Why May 17th?
Today’s date is not arbitrary. On 17 May 1990, the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), formally ending its designation as a mental disorder. It was a landmark moment: a recognition that queer people are not sick, not deviant, not in need of cure or correction. Yet thirty-six years later, that hard-won ground is being eroded. Conversion practices remain legal in many countries and are experiencing a quiet resurgence, including the USA which currently has many anti-LGBTIQ bills and anti-trans bills in progress. Transgender identities are increasingly framed in political and legal discourse as a pathology requiring intervention. IDAHOBIT Day exists to mark how far we have come, and to remind us that the battle the WHO helped settle in 1990 is not lost.
Today is the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, or IDAHOBIT. It is a day to mark, to remember, and to refuse to look away.
Across the world, being queer can still cost you your home, your safety, your life.
In more than 60 countries, homosexuality remains criminalised. In some, it carries the death penalty. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act has driven thousands of people from their homes, their families, their communities, fleeing not just prejudice but imprisonment, torture, and murder. It is the same in Tanzania, Rwanda, and many other nations across Africa and the Middle East and the Commonwealth. People run for their lives, often with nothing, heading for the nearest border and whatever uncertain safety lies beyond it.
This is not only an African story. Across Asia, the Middle East and beyond, 64 countries criminalise same-sex relations, with the death penalty legally prescribed in at least twelve of them.
None of this happened by accident. The Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act, and laws like it across Africa, did not emerge fully formed from local politics. US evangelical activists — among them Scott Lively, who travelled to Kampala in 2009 to meet with politicians, pastors and community leaders — helped provide the ideological framework and the legislative language. Organisations like Family Watch International have spent years and significant funding exporting their culture war to countries where the consequences are not protests or political setbacks, but imprisonment, torture, and flight. The people in Kakuma are not only victims of African homophobia. Some of them are there because of US politics pursued abroad.
Nor is this only a story about distant governments. In April 2025, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that the word “woman” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex — a ruling with immediate practical consequences for trans people’s access to services, shelters, and legal protections. Many of the countries that criminalise homosexuality are Commonwealth nations, shaped by British colonial law. The line between the countries that imprison queer people and the countries that legislate them out of public life is less clear than it is comfortable to believe.
Some of them end up in Kakuma, or in Gorom.
Kakuma is a refugee camp in the remote north-west of Kenya. Gorom is a refugee settlement in South Sudan. Both are harsh, remote, under-resourced places at the edges of the world, the kind of places that exist precisely because the rest of the world has decided it doesn’t need to look too closely.
Both are home to LGBTQI+ refugees who fled persecution in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia and beyond, people who ran for their lives because of who they are, and arrived hoping for safety. What many found was more of the same.
In Kakuma, LGBTQI+ refugees face homophobic and transphobic attacks from other refugees and from locals. They are beaten, stabbed, burned out of their shelters. They are denied medical care. They cannot work. Their food rations from the World Food Programme — already meagre — now last less than a week, because the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to foreign aid have gutted the humanitarian system that kept them alive.
They wait for resettlement that may never come. They await a world that will acknowledge they exist.
IDAHOBIT exists because the world keeps forgetting.
It needs reminding that homophobia and transphobia are not distant abstractions; they are policies, laws, and fists. They are people sleeping in shifts, taking turns to stand guard through the night against attack. They are mothers separated from children. They are people surviving on hot water and grass soup.
They are human beings who asked for nothing more than to live honestly and safely, and were told that was too much to ask.
IDAHOBIT is not a celebration of what has been won, but a reminder of what remains unfinished.
Days like this matter only if they change something for the people who cannot wait for the world to catch up. If you want to make that change real, support the organisations that keep them alive.
If you would like to support LGBTQI+ refugees in Kakuma, Gorom and beyond:
MAREPA — emergency shelter for LGBTQI+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya
Rainbow Railroad — helping LGBTQI+ people escape persecution worldwide
Queer Pride Africa — GoFundMe — refugee-led sustainable projects in Kakuma
Kakuma Refugee Camp — Food, Medication & Security — GoFundMe — direct support for LGBTQI+ refugees in the camp
Amnesty International Australia — advocacy for refugee and human rights protection
I am also happy to advise people on how to assist individuals or extended families and communities across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and other African problem areas.
©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. Some editorial/artistic assistance supplied by Claude AI.
