Uganda made international headlines this week as its Constitutional Court upheld the bulk of a draconian law that would impose the death sentence for “aggravated homosexuality.” But for LGBTQ+ activists within the country, the death penalty isn’t the only specter that looms in the judgment’s aftermath. Over the past 15 years, Ugandan authorities have endeavored to expand the scope of the country’s criminalization of homosexuality and to bolster its arsenal of punitive options. And with each codification of homophobia, citizens see an endorsement for violence against the country’s beleaguered LGBTQ+ community, resulting in a veritable panopticon of homophobic zeal.
Following the court decision, JURIST spoke with Liz,* a social worker and transgender-rights advocate in Kampala who has devoted her life to providing trans Ugandans with the resources she lacked as a child and young adult navigating her gender identity and expression.
Having identified as a girl from early childhood, Liz’ gender expression has courted reactions ranging from disapproval and disavowal to arrest and violence. Perhaps following from these decades of abuse, courage reverberates from her every word. It is thus telling that when she speaks of fear in Uganda, her fear is not limited to the authorities who recently won a court case authorizing the imposition of capital punishment for homosexuality; her fear is directed toward society at large.
“Whenever these laws are introduced to society, the result is violence,” Liz said in an interview from the Ugandan capital on Friday. “People start to think that anyone who wears a rainbow is gay. People start to think that someone who usually has facial hair and shaves is gay. … Ultimately these laws embolden the community to commit violence, verbal abuse and cyber bullying against people who they think might be gay. These laws spark and perpetuate violence.”
By the time Uganda enacted its first modern “anti-homosexuality act” in 2009, Liz was a teenage girl. She had been identified as male at birth but knew from early childhood that this sex assignment had been erroneous. As a child, she didn’t have the resources to make sense of these feelings.
“By the time I was 10, I knew I was a trans woman. I didn’t like men’s clothes. I preferred dresses, and I liked to wear makeup to school. People didn’t know what to make of it; they would assume it was because I had sisters, or that I was trying to be dramatic,” Liz said. She recounted her parents’ ad nauseum warnings not to wind up gay, and a dearth of support to help her navigate the feelings she was grappling with.
After graduating from high school, she discovered that the internet could be a gateway to sharing the trans experience. She found videos of trans women living in their truth and realized life could expand beyond her closeted experience. But a cousin caught her watching videos of trans women and reported it to her parents. Not only did her parents disown her; they outed her to her employer, a local airport, which promptly fired her. She found herself alone and resourceless.
This alienation prompted Liz to contemplate suicide. But her university years would show her that a compassionate and supportive community existed, even if only in the shadows of Ugandan society.
“When I went to university, I started to find other people like me, whether on social media or in real life. It was during this period that I began to feel like I was really becoming me,” she said.
Since then, she has devoted her life to creating the resources she was never afforded. “It was this experience that gives me the courage to talk to young trans women — women who are just considering coming out, or even those who aren’t ready to yet — and tell them to be proud of who they are,” she said.
She now works as a social worker and mentor, helping trans women who are grappling with some of life’s toughest blows — those who have been excommunicated from their families, driving them into poverty; those who have contracted HIV and other life-altering diseases; and those struggling with mental illness. She runs a halfway house for unhoused trans women, which was subjected to police raids even before the latest iteration of the anti-homosexuality act. She is a Global Ambassador with the Black trans organization Reuniting of African Descendants (ROAD), which she says has been generous with supporting her and other trans women in her community. She also volunteers with the local trans advocacy group Talented Youth Community Fellowship Uganda.
And beyond all of this, she decrypts the esoteric language of Uganda’s law so trans women of all educational backgrounds can know what they’re up against. “These women need to know in lay language what they are facing,” she said.
Each bolstering of Ugandan anti-homosexuality legislation has precipitous consequences.
“They literally don’t want LGBTQ+ people to exist,” Liz says, reflecting on the societal impacts of the country’s anti-gay legislation. “You see beatings, you see bullying, and you even see landlords evicting tenants who they think are gay.”
Since becoming a trans advocate, Liz has been arrested three times on various charges related to helping LGBTQ+ Ugandans. She readily admits that her most recent arrest ended in bribery; she tapped into the resources she had accumulated as a trans advocate to collect funds to pay off the police to secure her freedom.
But these arrests remain on her record, potentially implicating her in “aggravated homosexuality;” Part 3 of the Anti-Homosexuality Act stipulates that a person can be made to “suffer death” for committing “serial offenses” of the law.
Nonetheless, Liz and her community persevere. They have taken a variety of security precautions and self defense trainings to protect themselves from potential police and societal harms. After one of her arrests, Liz fled for several months to Kenya, but feeling that there was far too much work still be done in Kampala, she returned to Uganda.
As societal and legislative pressure mount, Liz questions whether she can commit to staying for the long haul. “I can’t hold up the flag when I’m dead. I can’t advocate for my community when I’m dead,” she said.
Liz’ life has never been easy. And as the anti-homosexuality legislation continues to gain steam in Uganda, it would be naive to assume her plight will soon improve. But for her, the threat is existential, and she has no choice but to continue fighting.
She urged the international community to continue pressuring Kampala to change course, voicing optimism that what has worked before may hold renewed promise.
She urged the authorities in Kampala to stop scapegoating the LGBTQ+ community; to take ownership of their shortcomings, and stop ambling to blame others.
And she expressed disappointment with the courts of Uganda. “Instead of working to apply the law to uphold the rights of their people, they used the law to discriminate — to push back — to infringe upon the fundamental rights” of Uganda’s LGBTQ+ community.
