In Bangladesh, the LGBT+ issue is still a taboo.

Unfortunately, there is currently a very real threat against the LGBT community in Bangladesh and indeed those who advocate for LGBT rights, Bangladesh as you know is a Muslim majority country and Islam strictly prohibits homosexuality or related behavior. That is one of the primary reasons the LGBT community is looked down upon in Bangladesh and is probably why the Penal Code 377 exists in the first place.

There are countless examples of how Islam essentially supersedes everything in Bangladesh. It has an undeniable stranglehold in society and indeed in the country’s administration. Extremism and militancy is just a part of it and a number of socio-political reason are behind its uprising in Bangladesh during recent times. Today it plays a key role in the plight of the LGBT community in Bangladesh today.

However much of Bangladesh probably acknowledged (not with open arms) the existence of the LGBT community, when one of its first (and perhaps only) pioneers, namely founder of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine “Roopban”  Xulhaz Mannan and his partner Tonoy Mahbub were brutally murdered by extremists.

Their deaths were not followed by a national mourning, but was sadly met with general contempt, which should perhaps come as no surprise given how the Bangladeshi society considers homosexuality to be a sin, as we have explained above. Indeed the religious extremists who killed Mr Mannan & Mahbub took pride in it. And shockingly certain members of the society even approved of their work, instead of recoiling in horror or demanding justice for them.

Thus given the circumstances, LGBT activists cannot seek any protection from law enforcement agencies. They have been deemed as criminals by Bangladeshi laws. Meanwhile, because of the hostilities that Bangladesh social system maintains, the LGBT community, in general, has been left to serve as cannon fodder for religious extremists and fundamentalists, who after all need no real excuse to shed the blood of ‘sinners in the eyes of Islam’. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that once the existence of the LGBT community came under the spotlight, radicals and fundamentalists jumped at the opportunity to exterminate them.

And then of course there is the current Bangladeshi government. This is a government which has been deemed by far the most dubious, conflicting, and debatable administration, by the very people that voted for them in the first place. This is an institution that has the gall to claim itself to be pioneers of secularism, and yet it has turned a blind eye to the minority crisis, the 2013 blogger murders, the oppression of the LGBT community, and the list goes on.