Earlier this year, I contributed evidence to the United Nations Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for a thematic report examining the experiences of lesbian, bisexual and queer (LBQ) women. The report has now been released, drawing together evidence from more than 200 submissions from governments, national human rights institutions, researchers and civil society organisations around the world. As I read it, I found myself moving constantly between my professional and personal lives.

Read the report here

For a long time now, I have worked in humanitarian action and international development, supporting organisations to become more inclusive of women, people with disabilities and people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (diverse SOGIESC). Much of what the report describes reflects what I have observed professionally. Much of it also reflects my own life.

One of the things I have often noticed in humanitarian, international and local community development work is that we separate people’s lives into sectors. We talk about health, housing, livelihoods, education, protection and gender-based violence as though they are separate issues. People’s lives do not work like that, and neither does exclusion.

Imagine, for a moment, that you fall in love. It is one of the most ordinary human experiences there is. Now imagine that the person you love is another woman. For many lesbian, bisexual and queer women, that single fact begins to shape almost every interaction with institutions for the rest of their lives.

The report describes women who are pressured into marriage with men because their relationships are not accepted by their families. Others leave home to escape violence, only to find themselves excluded from property, inheritance or family support. Some struggle to rent housing because landlords question why an unmarried woman is living alone. Others remain financially dependent on families who reject them because there are few alternatives.

The report also describes the persistent expectation that women should marry men and have children. That resonated with me in a deeply personal way. Like many lesbian and bisexual women of my generation, I married a man when I was young. Looking back, I can see just how powerful those expectations were. Marriage, motherhood and heterosexuality weren’t presented as one possible future. They were presented as the future.

The report reminded me that power is not exercised only through laws or violence. It is also exercised through culture. That is why we so often talk about gendered norms in humanitarian and development practice. They are not simply social expectations; they shape what people believe is possible, acceptable and even imaginable. Through the stories we are told about what a successful life looks like, what it means to be a "good woman", and which futures are considered “normal”, power becomes embedded in everyday life. Those messages become so familiar that they no longer feel like expectations at all. They feel like common sense.

Healthcare is another example. The report discusses healthcare systems that continue to define women's bodies through heterosexual assumptions, and I have lived that. Years ago, after fainting and hitting my head, I needed stitches. Before treatment, I was told I had to take a pregnancy test. I explained that pregnancy was simply not possible. That wasn't enough. It didn't seem to matter that I knew my own body and my own circumstances. As a result, I waited for hours before doctors would stitch the large gash on my forehead. The possibility that I might somehow be pregnant carried more weight than my own account of my life. It wasn't really about pregnancy. It was about authority: who was considered capable of knowing my own body, who was believed, and whose knowledge counted.

The report captures this dynamic well. It describes healthcare systems that continue to organise women’s access to care around assumptions of heterosexuality and reproduction, rather than listening to the women in front of them.

The irony is hard to ignore. Healthcare systems can become so preoccupied with the possibility that a lesbian might be pregnant that they overlook the very health issues we are statistically more likely to experience. Australia's SWASH surveys have repeatedly highlighted disparities in cervical screening participation and cervical health among lesbian, bisexual and queer women and trans men

Read about the SWASH reports here

The report also documents violence that many lesbian, bisexual and queer women will recognise immediately. Living in in Brisbane through the 1990s and early 2000s, threats of “corrective rape” were a regular part of life. Walking hand in hand with another woman meant calculating risk. It meant scanning the street before showing affection, anticipating comments from passing cars, deciding whether visibility was worth the potential consequences. The report describes these experiences from every region of the world, making clear that they are not isolated incidents but part of broader efforts to regulate women’s lives and relationships.

Reading those experiences reflected in a United Nations report was strangely validating. Not because any of it was new. But because it connected thousands of individual stories into something larger than personal experience.

As I read the report, I found myself returning to the way power shapes so much of my own work. Not because the report explicitly uses this language, but because it demonstrates so clearly that exclusion is never produced in one place. It is shaped by structural arrangements, reinforced through organisational systems, normalised by cultural expectations and ultimately experienced in people's everyday lives.

Some forms of power are structural. They are found in the laws that determine whose relationships are recognised, who can inherit property and whose families exist in the eyes of the State.

Some are disciplinary. They emerge through the policies and procedures of hospitals, schools, shelters, immigration systems and workplaces that reproduce exclusion, often without questioning the assumptions on which they were built.

Others are cultural. They are the stories societies tell about what it means to be a woman, who should marry, who should become a mother, and which lives are considered normal. These narratives become so familiar that they are rarely recognised as forms of power at all.

And then there is the interpersonal. The rejection by family. The healthcare provider who doesn’t believe you. The landlord who questions your right to rent a home. The threats shouted from passing cars. These moments are often treated as individual acts of prejudice, but the report reminds us that they rarely exist in isolation. They are shaped by the structural, disciplinary and cultural forces that surround them.

Perhaps the one place where my own thinking diverges slightly from the report is around data. The report argues that better disaggregated data are essential because lesbian, bisexual and queer women remain structurally invisible within research, policy and service delivery systems. I understand that argument, and in many contexts I agree with it. Without evidence, communities are often ignored.

At the same time, I have spent much of my career thinking about the ethics of evidence. We often assume that more data automatically leads to better policy, better services and better outcomes. Sometimes it does. But data are never neutral. We already know these inequalities exist. We know that lesbian, bisexual and queer women experience discrimination. We know that healthcare systems frequently fail them. We know that violence occurs. We know that exclusion from housing, employment and legal recognition is widespread. The evidence base is already substantial, and this report is an important contribution to that growing body of knowledge.

What concerns me is that we rarely ask the opposite question: when is enough evidence enough? In a world experiencing growing anti-gender movements and political backlash against women and diverse SOGIESC communities, increasingly detailed data can become something more than evidence. It can become a tool for surveillance, targeting and political violence. That doesn’t mean we stop documenting injustice. It means we approach data with the same ethical care that we expect in every other aspect of our work. Before collecting more information, we should also ask who benefits, who controls it, how it will be protected and whether the knowledge we already have is sufficient to justify action.

In a world experiencing increasing anti-gender movements and political backlash against women and diverse SOGIESC communities, I think we also need to ask difficult questions about what data we collect, who controls them and how they might one day be used. Recognition matters. Visibility matters. But so does safety. Humanitarian practitioners have long understood that collecting information about vulnerable communities carries responsibilities as well as benefits. Those same ethical questions apply here.

What this report ultimately reveals is that exclusion is rarely a single event. It is a pattern woven through ordinary life. It shapes who you can love, where you can live, whether your family is recognised, how healthcare professionals treat you, whether your children are legally protected, whether you inherit property, whether you feel safe walking down the street and whether your existence is counted in the first place.

For me, that is the enduring significance of this report. It is not simply a report about lesbian, bisexual and queer women. It is a reminder that rights are never experienced in isolation. They are experienced through the ordinary moments that make up a life. When those moments are shaped by institutions, assumptions and systems that fail to recognise who you are, exclusion becomes something far more profound than discrimination. It becomes the quiet negotiation of belonging, every single day.

If this report has prompted you to think differently about how power shapes people's lives, you may be interested in my three-part online workshop, Intersectionality in Practice: Understanding Power, Lived Experience and Designing Change. Together, we'll explore how structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal power interact with identity, social location and lived experience, and use a practical intersectionality matrix to strengthen analysis, participation and decision-making in programs, services and organisations. Click the link for more details.

Intersectionality in Practice

Community Powered Responses is an open-access publication. I believe conversations about participation, inclusion, power and justice should be available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. If you find value in this work, I hope you'll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support allows me to continue researching, writing and developing practical tools, workshops and resources that strengthen community-led, inclusive and accountable practice. Every paid subscription helps create the time and space to keep this work freely available to others.

Author’s note: These reflections are written in my personal capacity and represent my own analysis and opinions. They should not be read as an official statement on behalf of the Bilbies, individual players or coaching staff, Blind Sports Australia, or any other organisation connected with the team.

Last Friday, SBS released a podcast about the Bilbies, Australia’s women’s blind football team. The interviews were recorded in my lounge room. This is partly because I am one of the volunteer co-managers of the team, and partly because this is how the Bilbies women’s team operates. We do not have offices, paid staff or a well-resourced national program behind us. We use our homes. We borrow spaces. We share skills. We fundraise. We work out what is needed and then somebody volunteers to do it.

The players are volunteers. The coach is a volunteer. The managers and support team are volunteers. The players (and support team) have also been paying their own costs to represent Australia.

Yet, when you listen to the SBS podcast, what you hear is not a story about scarcity. You hear women who are funny, strategic, competitive and deeply connected to each other. You hear the concentration required to run towards a rattling ball while wearing eye shades, tracking the voices of teammates, coaches and guides. You hear women describing what it meant to finally find a sport designed for them - and, through it, to find each other. You hear a team.

As their coach, Bess Hepworth, says:

“This is not just about, ‘Oh, let’s support those in need.’ This is fucking badass. This is chess in an ice hockey arena with eye shades.”

That line gets closer to the truth than the familiar stories we are so often told about disabled people in sport. The Bilbies are not an inspirational side story, they are athletes, and they are awesome.

While the world watches football

The men’s FIFA World Cup is being played right now, football is occupying screens, stadiums and conversations around the world. There is something extraordinary about the scale of it: the money, the media, the infrastructure, the sponsorship, the national investment and the cultural importance attached to men playing football. At the same time, Australia’s national women’s blind football team is trying to raise enough money to hold its next training camp.

I am not suggesting that one tournament’s budget could simply be transferred to another team. I am asking us to notice what the contrast reveals about whose sport is understood as real, whose excellence attracts investment, and whose participation continues to be treated as optional.

Men’s blind football has been part of the Paralympic Games since 2004. Women’s blind football has not. Because the men’s game is part of the Paralympic program, it has access to pathways, institutional recognition and Paralympic resources that do not exist in the same way for the women. The Bilbies are working towards the inclusion of women’s blind football at Brisbane 2032, but in the meantime they are building a national team without the funding architecture that tells athletes: Your sport matters. Your development matters. You are expected to be here. This is sexism.

It does not always arrive as someone explicitly saying women cannot play. More often, it is built into budgets, pathways, selection systems and institutional priorities. It lives in the difference between an established program and a GoFundMe. It is present when men are funded as athletes while women are praised for volunteering, sacrificing and “making it happen.”

We need to become better at recognising sexism when it looks like absence: the program that was never established, the camp that was never funded, the pathway that was never built, the women who were never expected to arrive.

Where sexism and ableism meet

Of course, this is not only a story about sexism. It is about the way sexism and ableism work together. Mainstream football has largely been designed around sighted bodies. Women and girls with vision impairment are excluded from environments that assume everyone can see the field, follow a visual demonstration, track a conventional ball and move safely through spaces organised around visual information.

Within disability sport, gender creates another barrier. Men’s participation is established and resourced first, while women are expected to wait: until there are enough players, enough evidence, enough interest or enough institutional confidence. This is how intersecting systems of power operate. Sexism and ableism do not simply stack one disadvantage neatly on top of another. Together, they produce a particular form of exclusion - and then use that exclusion as evidence that women are not there.

The gendered imbalance is not confined to who gets to play. Bess is currently the only woman in the world head-coaching a national blind football team, across both the men’s and women’s games. Sit with that for a moment. Women are underrepresented not only on the field, but in the positions where sporting knowledge is recognised, strategy is shaped and authority is exercised. Every other national women’s blind football team is coached by a man. This is another way sexism reproduces itself. When men overwhelmingly coach both men and women, their leadership is treated as universal: they are simply “coaches.” Women are marked as exceptions because the system has made them so rare.

Bess brings enormous technical knowledge, commitment and political clarity to the Bilbies. She does not approach the team as a charitable opportunity for women with vision impairment. She coaches serious athletes and is building a competitive national program. Her description of blind football as “chess in an ice hockey arena with eye shades” refuses the soft, patronising lens so often placed over disability sport. And, like the players she coaches, Bess does this work as a volunteer. The only woman in the world holding this kind of national coaching role in blind football is building the game through unpaid labour. That is both extraordinary - and an indictment of the system around her.

Women with vision impairment can become invisible within women’s sport because disability access has not been built in. They can become invisible within disability sport because men are treated as the default athletes. Then, when women create their own team, their labour is framed as an inspiring act of resilience rather than evidence of systems that have failed to recognise and resource them. The problem is not that women with vision impairment lack interest, capability or ambition. The problem is that systems repeatedly mistake exclusion for absence.

Women’s blind football is growing rapidly around the world. There are now 13 ranked national teams across five continents, including Australia, active programs in at least 16 countries, and an established cycle of World Championships. The women are here. The sport is here. The skill and ambition are here. The resources have not followed.

Finding your people

What I love most about the SBS podcast is that it does not only explain the technical aspects of blind football. It captures what the team means to the players. Ale speaks about growing up without consistent friendships with other people with vision impairment and then finding this “seriously amazing group of friends.” Charlotte (or Char to the team) describes growing up without access to disability-specific sport or a community of people who shared her experience. Finding blind football changed how she understood her own vision impairment. Something she had previously hidden became something she could name proudly. Rachel (our beloved captain) calls the team “home.”

This matters because exclusion from sport is never only exclusion from physical activity. It is exclusion from friendship, identity, confidence, travel, teamwork, competition, leadership and the simple experience of belonging somewhere without having to constantly explain yourself. When a girl cannot access sport, she does not only miss a game. She misses all the relationships, risks, disagreements, discoveries and possibilities created around that game. The Bilbies are creating those possibilities for each other and for the girls who will come next. They are trying to ensure that a ten-year-old girl with vision impairment does not have to watch her friends leave for football training while assuming that football simply does not belong to her.

Inclusion has to become practical

Being part of the Bilbies is a joy. It is also an important part of my own practice. Through Community Powered Responses, I spend a great deal of time thinking, writing and talking about inclusion, participation and power. But inclusion cannot remain a policy commitment or a beautifully designed framework. Eventually, it has to become practical. It has to shape what happens on a football field.

Volunteering with the Bilbies gives me an ongoing space to practise and strengthen my skills. I continue to learn braille. I am developing my audio description and commentary. I think about what information I am conveying, what I am assuming, and what somebody needs to know in order to orient themselves, make decisions and participate. We have also been building tactile tools, including a tactile representation of a football field.

Some players have never visually seen an entire football field. They may know it through movement, sound and specific locations without having had access to its overall shape. With a tactile field, we can explore where the sidelines are, how the thirds of the field relate to one another, where a player is positioned and where the goal sits in relation to them. We can talk through movement and strategy spatially, using touch rather than relying upon a visual diagram that excludes the very people it is meant to support.

These might appear to be small details. But power often operates through small details. Who receives the information? In what form? Who can build a complete picture? Who has to depend upon somebody else’s partial explanation? Who can ask an informed question? Who can contribute to strategy? Accessibility is not something added after the “real” work has been designed. It shapes who gets to understand, decide and act.

I have worked alongside blind and vision-impaired groups before, including for six years through a Participatory Action Research water, sanitation and hygiene project in eastern Indonesia. But inclusive practice is not a certificate we earn once and then permanently possess. Skills need to be used. Assumptions need to be unsettled. Practice needs to remain close to people. The Bilbies keep me practising. They remind me that inclusion is made through relationships, communication, trust, repetition, tactile objects, careful description and a willingness to notice when the usual way of doing something only works for the people it was designed around.

They should not have to build this alone

The Bilbies want women’s blind football included in the Brisbane 2032 Paralympic Games. It is a big ambition, but it is not an unreasonable one. Women are not asking to be accommodated at the edge of somebody else’s sport. They are asking for equal access to a game they already play, at an international level, with extraordinary skill. They are asking to be recognised and resourced as athletes. Until then, the work continues through unpaid labour, donations and players carrying costs that should not be theirs alone.

Some players are still paying off the cost of representing Australia in Japan. We are now trying to raise funds for a national training camp in September or October. Every contribution helps bring players from across Australia together to train - not as a social activity, but as a national team preparing to compete and to build the future of their sport.

You can listen to the Bilbies tell their own story through the SBS Podcast, Playing in the dark: Australia’s Women’s blind football

Listen here

You can also donate through the Bilbies brand new Go Fund Me.

Donate here

We are always looking for volunteers too. If you have skills you would like to offer - from fundraising, communications and administration to sport, accessibility, transport or logistics - please email me and tell me how you would like to contribute.

As the world watches men play football on its biggest and most expensive stage, I want us to pay attention to the women building another part of the game with almost none of that machinery behind them. Not because they are inspiring for doing so much with so little. Because they should never have been given so little in the first place.

In solidarity,

Lana

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In previous years, June brought the familiar wave of rainbow logos, social media statements, and panel discussions from across the aid and development sector. Much of it was symbolic. Some of it was performative. Much of it deserved critique. Yet this year the silence feels different.

Many organisations appear to have stepped back altogether. The timing is striking. Across many parts of the world, people with diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, Expressions and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) and communities are facing escalating attacks on their rights, safety and existence. Anti-LGBTQ legislation continues to spread. Trans and gender diverse people are increasingly targeted by political campaigns. Funding for human rights organisations is shrinking. Diversity and inclusion initiatives are being rolled back. At precisely the moment political hostility is increasing, many aid organisations seem less willing to speak.

The recent controversy surrounding Oxfam in Africa offers a useful example. Reporting by The New Humanitarian revealed the existence of internal guidance that discouraged public communications linking Oxfam’s work in Africa to LGBTQIA+ issues and advised staff to avoid using the term LGBTQIA+ altogether. The guidance was later withdrawn, but the rationale behind it was familiar. Leaders argued that public association with LGBTQIA+ rights could create risks for staff, partners and programmes operating in hostile environments.

It would be easy to focus on Oxfam, but that would miss the point. The tensions exposed by this story exist across the aid sector. For years now, organisations have wrestled with the question of how far they are willing to go in defending the rights of people with diverse SOGIESC when doing so may create political, operational or financial consequences. The language changes, the contexts change, but the underlying calculation remains remarkably consistent. At what point does inclusion become too risky? The answer, too often, appears to be whenever diverse SOGIESC people are involved.

This is particularly concerning because the sector’s current caution is frequently framed as a response to backlash. Yet backlash is not the issue itself. Backlash is evidence of something deeper. Diverse SOGIESC people are not simply experiencing disagreement, controversy or competing cultural viewpoints. In many countries they are experiencing political violence.

Political violence takes many forms. Sometimes it is overt, expressed through criminalisation, imprisonment or state-sanctioned persecution. Sometimes it is less visible, operating through exclusion from healthcare, education, employment or public life. Sometimes it is embedded within public narratives that portray Diverse SOGIESC people as threats to culture, religion, children or national identity. In every case, the objective is similar: to reduce the ability of certain people to participate fully and safely in society.

Yet much of the aid sector continues to talk about these realities primarily through the language of risk management. Risk management is important. Humanitarian and development organisations have a responsibility to protect staff, partners and communities. But risk analysis cannot become a substitute for moral analysis. When organisations focus exclusively on the risks of speaking, they often stop asking questions about the risks of remaining silent.

Silence has consequences too.

This is not a new insight. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, activists created one of the most recognisable slogans in queer political history: Silence = Death. The phrase emerged from a context in which governments, institutions and much of wider society were unwilling to acknowledge the suffering and deaths occurring around them. The slogan was powerful because it challenged the assumption that silence was neutral. It argued instead that silence protected existing systems of power and allowed harm to continue. That lesson remains relevant today.

When institutions with significant influence choose not to name discrimination, violence or exclusion, they do not remove themselves from the political landscape. They become part of it. Silence is not the absence of action. It is a form of action in itself. This is where the aid sector’s position becomes particularly difficult to defend.

Many organisations present themselves as champions of human rights, inclusion and social justice. They advocate publicly for gender equality, disability inclusion, child protection, localisation, civic participation and accountability. They challenge discrimination in countless forms. Yet the rights of poeple with diverse SOGIESC are frequently treated as a special category, one that requires exceptional caution and exceptional justification. The result is a form of institutional inconsistency. Rights are defended until defending them becomes politically inconvenient.

Perhaps most troubling is the way organisational silence often shifts risk onto those with the least power. Large international NGOs, donors and UN agencies possess platforms, resources and political influence that grassroots LGBTQIA+ organisations can only dream of. When these institutions decide that public advocacy is too dangerous, the burden does not disappear. It falls back onto activists, community leaders and local organisations who are already carrying the greatest exposure to violence and retaliation. In effect, institutions with power withdraw from public view while expecting those with far less protection to continue the work. This is often justified as a strategy for protecting communities. Yet there is a profound difference between reducing risk and transferring it.

None of this is to suggest that every organisation should launch a Pride campaign or issue public statements in every context. Advocacy must always be informed by local realities, local movements and local leadership. There are situations where public visibility may create genuine danger. There are times when quiet diplomacy is more effective than public confrontation.

But there is also a difference between strategic action and institutional erasure. Too often the aid sector has chosen the latter. The deeper problem is that many organisations still fail to recognise genuine (as opposed to tokenistic) diverse SOGIESC inclusion as a core issue of justice and participation. Despite years of rhetoric about diversity and inclusion, humanitarian assessments remain heavily heteronormative. Gender analyses frequently collapse gender into cisgender women and men. Protection frameworks often fail to recognise the specific vulnerabilities faced by diverse SOGIESC people. Safeguarding systems rarely account for the realities of queer staff, volunteers or community members. Entire populations continue to disappear from data, programme design and decision-making processes.

The silence visible during Pride Month is therefore not an isolated phenomenon. It reflects a much longer history of exclusion.

For organisations that claim to be working towards a more just world, the challenge is not whether they can eliminate risk. No organisation can do that. The challenge is whether they are willing to use the power they already possess in support of those who possess far less. That is ultimately what solidarity requires. Not rainbow branding. Not symbolic statements. Not carefully crafted communications strategies. A willingness to name injustice when it occurs. A willingness to acknowledge political violence when communities experience it. A willingness to stand alongside those who are being targeted rather than quietly stepping aside when the political costs become uncomfortable.

As Pride Month ends, that feels like the question worth asking of the aid sector. Not whether organisations support diverse SOGIESC people when it is easy. Whether they are prepared to do so when it is not.

Community Powered Responses exists because I believe that more just, accountable and inclusive systems are possible. Through this blog, I share reflections on power, participation, disability inclusion, gender justice, diverse SOGIESC inclusion, humanitarian action and systems change.

All articles are published as open access. At a time when many of the communities most affected by exclusion are also those least able to pay for knowledge and resources, keeping this work freely available matters. Paid subscriptions help support the time, labour and independence required to continue researching, writing and sharing these ideas with practitioners and communities around the world.

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That is certainly part of it, but heteronormativity is much bigger than that. At its core, it is also about the organisation of society through gendered roles and expectations. Men’s work and women’s work. Men as leaders and women as carers. Men as decision-makers and women as supporters. Productive labour versus reproductive labour. Paid work versus unpaid care. Public authority versus private sacrifice.

These roles are not neutral. They are tied to power. Because they are tied to power, they shape far more than households or romantic relationships. They shape institutions, economies, disaster responses, aid programs, workplaces and political systems. They shape who is seen as capable, who is seen as vulnerable, who is listened to, and whose labour is expected to be endless, flexible and often invisible.

Once you start looking for these patterns, they become difficult to unsee. In development programs, women are frequently positioned around care, domestic labour and community cohesion. Women collect water. Women cook. Women weave. Women undertake unpaid community mobilisation. Women become the “natural volunteers” for social protection committees, preparedness activities, school feeding programs and health promotion work.

Often this reflects reality. In many communities, women are already doing these things. Ignoring that reality would make little sense. Yet there is also something deeper happening when interventions repeatedly organise women around the same socially acceptable roles without questioning the structures underneath them. Development practice does not only respond to social norms. Sometimes it stabilises them.

I have seen projects celebrated as transformative because women were included in handicraft production, food preparation initiatives or preparedness committees, while the broader systems of political and economic power remained largely untouched.

Men still controlled land. Infrastructure. Transport. Finance. Disaster governance. Formal authority. The women’s work became more visible, but the structure around that work remained remarkably stable.

Sometimes the contradiction is even more subtle. Women are encouraged to lead. They establish cooperatives, chair savings groups, register women’s organisations and coordinate community enterprises. Donors celebrate women’s entrepreneurship and leadership. Reports describe increased participation, confidence and agency.

Some of this work genuinely matters. Women’s collectives can create solidarity, income, visibility and forms of mutual support that are deeply important, particularly in contexts where women have historically been excluded from public life. Yet it is still worth asking what kinds of leadership are being encouraged, and within what limits. Leadership over handicrafts is not the same as having a meaningful voice in decisions about safe, accessible and inclusive infrastructure. Leading a community kitchen is not the same as shaping disaster governance. Managing a women’s cooperative is not the same as having authority within contexts of land, transport systems or major economic planning. Too often, women’s leadership is supported within carefully bounded spaces that remain compatible with existing gender expectations. Care work. Community wellbeing. Informal livelihoods. Social cohesion. Survival economies.

Meanwhile, the institutions associated with technical authority, large-scale resources and formal political power remain overwhelmingly masculinised. This is part of what makes social norms so difficult to challenge. They do not simply restrict participation. They shape the scale of power people are permitted to hold. I sometimes worry that development programs unintentionally confuse participation with transformation.

A woman leading a small handicraft enterprise may still have little control over land, mobility, political influence or long-term economic security. A women’s organisation may be highly active and visible while remaining structurally excluded from the forums where major decisions are actually made. Women may be heavily relied upon for community cohesion, unpaid care work and volunteer labour during crises, while remaining absent from the institutions controlling budgets, logistics, infrastructure and formal governance.

This is not always the result of deliberate exclusion. More often, it reflects the way institutions themselves have been shaped by assumptions about what kinds of leadership feel socially acceptable, realistic or “appropriate” for women. Social norms shape the imagination of institutions as much as they shape communities. They influence what donors fund. What NGOs design. What governments support. What risks organisations are willing to take. What kinds of futures are considered achievable. Even within humanitarian response, these patterns repeat themselves constantly.

Women are often expected to absorb the labour of community survival during crises, and much of that labour is framed as natural, instinctive or simply part of being a “good woman” or a “good community member”. Cooking in evacuation centres. Caring for children. Managing hygiene. Supporting older family members. Checking on neighbours. Organising donations. Providing emotional support. Cleaning communal spaces. Maintaining social cohesion. Carrying the invisible administrative labour of family and community survival after disasters. Increasingly, this extends into what development and humanitarian sectors celebrate as “community-led volunteering”.

Women are frequently the backbone of volunteer-driven preparedness and response systems. They become the local mobilisers, the awareness-raising volunteers, the people conducting door-to-door preparedness messaging, distributing supplies, identifying vulnerable households, maintaining community networks and ensuring people are accounted for during crises.

This work matters enormously. Communities survive because people undertake this labour. What is discussed far less often is why this labour is so consistently feminised, unpaid and expected. I continue to see situations where women are simultaneously described as “empowered community leaders” while carrying extraordinary unpaid burdens that institutions themselves rely upon to function. Women volunteer countless hours to preparedness committees, protection activities, disability support, community kitchens and recovery efforts, often on top of existing unpaid care responsibilities and precarious livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the more formalised and resourced parts of disaster systems frequently remain masculinised and professionalised. Paid logistics roles. Security coordination. Engineering. Infrastructure. Emergency governance. Transport. Procurement. Senior decision-making. Technical response leadership.

Women become central to sustaining the social and emotional infrastructure of survival, while men continue to dominate many of the formal structures associated with authority, technical expertise and institutional power. The language of participation can sometimes obscure this contradiction.

No one wants to dismiss the importance of community-led action. In many places, volunteer networks genuinely save lives, particularly where state systems are weak, underfunded or absent. Many women also find pride, solidarity, purpose and collective power through this organising. Community leadership can absolutely create pathways toward greater confidence, visibility and influence. Still, there are political questions sitting underneath all of this. Who is expected to hold communities together when systems fail? Whose labour fills the gaps left by underfunded institutions, weak infrastructure and inadequate state support? Why is that labour so often treated as limitless?

The language of “community resilience” can sometimes obscure the extent to which survival is being subsidised by women’s unpaid labour. From an institutional perspective, a community may appear resilient because evacuation centres functioned, vulnerable households were supported, food was distributed and social cohesion was maintained during crisis. From the perspective of the women carrying that labour, resilience may have meant exhaustion, overwork, emotional strain and the expectation that they would continue caring for everyone else while receiving very little structural support themselves. This is where social norms become deeply entangled with aid systems. When women’s unpaid labour is endlessly relied upon as the invisible glue holding together households, communities and disaster responses, institutions can stop recognising it as labour at all. It simply becomes what women do.

Then we wonder why inequality persists.

The development sector often talks about “women’s empowerment” in ways that remain surprisingly comfortable for existing systems of power. There is frequently support for women participating in the economy, as long as that participation remains small-scale, community-based, informal, underpaid and compatible with unpaid care responsibilities. Women are encouraged to generate income, but often in ways that still fit neatly around the expectation that they remain primarily responsible for caregiving, household labour and community support.

At the same time, I do not think the solution is simply for women to gain access to capitalist power in the same exploitative forms that already dominate much of the global economy. Replacing male business owners with female business owners while leaving systems of exploitation, precarious labour and inequality untouched is not liberation. The more important question is why women’s economic participation is so often imagined within narrow and heavily gendered boundaries. Why are women’s livelihoods so frequently concentrated in informal, low-paid and insecure sectors, while access to stable employment, union protections, infrastructure, technical industries, governance and political decision-making remains uneven? Why are women so often encouraged toward entrepreneurship as individuals, rather than collective bargaining power, labour rights, public services and structural redistribution? Why does so much development discourse celebrate women’s economic “empowerment” without seriously engaging with the broader conditions of labour itself? There is a difference between creating opportunities for women to survive within unequal systems and transforming the systems that produce inequality in the first place.

Too often, development projects reproduce the idea that women’s economic participation should remain flexible, community-oriented and secondary to caregiving responsibilities. Women are expected to “balance” income generation with unpaid labour in ways that men are rarely expected to do. The result is often additional income, but also additional labour. Additional leadership, but within constrained spaces. Additional responsibility, without a corresponding redistribution of power, resources or care obligations.

This is why discussions about gender equality need to move beyond representation alone and engage more seriously with political economy, labour rights and the social organisation of care. Inequality is not only about whether women participate in economies. It is also about the conditions under which participation occurs, who controls resources, whose labour is protected, and whose work remains endlessly flexible, undervalued and taken for granted.

There is also a contradiction in the way development actors discuss gender equality and risk. Many organisations acknowledge that restrictive gender norms are harmful while simultaneously designing programs that avoid challenging those norms too directly. The caution is understandable. Backlash is real. Safety matters. In some contexts, rapid shifts in gender expectations can expose women, girls and people with diverse SOGIESC to violence, exclusion or social punishment. Still, there is a difference between working carefully within context and unconsciously reproducing the logic of inequality itself.

If every intervention continues organising women around caregiving, volunteering, emotional labour and informal survival economies, then the broader structure remains largely intact. Women may gain visibility and additional responsibilities without necessarily gaining greater power. This is why conversations about social norms need to move beyond individual attitudes and behaviours.

Social norms are not simply beliefs floating around in people’s heads. They are embedded in institutions. In labour markets. In funding models. In disaster governance systems. In laws. In religious structures. In schools. In households. In the assumptions built into development programming itself. They shape what kinds of futures feel imaginable. They also shape what kinds of change feel “reasonable”, “appropriate” or “too political”. The longer I work in this sector, the more I find myself returning to the difference between inclusion and transformation.

Sometimes inclusion simply means making unequal systems function more smoothly. Transformation is something much more difficult. It requires questioning why some forms of labour are consistently undervalued. Why caregiving is feminised. Why authority is masculinised. Why some people are expected to absorb endless unpaid community responsibility while others are recognised as leaders, experts or decision-makers.

Most importantly, it requires us to examine the ways our own work can quietly reinforce the very social norms we claim to challenge.

About Community Powered Responses

Community Powered Responses is my small consulting and practice studio, focused on participation, inclusion, localisation and systems change across development, humanitarian and community settings.

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The International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism and Transphobia exists because violence, discrimination and exclusion continue to shape the lives of LGBTIQA+ people across the world. It exists because queer, trans and intersex people are still criminalised, attacked, excluded from services, erased from policy, targeted politically, and made unsafe in their own communities, workplaces, schools and homes. It exists because systems continue to decide whose safety matters, whose lives are considered politically convenient, and whose humanity remains negotiable.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been moving between very different pieces of work that all somehow circle back to the same question: what does inclusion actually look like when systems are under pressure, politically cautious, or unwilling to act?

One of those pieces of work was finalising a submission to the UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, focused on humanitarian contexts.

Writing that submission was difficult, not because the evidence is hard to find, but because putting those experiences, systems and patterns into a single document revealed just how deeply embedded many forms of exclusion continue to be within humanitarian structures. The submission explored how humanitarian systems often fail people with diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and expressions (SOGIE) not only through overt discrimination, but through assumptions embedded within preparedness planning, shelter systems, registration processes, data collection, participation structures and concepts of “family” and “community”. It argued that exclusion is often produced through invisibility, omission and institutional uncertainty rather than explicit policy alone.

Importantly, the submission also argued that inclusion is not simply about visibility. In many contexts, visibility can increase risk. That tension sits at the centre of a lot of this work. The answer is not forcing disclosure or symbolic representation. The answer is building systems capable of responding safely, ethically and accountably to different realities, relationships and forms of vulnerability.

At the same time, I was also completing the final socialisation webinars for Disaster READY organisations on the Strengthening Resilience for All toolkit on diverse SOGIESC inclusion in Community-Based Disaster Risk Management across the Pacific and Timor-Leste.

The toolkit release felt important for a different reason. Not because a toolkit itself changes the world. It doesn’t. And not because diverse SOGIESC inclusion in humanitarian and disaster preparedness work has suddenly become mainstream, institutionally embedded, or well-funded. It isn’t.

What felt significant was being given the opportunity to create something grounded in the realities of the work as it exists right now. Not where policy language says we should be. Not where advocacy imagines we might eventually get to. But where many organisations, communities and disaster systems actually are in practice.

That meant creating something culturally situated and approached with care. Something that recognised complexity, uncertainty and risk rather than pretending these tensions do not exist. Something that understood that inclusion cannot simply be imported through global language or technical compliance frameworks, particularly within Pacific and humanitarian contexts shaped by culture, relationships, history, faith, community dynamics and safety concerns.

The toolkit does not approach inclusion as visibility at all costs. It does not assume disclosure is always safe, or that every context is immediately ready for the same forms of engagement. Instead, it tries to meet practitioners where they are, while still asking difficult questions about exclusion, preparedness, participation and harm. It tries to create movement that is practical, relational and grounded in context, rather than performative.

That mattered to me because too often humanitarian guidance is written for idealised systems rather than real ones. But real humanitarian work is messy. It is shaped by institutional caution, political sensitivities, uneven capacity, competing risks and imperfect conditions. And yet, even within those realities, there are still opportunities to build safer, more thoughtful and more inclusive approaches.

And then, in the middle of all of this, the federal budget was released.

I found myself reading through it looking for meaningful investment in LGBTIQA+ communities and services, particularly at a time when Australia is seeing increasing hostility toward queer communities, rising public hate speech, organised anti-LGBTIQA+ campaigning, and growing reports of violence and harassment. And once again, there was that familiar feeling of absence.

Not just the absence of funding itself, although that matters deeply for organisations already stretched beyond capacity. It was the absence of recognition. The sense that LGBTIQA+ communities remain peripheral to broader conversations about safety, wellbeing, housing, mental health, family violence, disaster preparedness and social cohesion unless we are specifically pushed into the frame.

One thing that became incredibly clear through all of this work is that exclusion is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like silence or avoidance. Sometimes it looks like organisations deciding something is too politically sensitive to engage with. Sometimes it appears through data systems that make people invisible by design, or preparedness planning that quietly assumes everyone belongs safely within a heterosexual, cisgender household structure.

That is part of why IDAHOBIT still matters.

Not because awareness alone changes anything, but because naming discrimination matters. Naming systems matters. Naming violence matters. Naming erasure matters. It creates space to recognise that these issues are not isolated incidents or individual experiences alone, but are often produced and reinforced through institutions, policies and social structures that continue to position some lives as more legitimate, safe or worthy of protection than others.

And also, this work can feel incredibly exhausting. There are moments lately where it feels like we are simultaneously seeing greater visibility and greater backlash at the exact same time. More organisations adopting inclusion language while community services remain underfunded. More public statements about diversity while queer and trans communities are increasingly pulled into culture wars. More institutions wanting to appear inclusive while remaining deeply uncomfortable with the structural changes inclusion actually requires.

I think that’s ultimately what I’m sitting with this IDAHOBIT. Not a neat story about progress, but the reality that inclusion is ongoing work undertaken in the middle of contradiction, backlash and institutional hesitation. And despite all of that, people continue pushing forward anyway. That matters.

If you’d like to support this work, you can subscribe below. I choose not to lock articles, tools or resources behind paywalls because I want the material to remain accessible regardless of people’s financial circumstances. However, paid subscriptions make it possible for me to continue producing independent writing, research and practical resources about including the excluded.

The Data Question

This was the same question that followed me across the Pacific while developing the Diverse SOGIESC Community-Based Disaster Risk Management toolkit for the Australian Humanitarian Partnership (AHP). Disaster READY partners were asking it in very practical terms. They were working with forms that required gender indicators marked as Male, Female, or Other (M/F/O). They were noticing that no one was ticking “other.” And they were being asked, by reporting systems and donor requirements, to demonstrate that their programmes were inclusive. So they asked what feels like the most reasonable question in the world. How do we collect the data?

On the surface, this looks like a technical issue. It sounds like a problem that could be solved by adjusting the form. Add more categories. Reword the question. Provide better guidance. But the more time you spend in this space, the more you realise that the problem is not sitting neatly inside the form itself. It sits around it. In the systems that require the form, in the assumptions built into it, and in the conditions under which people are being asked to respond.

Because “other” is not a gender identity. It is a placeholder. A category that exists for whatever cannot be otherwise named. It tells us very little about the person selecting it, and a great deal about the limits of the system that produced it. In practice, it becomes a catch-all that cannot be meaningfully analysed or disaggregated, which means it rarely generates the kind of insight organisations are hoping for in the first place.

But the issue is not just technical. It is relational. Why would someone choose to mark themselves as “other,” particularly in contexts where difference can expose them to risk? Even in environments that feel relatively safe, disclosure is not a neutral act. It is a decision made within a web of relationships, expectations, and potential consequences. In many contexts, particularly across the Pacific, identity is not something that is casually declared to institutions. It is held, shared, negotiated, and protected within relationships of trust.

What We Think We’re Measuring

There is also a deeper conceptual problem that often gets overlooked. Gender is not sexuality. Sexuality is not sex characteristics. These are distinct dimensions of identity, each with their own meanings, implications, and risks. Collapsing them into a single question or treating them as interchangeable does not simplify complexity. It erases it, and yet, the pressure to collect better data is real.

Perhaps we are using the wrong measuring instrument?

Across the sector, there are strong and justified calls for improved data on people with diverse SOGIESC. Without data, it becomes difficult to demonstrate exclusion, to advocate for resources, or to hold institutions accountable. There is a real frustration with invisibility, and rightly so.

But alongside that, there is another body of evidence that tells a more complicated story. That data collection in this space is not straightforward. That standards are still emerging, and much of what exists has been developed in Global North contexts, often in health systems that do not map neatly onto humanitarian or development work. That identities are culturally embedded, and do not always align with the categories being imposed. And that, crucially, data collection itself can create harm if it is not approached carefully.

Too often, diverse SOGIESC data collection is treated as a problem of missing categories. As though the solution is simply to improve the list. Add more options. Expand the form. Make it more inclusive on paper. But that approach assumes that the problem is primarily one of representation, when in many cases it is one of safety, trust, and purpose.

There are, of course, more nuanced approaches available. The one-question method, where someone is asked to select their gender identity from a list, is common because it fits easily into existing systems. But it comes with clear limitations. It often relies on categories that do not translate across contexts, and it tends to push people into simplified or residual categories that do not reflect how they understand themselves. Which is why I guess DFAT programmes are using ‘other’, to get around culturally specific identity categories. But also, who says that a trans feminine person for example, won’t prefer to tick the female box as the best of limited options, than the other box?

The two-question method is often presented as an improvement. It separates sex assigned at birth from current gender identity, which can, in some cases, make transgender experiences more visible in the data without forcing people into a single category. In the right conditions, this can be more respectful and more useful.

This method assumes that people feel safe enough to disclose. It assumes they understand the questions in the way they are intended. It assumes that the categories themselves are meaningful in that context. And it assumes that the organisation collecting the data can be trusted to handle it appropriately. There are a lot of assumptions here, none of these things can be taken for granted.

The same complexity, and in many cases greater risk, applies to collecting data on sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is not routinely gathered in development contexts, partly because it is not always seen as relevant, and partly because it carries significant protection concerns. It is also not a single, stable category. It involves identity, attraction, and behaviour, which do not always align.

For example, what data are you actually trying to collect? Someone may identify as straight, but have sex with men. This distinction became particularly visible during the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, when researchers began using the term Men who have sex with Men (MSM) to capture behaviour rather than identity.

Without that level of clarity, asking about sexual orientation can quickly become both methodologically weak and ethically risky. Without a clear purpose and strong safeguards, it is likely to produce unreliable data at best, and harmful outcomes at worst. So while better question design has a role to play, it is not the solution on its own. More detailed questions are not automatically more inclusive. Sometimes they are simply more intrusive. What is needed instead is a different way of approaching the problem altogether.

A Different Way to Approach It

A practical way to think about this is through four steps, though in reality they are less linear than they sound.

The first is to clarify the purpose before designing the question. This sounds simple, but it is often the point where things begin to unravel. Why is this data being collected? What decision will it inform? Is it about programme design, monitoring, reporting, or advocacy? Without a clear purpose, data collection becomes extractive by default. It produces numbers that satisfy requirements without necessarily improving practice. It is also worth asking whether the question being directed outward should instead be directed inward. If the goal is to demonstrate inclusion, then what evidence exists within the organisation’s own practices? What has changed in how programmes are designed, delivered, and monitored?

The second step is to decide whether identity data is actually necessary. There is a strong assumption in development systems that more data is always better, and that quantitative data is inherently more valuable. But in this space, that assumption does not always hold. Qualitative data can often provide richer, more contextually grounded insights, and can be collected in ways that are safer and more controlled. It allows for nuance, for complexity, and for people to speak in ways that are not constrained by pre-defined categories. It is also reasonable, in many cases, to assume that any given population includes people with diverse SOGIESC, and to design programmes accordingly without requiring individuals to self-identify. Not every question needs to be asked.

This is where Pasifika research methodologies offer important guidance. Across many Pacific contexts, knowledge is relational rather than extractive. It is built through trust, reciprocity, and ongoing relationships, not through one-off data collection points. Methods grounded in talanoa, talanga, or other relational approaches prioritise dialogue, story, and shared understanding over categorisation. They recognise that identity is not always something that is declared in response to a question, but something that is understood through context, connection, and time.

From this perspective, the push to collect individual-level identity data through standardised tools can sit at odds with how knowledge is ethically gathered. It can feel abrupt, decontextualised, and in some cases unsafe. Qualitative approaches, particularly those led in partnership with local organisations and community members, are often better aligned with these methodologies. They allow people to share what they choose, in ways that make sense to them, within environments where trust has been established.

Deciding not to collect identity data, or to limit its collection, is not a failure of rigour. It can be a reflection of ethical practice. It acknowledges that inclusion is not only about what can be counted, but about how programmes are designed, how relationships are built, and whether people can engage safely, whether or not they ever formally disclose who they are.

The third step is that if identity data is necessary, the method must be matched carefully to the context. Gender identity, sexual orientation, and sex characteristics should not be collapsed into a single question. Each requires different approaches, and not all will be appropriate in all settings. Respondents must always have the option not to answer.

This is also the point where the role of LGBTIQ+ civil society organisations becomes essential, not optional. Too often, tools are designed at a distance and then applied in contexts where the language, categories, and assumptions do not hold. Working with local LGBTIQ+ CSOs shifts this dynamic. It brings in grounded knowledge about how identity is understood, expressed, and navigated in that specific place. It also brings a much clearer understanding of risk.

Language matters here, deeply. Terms that are common in global frameworks may not translate, or may carry entirely different meanings. In many Pacific contexts, gender diversity is already recognised through culturally specific identities, such as fa’afafine, fa’atama, or vakasalewalewa. These are not simply equivalents of Western identity categories. They are embedded within social, familial, and cultural systems. Attempting to replace them with externally defined labels can flatten meaning, or worse, create confusion and harm.

Co-designing data collection tools with local diverse SOGIESC CSOs allows organisations to use language that is actually meaningful and respectful within that context. It also helps ensure that questions are asked in ways that people can understand, and in environments where they feel safe enough to respond. This is not just about translation. It is about interpretation, adaptation, and relational accountability.

There is also a power dimension to this. When organisations design tools without local input, they are not only risking poor data. They are reinforcing the idea that knowledge can be extracted and standardised without regard for context. In contrast, co-design with diverfse SOGIESC CSOs recognises that these organisations already hold expertise, trust, and relationships. It positions them not as stakeholders to be consulted after the fact, but as partners in shaping what is asked, how it is asked, and whether it should be asked at all.

Matching method to context, then, is not just a technical exercise. It is a relational one. It requires working alongside those who understand the terrain, adapting tools to fit the realities on the ground, and accepting that in some cases, the most appropriate method may be to ask less, not more.

When Data Becomes Risk

And the fourth, and most critical step, is to build safeguarding, consent, and data governance before collecting anything at all. The value of the data does not outweigh the potential for harm. Participation must be voluntary, informed, and reversible. People must understand what is being collected, why, how it will be used, and who will have access to it. Data must be anonymised, stored securely, and handled by trained staff. These are not procedural details. They are the ethical foundation of the work. This is also where the conversation becomes more uncomfortable.

Many organisations want the legitimacy that comes with inclusive data, but have not yet built the systems required to collect it responsibly. They want to report on inclusion, to show progress, to demonstrate reach. But far less attention is given to what happens after the data is collected. What happens if that data is misused? What happens if it is requested? What happens if it is exposed?

In a context of increasing backlash, where people with diverse SOGIESC continue to face criminalisation, surveillance, and violence, these risks are not abstract. They are real, and in some places, already unfolding.

Data does not sit still. It moves through systems. It is stored, shared, reported, and sometimes demanded. An attendance list for a workshop may include names, phone numbers, organisations, locations. A sign-in sheet might be passed around the room, or left on a table for people to fill in as they arrive. It can feel routine, administrative, harmless. But in the wrong context, that list becomes a record of who was present, who is connected, who may be associated with a particular issue or identity.

Many organisations have not fully thought through what happens if a government authority, local partner, or other actor requests access to that information. In some settings, refusing may not be simple. Data-sharing agreements are often in place, but rarely designed with SOGIESC-specific risks in mind.

But what happens when the request is not optional? Consider a country office that operates as an independent national NGO within a globally affiliated organisation, implementing programmes funded by Western donors and using their reporting systems. On paper, it may have autonomy. In practice, it is still operating within national legal and political frameworks. If a government authority formally demands access to programme data, including participant lists or registration details, what are the organisation’s options? Can it refuse? On what legal basis? Is there a protocol for escalation to the global office? Will the global office support refusal, or prioritise compliance to maintain registration and access in-country? What protections exist for the individuals named in that data?

These are not theoretical questions. They sit at the intersection of donor requirements, organisational governance, and national sovereignty. In some contexts, refusing to comply with a government request could put the entire programme, or even the organisation’s legal status, at risk. In others, partial compliance may be negotiated, but without clear guidance, decisions are often made under pressure and without a strong protection framework.

This is where the tension becomes stark. Data that was collected to demonstrate inclusion can quickly become data that exposes people to harm. And the decision about what to do with that data is no longer in the hands of the individual who shared it, but in the hands of institutions navigating competing accountabilities. If organisations are not planning for this scenario in advance, then they are not truly practising do no harm.

There are also internal risks. Who has access to the raw data? Is it stored securely, or on personal devices? Is it shared over email? Are staff trained to understand the sensitivity of this information, or is it treated like any other demographic variable? A poorly anonymised report, a dataset that can be cross-referenced, or even a casual conversation can unintentionally expose someone.

In many Pacific contexts, where communities are closely connected, anonymity is fragile. It does not take much for someone to be identified indirectly. This is why safeguarding cannot be an afterthought. It must be central to the decision about whether to collect the data at all. It requires clear protocols, strong data governance, and an honest assessment of risk.

It also requires organisations to be willing to say no. To recognise that in some contexts, the most responsible decision is not to collect certain data. Because once it is collected, it cannot be taken back. And if something goes wrong, the consequences do not sit with the organisation. They sit with the people who trusted it.

Implications for Practice

This is why the question of accountability needs to be reframed. If organisations are serious about inclusion, then the burden of proof cannot sit solely with individuals disclosing who they are. It must sit with institutions demonstrating what they do. Inclusion should be visible in programme design, in staff behaviour, in partnerships, in safeguarding systems, in how feedback is handled, and in whether people feel safe enough to participate without having to declare themselves.

And this brings us back to the original question. How do we collect diverse SOGIESC data?

The answer is not a single method. It is not a better form. It is not a longer list of categories. It is a process that requires clarity, restraint, and accountability. Sometimes that process will involve collecting identity data, carefully and in controlled conditions. Sometimes it will rely on qualitative approaches and partnerships with local organisations. And sometimes, the most ethical decision will be not to collect identity data at all. Because inclusion is not achieved by improving the tick box. It is achieved by building systems that people can trust, whether or not they ever choose to tick it.

Diverse SOGIESC inclusion is complex, politically charged, and deeply contextual. It sits at the intersection of identity, culture, law, safety, and power. It requires technical understanding, careful judgement, and, often, guidance from people who have spent time working through these tensions in practice, across different contexts and systems.

But that complexity is not an excuse to avoid the work. Doing nothing does not maintain neutrality. It maintains exclusion. It leaves existing systems intact, along with the harms they produce. It allows programmes to continue in ways that may unintentionally exclude or marginalise people, simply because they were never designed to include them in the first place.

At the same time, doing something does not mean forcing visibility. It does not mean collecting data that cannot be held safely, or asking questions that people should not be expected to answer. Inclusion is not about making people visible to systems that may not be safe for them.

It’s about making systems safer, more flexible, and more responsive. It is about reducing harm, not increasing exposure. It is about designing programmes that can be accessed without people having to disclose who they are.

It’s also work that benefits from being done carefully and well. Rushed approaches, or tools applied without context, often create more problems than they solve. Taking the time to build internal capability, to work alongside local organisations, and to draw on technical expertise where needed is part of doing this responsibly. It’s about taking small, deliberate steps forward. Building understanding within teams. Testing approaches carefully. Learning, adjusting, and trying again.

Inclusion, in this sense, is not a single intervention. It is a practice.

We are not only in a moment of unfinished progress. We are in a moment of active backlash. And that backlash is not abstract. It is being written into law, into policy, and into the conditions that shape people’s lives.

In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation decision removed federal protection for abortion rights. Since then, multiple states have enacted trigger bans or severe restrictions, including near-total bans in states such as Texas and Alabama. These laws have led to delays or denial of care in medical emergencies, as clinicians navigate legal risk. Women have also faced investigation or criminal charges linked to pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages. The impact is not only on health. It shapes whether women can continue education, remain in paid work, or make decisions about their economic futures, reinforcing dependency at both household and structural levels.

In Europe, legal and policy shifts have narrowed both reproductive rights and gender recognition. In Hungary, a 2020 law amended the civil registry to define sex as “biological sex at birth,” effectively prohibiting legal gender recognition. In Poland, the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling further restricted abortion to only the most limited circumstances. The consequences have been material, with documented cases where women were denied timely care during non-viable pregnancies due to fear of legal repercussions among healthcare providers. These restrictions do not sit outside economic life. They shape who carries the burden of care, who can participate fully in the labour market, and whose bodies are regulated in the service of maintaining particular social arrangements.

In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, women have been systematically excluded from public life through formal decrees. These include bans on secondary and higher education for girls and women, restrictions on women working in NGOs and the United Nations, and requirements for women to be accompanied by a male guardian in many public settings. These policies also restrict access to healthcare, including sexual and reproductive health services, by limiting women’s ability to travel and engage with providers independently. The result is not only social exclusion, but enforced economic dependency and the removal of women from public and productive life.

In Africa, recent legislation has intensified both the criminalisation of sexuality and the regulation of gender norms. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 introduced some of the harshest penalties globally, including life imprisonment and, in certain cases, the death penalty. Alongside this, in countries such as Nigeria, laws restricting same-sex relationships have also been used to justify broader surveillance and control of gender expression and association. These environments often correlate with restricted access to sexual and reproductive health services, particularly for unmarried women and young people, reinforcing expectations around sexuality, reproduction, and gender roles.

In South America, the landscape remains uneven but increasingly contested. In Argentina, following the election of Javier Milei, there have been moves to dismantle or defund key gender institutions, including the closure of the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. This sits alongside broader efforts to roll back state support for gender-based violence prevention and reproductive health services. In Brazil, despite legal protections, there have been sustained legislative efforts to restrict comprehensive sexuality education and limit access to abortion even in cases currently permitted by law, including for survivors of rape. These efforts do not simply remove services. They reassert control over how women’s bodies and sexuality are understood within the state, and who is able to make decisions about them.

In the Pacific, backlash often operates through legal framing and institutional silence rather than sweeping reversals. In Vanuatu, recent legal positioning has reinforced the recognition of only two sexes within state systems, narrowing the space for recognising gender diversity in law and policy. Across the region, colonial-era laws criminalising same-sex relationships remain in place in countries such as Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. At the same time, access to sexual and reproductive health services for women remains uneven, shaped by geographic isolation, resource constraints, and strong social and religious norms. These conditions limit not only healthcare access, but also women’s ability to participate fully in economic and public life, reinforcing existing inequalities.

Across multiple contexts, there are also quieter but significant shifts. Governments are stepping back from commitments to comprehensive sexuality education. There is increasing resistance to the inclusion of sexual and reproductive health and rights language in international agreements. Within United Nations processes, previously agreed commitments are being challenged, including those aligned with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5 on gender equality.

These are not isolated developments. They point to a broader pattern in which control over gendered bodies is being reasserted as a way of stabilising social and economic uncertainty.

Cisgender women are feeling this in direct and material ways. Through reduced access to sexual and reproductive health services. Through legal and practical barriers to bodily autonomy. Through ongoing exposure to sexual and gender-based violence, often without adequate protection or recourse. Through labour systems that continue to rely on undervalued and unpaid care work.

At the same time, people with diverse SOGIESC are being positioned as a threat. Their rights, recognition, and safety are being challenged through law, policy, and public discourse. These dynamics are often separated in policy and programming. They are treated as different issues, requiring different approaches. In practice, they are deeply connected.

The same political movements that seek to restrict gender diversity are also seeking to regulate women’s bodies, sexuality, and roles. The same narratives that frame gender as destabilising are used to justify limits on reproductive rights, to reinforce rigid expectations of femininity, and to contain women within particular social and economic positions.

Because what is being contested is not only language or identity. It is control. Control over bodies, over reproduction, over labour and control over who is recognised and who is excluded.

For those of us working in humanitarian and development contexts, this changes the ground we are operating on. It is no longer sufficient to approach gender equality and inclusion as technical fields of work that can be advanced through better tools, stronger indicators, or increased capacity alone. These remain necessary. But they are not enough, because the barriers are not only technical. They are political. Practitioners are already navigating this, often without naming it directly. In how programs are framed, in what language is used or avoided, and in how far proposals can go before they become unfundable or unworkable. These are not minor adjustments. They shape whose realities are recognised, whose rights are advanced, and whose are left out.

As Women Deliver Conference convenes in Melbourne, there will be important conversations about progress and commitments. These matter. But access to these spaces is controlled. By cost, by institutional power, and by whose voices are seen as legitimate within global conversations on gender. Even in my own city, the registration cost of around $1325 is too prohibitive for me to attend. So I am not in the room.

And the work of gender equality is not only happening in these spaces. It is happening in contexts where laws are changing, where rights are being contested, and where the conditions for inclusion are becoming more constrained. We need to be clear about this, because without that clarity, we risk designing responses for a world that no longer exists, rather than the one we are actually working in.

This is a political moment, and it requires us to be political in how we practise. Not in the sense of partisanship, but in the sense of understanding power. Of recognising that rights are being negotiated, contested, and in some cases withdrawn. Of being clear about what is at stake, and for whom. It also requires solidarity, and the deliberate building of expansive movements. The backlash does not operate in isolation. It moves across issues and across groups. It links restrictions on reproductive rights with attacks on gender diversity, with limits on labour rights, with the narrowing of civic space. Our responses need to be just as connected.

This means ensuring that the rights and realities of lesbian, queer, and trans women are not treated as separate or secondary, but as central. It also means being careful about how we define “women” and “gender” in our work. These are not fixed or universal categories. They are shaped by language, culture, and age, and understood differently across contexts. If we rely on narrow, Eurocentric definitions, often carried through English-language frameworks, we risk reproducing the very exclusions we are trying to address. This is something we need to be particularly conscious of. In an English-speaking country shaped by colonisation, it can be easy to slip into a Eurocentric lens as if it were the only one.

Solidarity, in this moment, is not only about standing together. It is about expanding how we understand who is included, and how.

At the same time, the calendar has been full of recognition days. International Women’s Day. The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Harmony Day in Australia. Each accompanied by statements about inclusion, equality and belonging. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I found myself dealing with racist and sexist trolling on my YouTube page. It is not the worst thing happening in the world right now, but it sits within a pattern that many of us recognise. And it is exhausting.

What we are seeing is not simply burnout. It is the result of a sector that continues to speak the language of inclusion, while avoiding the shifts in power required to make it real. For myself, a queer woman of colour, this tension is difficult to ignore. The work asks us to carry complexity, to advocate for inclusion, and to facilitate dialogue and change. At the same time, we are navigating the realities of racism, tokenism and exposure, both within institutions and in the public spaces where we share our work.

The work does not sit neatly within working hours. It follows you, in the news cycle, in policy debates, in the cautious language organisations use to avoid controversy. It is present in the absence of disability in program design, and in the way work with people with diverse SOGIESC is routinely constrained by institutional risk aversion rather than guided by human rights commitments. There is a growing gap between what is said and what is done.

International Women’s Day generates visibility for women’s rights, but which women are centred, and which are not? Women with disabilities remain largely absent from many of these narratives. Women with diverse SOGIESC are often excluded altogether, or included only through carefully neutral language that avoids naming the realities of their lives. At the same time, there has been a continued shift away from the origins of International Working Women’s Day. While there has been critique of corporate branding, cupcakes and panel events, far less attention is paid to what has been lost. Conversations about economic rights, labour conditions, unionisation, cost of living pressures and poverty are increasingly absent. The structural realities that shaped the day’s origins are sidelined, replaced with messaging that is more palatable and far less politically demanding.

This matters not only in high-income contexts, but globally. For many women, economic precarity is not abstract. It is lived, daily, and intensifying. Yet these realities remain largely disconnected from how the day is framed and discussed.

Harmony Day speaks to inclusion and belonging, but it was introduced by the Howard government as a deliberate reframing of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, shifting the focus away from racism as a structural and political issue and towards a softer language of social cohesion. In the Australian context, this sits within a longer history of refusing to fully reckon with colonisation, dispossession, and the ongoing realities faced by First Nations peoples. By emphasising “harmony,” the language of rights, justice and accountability is displaced, and the power relations that produce racial inequality are left largely unchallenged.

This reframing also reflects a broader pattern within settler colonial and imperial contexts, where racism is recast as a matter of interpersonal tolerance rather than structural inequality. In doing so, it obscures how racial hierarchies continue to shape whose knowledge is valued, whose leadership is recognised, and whose lives are protected, both within Australia and across the global systems in which it operates. While the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calls for action, in practice this is often reduced to awareness and celebration, rather than confronting the ways racism continues to structure institutions, policies and funding decisions.

These moments are not meaningless, but they reveal a deeper pattern. Recognition is not the same as redistribution, and language is not the same as change. This same pattern is reflected in how inclusion is operationalised across the sector. Inclusion is often framed as something to be integrated, measured and reported, something that can be demonstrated through indicators and commitments. But when approached in this way, it becomes selective and uneven.

Disability is still treated as an add-on in many programs, rather than a core consideration, despite clear evidence of disproportionate impact in crisis settings. Work with people with diverse SOGIESC is frequently limited, delayed or avoided altogether, based on perceived risk rather than actual context or community leadership. What this creates is a system where some forms of inclusion are prioritised, while others are quietly sidelined. Practitioners are left navigating the tension between what is expected, what is permitted, and what is actually needed.

It is in this space that exhaustion takes hold, not because the work lacks purpose, but because the conditions under which it is being done are increasingly contradictory. Practitioners are asked to deliver inclusion without the authority, resourcing or institutional backing required to do it well.

At the same time, the material conditions of this work are shifting. Across the sector, funding for inclusion is becoming more constrained. Dedicated roles are disappearing. Pieces of work are smaller, shorter, and more fragmented. Many experienced practitioners are struggling to find work that, until recently, was considered essential. I am one of the lucky ones, but even from that position, the change is clear. There is less work available, the work that does exist is often offered at lower rates, and yet expectations have not reduced. If anything, they have intensified.

Practitioners are still expected to deliver high-quality, contextually grounded, politically informed inclusion work, to navigate risk, to support organisations through complexity, and to produce tools, strategies and training that can hold under pressure. But this is being asked of them with fewer resources, less time, and diminishing institutional commitment. This reflects a broader shift in how inclusion is being positioned, as something that should be integrated but not necessarily resourced, expected but not fully supported.

The result is a quiet hollowing out of the field, and it is those most committed to the work who are being asked to carry the gap.

This is not sustainable. If inclusion is to mean anything, it cannot remain at the level of language or commitment. It must involve a redistribution of power, resources and decision-making. It must be accountable to those most affected, including people with disabilities and people with diverse SOGIESC, not only in principle, but in practice.

Until then, the burden will continue to fall on those already carrying it, and the exhaustion so many of us are feeling will not ease.

The instinct in moments like this is often defensive. Protect the institution. Preserve funding. Reduce exposure. Avoid confrontation. But backlash is not evidence that inclusion has gone too far. It is evidence that it is shifting power. Rights-based progress has never unfolded in politically neutral conditions. Gains for women, for people with disabilities, for people with diverse SOGIESC, and for displaced communities have always generated resistance. Backlash is part of structural change. The question is not whether backlash exists. It is how governments respond to it.

There is a persistent belief within aid systems that narrowing ambition preserves longevity. That quiet recalibration protects diplomatic relationships. That scaling back visible commitments shields institutions from political turbulence. This logic misunderstands both risk and obligation. Governments are not merely funding inclusion as a policy preference. They are signatories to binding international human rights instruments that prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal protection.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights require states to ensure rights without discrimination of any kind. UN treaty bodies have consistently affirmed that protections against discrimination extend to sexual orientation and gender identity under existing provisions. The Yogyakarta Principles articulate how established human rights law applies to people with diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, Expressions and Sex Characteristics. These principles do not create new rights; they clarify the application of existing ones.

Under international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, protections in situations of armed conflict apply without adverse distinction. Civilians are entitled to protection regardless of status. In humanitarian response, the principles of impartiality and non-discrimination require that assistance be delivered based on need, not political convenience. People with diverse SOGIESC are not optional beneficiaries. They are protected persons under the same legal framework as everyone else.

A human rights approach therefore does not permit selective commitment. It requires that non-discrimination, participation and equal protection remain central even when contested. If governments respond to political pressure by reducing visible support for gender equality, disability inclusion or diverse SOGIESC initiatives, then rights are being treated as discretionary rather than as obligations grounded in law.

That is not risk management. It is risk redistribution. The risk does not disappear. It shifts onto activists, grassroots organisations and communities already navigating structural vulnerability. When institutions retreat into internal risk calculations while maintaining rhetorical commitments, they preserve institutional comfort at the expense of those on the front lines.

The alternative is clarity. Clarity that gender equality is not an optional theme but a structural commitment. Clarity that people with disabilities are rights holders, not beneficiaries.
Clarity that people with diverse SOGIESC are not politically negotiable constituencies. Backlash thrives in ambiguity. It feeds on signals of hesitation. Consistency does not eliminate risk, but it makes commitments credible.

Practising a human rights approach in moments of backlash requires structural action. Backlash should be anticipated rather than treated as exceptional. Political resistance to rights-based work is predictable. It should be factored into funding models, diplomatic engagement and communications planning. Contingency resources for partners facing pressure should exist before crisis unfolds.

Funding for gender equality, disability inclusion and diverse SOGIESC-led initiatives must be protected structurally. When budgets tighten, these areas are often merged, diluted or quietly deprioritised. Dedicated funding lines signal seriousness. They communicate that inclusion is foundational, not discretionary.

Governments must also fund movements, not only projects. Short-term, tightly scoped service delivery contracts may appear administratively safer, but they do little to sustain rights-based organising. Longer-term core funding enables organisations to respond adaptively to backlash. If civic space is to be resilient, it must be resourced as such.

Public defence matters. When partners face political attack, institutional silence is rarely neutral. Diplomatic engagement in defence of civic space and clear public reaffirmation of commitments are part of practising a human rights approach. Solidarity is not a branding exercise. It is a governance decision.

Finally, inclusion must be embedded across systems. When rights commitments sit only within specialist units, they remain vulnerable. When they are integrated into procurement frameworks, performance metrics, diplomatic strategies and leadership accountability, they are harder to retract quietly.

For leaders and practitioners, the test is straightforward.

• Have funding allocations for politically contested constituencies increased, decreased or stagnated under pressure?

• When controversy arises, do we defend partners publicly or retreat into internal recalibration?

• Are grassroots organisations implicitly expected to moderate advocacy to protect institutional reputation?

• Is senior leadership assessed on maintaining rights commitments in contested contexts?

If inclusion contracts when challenged, it was never structurally embedded. The deeper risk facing the aid sector is not controversy. It is the normalisation of retreat framed as pragmatism. When rights are treated as negotiable under pressure, they cease to function as rights at all. Justice has never advanced because it was comfortable. It has advanced because institutions and governments were willing to absorb uncertainty in defence of principle.

A human rights approach is measured not by what we say when inclusion is easy, but by what we defend when it is contested. The question is not whether governments should manage risk. They must. The question is whether they are prepared to carry it.

Across the aid sector, risk has shifted from being something we manage to something that manages us. Risk registers shape strategy. Safeguarding language frames political decisions. Reputational exposure sits alongside program design. Funding sustainability quietly defines what is possible. This is happening in a context of real backlash. Gender equality initiatives are being publicly contested and, in some places, rolled back. People with diverse SOGIESC face renewed criminalisation and vilification. Migrants and refugees are framed as security threats. People with disabilities continue to confront structural exclusion. In this environment, risk analysis is unavoidable. But listen closely to how risk is discussed inside institutions.

Photo by Martin Olsen on Unsplash

The question is increasingly not, “What risks are communities navigating and choosing?” It is, “What risks are we exposed to if we continue this work as previously framed?”

Funding risk. Reputational risk. Political risk. Compliance risk. These concerns are real. Organisations operate within constraints. But when institutional exposure becomes the dominant lens, inclusion begins to contract. You can see it in how programs are reframed.

Groups are described as “politically contested,” which is often shorthand for “too risky in the current funding climate.” The language of neutrality is wearing thin. In some spaces, the pretence has dropped altogether. Certain identity groups are openly discussed as liabilities. The question is no longer whether their rights are valid, but whether supporting them is strategically defensible.

Advocacy has not been abandoned. It has been reconfigured. Public confrontation becomes private consultation. Structural demands are translated into technical recommendations. Political struggle is reframed as capacity strengthening. Rights language remains in strategy documents, but the sites of contestation narrow.

Work with people with diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, Expressions and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC) has, in many contexts, not merely shifted but receded. Visible leadership and public advocacy are often the first to be withdrawn. In some cases, support continues quietly, informally, or under the radar. In others, it drops off altogether, policies have disappeared, job descriptions have changed. Funding removed or redistributed. What remains is framed as too politically exposed to sustain.

Women’s rights initiatives in volatile contexts are steered away from structural accountability and toward more palatable leadership programmes. Disability inclusion is affirmed, yet action led by people with disabilities is supported only insofar as it does not disrupt established hierarchies. These decisions are framed as prudence. As contextual awareness. As responsible risk management. Taken together, however, they reveal a structural pattern.

Risk Coloniality

What we are witnessing can be understood as risk coloniality.

Coloniality refers to enduring patterns of power that structure whose knowledge counts, whose lives are valued, and who bears the costs of maintaining order long after formal colonial rule has ended. Risk coloniality extends this insight to contemporary governance. It describes how uncertainty and exposure are organised in ways that protect institutional centres while redistributing political and operational risk toward the margins.

Risk coloniality is not simply risk aversion. It is a patterned redistribution of vulnerability. Under it:

• Risk appetite is defined upstream, within donor and organisational centres.

• Risk thresholds are set before meaningful community participation.

• Institutional exposure is minimised through compliance systems and reputational management.

• Residual risk is transferred to communities already navigating structural disadvantage.

Communities are invited to participate, but within boundaries defined elsewhere. Risk does not disappear. It is displaced.

This displacement is embedded in contemporary aid architecture. Over the past two decades, development has become increasingly securitised and compliance-driven. Counter-terror financing regulations, anti-money laundering regimes, performance-based contracting and intensified donor scrutiny have reshaped accountability systems. Risk is codified in contracts, cascaded down supply chains and tracked in registers.

Within this architecture, politically contested inclusion work carries disproportionate weight. Not because it lacks legitimacy, but because it generates uncertainty that cannot be easily neutralised through technical controls. The result is not the elimination of solidarity, but its containment.

NGO-isation and the Management of Dissent

Critiques of NGO-isation help explain how this containment operates.

Arundhati Roy warned that the “NGO-ization of resistance” could transform radical struggle into professionalised, donor-managed projects. INCITE! and others have described how funding structures and compliance regimes discipline political movements. Risk governance now functions as one of the primary mechanisms through which this disciplining occurs.

Political demands that challenge power structures are reframed as risk exposures. Advocacy that may generate controversy becomes reputational liability. Grassroots organisations that are informal, confrontational or politically explicit are categorised as high-risk partners. In this context, NGOisation is not merely about professionalisation. It is about translating dissent into forms that are administratively legible and reputationally safe.

Risk coloniality and NGOisation intersect here. Risk governance becomes the language through which political containment is justified. This does not require malicious intent. Many institutional actors remain deeply committed to justice. But structural logics shape outcomes. When institutional exposure consistently outweighs community agency, risk is redistributed downward.

From Dignity of Risk to Conditional Solidarity

The idea of the dignity of risk emerged in disability advocacy, where Robert Perske argued that overprotection diminishes autonomy. But its implications extend far beyond disability practice. At its core, the concept insists that agency requires the possibility of uncertainty.

Mia Mingus and other disability justice thinkers remind us that marginalised communities already take risks simply to exist publicly, organise collectively and claim rights. The ethical question is not whether risk is present. It is who has the authority to define acceptable exposure.

When institutions pre-emptively curtail advocacy in the name of safeguarding, they are making determinations about risk tolerance on behalf of communities.

This is where conditional solidarity emerges.

Solidarity becomes conditional when support is extended only within the limits of institutional risk tolerance. Communities are backed as long as their strategies remain manageable. When political action generates exposure, solidarity narrows.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about incremental retreat resonates here. Institutions rarely withdraw outright. They recalibrate. Over time, recalibration reshapes what inclusion is allowed to mean.

Representation Under Risk

Nancy Fraser’s framework of redistribution, recognition and representation offers a useful lens. When certain constituencies are considered too politically risky to centre, they may remain rhetorically recognised while being structurally excluded from meaningful representation in decision-making. Community engagement often begins after funding parameters and risk thresholds are already defined. Localisation is invoked, yet risk appetite is set upstream. Under these conditions, participation becomes bounded.

Safeguarding against exploitation and abuse remains essential. The concern arises when safeguarding expands to encompass political discomfort and reputational anxiety, and when this expansion is treated as neutral. Prudence is necessary. But prudence that consistently narrows solidarity is not merely technical. It is political. If risk governance continues to eclipse political commitment, social inclusion may persist as language while shrinking in practice. The sector may continue to speak of decolonisation and localisation while institutional risk architectures remain centralised.

The dignity of risk reminds us that agency entails uncertainty. The critique of NGOisation reminds us that institutions can domesticate struggle. Risk coloniality names the structural pattern through which uncertainty is displaced rather than shared. The most consequential risk facing the aid sector may not be controversy. It may be the quiet normalisation of conditional solidarity. The question is not whether institutions should manage risk. They must. The question is whether they are prepared to share it.

Justice does not require the elimination of risk. It requires its redistribution away from the margins and toward collective responsibility. Whether the sector is willing to move from risk coloniality toward shared risk will determine whether inclusion remains transformative, or becomes a carefully managed performance.

Conceptual Frame: Risk Coloniality

Risk coloniality describes a pattern in contemporary aid and development systems where decisions about acceptable risk are concentrated at institutional centres, while the consequences of those decisions are borne by marginalised communities.

It is not simply risk aversion. It is a structural distribution of vulnerability. Risk thresholds are typically determined upstream, within donor and organisational systems, before meaningful community participation occurs. Institutional exposure is reduced through contractual safeguards and reputational management. The risks that remain are more likely to be absorbed by those already navigating structural disadvantage.

Risk coloniality functions as a governance logic. It allows institutions to maintain the language of rights, partnership and localisation, while quietly narrowing what forms of political action can be supported. It does not require explicit exclusion. It works through recalibration, containment and conditional support. When uncertainty is organised rather than eliminated, who carries it becomes a political decision.

Recommended Reading

For readers interested in exploring these ideas further:

• Banks, N., Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (2015). NGOs, states, and donors revisited: Still too close for comfort? World Development, 66, 707–718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.09.028

• Chandler, D. (2016). Resilience: The governance of complexity. Routledge.

• Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press.

• Howell, J., & Lind, J. (2009). Counter-terrorism, aid and civil society: Before and after the war on terror. Palgrave Macmillan.

• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Ed.). (2007). The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex. Duke University Press.

• Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.

• Mingus, M. (2017, April 12). Access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/

• Perske, R. (1972). The dignity of risk and the mentally retarded. Mental Retardation, 10(1), 24–27.

• Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215-232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005

• Rutazibwa, Olivia. (2019). What’s There to Mourn? Decolonial Reflections on (the End of) Liberal Humanitarianism. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs. 1. 65-67. 10.7227/JHA.010.

• Roy, A. (2014). The NGO-ization of resistance. Toward Freedom. https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/globalism/arundhati-roy-the-ngo-ization-of-resistance/

• Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Governing by numbers: Audit culture, rankings and the new world order. Social Anthropology.

Note on Language

Robert Perske’s 1972 article introduced the concept of the dignity of risk and remains an important historical source. However, the language used in the original publication reflects terminology that was common at the time but is no longer considered acceptable. I do not endorse the outdated language used to describe people with intellectual and learning disabilities. It is important to acknowledge both the significance of the article in shaping contemporary thinking and the fact that language evolves. While the concept remains influential, aspects of the terminology are outdated and should be read with critical awareness.

Alongside this clarity, however, sits a familiar frustration. When decisions become difficult, when time is short, when funding tightens, or when political and reputational risk increases, values often stop guiding what actually happens. They remain present as language, but they lose their influence over practice.

The problem is not that organisations lack values. The problem is that they have not agreed on how those values should be practised. When there is no shared approach, people fall back on personal judgement and role-based risk, and values stop guiding decisions in any consistent way.

This gap becomes most visible under pressure. In coaching and advisory work, I regularly see organisations navigating decisions that involve real trade-offs. Participation may slow delivery. Inclusion may introduce political risk. Accountability may strain funding relationships. In these moments, values are rarely absent. Instead, they often arrive late.

Values are often invoked after a decision has already been made, once outcomes are visible and consequences are felt. They are used to explain intent rather than to shape choices in advance. The central question subtly shifts from “what should we do, given our values?” to “how do we understand or justify what we have already done?” This shift is rarely deliberate. It is a predictable response in systems shaped by urgency, compliance, and external accountability.

When exclusion occurs, it is frequently framed as an exception. The explanation is familiar: timelines were too tight, the context too complex, the political environment too hostile, or the risk too high. These explanations are often true. What matters is how they are used. When such moments are treated as isolated anomalies rather than predictable outcomes of constrained systems, learning is blocked. The organisation does not ask how its structures, incentives, and decision-making processes reliably produce these results under pressure. The issue is located in the moment, not in the system.

Over time, this creates drift. Values remain stable, polished, and widely endorsed. Practice adapts to constraint. Decisions become shaped more by speed, risk management, and institutional survival than by stated commitments. Because the values themselves are not questioned, the growing gap between values and practice becomes normalised. People still believe in the values. They simply stop expecting them to guide difficult decisions.

Organisational change literature helps explain why this pattern is so persistent. Values statements are often designed to be broad, aspirational, and non-controversial, precisely so they can travel across donors, partners, and political contexts without friction. They function well as signals of legitimacy and alignment. What they do not offer is guidance for navigating conflict. Values rarely tell people what to do when inclusion slows delivery, when participation increases risk, or when accountability threatens institutional stability.

Brené Brown draws a clear distinction between values as beliefs and values as practice. In Dare to Lead, she defines integrity as choosing courage over comfort and aligning behaviour with values, particularly when doing so is difficult or costly (Brown, 2018). From this perspective, values only become meaningful when they shape behaviour under pressure. Without that translation, they remain part of organisational identity rather than organisational discipline.

The absence of shared practice has consequences. When organisations do not collectively agree on how values are enacted, ethics become individualised. Each person interprets the values through their role, seniority, and exposure to risk. Decisions made higher up the hierarchy are often buffered from relational and ethical consequences, while those with less power carry the emotional and relational labour of “holding the values” in practice. This unevenness is not a failure of individual ethics. It is a predictable outcome of unclear organisational practice.

Amy Edmondson’s work on learning in complex and uncertain environments helps illuminate this further. She shows how organisations under pressure default to speed and certainty, even when doing so undermines inclusion, participation, and learning (Edmondson, 2018). Without shared structures that support reflection before decisions are made, people choose what feels safest or most defensible in their position, rather than what best aligns with stated values.

This is what the practice gap looks like in everyday organisational life. It is not a lack of commitment or care. It is a failure to build the habits, conversations, and shared language needed to practise values together. Values alone cannot carry the weight of ethical decision-making in complex systems. They need to be supported by processes that make trade-offs visible, name power, and slow decisions down enough for responsibility to be exercised.

This is where reflective practice, coaching, and shared tools matter, not as optional extras, but as organisational infrastructure. They create space for asking, in advance, what values require in specific situations. They support people to navigate conflict between values, rather than pretending those conflicts do not exist. They help move values out of statements and into decision-making.

Practising values is harder than stating them. It requires time, discomfort, and collective accountability. It often involves choices that are slower, less efficient, or more politically difficult. But without this work, values risk becoming a form of moral reassurance rather than a guide for action.

If values are to matter, they must shape the decisions organisations would rather avoid. Not perfectly, and not without tension, but consistently enough that people can recognise the difference between what is said and what is practised. Until then, the sector will continue to speak the language of values without agreeing on how to practise them.

References

Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. Random House.

Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons

Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.

Kahane, A. (2017). Collaborating with the enemy: How to work with people you don’t agree with or like or trust. Berrett-Koehler.

For many of us, it marks 238 years since the invasion of this continent in 1788. It marks the beginning of a system that has produced enduring patterns of dispossession, violence, and exclusion for First Nations peoples, not as history, but as living structure.

When Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about intersectionality, and Patricia Hill Collins about the matrix of domination, they remind us that power operates through multiple, reinforcing systems. Legal power. Institutional power. Cultural and social power. These are not abstract ideas. They show up very clearly in Australia today.

First Nations peoples make up just over 3 percent of the population, yet account for around one third of the adult prison population nationally, and significantly higher proportions in some jurisdictions. This overrepresentation is not explained by crime rates alone. It is shaped by racist policing practices, discriminatory laws, and socio-economic exclusion that criminalise poverty, mobility, and survival.

Since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, more than 500 First Nations people have died in custody, with very few resulting in convictions. This is not an absence of evidence. It is an absence of political and legal will.

These dynamics are especially stark in the treatment of children and young people. First Nations children are vastly overrepresented in youth detention, often for low-level offences or on remand. Recent policy shifts in several jurisdictions have moved toward treating children as adults in the justice system. In practice, this means harsher sentencing, increased use of remand, prolonged detention, adult-style facilities, and reduced access to diversion, education, and therapeutic support. These changes disproportionately harm First Nations children, who are more likely to be policed, charged, denied bail, and detained.

In Western Australia, people can still be imprisoned for fine default. This disproportionately affects First Nations women, who are more likely to be fined for minor offences, more likely to live in poverty, and less likely to have access to legal support or alternatives to payment. The result is a system where unpaid fines escalate into incarceration, family separation, and further harm, with devastating flow-on effects for children and extended families.

Child protection and youth justice do not operate in isolation. For many First Nations children, they function as a pipeline, where surveillance begins early, family separation is normalised, and contact with the justice system becomes increasingly likely.

First Nations children are now being removed from their families at higher rates than during the height of the Stolen Generations. This is not a legacy issue. It is a current policy reality, driven by risk-averse systems that continue to confuse poverty with neglect, and surveillance with care.

None of this can be separated from the ongoing denial of First Nations sovereignty and the systematic undermining of self-determined, community-led responses.

This is why, each year, I choose to participate in Invasion Day protests.

As a woman of colour, a Pasifika settler on Australian land, and as someone with First Nations children and extended family, I do not see this as optional or symbolic. It is a responsibility. It is about using my voice, my position, and my professional platform to say clearly that the way Australia treats First Nations peoples is neither just nor acceptable.

I work in international development and humanitarian systems, and I often speak about decolonial practice, power, and localisation. Days like today remind me that localisation is not only something we talk about overseas. It is also about how we reckon with colonial power here, on this land, in our institutions, policies, and professions.

If we are willing to name colonial harm elsewhere, we must be willing to confront it at home.

Decolonial practice demands more than acknowledgements. It demands structural change, accountability, and a willingness to confront how deeply embedded these systems remain.

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

References:

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). Australia’s prison population. AIHW.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). Youth justice in Australia 2021–22. AIHW.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). Child protection Australia 2021–22. AIHW.

Australian Institute of Criminology. (2024). Deaths in custody in Australia 2023–24. Australian Institute of Criminology.

Amnesty International. (2022). Australia: Punishing children, not protecting them. Amnesty International.

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.

Cunneen, C. (2018). Indigenous incarceration: The violence of colonial law and justice. Palgrave Macmillan.

Human Rights Law Centre. (2020). Punishing poverty: The criminalisation of homelessness and fines enforcement in Australia. Human Rights Law Centre.

Human Rights Law Centre. (2023). Still punishing children: Australia’s failure to protect the rights of children in the justice system. Human Rights Law Centre.

National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. (1997). Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Australian Human Rights Commission.

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. (1991). National report. Australian Government Publishing Service.

By then, the work is usually well underway. We have talked about values, institutional constraints, competing accountabilities, and the daily tension of trying to practise inclusion inside systems that are rarely designed for it. The people I work with are thoughtful and committed. Many are deeply reflective. They care about harm, about justice, about doing better.

When positionality enters the conversation, most clients can name their identity with ease. They are fluent in the language of gender, race, nationality, disability, sexuality. They understand that identity matters.

I offer myself as an example. If I were to perform positionality as it is commonly practised, I might say that I am a cisgender, middle-aged lesbian woman of colour. I am Australian-Fijian. I am a lesbian. These descriptors are familiar. They sit comfortably in the room.

Artist unknown - https://www.cuidentitylab.com/project/positional-ML/

But the conversation shifts, when I ask not who they are but how their position operates, how authority, risk, and institutional alignment move through their role, something changes. The language of identity no longer carries the conversation. Answers slow. Certainty thins. The analysis becomes harder to sustain, because this is the point where positionality stops being descriptive and becomes relational, political, and consequential. That hesitation is not about individual capacity. And it is not really about coaching. It reveals something more systemic about how positionality is currently understood and practised across the social inclusion sector. Coaching simply makes the pattern visible.

Across organisations, positionality now appears regularly in workshops, reflection statements, and facilitation spaces. In other areas of organisational life, particularly where decisions about budgets, risk, and delivery are made, it is often absent altogether. Where it does appear, positionality is frequently treated as a marker of ethical competence, something to be named early and then set aside. Too often, it functions as closure rather than inquiry. The result is a troubling tension. Positionality is being named more frequently, while being practised less deeply. The concept circulates, but its capacity to interrogate power is weakening. This matters because positionality was never meant to be decorative. It emerged as a critical response to power, not as reassurance that power had already been addressed.

Positionality has its roots in feminist, postcolonial, and critical race scholarship that explicitly rejected claims of neutrality and objectivity. Thinkers such as Donna Haraway challenged the fantasy of a “view from nowhere,” arguing that all knowledge is situated and that this situatedness brings responsibility, not innocence. Patricia Hill Collins emphasised that standpoint is not a demographic fact but a political and ethical orientation shaped by analysis, power, and accountability. Linda Tuhiwai Smith located positionality within histories of extraction and institutional dominance, insisting that who conducts research or intervention, and for whom, is never neutral. Paulo Freire grounded positionality in praxis, where reflection and action are inseparable, and responsibility is measured through practice rather than intention. Across these traditions, positionality was never about confession. It was about responsibility in relation to power.

Yet in contemporary social inclusion practice, positionality is increasingly collapsed into identity or characteristic markers. Identity does matter. It shapes how people are read, treated, trusted, marginalised, or protected. It shapes access to space, voice, and safety. But identity alone does not explain positionality. Identity does not tell us what political commitments guide someone’s work. It does not tell us how they are institutionally aligned, whose interests they ultimately serve, or how power is exercised through their role. It does not surface internalised bias, default assumptions, or the ethical compromises someone is willing to make under pressure.

A woman of colour can hold deeply exclusionary positions on migration. A lesbian can actively advance conservative social policy. A leader from a formerly colonised country can reproduce colonial power through donor alignment, institutional loyalty, and control over resources. These realities are not contradictions. They are reminders that identity and power are not interchangeable. When identity becomes a substitute for positionality, power goes unexamined.

What follows is not benign. When positionality stops at identity, power does not disappear. It becomes hidden, procedural, and harder to contest. Institutional authority is obscured behind process and professional language. Decisions about budgets, timelines, and acceptable risk are framed as technical necessities rather than political choices. Those insulated from consequence remain so, while those who carry risk continue to absorb it quietly. Politics does not vanish either. It is reframed. Questions about whose rights matter most, which harms are tolerable, and who should bear uncertainty are rendered managerial, inevitable, or beyond discussion. In this framing, inclusion becomes something to be balanced against feasibility, rather than a challenge to how feasibility itself is defined.

Practice, meanwhile, remains largely unchanged. Decisions are still made in the same rooms, by the same people, under the same incentives. Harm is managed procedurally rather than addressed relationally. Inclusion language circulates freely, even as power tightens its grip behind the scenes. This is not a loss of power. It is its refinement.

The consequences of that refinement become clearest inside project life. Not in reflection workshops or opening circles, but in moments of pressure. During design trade-offs and co-design negotiations. When budgets are cut or timelines compressed. In donor conversations that quietly reshape priorities. In community engagement processes where inclusion is named, but risk is unevenly distributed. These are the moments when positionality matters most, and where it is most often absent.

Rarely do we pause to ask how we are being read in a particular context, or how communities themselves are being read by institutions. We seldom interrogate what authority we carry, regardless of intention, or what authority communities carry and how that authority is discounted. We do not often ask what becomes easier for us, and harder for others, because of our presence. Nor do we spend enough time examining whose safety is prioritised by project decisions, how communities understand those safety assessments, and whether they agree with them.

Risk is almost always discussed, but rarely from the perspective of who bears it, in what form, and with what long-term consequences. Under pressure, what feels “reasonable” to us is often taken for granted, even when what feels reasonable to communities is markedly different. These are not abstract questions. They shape design, delivery, and harm.

When positionality is treated as a living practice rather than a declaration, it becomes visible in small but consequential ways. In pauses before decisions are finalised. In moments when someone steps back rather than filling space. In the willingness to name limits, to refuse hiding behind “the system,” and to remain present when harm is named. It shows up in repair rather than defensiveness, and in adjustment rather than justification. Positionality, in this sense, is not static. It is noticed and renegotiated in real time, particularly as stakes rise.

That depth of practice is increasingly urgent. Aid and development work is unfolding within overlapping crises: accelerating climate impacts, shrinking civic space, intensifying backlash against gender, disability, and diverse SOGIESC inclusion, and the steady displacement of risk onto communities already carrying disproportionate burdens.

In such contexts, superficial approaches to positionality do not merely fail to protect communities. They increase risk by obscuring where power sits and how it is exercised. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously asked, the critical question is not simply who is invited to speak, but who is heard, authorised, protected, or punished when they do. Positionality shapes all of this, whether we name it or not.

Positionality is the difference between naming who we are and taking responsibility for what our power does.

References

Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continnium International Publishing Group.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

Including the Excluded is Community Powered Responses’ Substack on social inclusion in the aid and development sector. It is a space for critical reflection, practical insight, and honest conversations about power, ethics, and practice. Everything is open and accessible to everyone. If you choose a paid subscription, you help sustain these fortnightly blogs and keep this work going.

It has been a hard year. Not in a single, dramatic way, but in an accumulating one. A year of watching wars stretch on and then multiply, until violence begins to feel like a permanent backdrop rather than a shock. A year where authoritarianism has grown more confident and less apologetic, and where cruelty has edged closer to the centre of public life, not only tolerated but, at times, openly rewarded.

There has been so much loss. Loss of life, of safety, of trust, and of language that once helped us make sense of what we were witnessing. What has been most unsettling has not been any one event, but the accumulation. The way harm stacks on harm. The way exhaustion becomes a constant background hum. The way staying informed can start to feel indistinguishable from being overwhelmed.

At times this year, it has felt as though the world has narrowed. Nuance has been treated as inconvenient. Empathy as weakness. Meanness reframed as honesty, and violence explained away as inevitability. For those of us working in social inclusion, justice, or care-based work, this has been particularly heavy. This year has asked us to keep showing up in climates that often feel openly hostile to complexity, dignity, and shared humanity. It has asked us to witness harm while still holding onto the belief that repair is possible.

That is not nothing.

One of the dangers of a year like this is how easily it can convince us that what we are seeing is permanent. That this is simply how things are now. That cruelty has won. But history suggests something else. There have always been moments where power tightens, fear is mobilised, violence escalates, and public life becomes harsher and more brittle. These moments are devastating, but they are not new, and they are not the whole story.

What often gets lost in years like this are the quieter truths. That care continues, mostly unseen. That people keep choosing one another in small, stubborn ways. That solidarity does not disappear just because it is not trending, loud, or rewarded.

As the year ends, I am not interested in pretending that things are fine. They are not. But I am also not willing to believe that this year defines what comes next. If anything, it has clarified what matters. Who we stay accountable to. What we refuse to normalise. Where we place our attention when the world feels unkind.

I also want to take a moment to thank those of you who have been reading along. This blog has been a space to open new areas of inquiry, not to arrive at tidy answers. Much of the writing this year has been driven by questions I keep returning to in my work.

When we talk about gender, which genders are we actually talking about?
When we talk about diverse SOGIESC, who is included and who is quietly left out?
Are we meaningfully including lesbian, bisexual, and queer women and girls?
What does the “A” in LGBTIQA+ really stand for in practice, not just in acronym form?

Writing here has been a way of sorting through these questions in my own head, and of noticing where they show up in my work. Am I seeing them reflected in the literature I am reading and reviewing? Am I asking these questions in gender analyses with organisations? How do these gaps and assumptions show up in norms, tools, templates, and language across the aid system?

Having a place to put these thoughts down, to follow the rabbit holes, and to share them with you has been deeply supportive of my practice. It helps me move ideas out of my head and into a space where they can be unpacked, challenged, and made more useful. This writing is part of how I think, how I learn, and how I try to do this work with more care and accountability.

On a more practical note, there have been some significant changes this year. Community Powered Responses has moved from the name I was using while working as a sole trader into a formal organisation. That shift has been both exciting and grounding, and I am grateful to everyone who has supported that transition.

I have also continued writing about social inclusion moving the blog from Medium to Substack this year. That change has created a new kind of space for reflection and conversation, and I am especially grateful to Mark (my first paid subscriber for this particular blog. Thank you, Mark, for being part of that support.

I will be away from 20 December 2025 until 12 January 2026, and I want to wish everyone a gentle and restorative festive season, in whatever way rest is possible for you.

There are new and exciting things coming up in Community Powered Responses in the year ahead, so keep an eye out. And if you are interested in reflective practice, systems thinking, and grounded approaches to social inclusion, you are warmly invited to follow Power to Praxis on Substack.

I do not have a neat conclusion for this year. Just a hope that as we step into whatever comes next, we do so remembering that even in the hardest years, people continue to imagine, to organise, to care, and to choose something better than what is being offered.

Sometimes, that is enough to carry us forward.

They are not abstract ideals. They are intended to protect people. They exist to ensure that assistance is provided based on need rather than preference, that harm is avoided, and that organisations remain accountable to the communities they claim to serve.

Neutrality, within this framework, has a specific and limited purpose. It requires humanitarian actors not to take sides in hostilities or political disputes. It exists to safeguard access, trust, and safety in contested environments, particularly where overt political alignment could endanger both aid workers and the people they seek to support.

The problem is not neutrality as a principle. The problem is what neutrality has become in practice.

Stretched beyond its legal and ethical intent, neutrality is increasingly used as a general posture of avoidance rather than a carefully bounded humanitarian tool. Under conditions of political pressure, shrinking budgets, and rising backlash against gender equality, neutrality becomes a way of deferring hard choices while preserving institutional legitimacy. This shift does not affect all communities equally. It falls most heavily on those whose needs are already framed as controversial.

People with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, expressions, and sex characteristics sit squarely at this fault line.

I did not come to this conclusion through theory alone. It emerged slowly, through repetition, as I watched the same reasoning surface across organisations and contexts, always leading to the same outcome. The exclusion of people with diverse SOGIESC was rarely described as a failure of prioritisation or resourcing. It was framed as unfortunate, unavoidable, or outside mandate. Neutrality provided the language that allowed this framing to sound principled rather than strategic.

In many humanitarian contexts, people with diverse SOGIESC are not simply marginalised. They are criminalised, pathologised, or officially denied recognition. Their existence is framed by states as a moral issue, a cultural threat, or a political problem. In such environments, recognising their needs is treated not as an expression of impartiality, but as a political act that risks damaging relationships with host governments.

This is where neutrality enters the conversation.

When organisations say they cannot focus on the unmet needs of people with diverse SOGIESC because they must remain neutral, what they are often saying is that they cannot afford the consequences. Neutrality becomes shorthand for deference to the legal and social status quo, even when that status quo produces harm. The principle intended to protect humanitarian access is repurposed to protect political relationships.

In the current funding climate, this logic is reinforced.

As humanitarian budgets shrink and competition for funding intensifies, organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate alignment with donor priorities and risk appetites. At the same time, a global backlash against gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights has made work on gender and sexuality more politically charged. In this context, people with diverse SOGIESC are increasingly framed as a “non-essential” focus, something to be addressed only if resources allow, rather than as rights holders whose needs demand attention regardless of political comfort.

Rather than naming this as a prioritisation decision shaped by scarcity and backlash, organisations often reach for neutrality. Exclusion is reframed as principled restraint rather than as a choice. Limited funding becomes a justification not for harder prioritisation, but for avoiding politically sensitive populations altogether.

In this formulation, people with diverse SOGIESC are quietly recast as liabilities.

Their unmet needs are no longer understood as evidence of humanitarian failure, but as collateral consequences of operating in difficult political and financial conditions. Their exclusion is framed as pragmatic, inevitable, and beyond the organisation’s control. Neutrality supplies the language that allows this abandonment to appear ethical rather than strategic.

This is not neutrality as articulated in international humanitarian law. It is neutrality as risk management.

The consequences are structural. Needs are filtered through political acceptability rather than vulnerability. Impartiality is hollowed out, because need alone is no longer sufficient to warrant action. Humanity is narrowed, because dignity becomes conditional. Accountability is displaced, because organisations locate the source of exclusion in “context”, “backlash”, or “funding constraints” rather than in their own choices.

People with diverse SOGIESC become political casualties of humanitarian compromise.

This logic does not remain abstract. It embeds itself in everyday systems and tools, where it quietly reproduces exclusion while claiming restraint.

One of the clearest examples appears in gender reporting.

In reporting frameworks, gender is often captured through a limited set of categories: male, female, other. On the surface, this appears neutral, even inclusive. It signals awareness that not everyone fits neatly into a binary, while allowing organisations to claim that diversity has been acknowledged.

But neutrality does not stop at the form. It continues in what the form makes possible.

Everyone involved understands the risks. We know what it means to ask people to disclose gender identity or sexuality in contexts shaped by criminalisation, stigma, surveillance, and violence. We know that disclosure without trust, protection, or clear purpose is not inclusion. It is exposure. And yet the category remains unchanged, unsupported by investment in safer approaches or meaningful follow-up.

For many people with diverse SOGIESC, identifying as “other” does not feel safe or affirming. It feels flattening and risky. It offers no language that reflects lived realities, no clarity about how the information will be used, and no assurance that visibility will lead to safer or more inclusive programming. It asks for disclosure without offering care.

So people do not report. Or they select the least dangerous option. Or they disengage entirely.

This silence is then misinterpreted.

When reporting data shows few or no people identifying beyond male or female, institutions draw a familiar conclusion. People with diverse SOGIESC are not present, or not relevant, or unwilling to be included. Responsibility quietly shifts. If people do not identify themselves, the logic goes, then nothing can be done. Programs remain unchanged. Resources remain unallocated. Accountability dissolves.

Neutrality completes its work here. The burden of inclusion is placed on individuals already navigating risk, rather than on organisations with power and resources. Communities at the margins are asked to make themselves legible to systems that have not earned their trust, and when they do not, their absence is used as evidence against them.

This is how neutrality converts institutional failure into community responsibility.

The same logic appears elsewhere. In project design meetings where evidence of harm to people with diverse SOGIESC is acknowledged, then set aside. In safeguarding discussions where reputational and political risks are mapped in detail, while risks to queer and trans people are deemed too sensitive to address. In policy drafts where SOGIESC inclusion appears briefly, only to be softened or removed once neutrality and funding constraints are invoked together.

In one such meeting, after weeks of circling, the question finally surfaced: would the program explicitly include people with diverse SOGIESC? The evidence was clear. The consultations were clear. The risks of exclusion were clear. And still the proposal collapsed. Naming these communities, I was told, would compromise neutrality, stretch limited resources, and invite political scrutiny.

The sentence was delivered gently, as if neutrality were offering protection. But neutrality was not protecting people with diverse SOGIESC. It was protecting donor relationships, government partnerships, and organisational stability. Under its cover, the institution found a way to avoid discomfort while maintaining moral authority.

Over time, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore. Neutrality, as practised, is not an absence of politics. It is a politics of refusal. A refusal to name harm. A refusal to challenge systems that benefit the powerful. A refusal to acknowledge that scarcity and backlash do not absolve humanitarian actors of responsibility.

Neutrality has always had consequences. Colonial administrations invoked non-interference while sustaining inequality. Apartheid endured behind claims of neutrality. Silence has long been mistaken for restraint.

For people with diverse SOGIESC, the consequences are immediate and enduring. Neutrality is invoked to justify erasure, to sidestep criminalisation, to recast rights as political risks. Inclusion becomes conditional on state comfort, donor appetite, and institutional survival rather than on human need.

This harm is compounded by a persistent confusion between neutrality and impartiality. Impartiality requires that assistance be provided based on need, without discrimination. Neutrality requires non-alignment in hostilities. When these principles are collapsed, silence masquerades as ethics and distance passes for fairness.

Neutrality does not guarantee justice. It guarantees distance.

Inside organisations, neutrality becomes culture. It disciplines language, narrows imagination, and shapes which lives are considered actionable. It rewards caution and punishes insistence. It trains practitioners to manage risk upward rather than responsibility outward.

Rejecting this misuse of neutrality does not mean abandoning humanitarian principles. It means reclaiming them. It means recognising that neutrality has been stretched beyond its mandate and redeployed to protect institutions at the expense of people. It means re-centering impartiality, humanity, and accountability as obligations, not optional extras dependent on funding cycles or political winds.

If neutrality once helped organisations appear trustworthy, today its misuse prevents them from being accountable.

Letting go of neutrality as deference would require honesty. It would require acknowledging that humanitarian work is inherently political because it operates within political and economic systems that distribute safety unevenly. It would mean naming prioritisation decisions for what they are, rather than hiding them behind principle. It would mean shifting from silence to responsibility, from procedural inclusion to genuine accountability.

This would not weaken the sector. It would strengthen it.

Neutrality, misapplied, protects institutions. Impartiality protects people. Accountability is what turns principles into practice.

And the choice, in the end, is not between neutrality and politics. It is between neutrality as avoidance and justice as responsibility to those rendered expendable under pressure.

But let us look a little deeper at one of those letters.
The letter A.

Asexuality is often added to the acronym with good intentions, but very rarely with depth. Many practitioners have not read asexuality scholarship, never considered how compulsory sexuality shapes our programming assumptions, and may not have met someone who identifies as asexual. Yet the A is included confidently, as though naming it ensures inclusion.

It is important to understand why this matters.
And it is equally important to understand why I do not rely on identity based acronyms in my work.

Why the A in LGBTIQA+ Matters

Asexuality is a sexual orientation, like heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Some people experience no sexual attraction. Others experience attraction only in specific emotional or relational contexts. Some people on the asexual spectrum choose to engage in sex for cultural or relational reasons. Others do not. Asexuality is not celibacy. Asexuality is an orientation.

What makes asexuality significant in development and humanitarian work is not simply the diversity of experience. It is the unspoken assumption our systems rely on. That everyone is sexual. That sexual desire is universal. That adulthood, health, empowerment, and relationship belong inside sexual narratives.

This assumption is called compulsory sexuality. It sits alongside compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory cisnormativity. Once you see it, you begin to see how it quietly shapes SRHR programming, MHPSS guidance, safeguarding frameworks, asylum processes, and humanitarian distribution models grounded in nuclear family structures.

What Asexuality Is, and What It Reveals About Our Systems

Asexuality is a sexual orientation characterised by a lack of sexual attraction. This definition is simple, but the lived experiences behind it are diverse and shaped by culture, power, and social norms.

Asexuality does not mean a lack of intimacy, connection, or emotional depth. Asexual people form relationships, create meaning, and build lives within the same social and cultural worlds as everyone else. What differs is how sexual attraction functions in their lives.

Asexuality as a Spectrum

The asexual umbrella includes many experiences. Some people feel no sexual attraction. Some experience attraction only under specific emotional conditions. Some feel desire rarely, inconsistently, or in forms that do not match cultural narratives. This includes:

• Asexual
• Demisexual
• Greysexual
• Aegosexual and other identities where desire and fantasy do not align with interest in sexual contact

Some asexual people engage in sexual activity for relational, cultural, or reproductive reasons. Others do not. The key point is that identity is not determined by behaviour, and behaviour alone does not reveal orientation.

This matters because many policies still treat low or absent sexual desire as a disorder unless a person explicitly self identifies as asexual. This is a structural inequity that rarely receives attention.

Asexuality Is Not Western, New, or Niche

Asexuality is sometimes dismissed as Western because community organising often takes place online. But experiences of non sexual orientation long predate contemporary identity language. Many cultures recognise relational paths and life roles that do not centre sexual partnership.

Stigma does not arise from unfamiliarity. It arises from pressure to conform to expected social roles. In places where marriage determines security, legitimacy, or land access, asexual people navigate vulnerabilities that remain invisible to our systems.

Why Asexuality Confronts Core Assumptions in Aid

Asexuality disrupts assumptions that sexuality is universal, that adulthood requires sexual partnership, that sexual empowerment means sexual activity, and that pleasure is something everyone should want.

These beliefs shape SRHR, MHPSS, protection, and inclusion programming. They affect not only asexual people, but anyone whose experience of desire falls outside dominant narratives.

How Asexuality Shows Up in Development and Humanitarian Work

Protection and safeguarding

Asexuality rarely appears explicitly in protection work. Most people would never identify themselves as asexual during a protection interview, and frontline workers are not trained to ask questions that would make this relevant or safe to share. The issue is not that asexual people are failing to identify themselves. The issue is that the system is not designed to see them at all.

Screening tools are not equipped to identify asexuality. They rely on questions shaped by normative assumptions about sexuality, which means asexual experiences remain invisible within the assessment itself. When someone expresses disinterest in relationships or sexual activity, this is far more likely to be interpreted as trauma, depression, stress, or the impact of displacement, rather than recognised as a valid orientation.

Asexual people may also be vulnerable to forms of violence that are framed as correction. In some contexts, asexuality is treated as something that must be fixed, encouraged, or forced into alignment with normative expectations. Asexual people may be subjected to coerced sexual encounters presented as a way to “wake up” desire, to “heal” them, or to make them “normal.” They may be pressured into sexual activity under the guise of therapy, spiritual intervention, medical treatment, or conversion practices. These harms are about enforcing norms around sexuality and adulthood, not about sexual attraction or desire.

Sexual violence against asexual people is not widely recognised because systems assume that people who are not sexually active or romantically partnered are less likely to be targeted. But sexual violence is about power, coercion, and the policing of norms. When institutions assume that sexuality is universal and desirable, asexual people’s experiences of violence become even less legible and less likely to be believed.

The core issue is not whether asexuality is named. It is that protection systems are built on assumptions that make some experiences visible and others invisible. For asexual people, invisibility itself becomes a form of risk.

MHPSS

Asexuality is almost entirely invisible within mental health and psychosocial support systems. Most MHPSS frameworks assume that sexual desire, romantic interest, and normative relationship trajectories are part of healthy development. When someone does not fit these expectations, their experiences are often interpreted through clinical or trauma based lenses rather than understood as part of the natural diversity of human sexuality.

This invisibility means that asexual people can be excluded or misunderstood within psychosocial services. Practitioners may view a lack of sexual attraction as a symptom of depression, stress, PTSD, hormonal imbalance, or the impact of displacement, rather than a valid orientation. This does not happen out of ill intent. It happens because the system has no alternative category to hold these experiences.

Being perceived as atypical can itself cause distress. For someone on the asexual spectrum, the pressure to explain, justify, or pathologise their experience can compound existing stressors. This is especially true in contexts where adults who are not in relationships, not married, or not pursuing sexual partnerships are viewed as incomplete or socially deviant.

These patterns mirror broader trends across diverse SOGIESC communities. Research consistently shows higher rates of psychosocial distress and poorer mental health outcomes among people with diverse SOGIESC. This is not because of their identities. It is because of the social conditions they live within. Stigma. Discrimination. Harassment. Forced or coerced marriages. Family rejection. Structural violence. Norm enforcement.

Asexual people experience many of the same pressures. They may also face additional forms of coercion or misunderstanding because their orientation contradicts deeply held assumptions about desire, adulthood, and relational belonging. When mental health systems cannot recognise this, asexual people are left without appropriate support and without language to make sense of their own experiences.

In humanitarian settings, where MHPSS resources are already thin, invisibility becomes a barrier to care. People whose experiences fall outside normative frameworks often remain unseen, uncounted, and unsupported.

Humanitarian distribution models

Humanitarian systems rely heavily on the household as the basic unit of analysis, vulnerability assessment, and resource allocation. Assistance is organised around nuclear families, marital partnerships, and reproductive or caregiving roles. This seems neutral at first, but it creates structural barriers for anyone whose life does not align with these expectations.

Asexual people may be single by choice or may form chosen families that do not fit legally recognised or culturally validated structures. These configurations do not map neatly onto household based targeting tools, which are designed to count dependents, marital status, and traditional care relationships. As a result, asexual people may be deprioritised or become invisible within the logic of aid distribution.

For example, a single adult with no children or spouse is usually assessed as less vulnerable than a household with dependents, even if that single adult is socially isolated, economically marginalised, or disconnected from family support because their orientation is misunderstood or stigmatised. Chosen families, friendship households, queer kinship networks, or non-cohabiting relationships rarely fit into official categories and therefore receive no formal recognition in vulnerability scoring.

In contexts where adulthood is defined through marriage and reproduction, unmarried adults may be perceived as fully self-reliant even when they are excluded from land, inheritance, safety nets, and social protection. Asexual people who choose not to marry, or who delay or avoid partnership for their own safety or comfort, can fall through the gaps of eligibility criteria that assume marriage as a universal life stage.

These gaps are not incidental. They reflect deep structural assumptions within the humanitarian system about what a “family” is, how adults should live, what relationships matter, and who is considered a legitimate recipient of care. When systems rely on marital status or reproductive roles to determine vulnerability, people who live outside these norms are systematically overlooked.

For asexual people, who may not pursue sexual or romantic partnerships, this can mean reduced access to shelter allocation, food distribution, protection services, and cash programming. Not because their needs are lower, but because their lives do not match the categories the system knows how to see.

Localisation

Asexual communities are often informal, decentralised, or primarily online. This is not because asexual people are disengaged. It is because the social conditions that shape their experiences do not always lead to formal organising, visibility, or legal registration in the same way they do for other diverse SOGIESC groups. Many asexual people live in environments where the concept itself is not widely understood, where they may not have language for their experiences, or where coming out brings social or familial risk. Informal organising becomes a safer, more accessible pathway.

This creates challenges in humanitarian and development spaces, which have come to associate inclusion with partnerships built through registered civil society organisations. When donor frameworks require formal structures, legal registration, governance systems, and organisational track records, asexual communities rarely meet these criteria, even when they are active, connected, and capable of providing insight.

At the same time, many LGBTIQ organisations do not automatically include asexual people or advocate for asexual inclusion. This is not always intentional exclusion. It often reflects the internalisation of the same normative assumptions found in the broader aid system. Movements that have had to fight for decades to assert the legitimacy of same sex attraction, gender diversity, and queer kinship structures may still operate within frameworks that presume sexual attraction as a defining feature of identity and community.

Because asexuality challenges core assumptions about desire, relationships, and adulthood, it is sometimes viewed as peripheral, less urgent, or difficult to integrate into existing advocacy structures. In some cases, organisations may perceive asexuality as outside the scope of their mandate, or assume that asexual people do not experience comparable levels of discrimination or violence. These assumptions erase experiences of coercion, corrective practices, and social exclusion that are well-documented among asexual communities.

For humanitarian actors committed to localisation, this creates a significant gap. Working only through established LGBT organisations does not guarantee asexual inclusion. It can even reproduce exclusion by assuming that representation within the acronym equates to representation within practice.

Meaningful localisation requires broadening our understanding of who constitutes a community partner. It may involve:

• identifying informal online networks
• connecting with small or emerging asexual collectives
• supporting safe, context-specific engagement strategies
• ensuring that mainstream SOGIESC organisations are not treated as a proxy for all identities and experiences
• recognising that informal groups often hold expertise, insight, and lived experience that registered organisations cannot represent alone

Without this broader approach, asexual people will remain underrepresented in localisation efforts, community consultations, safeguarding conversations, and program adaptation processes. Their absence does not signal a lack of need. It signals a lack of structural pathways to engage.

Asexuality, Protection, and Asylum

The invisibility asexual people experience in frontline protection work extends into the legal and policy architecture of international protection. Asexuality is not only a matter of identity. It is a protection issue, because protection systems rely on specific assumptions about sexuality, relationships, and risk that asexual people do not fit.

A clear example emerged in 2018 in the Netherlands. An Algerian man sought asylum because he feared persecution for being asexual. His claim was rejected because asexuality was not recognised as a sexual orientation under the LGBT exception criteria of the Refugee Convention. In other words, his orientation was treated as a non category, something outside the system’s imagination and therefore outside its protections.

This rejection was not an anomaly. Refugee status determination processes around the world rely heavily on narratives shaped by normative expectations. To be legible to the system, an applicant is often expected to demonstrate a history of romantic or sexual relationships, community belonging, or experiences of discrimination based on visible or publicly known markers of identity. These expectations mirror assumptions that sexual desire is universal, that sexual partnership is central to adulthood, and that sexual orientation is most credible when it is expressed through relationships.

Asexual people, who may not have romantic partners, relationship histories, or community structures that align with these expectations, are easily misinterpreted as lacking credibility. Their fear of persecution may be discounted because their orientation does not fit the framework officials are trained to recognise. When a system assumes that sexuality must be expressed through attraction, relationships, or behavioural evidence, an orientation defined by the absence of sexual attraction becomes almost impossible to present in ways the system understands.

In the Netherlands case, the decision was eventually overturned. The court recognised that discrimination based on deviation from normative sexuality should fall within sexual orientation protections. This was an important precedent, but it also revealed how fragile protection is when an identity is not widely understood or explicitly named in legal or humanitarian frameworks.

The larger truth remains:
when protection systems do not explicitly recognise asexuality, people are denied safety not because their risk is any lower, but because the system cannot imagine their existence.

This has real consequences. People may be forced to frame their experiences through inaccurate labels to gain credibility. Their fear of persecution may be minimised. Their claims may be rejected purely because their orientation does not match normative assumptions about what sexuality looks like. And in contexts where asexuality is deeply stigmatised or misunderstood, the inability to make a claim under the correct grounds increases vulnerability at every stage of displacement.

Asexuality exposes a broader problem in international protection systems.
When legal frameworks rely on narrow understandings of sexuality, anyone who lives outside those understandings becomes harder to see, harder to believe, and harder to protect.

The Shift Toward Sex Positive SRHR, and Its Unintended Gaps

SRHR programming has shifted toward sex positive approaches that emphasise pleasure, desire, agency, and bodily autonomy. This has been essential in challenging decades of risk based, shame based, and violence focused narratives.

But even positive framings can unintentionally reinforce assumptions.

A pleasure based approach still assumes sexual desire is universal. It assumes that sexual exploration is a marker of empowerment. It assumes that healthy development includes sexual activity. These ideas can reinforce both compulsory sexuality and compulsory heterosexuality.

For asexual people, sex positive programming may become exclusionary rather than liberating. The message becomes subtle but clear. A healthy life is a sexual life. Pleasure is something you should want. If you do not want sex, the problem is you.

A comprehensive rights based approach must include the right to sexual pleasure and the right to sexual self determination. Self determination includes the right to no sexual desire and no sexual activity.

When SRHR programs incorporate this fuller spectrum, they become more relevant not only to asexual people, but to people with disabilities who are often desexualised, to adolescents uninterested in sex, to trauma survivors, and to anyone whose experience of desire sits outside dominant narratives.

A sex positive approach can be transformative. It becomes even more transformative when it recognises that sexuality is not universal and that desire is not required for a healthy, dignified, or empowered life.

The Limits of Identity Based Approaches

This is all getting pretty technical and complex, which brings us to a broader issue that extends far beyond acronyms. Identity based approaches focus our attention on labels and categories, but labels alone do not explain how exclusion is produced. They do not tell us how people are treated, what assumptions shape decision making, or which bodies and life paths are considered normal within an organisation.

The real drivers of exclusion sit in the behaviours, ideologies, and social norms that institutions reproduce, often without noticing. These drivers are embedded in everyday practices: how needs are assessed, how vulnerability is defined, how families are recognised, how risk is interpreted, and whose relationships or identities are considered credible. They appear in program design templates, safeguarding questions, donor frameworks, staff training, monitoring tools, and the unwritten expectations that guide how practitioners make sense of people’s lives.

This is why simply adding letters does not resolve the deeper patterns of exclusion inside our systems. Expanding an acronym may give the appearance of inclusivity, but it does not shift the underlying assumptions that determine who is seen, who is believed, and who is protected. Real inclusion requires examining the norms and power structures that sit beneath the categories we use, not only the categories themselves.

Why I Do Not Use LGBTIQA+ as My Practice Framework

Identity based acronyms were political tools shaped by specific histories in specific places. They emerged from movements in the global North that relied on visibility, public identity, legal recognition, and community organising strategies rooted in particular cultural and political conditions. These acronyms were never designed for global South contexts, where gender and sexuality may be understood through different cosmologies, languages, kinship structures, and social norms. They were not designed for humanitarian systems that operate in crisis conditions, where safety, disclosure, and identity expression are shaped by fear, instability, and survival. And they were not designed for fluid and culturally diverse understandings of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and identity that exist across Indigenous, migrant, diasporic, and colonised communities.

The challenge is not the communities behind the letters. The challenge is what the acronym focuses attention on: identity labels. When we centre the acronym, we risk centring the categories themselves rather than the systems that shape people’s experiences of power, risk, and exclusion.

Identities shift across time, place, language, and safety. A person may use one label in an urban setting and another in a rural one. They may use no label at all in a humanitarian context where disclosure carries real danger. Many people do not organise their lives around these categories. Their sense of self may be relational, spiritual, cultural, or grounded in roles rather than identities. Others use local or Indigenous identities that do not map neatly onto global frameworks. Some people with diverse SOGIESC cannot safely claim any identity label because visibility can lead to violence, family rejection, or loss of livelihood.

If our practice is built around categories, we miss the deeper forces shaping exclusion. Categories tell us little about the systems that govern people’s lives: the laws that criminalise, the social norms that punish, the institutions that police relationships, the economic structures that restrict autonomy, and the humanitarian frameworks that determine who is visible and who is not. To work for genuine inclusion, we must look beyond the labels and into the norms, power relations, and institutional practices that shape people’s experiences long before an acronym is ever applied to them.

Why I Use SOGIESC Instead

SOGIESC stands for Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics. Everyone has SOGIESC. That is the point. These are not niche categories that apply only to people who are marginalised or labelled as different. They are universal human characteristics, shaped by culture, power, history, and social norms.

The issue is not who people are.
The issue is how systems treat people based on these characteristics.

Identity based approaches focus on naming groups, but SOGIESC analysis shifts our attention to the systems, structures, and assumptions that shape how people are included or excluded. This is far more useful in humanitarian and development contexts, where risk is rarely tied to identity alone. Risk emerges from the interaction between people’s characteristics and the norms and institutions that govern their lives.

Using characteristics allows us to examine the underlying rules of the system. It aligns with Patricia Hill Collins’ understanding of intersectionality as a systems concept: oppression is not located in individual experiences but in the interaction between norms, institutions, and structural power. In this framing, exclusion is not a list of who is vulnerable. It is a set of processes that decide who is seen, who is protected, who is believed, and who is considered legitimate.

When we work with characteristics rather than identities, we can analyse how heteronormativity (the assumption that heterosexuality is the default), compulsory sexuality (the assumption that everyone is sexual), cisnormativity (the assumption that gender identity aligns with sex assigned at birth), and gender binarism (the assumption that there are only two genders) shape our systems. These ideologies do not appear in policies as explicit statements. They appear in technical guidance, in safeguarding questions, in who programs are designed for, in which families are recognised, in how data is collected, in how staff are trained, and in what donor templates implicitly reward.

They are built in.

Characteristics analysis helps us see these patterns and name them. It shows that inclusion is not about adding categories; it is about changing the architecture of the system so that all people are recognised and protected.

This is why Diverse SOGIESC advisors are essential.
Not advisors who focus on counting identities or reciting acronyms.
But advisors who can identify the deeper, often unintended barriers baked into institutional practice.

Effective Diverse SOGIESC advisors understand how local identities are shaped by underlying SOGIESC characteristics, and how those characteristics interact with norms and power across program design, safeguarding, localisation, MHPSS, SRHR, and protection systems. They recognise that exclusion is produced through institutional assumptions, not only through individual attitudes.

These advisors help organisations examine their tools, templates, decision making processes, and program architecture. They help practitioners see where norms are built into vulnerability criteria, participation models, data systems, partnership frameworks, and accountability structures. Their work ensures that inclusion is not an afterthought or a separate workstream, but something embedded throughout the system.

SOGIESC is not an identity project.
It is a systems project.
And systems change is what makes inclusion real.

Asexuality as an Inclusion Issue

People on the asexual spectrum face discrimination, corrective practices, stigma, and invisibility across health, legal, and protection systems. These harms do not arise because asexuality is controversial or new. They persist because asexuality sits outside expected patterns of vulnerability. Humanitarian and development systems are built around assumptions that adults will form relationships, pursue sexual partnerships, marry, have children, and organise their lives around sexual and romantic norms. When someone does not follow these patterns, their experiences become harder for institutions to interpret, categorise, or respond to.

This means asexual people are often invisible not only because of stigma, but because our systems do not know where to place them. Health systems read low or absent sexual desire as pathology. Legal systems struggle to recognise persecution that is not tied to visible markers of identity or community membership. Protection systems overlook risks experienced by people whose lives do not fit normative relationship patterns. Even community based organisations may assume that sexuality always involves desire, partnership, and relationships, making asexual lives difficult to recognise.

Asexuality shows us something deeper about inclusion.
Exclusion is rarely about identity labels. Exclusion is produced by the norms that define what is considered normal, credible, or real. These norms shape who programs are designed for, what forms of harm are legible to the system, how vulnerability is defined, and whose experiences must be “explained” rather than accepted.

Asexuality helps us locate those norms.
Because asexuality sits outside expectations of desire, adulthood, partnership, and sexual expression, it becomes a powerful lens for seeing how deeply heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, and relationship-based assumptions are embedded within humanitarian and development practice. When asexual lives do not fit our systems, it exposes the limitations of the systems - not the people.

Asexuality reveals where our frameworks are too narrow, where our assumptions are invisible, and where our models of risk and vulnerability are incomplete. It shows us that inclusion is not about adding more identity categories. It is about examining the structures and ideologies that shape people’s lives long before they enter a program or register for assistance.

What This Means in Practice

Shifting from identity based frameworks to SOGIESC analysis changes the questions we ask. Instead of counting letters, we begin asking different and more useful questions. Not “who fits which category” but “what norms are operating here” and “how do these norms shape risk, access, and decision making.”

A SOGIESC approach asks us to examine the underlying structures of our work.
It moves us away from naming communities and toward understanding how systems respond to people based on the characteristics they embody. It asks us to look at the norms underneath our tools, our policies, our safeguarding guidance, our program designs, and our assumptions about family, partnership, adulthood, and vulnerability.

This shift helps us see the things we rarely interrogate:
• who is assumed to be in a relationship
• what kind of household is considered legitimate
• who programs are implicitly designed for
• which forms of harm are legible
• whose lives fit into donor templates and whose do not
• who is expected to disclose, explain, or justify their identity
• how safety, dignity, and agency are defined
• what experiences are considered normal or believable

When we begin analysing norms rather than identities, new patterns emerge. We see how heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, cisnormativity, and gender binarism shape institutional behaviour—not through explicit discrimination but through quiet, inherited assumptions that structure how decisions are made.

This is where meaningful inclusion begins.
Not with bigger acronyms or more categories, but with clearer systems analysis.
With understanding how power operates through norms.
With recognising the assumptions embedded in our tools.
With acknowledging who becomes invisible because our frameworks were not designed with them in mind.

In practice, this means re-examining the architecture of our organisations, not only the language we use. Inclusion becomes a design choice, not an add on. It becomes something we build into systems, not something we gesture toward through terminology.

Meaningful inclusion starts when we shift from “who is included in the acronym” to “how do our systems respond to the full diversity of human experience.”

Recommendations for Aid Actors

Strengthening Diverse SOGIESC inclusion requires more than adding terminology to policies. It requires organisational capability, sustained analysis, and systems level change.

• Invest in organisation wide learning on Diverse SOGIESC.
Build staff capability to understand Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sex Characteristics within humanitarian and development contexts, including compulsory sexuality, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and the assumptions embedded in institutional systems.

• Work with a Diverse SOGIESC inclusion specialist.
Partner with an experienced specialist who can identify how norms and assumptions are shaping your organisation’s strategies, tools, partnerships, safeguarding frameworks, and program logic.

• Use a structured organisational appraisal.
Work with Community Powered Responses, which has developed a comprehensive Diverse SOGIESC organisational assessment tool, to establish a clear baseline and identify strengths, risks, and gaps across culture, governance, systems, and practice.

• Review your existing policies, tools, and systems.
Assess safeguarding policies, HR processes, SRHR manuals, MHPSS protocols, MEAL systems, data tools, communications, and partnership agreements for exclusion risks and normative assumptions.

• Develop a roadmap for embedding inclusion into organisational architecture.
Create a multi year plan that integrates Diverse SOGIESC inclusion into governance, strategy, technical guidance, program cycles, partnership models, staff development, and accountability systems.

• Build and strengthen partnerships with community groups.
Engage a wide range of local SOGIESC communities, including asexual networks and informal groups that may not be connected to mainstream LGBTIQ organisations.

• Resource inclusion meaningfully.
Allocate staff time, leadership responsibility, and financial resources to sustain Diverse SOGIESC inclusion rather than treating it as an add on.

Final Thoughts

Asexuality is not an afterthought in the acronym. It highlights the structural assumptions that shape humanitarian and development systems. If we want inclusive, culturally grounded, rights based, community led practice, we must look beneath the letters.

SOGIESC helps us do this. It helps us analyse norms and structures. It helps us ask better questions. And it helps us understand whose lives become invisible when we rely on categories instead of systems analysis.

If our commitment is to leave no one behind, asexuality cannot remain unexamined. Neither can the deeper norms that produce exclusion.

This work is not about expanding the acronym. It is about expanding our understanding.

Note: This blog is a revised and expanded version of “A is for Asexuality” originally published on April 8, 2024.

Community Powered Responses operates on the belief that knowledge should be accessible. Everything here is free. If my work supports your practice and you are able to contribute, paid subscriptions help me continue creating tools, analysis, and reflections for our sector. Thank you for being part of this community.

This essay focuses on the experiences of lesbian, bisexual and queer women who were assigned female at birth. I want to be explicit that this is a deliberate and limited scope, not a definition of who lesbian women are. Increasingly, especially in many global North contexts we are seeing, knowing and loving trans women who are lesbians, and I welcome, support and celebrate them as part of our broader lesbian communities. Trans women, trans men, non-binary people and other gender diverse people also face profound forms of violence, exclusion and erasure in humanitarian and development systems. Their experiences are central to any serious conversation about diverse SOGIESC.

My focus here is specific. I am naming the particular patterns of invisibility, harm and structural neglect experienced by cisgendered LBQ women who are read as women in deeply gendered development and humanitarian environments. This is only one thread within a much wider tapestry of queer and trans lives under pressure, and it should be read as such.

I carry lavender on my skin for a reason.
I have a single stalk of lavender tattooed on the back of my right arm, a quiet nod to the “lavender menace” label that white, cisgender, heterosexual feminists once used to describe lesbians. At the time, many feminist leaders believed that openly acknowledging lesbians, or naming sexuality as central to women’s oppression, would damage the credibility of the women’s movement. They feared it would feed the conservative claim that feminists were simply man haters, and that all feminists were secretly lesbians.

The history is not abstract. In 1970, Betty Friedan warned that lesbians were a “lavender menace” to respectable feminism. Lesbian feminists responded by reclaiming the insult, printing Lavender Menace on purple T shirts, and intervening at the Second Congress to Unite Women. Their point was simple. You cannot build a women’s movement by pushing lesbians into the shadows or treating us as a liability (Radicalesbians, 1970).

My tattoo is my own quiet reminder of that history. The joke, for me, is that I am the lavender menace now. Not because I walk into meetings and demand to know where the lesbians are. It is rarely that simple or that safe. But because I carry the knowledge that lesbian lives have always been treated as politically inconvenient, and that part of my work is to refuse that erasure in whatever ways are possible in the spaces I move through.

The reality of international development and humanitarian work is that everything about diverse SOGIESC is already contested, politicised and, in many places, dangerous. By SOGIESC I mean sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics, a term that describes how people experience and express who they are and who they desire, and how their bodies are read and regulated in law and society. I am a lesbian ‘social inclusion’ practitioner, often hired as a “gender” or “diverse SOGIESC” specialist. My job is to help organisations practice inclusion (sometimes leading the projects myself) without putting communities, or myself, at unnecessary risk. I do not walk into meetings or communities and ask confrontational questions. I listen, I take the temperature in the room, and I work out where there is enough political space to move.

What I notice, over and over, is a quieter kind of violence. Colleagues will say things like “Well, lesbians can marry now in Australia, so at least that is sorted” and look genuinely puzzled when I suggest that discrimination has not disappeared with marriage equality. For many aid actors, it is hard to imagine what discrimination looks like for lesbians and queer women once the image of criminalised gay men has faded, and that marriage equality ‘out and proud’. Unaware that 1 in five countries explicitly criminalise sex between women/ assigned females at birth (Human Dignity Trust 2024). If things seem “good enough” in a high-income country like Australia, then surely, they are not a priority elsewhere.

That assumption is one of the reasons I had lavender tattooed on my arm. It reminds me that lesbian, bisexual and queer women are still treated as a risk to the main story in many women’s rights and SOGIESC spaces. It also reminds me that we have always been here, insisting that you cannot talk about gender equality while pretending that women who love women do not exist

I want to sit inside that tension and name some of what it hides.

Living in the blind spot between “gender” and “LGBTIQ+”

I have spent much of my working life inside “gender work” and “diverse SOGIESC work.” On paper, these should be the spaces where someone like me is most visible. In practice, they are often the spaces where lesbian, bisexual and queer women quietly disappear.

In the “gender” (read women and girls) world, the default woman remains cisgender and heterosexual. Humanitarian gender in emergencies guidance, development gender strategies, and “women and girls” programmes are still written with husbands, male partners and sons as the primary reference points in women’s lives. Even in otherwise sophisticated gender frameworks, sex between women is treated as marginal, a “special group,” or more often not mentioned at all (Cornwall et al., 2006; Cornwall et al., 2008).

In the diverse SOGIESC world, the focus has often tilted toward gay men and trans women, especially where movements grew from HIV and AIDS responses. Across Southern Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, many of the strongest LGBTIQ+ organisations began as gay men’s health projects and clinic-based services. In Australia, for example, ACON emerged from HIV work with gay men and then men who had sex with men (MSM), and ‘key populations’ and then expanded to LGBTIQ+ health more broadly, adding dedicated work with LBQ women later. The history matters and should be honoured. It also means that in many places there is literally no institutional place for LBQ women to go. The “community” in organisational practice is still coded as gay men plus gender diverse people, with women who love women tacked on in the margins (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

When I step into development spaces as the diverse SOGIESC advisor, I am asked about criminalisation, about data collection, about gender backlash against trans people. I am rarely asked about the very specific ways LBQ women and AFAB gender diverse people are squeezed by patriarchy and heterosexism at the same time, or about what it means to be a woman or femme person who doesn’t organise her life around a male partner.

HIV, inheritance, and who gets to count as “the community”

If you look at the institutional DNA of many LGBTIQ+ civil society organisations, you can still see the imprint of HIV and AIDS.

In Southern Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia and the Pacific, community organisations grew out of gay men’s HIV support groups, clinic outreach, and rights campaigns (Outright International, 2023). The same pattern holds in my own context. HIV services for gay and bisexual men were the wedge that forced health systems to acknowledge sexual diversity. Lesbian, bisexual and queer women benefited from that shift, but we were rarely at the centre of it.

The SWASH survey in Sydney, which has been running since 1996, is one of the rare exceptions. It exists because health workers and community advocates realised, they had almost no evidence on LBQ women and needed data to inform health promotion. Today, SWASH is the longest running periodic survey of LBQ women’s health in the world. Recent rounds show a stark picture. Low engagement with preventive health care sits alongside sixty percent of respondents reporting high or very high psychological distress in the preceding month, over a third saying life felt not worth living in the past year, around one in six having self-harmed, more than half living with disability or a long-term health condition, and nearly half reporting intimate partner abuse. And that is in Australia, inside a relatively well-resourced health system with legal protections (Mooney Somers et al., 2022).

A recent Australian mapping of LBQ women’s health concludes what global evidence has been saying for some time. Sexual minority women, as a group, show worse mental health, higher rates of some chronic conditions, and distinct reproductive health challenges when compared to heterosexual women. Yet LBQ women remain under examined and under prioritised, even in high income settings (Grant, 2025; Meads, 2019).

Now imagine what that looks like outside a system like this, in the countries where I actually work. There is no SWASH, no LBQ module in the national health survey, no meaningful disaggregation by sexuality in humanitarian health data, no culturally safe qualitative research, that can actually tell us what is going on. We are forced to infer from patterns. If this is what we see among some of the most researched LBQ communities on earth, what might we expect in low income or crisis affected settings where the laws are harsher, the services thinner, and family control over women’s lives tighter?

As someone who spent nearly two years as a social inclusion advisor for Plan International’s global sexual health and reproductive rights programme My Body My Future 2, I can say that this is not a hypothetical question.

We already have enough global evidence to know that poorer mental health, higher rates of violence and structural barriers to care are persistent trends for sexual minority women (Grant, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2023; Meads, 2019). The question in humanitarian and development work is not whether LBQ women are at risk. It is why we keep designing programmes as if they are not there.

Colonialism, “traditional” gender diversity, and the missing category of women who love women

There is another silence that runs alongside this: the way we talk about pre-colonial gender and sexual diversity.

In many of the countries where I work, colleagues will point to “traditional” gender diverse identities as evidence that queerness is not a Western import. Fa’afafine in Samoa, Leiti in Tonga, Hijra, Hijra-Geri, Aravani and Kinnar in South Asia, Transpuan, and Waria in Indonesia, and many more. These roles are embedded in labour, kinship and spirituality. They were constrained and distorted by colonial rule, missionary violence and imported binaries, but not fully erased

What is rarely said out loud is that even in these contexts, heterosexuality and the division of labour along masculine and feminine lines have usually remained very strong norms. “Women’s work” and “men’s work” are tightly policed. Cisgender women’s sexuality is tied to marriage, childbearing and family honour. Some traditional gender diverse roles, particularly for those assigned male at birth, have been more visible and have sometimes been folded into a heteronormative script, with feminine gender expression paired with masculine partners in ways that can be read as a variation on man plus woman. That visibility has come at a terrible cost, with trans and gender diverse people, especially trans women, facing extreme violence. Recent Trans Murder Monitoring data show at least 350 transgender and gender diverse people killed globally in the last year, the vast majority of them trans women and transfeminine people of colour (Transgender Europe, 2024; ILGA World et al., 2024).

By contrast, diversity of sexual orientation among women, and relationships between women, often sits entirely outside these frameworks. A masculine presenting woman who loves women is not the same as a recognised third gender category, and often has no cultural script to stand in. A feminine presenting woman who loves women can be rendered invisible in a different way, her relationships dismissed as a phase, a close friendship, or something that will end once she marries a man, until the moment her refusal of men is taken seriously and becomes a source of surveillance, pressure and threat. Diverse sexualities between women can be punished precisely because they disrupt the heterosexual organisation of kinship and reproduction (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

This is one of the paradoxes I live with as a lesbian practitioner in decolonial spaces. We rightly challenge the way British colonial law criminalised same sex acts and imposed rigid binaries, drawing on sexuality and development thinkers like Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa and Susie Jolly, who have shown how heterosexuality and gender complementarity are baked into development practice (Cornwall et al., 2006; Cornwall et al., 2008). At the same time, we need to be honest that in many pre-colonial and colonial societies, women’s lives and bodies were already heavily controlled, and female same sex desire often sat outside even the most expansive traditional categories.

That double history helps explain why LBQ women fall so neatly between the cracks. We are not quite central enough to women’s rights work that assumes heterosexuality, and not quite central enough to SOGIESC work that has been shaped by gay male and trans narratives (Outright International, 2023). We become the quiet labour in the background, fetching water, running women’s groups, doing community mobilisation, while almost never being named as rights holders in our own right.

SRHR: when “women’s health” forgets queer women

Sexual and reproductive health and rights is one of the clearest places where this erasure shows up.

I have read countless sexual health programme documents that talk in detail about “women of reproductive age,” family planning, maternal health, and adolescent pregnancy but never once mention that some of those women have female partners. The default is still heterosexual marriage.

The global evidence that does exist tells us that sexual minority women face distinct sexual health and reproductive rights risks. Systematic reviews find that women with diverse sexual orientations have higher rates of some physical and mental health conditions, more behavioural health risks, and specific reproductive health needs compared to heterosexual women (Grant, 2025; Meads, 2019). Studies in high income countries show lower rates of routine cervical screening among lesbian women, because both providers and women themselves assume they are “low risk,” and higher reported barriers to respectful care (Meads, 2019). LBQ women are also more likely to report pregnancies under conditions of coercion or economic pressure and less likely to have those pregnancies recognised as unwanted within heteronormative systems that assume a husband in the background (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

SWASH gives us one granular example. In recent samples, almost a third of LBQ respondents described their general health as poor or fair, over half reported disability or a chronic condition, and experiences of discrimination, anti LGBT harassment and intimate partner violence were common (Mooney Somers et al., 2022). This is sexual health and reproductive rights work too. It is about whose bodies are considered legitimate, whose pain is believed, and who can safely access care that is not designed with them in mind.

Human Rights Watch’s global investigation into violence against LBQ women and non-binary people adds another layer. It documents forced and coerced heterosexual marriages in settings from Kyrgyzstan to Malawi and Tunisia, where women are pressured or compelled to marry men as a form of “correction” or to secure access to land, inheritance and social legitimacy (Human Rights Watch, 2023). These marriages are SRHR issues. They constrain sexual autonomy, increase exposure to sexual violence, and make it almost impossible for LBQ women to access services as themselves. Sexual violence that targets lesbians and bisexual women as punishment, often described by activists as “corrective rape,” sits on the same continuum. In Southern Africa, research with lesbian and bisexual women has found that around one third reported forced sex at some point in their lives, usually by men, and that these experiences were strongly associated with depression, substance use and self-reported HIV infection (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Meads, 2019).

In humanitarian settings, these patterns are likely intensified. If you are an LBQ woman in a camp or informal settlement, you may avoid sexual rights services because the clinic is staffed by someone who knows your family. You may be living in a forced heterosexual marriage as a direct result of family pressure, displacement and economic crisis. You may be pregnant after rape that targeted you because you are read as “too masculine,” or because you are a feminine lesbian or bisexual woman whose very femininity becomes a weapon used against you. Feminine queer women are often told they just need to know what a real man is like, a familiar threat that frames sexual violence as both entitlement and instruction. Whether the violence is justified through punishing gender non-conformity or policing feminine desirability, the intent is the same. It is to correct, to discipline, and to force women back into heterosexuality (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

We do not have neat global prevalence figures for any of this. But we have enough pieces to see the outline, and it is striking how rarely those pieces appear in our sexual rights strategies, humanitarian response plans, or “women’s health” programming.

WASH and the everyday labour of survival

If you want to know who is carrying the burden of water and sanitation, you do not need a survey. You can sit in almost any village or informal settlement at dawn and watch who walks to the water point. It will be women and girls, including those of us who are lesbian, bisexual, queer or gender diverse but still read as “women of the household.”

Global WASH reporting makes it clear that women and girls bear the brunt of water collection and inadequate sanitation. UNICEF and WHO estimate that in many countries, women are most likely to be responsible for fetching water, and that girls are almost twice as likely as boys to perform this work (UNICEF & World Health Organization, 2017). Tools like the WASH Gender Equality Measure and recent reviews in PLOS Medicine highlight how gender inequality is woven through WASH: who controls decisions about toilets and taps, who risks harassment or assault on the walk to the water point, who loses schooling because of menstruation without safe facilities (UNICEF & World Health Organization, 2017).

What these analyses almost never tell us is which of those women and girls are queer. Sexuality is not measured. Diverse SOGIESC is treated as a separate thematic issue, if it is treated at all

Here I start to hypothesise based on what we know from LBQ health research, from broader diverse SOGIESC violence data, and from my own fieldwork, including five years leading a WASH Participatory Action Research project in Indonesia with women, people with disabilities and the transpuan and waria communities.

If LBQ women and AFAB gender diverse people are already at higher risk of violence and harassment, it is not a stretch to imagine that public water points, shared latrines and bathing spaces are dangerous places. For masculine presenting LBQ women, simply queuing at the pump or entering the “women’s bathing block” can trigger taunts, accusations and attacks. Girls who are read as “tomboys” may be policed by relatives if they are seen alone at odd hours. Feminine presenting lesbian and bisexual women face a different set of risks that are no less serious. Their very femininity can be weaponised against them, making them targets for men who assume entitlement to their attention, touch or time, or who interpret their femininity as proof that they “just need the right man.” In crowded WASH facilities, this can mean sexual harassment, unwanted propositions, being cornered or followed, or being accused of “corrupting” other women if friendships or intimacy are suspected. Trans men or non-binary people assigned female at birth may avoid WASH facilities altogether, with serious health consequences, because there is literally no safe door to walk through.

These risks are invisible in standard WASH gender assessments because we do not ask. Yet we know from evidence on violence against diverse SOGIESC folks that public spaces, schools and institutions are high risk sites, and that LBQ women and other AFAB sexual and gender minorities face very high rates of violence starting early in life (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Outright International, 2023).

If we took that seriously, WASH programming would look different. Gender analyses would explicitly consider diverse SOGIESC. Participatory safety mapping would include LBQ women, trans men and non-binary people. We would ask who feels safe using which toilets, at which times of day, and why. That is not adding something extra to WASH. It is doing the bare minimum for all the women we claim to serve.

Economic life, work and social protection: between discrimination and “respectable” invisibility

Economics sounds dry until you remember that for many LBQ women, the ability to earn and control an income is the only protection they have against coerced marriage, family violence and homelessness. This was starkly present, in the unpublished research (abruptly stopped by the closing if USAID) I did for Edge Effect on Diverse SOGIESC access to social protection mechanisms in Jakarta, South Sulawesi and North Sumatra.

According to The economic cost of stigma and the exclusion of LGBT people: A case study of India, the economic cost of LGBT inclusion has focused largely on gay men and transgender workers, but the patterns are instructive. The World Bank’s work in countries like India has shown how stigma and discrimination reduce labour force participation, depress wages, and increase health and social protection costs at a national scale (Badgett, 2014). Labour market studies in Europe and North America find that sexual minority workers report higher levels of discrimination, harassment and job instability, even where anti-discrimination laws exist (Badgett, 2014; Meads, 2019).

There is a small body of work that talks about a “lesbian pay premium” in some high-income countries, where lesbians in same sex couples appear to earn more on average than heterosexual women. But even those studies show that the picture is highly uneven, that discrimination in hiring and promotion still exists, and that any “premium” is shaped by selective samples and by the fact that some lesbians delay childbearing or opt out of certain gendered expectations. None of this is evidence that lesbians are economically safe. It shows that lesbians who are allowed to be visible in formal labour markets can sometimes escape some of the penalties attached to motherhood and heterosexual marriage, while still facing homophobia and sexism at work (Grant, 2025; Meads, 2019).

Human Rights Watch’s LBQ violence report adds another layer that feels very familiar. LBQ women often end up in precarious low-income work because discrimination in schooling and formal employment closes off other options, and because family rejection leaves them without a safety net. This can mean informal agricultural labour, sex work, domestic labour, or short-term NGO contracts without benefits or legal protections (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

From where I sit in the humanitarian and development world, three patterns stand out in economic inclusion and social protection programming, none of which are routinely named.

First is invisible dependency. Many LBQ women are financially dependent on families or male relatives who do not recognise their relationships or rights. Where laws and customs restrict women’s access to land and property, lesbian or bisexual daughters are expected to “repay” housing and food through unpaid domestic labour and caregiving while remaining closeted. The HRW report highlights how discriminatory property and inheritance laws, many of them colonial holdovers, constrain women’s access to land and directly harm LBQ women’s ability to live queer lives without male guardians (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

Second is the erasure of our families in social protection systems. Many schemes tie benefits to officially recognised spouses, “heads of household” or male breadwinners. This erases LBQ couples and networks of care that fall outside heterosexual norms. In practice, a lesbian woman caring for a sick female partner or co-parenting children may be treated as single and ineligible, or may have to pretend that a male relative is the primary caregiver to be taken seriously (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Outright International, 2023).

Third is workplace violence and harassment. LBQ women are not only discriminated against, but we are also often targeted for sexual harassment and violence at work, especially when we present in gender non-conforming ways. HRW documents LBQ women who face rape threats and sexual assault from male colleagues, and masculine presenting LBQ women who are harassed by police when they are visible in public space or sex work (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

Data by sexual orientation and gender identity are scarce in labour surveys, especially in the global South. But what we do have, combined with the testimonies of LBQ activists, is enough to act. When agencies design “women’s economic empowerment” or social protection programmes without any attention to sexuality and gender expression, they risk reinforcing heterosexual marriage as the main route to security and leaving LBQ women off the ledger entirely (Badgett, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2023).

Violence, “corrective rape” and the politics of naming

It is impossible to talk honestly about LBQ women’s lives without talking about violence.

The term “corrective rape” emerged from South African activism and media work to name a specific pattern, where men rape lesbians in order to “correct” them or punish them for defying gender norms. It is an ugly phrase for an ugly practice. The label has travelled widely and can sometimes be used loosely, but the underlying pattern is very real. Research from Southern Africa suggests that about a third of lesbian and bisexual women surveyed had experienced forced sex at some point, often by male perpetrators, and that these experiences were strongly associated with HIV infection and severe mental distress (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Meads, 2019). A broader review of violence against LGBTQI+ people in the region reports that over half of sexual and gender minorities have experienced physical or sexual violence, with particularly high rates among LBQ women (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

Human Rights Watch’s work on violence against LBQ women and non-binary people does not try to quantify corrective rape as a neat category, and I think that is wise. Instead, it situates forced and coerced marriage, sexual assault, attacks on masculine presenting women, workplace harassment, land dispossession and restrictions on movement inside a larger architecture of punishment for those who dare to decentre men in their lives (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

From my own work, I could map that pattern onto many stories I have heard, in very different contexts. The lesbian activist in East Africa who was told by police that the rape she reported did not count because “you needed to learn to be a real woman.” The young bisexual woman in a Pacific Island country who was forced into marriage after being caught with her girlfriend and still receives threats whenever she visits her natal village. The masculine presenting queer woman in a Filipino city who describes constant street harassment as the background hum of her life: “Men shout that they will show me how it really feels to be a woman. They say it like a joke, but there is always the possibility they might act on it.”

In my own research on backlash against women’s and LGBT+ rights movements in the Commonwealth, drawing on activists in Sri Lanka, St Lucia, Tanzania and Tonga, we heard again and again how violence, surveillance, ostracism and financial retaliation are used to keep women and diverse SOGIE activists “in their place” (Woolf & Dwyer, 2020). LBQ women sit at the intersection of those forces. Backlash is not only something that hits organisations or movements at a high level. It is also the brother who threatens you when you come out, the family who use financial dependency as a leash, the church that frames your existence as a threat to “traditional values,” the colleague who jokes about teaching you a lesson in the stairwell.

We have to be careful not to turn these experiences into trauma pornography, or to assume that all LBQ women are always in acute danger. Many of us live ordinary, joyful lives, with friendships, lovers, children, chosen families and moments of stubborn safety we have carved out for ourselves. But it is equally important not to look away from violence that is very specifically shaped by being read as women who love women.

For humanitarian and development actors, this has at least two implications. First, we cannot assume that generic GBV programming will automatically address LBQ women’s experiences. If your case management forms or social norms do not allow a woman to name a female partner, if your intake questions are built on heterosexual assumptions, if practitioners have never been trained to recognise or respond to violence within same sex relationships, or if heteronormativity is baked into assessment tools in ways that render LBQ risk factors invisible, survivors will not be well served. Referral pathways often compound the problem. If we do not assess whether the clinics or counsellors we are referring to are actually safe for LBQ women, if we do not check whether they have any training in sexual orientation and gender diversity, or if we send survivors to providers who reject or shame queer clients, then the referral itself becomes another layer of harm. Even “safe spaces for women and girls” can reproduce exclusion when they are implicitly heterosexual, rely on assumptions about husbands and male partners, or create environments where LBQ women fear being outed or ostracised. Second, we must stop treating violence against LGBTQI+ people as a niche concern for a separate project. Evidence shows that violence based on SOGIESC intersects with and amplifies other forms of gender based violence and has direct impacts on health, education and economic outcomes (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Outright International, 2023).

You cannot claim to be addressing violence against women and girls while ignoring women and girls who are targeted precisely because they love women.

We are out there, and we are many

One of the most hopeful experiences I have had in recent years was walking into the Global Feminist LBQ Women’s Conference in Cape Town in July 2019. For several days, over four hundred, possibly five hundred, lesbian, bisexual and queer women and non-binary people from more than a hundred countries came together to talk about healing, leading and transforming. We mapped our histories, argued about strategy, designed futures, danced, mourned our dead and celebrated the fact that we had found each other in the same room (Coalition of African Lesbians et al., 2019).

At the LBQ conference in South Africa with longtime colleagues and friends.

What struck me was not only the scale but the diversity. LBQ feminists working on climate justice in the Pacific. Queer Muslim organisers from North Africa. Rural activists from Eastern Europe. Sex worker collectives. Indigenous queer leaders. People who had survived more than most development workers will ever have to imagine and were still building organisations, movements and communities anyway (Coalition of African Lesbians et al., 2019; Outright International, 2023).

So, when I say we are out there and we are many, it is not a metaphor. I have seen the room, I have visted some informal (and sometimes formal) collectives in Tonga, Fiji, Indonesia, Phillipines, Timor Leste, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia, and I have met LBQ women from many more countries.

With a lesbian collective in the Phillipines in 2018 talking about the local lebsian networks that provide informal disaster response to diverse SOGIESC communties in disasters.

Lavender on purpose

So why the lavender tattoo really?

Partly it is for that movement history. The phrase “lavender menace” was meant to name lesbians as a threat to respectable feminism. Lesbian feminists turned it around and used it to insist that you cannot talk about women’s liberation while pretending that women who love women do not exist (Radicalesbians, 1970).

I carry lavender on my arm as a quiet reminder to myself that my job in international development and humanitarian work is, in some ways, exactly that. To be the lavender menace in the room without always naming it outright. To hold the line that you cannot talk about gender equality and leave LBQ women out of the picture. To keep asking, in whatever language is safest in a given moment, where we are in the data, in the logframes, in the case studies, in the budgets. To insist that when we talk about “women’s work” we also talk about women’s desire, women’s autonomy, and women’s right to organise our lives in ways that do not revolve around men.

I am one lesbian, with one set of experiences. LBQ women are not a single story. But the patterns are clear enough to act on. We have SWASH and other community surveys reminding us that LBQ women’s health and mental health are under strain (Grant, 2025; Mooney Somers et al., 2022). We have systematic reviews and human rights reports showing us that sexual violence, forced marriage, property dispossession and workplace harassment are part of a global architecture of control (Badgett, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2023; Meads, 2019). We have decades of sexuality and development scholarship warning that heteronormativity is not a side issue but a structuring logic in our work (Cornwall et al., 2006; Cornwall et al., 2008).

What we lack is not evidence, but the political will to centre LBQ women as rights holders in the places where “gender” and “SOGIESC” meet, and to recognise that any serious conversation about backlash against gender and sexuality rights has to account for how LBQ women are pushed back, punished and yet still persist.

Until that changes, I will continue to be, the lavender menace.

References and Recommended Readings

Badgett, M. V. L. (2014). The economic cost of stigma and the exclusion of LGBT people: A case study of India. World Bank.

Coalition of African Lesbians, Pan Africa ILGA, & partners. (2019). Global Feminist LBQ Women’s Conference, Cape Town, July 2019: Conference report. Coalition of African Lesbians.

Cornwall, A., Corrêa, S., & Jolly, S. (2006). Sexuality and development: The trouble with gender. IDS Bulletin, 37(5), 1–11.

Cornwall, A., Corrêa, S., & Jolly, S. (Eds.). (2008). Development with a body: Sexuality, human rights and development. Zed Books.

Grant, R. (2025). Mapping the state of lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s health in Australia. Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University.

Human Dignity Trust. (2024). Breaking the silence: Criminalisation of lesbians and bisexual women and its impacts(2nd ed.). Author. https://www.humandignitytrust.org/news/one-in-five-countries-criminalises-lesbians-and-bisexual-women-says-new-report-from-human-dignity-trust

Human Rights Watch. (2023). “This is why we became activists”: Violence against lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, and non-binary people. Human Rights Watch.

ILGA World, Transgender Europe, GATE, Asia Pacific Transgender Network, IGLYO, & ESWA. (2024). Trans Day of Remembrance 2024 joint statement: We honour the lives of our siblings and demand safety amidst growing hate and anti-trans movements. ILGA World.

Meads, C. (2019). A systematic review of sexual minority women’s experiences of health care. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(18), 1–23.

Mooney Somers, J., Deacon, R. M., Anderst, J., Barker, A., Watson, L., Blake, S., Wang, L., Gillmore, T., & Rees, R. (2022). Women in contact with the Sydney LGBTQ communities: Report of the SWASH lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s health survey 2022. University of Sydney, Centre for Social Research in Health, and ACON.

Outright International. (2023). Lesbian, bisexual and queer women and non-binary people: Submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Outright International.

Radicalesbians. (1970). The woman-identified woman. Radicalesbians.

Transgender Europe. (2024). Trans Murder Monitoring 2024 update: 350 reported murders between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. TGEU.

UNICEF, & World Health Organization. (2017). Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene: 2017 update and SDG baselines. UNICEF and World Health Organization.

Women’s Health and Equal Rights Initiative. (n.d.). Women’s Health and Equal Rights Initiative. WHER.

Woolf, L., & Dwyer, E. (2020). Managing backlash against women’s and LGBT+ rights movements in the Commonwealth. Royal Commonwealth Society.

A row over the term “gender” is threatening to bog down negotiations in Belém. Conservative states are pushing to define gender as “biological sex,” trying to fence trans and non binary people out of a new gender action plan for climate policy. Argentina and Paraguay want footnotes clarifying that gender only refers to “female and male sexes.” The Vatican is lobbying for “sex” instead of “gender” in official language. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Egypt are once again lining up to resist references to gender that might imply anything beyond the binary.

Gender advocates are calling it what it is: a deliberate attempt to roll back decades of UN language and keep climate action safely inside a narrow, binary frame.

If you have read my recent piece, Beyond the Binary: When the Sector Knows Better and Still Chooses Erasure, none of this will surprise you. The development sector already knows that gender is not synonymous with “women and girls.” It has written that knowledge into policies, submissions and strategies. It simply refuses to act as though that knowledge comes with obligations.

The UN has been playing out a version of this same struggle for decades. Cop30 is not an exception, it is the latest stage.

We Have Been Here Before: Beijing 1995 And The “G Word”

In my 2021 blog, Beyond The Gender Binary, I went back through the evolution from Women in Development to Gender and Development, and how we arrived at a “gender mainstreaming” paradigm that supposedly included everyone but in practice stayed stubbornly binary.

The UN story sits inside that history.

By the time the Fourth World Conference on Women met in Beijing in 1995, debates over the term “gender” were already intense. Some states were worried that “gender” might be used to legitimise trans and gender diverse identities, or to smuggle in what they called “new” or “controversial” meanings. Others, particularly from feminist movements, were pushing for gender as a structural concept: a way of naming the power relations and social norms that shape our lives.

The result was a compromise that should sound familiar.

The Commission on the Status of Women set up an informal contact group to “seek agreement on the commonly understood meaning” of gender for the Beijing Platform for Action. After all that effort, the President’s statement concluded that:

· gender had already been used “in its ordinary, generally accepted usage” in other UN forums,

· there was “no indication” any new meaning was intended, and

· the Platform should be read with that “ordinary usage” in mind.

In other words: we will not define it here.

This deliberate ambiguity allowed progress to move forward, but it also created fertile ground for endless dispute. “Gender” could be expansive enough for feminist and queer movements to use, while still feeling “safe” enough for states that wanted to reassure conservative constituencies that nothing radical had happened.

It is the same ambiguity that Argentina, Paraguay and the Vatican are now trying to close down at Cop30.

How The Binary Survived Gender And Development

In Beyond The Gender Binary, I traced how development thinking moved from Women in Development (WID) to Women and Development (WAD) and then Gender and Development (GAD). The story is usually told as a smooth evolution:

· WID: integrate women into development.

· WAD: recognise women’s central role in development and link it to global economic structures.

· GAD: analyse and transform the social relations between women and men.

On paper, GAD was a shift away from “women as a special issue” and toward understanding gender as a social system. It drew on scholars like Gayle Rubin, who described a “sex/gender system” of social arrangements, and on feminist economists who showed how colonialism and capitalism materialise gendered inequalities.

In practice, something else happened.

Gender became a new label put on old habits. “Gender equality” was shorthand for “women’s equality.” Program documents talked about “women and men, girls and boys,” but the real work, the budgets and the indicators stayed tightly tethered to that binary. Trans, non binary and intersex people were, at best, an “other vulnerable group” in a footnote.

In that 2021 piece I wrote that:

The current development system is stuck with perpetuating an artificial gender binary that simply does not exist.

That sentence could be pasted directly into the Cop30 coverage without editing.

The UN “Gender Wars”: Not New, Not Accidental

What is happening in Belém has been happening across UN spaces for years.

Negotiations at the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission on Population and Development, the World Health Assembly and the Human Rights Council have all seen repeated attempts to dilute or remove references to “gender,” “gender responsive,” “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” and anything that looks like it might acknowledge diverse sexual orientations or gender identities.

These are not technical edits. They are political strategies.

In 2024, for example, conservative states at the World Health Assembly objected to phrases like “gender responsive” and “advancing gender mainstreaming,” along with their long standing resistance to the words “sexual” and “rights” when attached to health.

Scholars who track these fights inside the UN have described them as “gender wars” in which conservative coalitions work to contain or reverse the gains made since Beijing, particularly when it comes to recognising gender identity and sexual orientation as human rights questions.

The pattern is familiar:

· Challenge the term “gender” itself, or demand that it be explicitly tied back to “women and men” or “biological sex.”

· Frame any broader understanding as “ideology,” “western” or “against cultural values.”

· Use procedural tools like brackets, footnotes and definitional debates to stall agreements and weaken commitments.

The fight at Cop30 sits squarely inside this older pattern.

A Different Story Inside The Same Building: The SOGI Mandate

At the same time, another current has been running through the UN system.

In 2016, the Human Rights Council created the mandate of the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). The resolution, HRC 32/2, tasked this mandate with documenting human rights violations against people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, identifying root causes, and making recommendations to states.

The first mandate holder, Vitit Muntarbhorn, and his successor, Victor Madrigal Borloz, have been remarkably clear about what is at stake. Their reports show that:

· violence and discrimination based on SOGI are widespread in every region,

· these harms are intensified by other systems of oppression, including gender, race, class and disability, and

· backlash against “gender” and “gender ideology” is being used to undermine not only LGBTQIA+ rights, but the entire human rights framework.

In his 2021 report to the General Assembly, Madrigal Borloz explicitly analysed the “gender backlash” and warned that attacks on gender frameworks threaten “the universality and indivisibility of human rights,” not just the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.

In later reports, he linked this backlash to colonial legacies and the way colonial laws and norms continue to shape which bodies and identities are seen as legitimate.

In other words, what conservative states are presenting as a defence of women or culture is, in fact, a project of erasing certain people from legal and political recognition. It is about power, not protection.

States that support the SOGI mandate have been clear about this too. In a 2022 joint statement, a group of “friends of the mandate” (including DFAT) welcomed the Expert’s work precisely because it brings a SOGI lens to issues like health and the Sustainable Development Goals, and helps identify the structural obstacles that keep LGBTIQ+ people excluded.

So when we look at the UN, we see two currents running side by side:

· One that tries to narrow “gender” back to biology and keep diversity out.

· Another that insists that protecting people from violence and discrimination based on SOGI is integral to the UN’s human rights project.

Cop30 is happening at the point where those currents collide.

Cop30: Old Battle, New Consequences

Cop30 is not a feminist summit. It is a climate summit. Which is precisely why the fight over gender language there is so revealing.

Climate change is already amplifying inequalities. Women, especially those with caring responsibilities and limited access to resources, are bearing disproportionate burdens. By 2050, climate change is projected to push far more women and girls into food insecurity than men and boys.

We also know, from work across the Pacific and beyond, that people with diverse SOGIESC are excluded and harmed in climate related disasters, in evacuation centres, in early warning systems and in livelihoods support. Those of us who have worked with SOGIESC communities in disaster risk reduction have seen how gendered and sexual norms determine who can enter a shelter, who gets aid and who is left outside in the storm.

So when conservative governments insist that “gender” in a climate gender action plan must mean “biological sex,” they are not clarifying. They are deciding that certain people’s experiences will not count.

As reported in The Guardian today, Claudia Rubio Giraldo of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization described the move to redefine gender as “a way to stall the negotiations, to burden the process and block more ambitious conversations.” Her comments were made in response to conservative states attempting to narrow the definition of gender in the Cop30 gender action plan.

In the same article, Chikondi Chabvuta-Mkawa, the gender coordinator for the group of Least Developed Countries, warned that the debate over terminology is distracting from the real issue: the chronic underfunding of measures that address gender inequality. She noted that only a very small share of global climate finance is directed toward gender equality, and even less reaches the grassroots women’s organisations and gender diverse communities that are doing the frontline work.

The stakes here are simple:

· If the gender action plan at Cop30 defines gender narrowly, it will legitimise the exclusion of trans and non binary people from climate policy and finance.

· If it remains expansive and rooted in lived realities, it can strengthen the hand of those working for intersectional, inclusive climate action in every region.

This is not semantics. It is survival.

The UN Already Knows Better

In 2021 I wrote that there is no longer any excuse for development practitioners, especially those working on GEDSI, to perpetuate exclusionary sex and gender binaries. That was four years, multiple IE SOGI reports, and countless UN resolutions ago.

Since then, the UN system has:

· reaffirmed that gender is a socially constructed system of roles, norms and power, not a synonym for “women,”

· established and repeatedly renewed a mandate dedicated to SOGI, with a body of work that documents violence, discrimination and backlash in detail

· recognised that “leave no one behind” requires identifying who is marginalised precisely because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics.

The problem is not the absence of definitions or data. The problem is that states and institutions selectively ignore them when it is politically or financially convenient.

This is the same pattern I wrote about in my recent piece on ACFID and the Australian aid sector. The sector names diverse SOGIESC in policy documents, then quietly drops us when it is time to write strategies, budgets and communications. Gender is used as a neat stand in for “women and girls,” leaving everyone else out of the frame.

The UN is now replaying that same move on the climate stage.

So What Would It Look Like To Take The UN’s Own Expertise Seriously?

If negotiators at Cop30 wanted to take the UN’s existing work on gender and SOGI seriously, they might start by:

· Using the UN’s own concept of gender as a socially constructed system of relations and power, not collapsing it back into “female and male sexes.”

· Explicitly recognising that people of diverse SOGIESC experience particular forms of vulnerability and exclusion in the context of climate change, drawing on the evidence gathered by the IE SOGI and by SOGIESC led organisations globally.

· Embedding intersectionality, as some states have proposed, so that “women and girls in all their diversity” and “gender diverse people” are named as central to climate justice, not optional add ons.

· Linking gender language to actual climate finance decisions, so that gender responsive action plans do not remain unfunded aspirations.

None of this would erase the focus on women and girls. It would make that focus more honest.

In my recent blog I wrote:

Women and girls are not gender, they are women and girls. Gender is the structure of power we all live within.

If climate policy cannot hold that nuance, it is not practising gender equality. It is managing optics.

Back To Accountability

At the end of Beyond the Binary: When the Sector Knows Better and Still Chooses Erasure, I offered an accountability test.

Do not start with what organisations say about gender. Start with how they behave.

The same test applies here.

If states at Cop30 claim to care about women’s rights and gender justice, ask:

· Whose experiences are counted in their data and assessments.

· Whose organisations receive core, multi year funding.

· Whether they support or attack the SOGI mandate.

· How they vote when “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “gender expression” and “sex characteristics” appear in resolutions.

And if climate negotiators, INGOs and managing contractors insist that they are advancing “gender equality,” ask whether they are prepared to name and include people of diverse SOGIESC in their climate work where it is safe to do so, and whether they are funding those communities to lead.

Because this is not about perfectly crafted language. It is about power, risk and resources.

For thirty years, the UN has chosen ambiguity over clarity on gender when it suited political convenience. Now, at Cop30, we are seeing the cost of that choice. The cracks are being widened by those who wish to exclude.

My hope sits where it always has, with communities who keep pushing the UN to live up to its own promises, and with the practitioners and advocates who refuse to accept that “gender” must be narrowed to make some states comfortable.

The climate crisis is already here. The question is not whether the UN can agree on a definition of gender that keeps everyone happy. The question is whether we will build climate action that reflects the reality of who we are, or retreat into a binary that never existed in the first place.

A note for readers

As of today, I will be slowly moving all Including the Excluded writing to Substack. This blog has always centred social inclusion for groups who are underrepresented, erased or pushed to the margins. Much of the writing comes from my humanitarian and development work, but the boundaries are intentionally permeable. The issues we face in practice are the same issues communities navigate every day.

I will continue publishing weekly pieces focused on diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, Gender Expressions and Sex Characteristics, as well as on the experiences and rights of women, people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. If you would like to stay connected and receive new posts, please subscribe.

For those who also follow my Power to Praxis work: that space will remain dedicated to supporting development practitioners to strengthen their practice collectively, through reflective questions, tools and shared learning. If you would like to join the Power to Praxis community, you can sign up here: