politics

The US (CIA) uses these NGO to cause problems in these countries. The US loves to use minorities against the US enemies. The US used to "support" LGBTQ+ groups in Venezuela and Cuba, and used them against Chavez and Fidel. The moment Cuba and Venezuela began actually supporting and granting these groups rights, the US and the NGO stopped supporting them.

The fear is that those LGBT organizations might be being used as tools for various intelligence organizations to do intelligence organization stuff. I cant remember any specifics but the CIA has aided some minorities to act against powers they oppose. As much as I want global liberation for my sisters, brothers, and siblings I do recognize how the existence of people like me is cynically weaponized on political stages.

Aside from the way NGOs are often part of a larger complex of foreign intervention, even to take them at face value as attempting to "help" is to buy into an imperialist narrative. It is one of white saviorism, that pushes a hegemonic anglo ideal of queer identity. The idea that there is some inherent "community" between queer people in distinct and discrete cultural milieus is abjectly ahistorical: queer identities are products of the cultural contexts in which they come to exist, and so colonial queer institutions at their most innocent are still trying to spread a domineering hegemony of queerness.

What it is to engage in same-sex desires, what it is to adopt different gender roles: these are not translatable from one cultural context to the next, but in western media/political landscapes it is only by adhering to a specific set of (largely white, middle class, and english) identities can "queerness" be liberated. Which is especially egregious considering how deftly colonialism introduced much of the global systems of discrimination in play today, and strives even now to subsume and erase a multitude of identities both within the imperial core and without. Not to mention the blatant hypocrisy at feigning some higher state of social progression in the west when that is felt only by the economically secure, educated white class of queers.

Just as colonial authorities sought to prescribe universal and immutable identities of "man" and "woman" (which included the act of penile-vaginal intercourse as inherent gender markers) and to vilify all that fell without, queer colonial authorities now seek to prescribe immutable categories of "gay" and "trans" that are completely illegible in most cultural contexts.

For specific and concrete examples of NGOs acting as insidious cultural dominators, I recommend Adnan Hossein's Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh. In the latter half of the book, Hossein addresses the way western NGOs brought trans identity into conflict with hijra lived experiences, and created conflict between those who existed in the cultural context of hijra, and those who now sought to conform to the cultural context of trans. One of the main ways this conflict is perpetuated is by tying international and domestic funding to NGOs that operate with western ideas of LGBT, and thus force Bangladeshi people to vie for recognition and legitimacy under western frameworks that are irreconcilable with many hijra practices and identifiers.