Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Rights: IDAHOBIT 2022
May 17, 2022 – Today marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), and we welcome President Biden’s statement in which he joins “Americans across the country to reaffirm our commitment to the ongoing work of upholding human dignity for all people and advancing equality globally.”
IDAHOBIT feels particularly urgent this year. President Biden warned that “we continue to witness disturbing setbacks and rising hate and violence targeting LGBTQI+ people in the United States and around the world.” Secretary of State Blinken echoed that warning, emphasizing that “[g]lobal data makes clear that the dehumanization of LGBTQI+ persons is systemic, pervasive, and often violent.” And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reminds us that the fight against intolerance “remains as urgent as ever, as right-wing forces target trans students, Republican leaders threaten to unwind marriage equality and a radical Supreme Court takes aim at Americans’ most fundamental rights.”
This year’s IDAHOBIT theme, Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Rights, fundamentally understands the moment we find ourselves in. As social justice movements in the United States frantically work to respond to the many anti-trans health and rights bills being passed by state legislatures across the country and to the leaked Supreme Court draft that threatens to formally overturn the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, it’s easy to feel demoralized and isolated as well as enraged and exhausted. LGBTQI groups are speaking out against the end of Roe and the legal “reasoning” from Justice Alito that clearly endangers many “privacy rights,” including same-sex marriage equality and access to contraception.
What we know from our global colleagues is that we are up against the integrated work of the anti-gender movement. The Commission on Unalienable Rights and the Geneva Consensus Declaration, two anti-rights efforts championed by the Trump Administration, sought to create a narrow framework that excludes the bodily and familial rights of all women and of all LGBTQI people. Like the reactionary laws we now see in Poland, Hungary, and Guatemala, these initiatives are backed by a tightly integrated network of far-right Catholic and evangelical organizations.
While overworked and underfunded NGOs and lawyers try to play whack-a-mole with anti-trans and anti-abortion laws that might seem unconnected – as well as the uniquely American attacks on “critical race theory” – it can be difficult to zoom out to the larger picture of the global anti-gender movement, and even harder to know what to do once we get there.
Last fall, Judith Butler suggested in The Guardian that, because the anti-gender movement is inherently an authoritarian movement, anti-fascist solidarity is the most urgent need. This IDAHOBIT, we see and name the coordinated anti-gender movement attacks on our bodies, our lives, and our rights. LGBTQI rights and abortion rights are one, and we call for the democratic reforms necessary to protect voting rights in the United States, halt the rise in electoral authoritarianism, and protect and promote everyone’s sexual and reproductive rights in the United States and beyond. This is what protecting democracy means today, right here.