OP-ED: The “Identity misconception trap” about Gay and minority Identities

By Ivan Mugonero

The debate on LGBTQ rights in Uganda has lately been fronted by a babble of voices that have no doubt communicated the stand of a big section of Ugandans. Compared to the 2013/14 debate on the subject where information on the same was still scanty, the current debate meets a more informed Ugandan society where everyone ‘seemingly’ has an informed opinion either from a moral site, political site or from a rights/legal site. The arguments are now raised by people coming from various viewpoints.

Social and mainstream media have managed to sustain the public’s attention on the matter and the arguments raised are quite interesting. The previous debate about a decade ago was more emotionally founded than logical. The current one is but a mixture of the two though the emotionally charged treatment of the matter seems to be carrying the day again. The sensitivity of this matter demands a more logically founded debate and we shouldn’t clog the way for logical reasoning with just mere popular opinion on LGBTQ rights.

The stakeholder consultations on the matter before the passing of the recent bill give me some hope that there is territory for sound evidence-based discussion without leaving the matter to just an emotionally charged public squabble. I particularly respect the submissions put forth by Pastor Martin Ssempa of One Love Church as he read parts of his Ph.D. thesis to ground his arguments. This gives me the confidence to talk about what I would love to call the “Identity misconception trap.”

I write this article at the strong urging of my Human rights, philosophy and M&E background where evidence for opinion and decisions is important. I watched a recent video about a young man who was beaten by an emotionally charged angry mob in Kasese on allegations of homosexuality. As the case has been in a number of videos that make rounds on social media, I expected the police to pick interest in the matter.

In a video where a little girl “pretty Nicole” was insanely beaten by a group of girls on accusations of infidelity, Police took interest and on the urging of the public made an effort to investigate the matter. Another video was of a woman who tortured her two-year-old child. Police were able to pick interest in the matter as well. In the Kasese case, the Police and the public seem not to care but rather pay attention to their charged emotions that dread the identity and act of homosexuality.

I must mention here that I do not condone any act of homosexuality and I wouldn’t wish such acts to have a rooting in our society.

I come from a morality point of view, since as a society we do not have any moral justifications for homosexuality. However, I must quickly reason here that mob justice has never been a legal procedure in a democratic society like Uganda. Much as we do not approve of the sexual acts of LGBTQs, must we resort to unlawful means to deal with them. 

The law is quite clear under Article 28 (1) of the 1995 constitution as amended that a person shall be entitled to a fair, speedy and public hearing before an independent and impartial court or tribunal established by law. It further provides under 28(3a) that every person who is charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed to be innocent until proven guilty or until that person has pleaded guilty.

For many people suspected of homosexuality, these procedures are rarely followed but rather the public does its own judgement and conviction. It denies such people of the pronouncement under Article 21 (1) on equality of all persons before and under the law and the enjoyment of equal protection of the law. Police’s lack of interest in the Kasese mob justice squarely affirms my assertion. 

As I was watching the video of the Kasese young man, my fear was that as a country aren’t we going to find ourselves in an “identity misconception trap.” Even as the laws come up, I still have a question on how Acts of homosexuality can be proved before the court given that evidence on sex-related offences has never been easy to come by. The question of identity will form the rest of this article. 

I was first introduced to the word homosexuality years back in my lower secondary school, which was an only-boys school. At this point the discussion was not about LGBTQ rights but rather the sexual act of penile penetration of anything other than a woman’s vagina (well this is vague but it’s the understanding we had then).

Accusations of homosexuality at this school were on a poorly founded understanding of identity and were also intended to serve two purposes; (1) to maliciously cool someone’s ego, especially for the little handsome young brown boys whose young faces could be likened to those of girls; (2) to challenge power or authority of a student leader.

So, at this school if you were handsome and by coincidence you were friends with a student leader, you would be accused of being sodomized by the student leader just to maliciously flatten your ego and make both of you lose esteem. This would automatically affect the academic outcomes of such boys and many would leave the school because of the discomfort caused. 

With the renewed emotional debates around gays, I now observe with some trepidation that many might be victimized by society on grounds of misconceptions about people’s identities or with intentions of malice and blackmail. We might find ourselves in a situation of ferment over the “identity misconception trap.” Imagine the trauma that someone has to go through because they have been accused of being gay and the public instantly sits in its popular opinion court to have you convicted and punished by a mob.

Imagine the pain a boy that has grown up in a family of many girls has to go through to challenge the perception of homosexuality just because he has observable behaviour influenced by the girls he has lived with all his life. The same applies to girls referred to as “Tomboys.”

We therefore need to challenge this growing “identity misconception trap” by engaging in candid discussions threaded with logic rather than emotions. The trap has created an atmosphere where reason is losing out on territory.

Even as I write this, I undertake the task with hesitancy and humility, afraid that I may as well be a victim of the trap by just talking about this. My closing thought though is that we need to challenge the trap and give a chance to reason, evidence and the law take their course in dealing with the question of LGBTQs. 

The author; Mugonero Ivan Mutebe is a Human Rights Advocate and M&E Consultant