feared controversy more than imagination, the very dynamic Ellison spent his career exposing.

Literary science fiction has always had the advantage of range: the room to explore ambiguity, the inner life of its characters, and the political complexity that television often smooths away. It has also been the space where the genre tests its limits first, the place where writers try out ideas, politics, and forms before they reach a wider audience. Media science fiction, for its part, has strengths literature cannot match: visual immediacy, emotional accessibility, and the ability to reach audiences far beyond the readership of even the most influential novels. Literary science fiction has always pushed the genre forward; media franchises matter because they show what happens when those ideas reach the wider culture. Good media SF doesn’t replace the literary tradition; it carries the same arguments into a different form.

While Star Trek is marketed as being utopian, progressive or “woke,” its history often mirrors Kincaid’s description: a safe, bland, predictable product geared towards straight, white middle-America. Ellison inferred that US media gave a “white bread, homogenised view of the world,” and it’s hard not to see how Star Trek was shaped by similar cultural forces.

This year marks the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary, but instead of celebration, Paramount cancelled its most controversial new Star Trek production. Starfleet Academy faced criticism for weak scripting, but the most vitriolic responses came from fans who despised its racially and sexually diverse characters. This show aimed to present a 2026 version of what Ellison might call forward-looking, if not exactly “dangerous,” visions of the future. Yet it was shut down amid the outrage of some vociferous fans, who accused it of being “too woke.”

This reflects broader trends in current US culture: a society that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion as being social evils, and increasingly views the “other” with hostility, hatred, exclusion, deportation or even concentration camps.

Star Trek’s Struggle for Progress

Despite its reputation as a family-friendly adventure, early Star Trek was shaped by some of the most interesting science fiction writers of the mid-20th century.

Frederic Brown provided the moral core for “Arena,” based on his own short story; John D. F. Black infused scripts with social consciousness; Robert Bloch brought horror into the utopian vision; and Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the most quietly radical of them all, wrote the first episode to touch upon alien sexuality. Even “Charlie X,” credited to Gene Roddenberry but heavily rewritten by Dorothy Fontana, resembles Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in characterisation of its central figure, and in plot elements of the story.

Sturgeon’s humanism culminated in “Amok Time,” featuring an exploration of Vulcan sexuality but concluding with a moment that, whether intentionally or not, launched decades of slash fiction: Kirk and Spock sharing a moment of affectionate joy that fans immediately recognised as something more than friendship. Isaac Asimov’s insistence that Kirk and Spock be fiercely loyal further helped create a space where viewers could imagine a relationship the series itself dared not name. The franchise’s mythmaking about progress often ignores this lineage, but its earliest boundary-pushing came from writers already testing limits elsewhere.

These individual acts of courage occasionally extended beyond the writers’ room. Chekov’s presence (a Russian hero on American television at the height of the Cold War) was a quietly political gesture that the network seemed almost not to notice. Nichelle Nichols as Uhura inspired a generation of people of colour, including astronaut Mae Jemison, who cited her directly as the reason she could imagine herself in space. Decades later, DS9’s Far Beyond the Stars placed Sisko inside a 1950s America that brutalised Black writers, making racism not an alien metaphor but a direct confrontation. Each of these moments genuinely mattered. But significantly, they succeeded through individual nerve rather than institutional courage, happening almost despite the franchise’s instincts rather than because of them.

“Science Fiction is the very literature of change.”

— Frederik Pohl

Artwork by Deep AI

Fandom as a Catalyst for Change

What the series hesitated to explore, fandom embraced wholeheartedly. Long before queer people could be visible on TV, Star Trek clubs and conventions became safe spaces for outsiders; spaces where difference was celebrated, not condemned. Australian fan Diane Marchant, a friend and mentor to me and many Australian Star Trek fans, wrote the first ever published Kirk/Spock slash story in 1974, transforming same-sex relationships from whispered, underground subversion into a fanzine culture that was available to anyone with an open mind.

But fandom has not always lived up to its own ideals. It is worth being clear: most Star Trek fans have been broadly progressive, drawn to the franchise precisely because of its inclusive vision. The toxic voices that helped sink Starfleet Academy do not represent fandom’s mainstream, but they have grown louder and more organised in the MAGA era, weaponising the language of fan entitlement to target diverse creators and diverse characters. Harassment campaigns, coordinated review-bombing, and the gleeful celebration of cancellation — these are not traditional fandom activities. They are culture war tactics wearing fan clothing. Ellison would have recognised them immediately: the same instinct that wanted Campbell’s safe, bland, predictable heroes is still with us, now armed with social media. The whole point of Dangerous Visions was to publish stories that broke the taboos that Campbell-era science fiction refused to touch. In this sense, fandom was Ellison’s Dangerous Visions in action: refusing to wait for permission, refusing to dilute the future to make it more palatable. Women, queer, trans, and non-binary fans created a fandom that was diverse, emotionally literate, and politically alive. The franchise only caught up when it could no longer ignore these visions.

Fandom’s international and inclusive nature also revealed how slowly the franchise evolved. It took nearly thirty years — until The Next Generation — for Star Trek to progress from Brown’s “Arena” to the more sophisticated “Darmok.” Both stories deal with communication with the “other,” but where “Arena” offers a moral duel, “Darmok” seeks to understand a culture on its own terms.

That gap mirrors the franchise’s uneasy relationship with its writers. When Roddenberry returned to launch The Next Generation, he resisted working with established science fiction authors, partly to maintain control, and possibly because he worried that they’d push the show into unfamiliar territory. That tension was exemplified by Ellison’s earlier, infamous feud over “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which became a decades-long debate about compromise and network courage.

His original script made the point sharply: a crippled, shell‑shocked war veteran dies stepping between Kirk and danger, a small act of human decency and sacrifice the aired episode reduced to a meaningless accident involving a nameless drifter. Even in 1967, the studio avoided the moral ambiguity Ellison insisted on.

This was not simply a creative dispute. It revealed something structural: literary science fiction can sustain moral ambiguity across a short story or novel, while television (dependent on audiences, advertisers, and weekly scheduling) tends to resolve rather than disturb. Ellison understood both forms well enough to know exactly what was being lost.

Ellison’s experience wasn’t unique; his later work on The Starlost TV series collapsed under studio interference, and he disowned that series before it aired. The pattern was clear: ambitious ideas were watered down, and stranger visions were diluted into formula. By 1991, Star Trek had started to live up to its ideals: empathy, patience, and an openness to change. “Darmok” marked a turning point from superficial moral tales to genuine understanding. Likewise, the Babylon 5 TV series brought Ellison in as a ‘creative consultant,’ a role that let him push the series toward sharper, more confrontational storytelling.

Art by Deep AI

The Ongoing Battle for Representation

By the 1990s, fandom had grown large, global, and confident, sometimes out‑thinking the franchise itself. Like earlier science‑fiction fandoms, fans blurred the line between response and cultural appropriation, feeling a sense of custodianship over the universe. That energy lived in fanzines, fan‑run conventions, and the wider creative culture that surrounded the show. One obvious example is Spock being brought back from fictional death — like his literary predecessor, Sherlock Holmes — due to fan demand. But corporations weren’t comfortable with this.

Viacom’s 1990s crackdown on fan activities was a warning sign: stewardship isn’t ownership. The result wasn’t a blanket shutdown, but it created a chilling effect across the franchise: movies flopped, one TV series ended prematurely, and Star Trek withered for nearly twenty years. Paramount paid the price for alienating the very people who kept the universe alive.

What changed next was less about corporate hostility and more about the world shifting under fandom’s feet. As the internet replaced print, and as social habits changed — later accelerated by social media and the long tail of COVID — the old hubs of fan creativity thinned out across every corner of science‑fiction fandom. The impulse didn’t disappear; it simply moved online. Fan fiction migrated to digital platforms, podcasts replaced newsletters, and community energy dispersed into new forms. It was still the pattern Ellison warned about: institutions encouraging passive consumption while discouraging the unruly, imaginative participation that makes a culture worth having.

Two decades later, Paramount repeated the pattern more directly by imposing strict limits on fan films, shutting down some of the most ambitious grassroots visual storytelling fandom had ever created. Different decade, different medium, same anxiety: whenever fans pushed the universe forward in ways the studio couldn’t control, the corporate instinct was to pull back.

Ellison spent his career arguing that institutions fear imagination because they can’t control where it leads. Star Trek’s history proves him right.

The irony is hard to miss as Paramount responds to public outrage about so‑called “wokeism” by cancelling Starfleet Academy and announcing the end of more Trekkie TV for the foreseeable future: the same franchise that once feared fans for loving too expansively now fears those who hate too loudly. The dynamic has flipped, but the pattern is the same: a studio retreating from the very community that keeps its universe alive, and in its sixtieth anniversary year.

What makes this latest retreat even more bitter is that it may have come under political pressure rather than creative judgment, the very dynamic Ellison spent decades dissecting.

The Future of Imagination

“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking
whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people?”

— Octavia E. Butler

Butler’s challenge frames the problem sharply: a future that claims to be universal must be judged by who it includes, and who it excludes.

Art by Copilot AI
Star Trek’s reputation for progressivism often rests on the famous 1968 Kirk–Uhura kiss. However, this was not the first interracial kiss on television. Earlier examples existed in British, Dutch, and US TV programs, and even within Star Trek itself. The myth that it was groundbreaking persists because it flatters the franchise’s self-image as a trailblazer. In reality, the scene was heavily constrained by network anxiety; it was filmed in multiple versions to minimize the visibility of the kiss, and its framing contained layers of rape culture and racial stereotyping. Rather than a bold step forward, it was a carefully managed moment that reflected the limitations and anxieties of its time.

The real significance lies in how the show reinforced boundaries of acceptability, then later claimed to have shattered them.

And this is the real frustration: for all its rhetoric about boldly going, and for all its aspirations that gained legions of fans attracted by its potential rather than by its reality, Star Trek actually spent decades retreating from the very dangers Ellison embraced. Instead of looking ahead to the kind of boundary‑shattering work collected in Dangerous Visions, the franchise often chose the safest possible path. Janeway was written as blandly authoritative rather than genuinely transgressive; Deep Space Nine tiptoed around trans narratives that it was perfectly positioned to explore; and The Next Generation, for all its polish, carried the quiet prejudices of its era: racist caricatures, sexist framing, and a pointed refusal to acknowledge queer lives. Even Trek’s Asian characters: Sulu, and Harry Kim, were left without meaningful character development, romance, or timely promotion; while Chakotay became a token Indigenous figure encumbered with nonsensical, mystical clichés and a Māori tattoo that had nothing to do with his culture.

The franchise consistently avoided confronting cultural and racial complexities head-on. It still does today.

And the absences ran deeper still. For all its talk of universalism, Star Trek almost never engaged with the rising currents of AfricanFuturism, AsianFuturism, or Indigenous futurisms, traditions that were already reshaping the genre with visions far bolder than anything the franchise attempted. Even its rare brushes with AfroFuturism were bowdlerised into something palatable for white audiences, stripped of the political bite that defined the movement elsewhere. Trek kept promising a galaxy of cultures while constraining those cultures within their white understandings and refusing to let those cultures speak in their own voices.

In all these cases, Star Trek wasn’t attempting to portray genuine diversity so much as reproducing the straight, white, male gaze and its familiar Orientalist assumptions. The franchise kept promising a future that challenged the present, yet too often delivered stories designed not to disturb anyone’s sleep. Ellison’s anthology showed what the genre could be when it stopped flinching. Star Trek spent far too much time flinching.

Beyond the Final Frontier

While Star Trek broke some ground, many other science fiction creators have pushed progress much further. Theodore Sturgeon’s stories beyond “Amok Time” (such as More Than Human and Venus Plus X) explored complex themes of sexuality, identity, and human connection with nuance and depth. Beyond “The Trouble with Tribbles”, David Gerrold’s Blood and Fire and The Martian Child introduced diverse characters and challenged conventional narratives. Female authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nnedi Okorafor have crafted stories centered on intersectional identities and cultures that are otherwise often marginalized in mainstream media.

Additionally, TV series like The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Lexx, Sense8, The Expanse, Black Mirror, and even The Simpsons have pushed social and technological storytelling into far bolder territory, treating marginalised people as full participants in the future and refusing to look away from uncomfortable realities. These shows carry the spirit of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions more faithfully than Star Trek, by expanding representation and challenging the norms that mainstream science fiction still hesitates to confront. Their futures leave Star Trek looking reactionary by comparison.

This is already changing. As US cultural dominance wanes, the centre of gravity in science fiction is already shifting: AfricanFuturism, AsianFuturism, and Indigenous futurisms are not waiting for mainstream validation. They are building their own futures, on their own terms, with or without a starship. Dangerous Visions may become wondrous visions. If the future belongs to those who imagine it, then the next century of science fiction will not be written from Los Angeles. It will come from Lagos, Nairobi, Mumbai, Seoul, and the communities Western SF spent decades ignoring.

Nowhere was this cultural shift more visible than in the collapse of the 2026 Starfleet Academy TV series, a moment that exposed just how fragile the old US-focussed future had become. In that sense, its collapse felt less like a production failure and more like a metaphor: a Federation falling at the same moment its cultural centre of gravity was shifting elsewhere.

That global shift makes Ellison’s warning feel even more urgent. His challenge to the genre didn’t disappear; it just found better homes. Meanwhile, Star Trek was about to prove once again exactly why that challenge still mattered.

Artwork by Deep AI

The Failure of Imagination

The Starfleet Academy debacle makes the pattern impossible to ignore. A show that finally gave queer, Black, brown, and neurodivergent youth a fair go was met with a wave of hostility so familiar it could have been lifted from the letters pages of 1967. The franchise once again flinched, choosing to appease the loudest reactionaries rather than stand by the very future it claimed to champion. In that sense, the cancellation is not an aberration but a reminder: the culture Ellison challenged is still with us, still frightened of the wrong people inheriting the future, still willing to burn down a story rather than broaden its imagination. The downfall of this culture is happening in real time as we watch.

“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s line is a reminder of what the genre is for, and of how often Star Trek has forgotten it. Ellison never did. The future has always belonged to those willing to imagine it without flinching, and to those who refuse to apologise for who gets to stand inside it. I have been a Star Trek fan for most of my life, so I understand precisely why its failures matter. If Star Trek wants to remain culturally relevant, it will need to avoid the fate of Edward Bellamy’s utopian future and rediscover the courage it takes to adapt to the future.

Ellison was born on 27 May 1934. He spent his life insisting that the future was not a destination but a discussion; one that required courage, honesty, and a willingness to disturb comfortable assumptions wherever they were found. Star Trek promised that discussion and too often retreated from it. Fandom carried it forward, imperfectly but persistently. The argument continues. It always will.

Bibliography

  • Geoff Allshorn, 2021. A Kiss is (Not) Just A Kiss, Humanist World blog, 1 August.
  • = = = = = = = = =, 2025. Forgotten Futures, Humanist World blog, 8 September.
  • Robert W. Bly, 2002. The Online Copywriter’s Handbook (features an interview with Harlan Ellison in 1979), p. 19.
  • The Comics Journal, 1980. Harlan Ellison Interview, Issue #53.
  • Harlan Ellison, 1967. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, March 1967.
  • = = = = = = = = =, 1970. The Glass Teat, New York: Pyramid Books.
  • = = = = = = = = =, 1975. The Other Glass Teat, New York: Pyramid Books.
  • = = = = = = = = =, 1985. An Edge in My Voice, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  • Los Angeles Times, 1985. “Terminator Suit Settled”, March 1985.
  • Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge University Press.
  • Paul Kincaid, 2026. “Who is in danger?”, in Bruce Gillespie (ed.), SF Commentary, #126, April 2026, pp. 20–32. [First published, Strange Horizons, 27 January 2025.]
  • Marc Scott Zicree, 1982. The Twilight Zone Companion, New York: Bantam Books.
  • Ellen Weil & Gary K. Wolfe, 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever, Ohio State University Press.
  • Gary K. Wolfe, 1979. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, Kent State University Press.
  • Writers Guild of America West, n.d. Award and Arbitration Records. (Documentation of Ellison’s WGA Award withdrawal and arbitration decisions.)
  • Zicree, Marc Scott, 1982. The Twilight Zone Companion, New York: Bantam Books.

If this essay speaks to you, you may find these related pieces useful:

A Kiss Is (Not) Just a Kiss
The Kirk–Uhura Kiss: Myth and The Real Story.

The Prime Defective
The Prime Directive: Another problem within the Star Trek franchise.

From Fic to Future
A short biography of Diane Marchant, the Australian fan who helped reshape the future of fandom.

Forgotten Futures
An examination of how utopian imagination shifted from 1888 to 1966, and why Edward Bellamy’s future vision died but Gene Roddenberry’s endured, including how women contributed to fandom.

Time, Youth, and the Call of the Future
I Have Seen the Future
Two explorations about why “Starfleet Academy” mattered.

From Queer to Eternity
How queer issues intersect with science fiction.

Race and the Colonial Imagination
An essay tracing the threads of colonial imagination in science fiction, and emerging AfroFuturism, AfricanFuturism, and other movements that explore beyond the white gaze.

From Trek to Trump
A look at sample homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, and racist objections to the “Starfleet Academy” TV series.
©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared. Editorial/artistic/research assistance from Anthropic Claude AI, Copilot AI, and Deep AI.

LGBTQ+ Refugees Left Behind

The Human Cost of Foreign Aid Cuts

Published in the lead-up to commemorate Africa Day on 25 May
by Charity Austin

Charity is an activist, writer, and community leader, and the founder of Trans Inclusion Group (formerly Trans Initiative Gorom). Her work focuses on human rights, social justice, displacement, resilience, and amplifying marginalized voices through storytelling and advocacy. Through her writing and activism, she brings attention to the lived experiences, struggles, and resistance of LGBTQ+ communities in East Africa.

Kakuma (photo supplied)

For many people living safely in wealthy countries, foreign aid may sound like a political debate or a government budget issue. But for refugees in Africa, especially LGBTQ+ refugees, foreign aid is often the difference between life and death.

Under the U.S. administration led by President Donald Trump, major changes to foreign aid and humanitarian funding have been introduced. One of the most significant shifts has been the restructuring and severe reduction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was formerly the world’s largest foreign aid agency. In 2025, USAID’s operations were significantly cut back, with many of its functions reduced or transferred into other government structures, including the U.S. State Department.

For refugee communities across Africa, these changes have had immediate and life-threatening consequences.

In already under-resourced refugee settlements, people are now facing even deeper shortages of food, clean water, shelter, and essential medical care. For transgender refugees and other LGBTQ+ people, who already experience discrimination and exclusion within these systems, the impact has been especially severe.

Reality on the Ground

According to Trans Inclusion Group (TIG), a trans-led initiative supporting LGBTQ+ refugees in displacement, reduced humanitarian funding has directly worsened the living conditions of transgender refugees who rely on aid programs for survival.

Many transgender refugees live with HIV/AIDS and depend entirely on donor-funded clinics and humanitarian health programs for antiretroviral medication. When funding is reduced or programs are disrupted, access to treatment becomes unstable. Missing medication is not a minor interruption—it is life-threatening.

Image by Dan Sudermann from Pixabay

The mental health impact has also been devastating. Many LGBTQ+ refugees fled persecution, violence, and arrest in their home countries, only to find themselves trapped in overcrowded and unsafe refugee settlements where protection is limited and stigma is widespread.

At the same time, reductions in refugee resettlement pathways to the United States have worsened the crisis. For many LGBTQ+ refugees facing ongoing threats, resettlement is not a privilege, it is often the only route to safety. When these pathways are slowed or suspended, people remain stuck in dangerous environments with no realistic exit.

Some transgender refugees previously escaped extreme violence in places such as Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, hoping for safety through resettlement programs. Instead, many now remain stranded in other settlements with shrinking international support and increasing vulnerability.

These policy decisions are not abstract. They directly determine whether a person receives HIV medication, whether someone eats that day, or whether a refugee survives another attack.

For many refugees in Africa, daily life is already a struggle for survival. Reducing humanitarian funding and restructuring key aid institutions like USAID only deepens that crisis.

Trans Inclusion Group (TIG) continues to highlight these realities and calls for urgent international attention, renewed funding, and stronger protection mechanisms for LGBTQ+ refugees who are being left behind in global policy shifts.

LGBTQ+ refugees deserve dignity, healthcare, protection, and the chance to live safely. Their lives should never be treated as collateral damage in political decisions about foreign aid.

“I was thirsty”

In Kakuma refugee camp (Kenya), water has become a daily struggle for many refugees following cuts to humanitarian support. These photos capture people digging into dry ground in search of water, filling jerrycans by hand because formal water systems are under severe strain. With reduced USAID funding affecting essential services, families are forced to spend hours searching for unsafe and scarce water sources just to survive. Access to clean water is not a privilege, it is a basic human right.

Searching for water in Kakuma (photos supplied)

I can personally testify that this crisis is real because I experienced it myself together with other transgender refugees before being resettled. In Kakuma refugee camp, there were days when my friends and I would wake up very early and spend hours searching for water because the normal supply points had run dry or were overcrowded. Sometimes we had no choice but to dig shallow holes in the ground and wait for dirty water to collect so we could fill our jerrycans. The water was often unsafe, but when people are desperate, they use whatever they can find. For transgender refugees who already faced discrimination, violence, and exclusion inside the camp, the struggle for clean water became even more dangerous and exhausting.

(Photo supplied)

This situation is not only happening in Kakuma. Many transgender refugees in Gorom refugee settlement in South Sudan are also facing severe water shortages and humanitarian neglect. People walk long distances under extreme heat just to access a small amount of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. In some cases, refugees are forced to rely on unsafe water sources – even from swamps – that expose them to disease and other health risks. These experiences show that the humanitarian crisis affecting transgender refugees is not abstract — it is happening to real people every day, across different refugee settlements, where survival itself has become a daily struggle.

Human Stories, Not Statistics

For many transgender refugees, the impact of aid cuts is not just political, it is deeply personal and life-threatening

One transgender woman living in the refugee camp had been relying on antiretroviral medication (ARVs) to manage HIV and stay healthy. But when she recently went to the clinic for her routine refill, she was told that the medication was no longer available. With humanitarian health services under strain and supplies running low, she returned home without the treatment she depends on to survive. She now lives in fear, uncertain when or if she will be able to access the medicine again.

I also have a friend who stopped taking the ARVs he had before the aid was cut, because he wasn’t sure that he would get another dose of medication.

Trans Inclusion Group advocates for queer refugee safety

Such stories reflect the reality facing many vulnerable refugees whose lives depend on consistent medical care. For transgender refugees, accessing healthcare is already difficult because of stigma, discrimination, and insecurity inside refugee settlements. Now, with funding cuts affecting clinics and humanitarian programs, many are being pushed into even more dangerous situations. These are not just statistics or policy discussions — they are real people losing access to food, clean water, and lifesaving medication every single day.

Looking the Other Way

Searching for water (photo supplied)

What makes this situation so painful is that these decisions were made by political leaders and administrations who chose to cut foreign aid despite knowing that millions of vulnerable people depend on that support to survive. The reduction of humanitarian assistance under the Trump administration has had devastating consequences for refugees already living in desperate conditions. Today, people are struggling to access food, clean water, shelter, and lifesaving medication, and many feel abandoned by the very countries and leaders that had the power to help.

I have painful news for those who made these decisions: people are now dying because of these cuts. Refugees who were already vulnerable are being pushed beyond their limits, with some unable to access medicine, food, or safe water. For refugees, this is not a political argument — it is about survival. The suffering taking place in refugee communities is real, and the world should not look away from the human consequences of these decisions.

Refugee Rights

Read other human rights contributions from Charity:

Protection Briefing
Published: 20 December 2025
Protection Challenges and Advocacy Engagement for LGBTQ Refugees in Gorom Refugee Settlement, South Sudan

Kakuma Pride 2023
Published: 11 July 2023
A report from Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, possibly the only refugee camp in the world to ever have a Pride March, brutally shut down by homophobic Kenya Police.

This blog ©2026 Geoff Allshorn. All rights are hereby returned to the author, who can be contacted via this blog. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present.