A democracy measured only through elections, party transition, or institutional reform will fail to account for those whose lives are regulated before they ever enter formal politics.
Bangladesh is once again described through the language of return. After the July 2024 uprising and the fall of an authoritarian regime, the country is being narrated through terms such as transition, restoration, participation, and democracy. These words matter to an extent. They speak to real aspirations after years of fear, censorship, repression, and political exhaustion under a long-standing authoritarian regime. But even after the fall of the regime, we are now seeing that public life is never returned to everyone equally.
A state may reopen electoral processes, loosen certain forms of speech, or promise institutional reform, while certain bodies continue to move through public space under surveillance, suspicion, and constant threat. For queer, trans, hijra, kothi, and gender-diverse communities in Bangladesh, the question is not only whether democracy has returned, but what kind of safety in public spaces is being restored, who is allowed to appear within it, and whose presence still becomes a reason for punishment.
To think through this uneven return, I look closely at two moments, ten years apart, both unfolding in the days leading up to the Bengali New Year in April, one in 2016, the other in 2026. For the Bangladeshi queer community, or at least my generation of a queer community, April 2016 is often remembered through the murder of Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy on 25 April. Still, I return to the days immediately before that event: to 14 April, when the Rainbow Rally organized by Roopbaan under Xulhaz’s leadership was cancelled under pressure, and when individuals were detained from Shahbagh for allegedly being part of what police described as a “rainbow gang.”
The question is not whether queer and trans people are acceptable within religious, social, or nationalist sentiment. The more basic question is whether a state can offer safety to its citizens even when parts of society disagree with how those citizens live, love, dress, gather, or name themselves. The promise of democracy cannot depend on the moral approval of the majority. If the state waits for social acceptance before offering protection, then protection will always arrive too late.
I place this alongside a very recent incident from April 2026, when, just days before the New Year, a group of people was publicly attacked in Shahbagh after being identified—based on appearance—as homosexual or part of the LGBTQ community. These two moments are not identical, but they begin to echo each other in structure: in how queer and trans bodies are read in public, how presence becomes an evidence of projected demonic sexual monstracity for religiously fanatic groups, and how public space turns quickly into a site of violence for unclassified bodies of Koti, Hijra, Tranny, Faggot, and Dyke in Bangladesh.
To understand these moments, it is necessary to situate the emergence of the Rainbow Rally (2014-2016), the first and unofficial queer coming-out public parade in Bangladesh, within Dhaka’s urban and political landscape. Organized around Pohela Boishakh, the Bengali New Year, the rally was a small but significant initiative that sought to create a visible queer presence on one of the most public and culturally saturated days in Bangladesh. It was not a large-scale protest, nor did it claim institutional backing.
Rather, it existed as a fragile intervention, part celebration, part gathering, part quiet assertion that queer and trans people should and must belong visibly in a public secular festival gathering. Xulhaz Mannan, who was widely known as a pioneering LGBTQ organizer in Bangladesh and the founder of the country’s first queer publication (later became a social platform) Roopbaan, played a central role in this effort, not only as an organizer but as someone who understood how visibility had to be carefully negotiated within a Bangladeshi context shaped by legal ambiguity, social conservatism, and religious scrutiny.
Shahbagh, where the rally unfolded, camouflaged under the Bengali New Year celebration, was not chosen arbitrarily. It functioned as a dense public node where student movements, cultural practices, and everyday urban circulation overlapped, and where queer sociality had long existed informally as an accessible urban gathering space for cruising, unofficial kinship building, and coded recognition of unauthorized sexual desires.
As I think through these processes of becoming and criminalization of queer bodies in Bangladesh and analyzing how queer bodies come into being in public space—especially in a place like Shahbagh, with its long cultural and political significance in Bangladesh—I find myself returning, again and again, to 14 April 2016. It is not a date I can approach as distant history, probably because I lived through it. What follows is not simply a recollection, but my deliberate attempt to walk through that moment from within, before returning later to 2026 to analyze why the forever becoming of queer identity continues to matter and why it resurfaces so sharply in the present-day political context in Bangladesh.
On 14 April 2016, the day of the Bengali New Year, I traveled from Xulhaz Mannan’s apartment to Shahbagh already knowing that the Rainbow Rally would not take place that year. The night before, there had been repeated phone calls. People called Xulhaz and others in the organizing circle, asking them to stop the rally. Some calls came from people we knew, others from allied contacts who were worried about safety. By then, people had already begun arriving in Dhaka from different parts of the city and from outside the city.
Some were staying at Xulhaz’s apartment so they could participate in the rally. For the previous two years, the Rainbow Rally had created a fragile but meaningful sense of visibility. It was not large in the way political gatherings in Bangladesh are often imagined, but it mattered because it allowed a brief public alignment of people who otherwise lived dispersed lives, often hidden inside family, class, gender, and social expectations.
As I already mentioned, Shahbagh was not an incidental location. It was already a meeting point for Dhaka’s middle-class and lower-middle-class queer community, located near Ramna Park, a known cruising area, and close to the Faculty of Fine Arts, where the Mongol Shobhajatra begins. It was also one of the most important cultural and political spaces in the city. My own relationship to Shahbagh did not begin as a queer space.
I first learned of it through the student-led Shahbagh movement in 2013, and later as a student at Charukola, the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka. I passed through it regularly. Only after meeting Xulhaz and other kothi & gay men in Dhaka did I begin to understand how Shahbagh also functioned as a queer social landscape for simply finding one another in a city that offered very few places to gather for queer bodies.
By early April of 2016, that fragile recognition had begun to attract a different kind of attention. Friends from Charukola, who were involved with the Mongol Shobhajatra, told me that police had asked whether “homosexuals” or people dressed in rainbow colors would be part of the procession that year. They also said there was pressure not to allow such participation.
At the same time, an online Facebook event page was openly spreading hate, circulating messages that encouraged people to hit homosexuals with shoes if they saw them on the street during the New Year celebration. The group also shared information about organizers, allies, and community networks on their page to fuel public hatred. What (rainbow rally) had been imagined as a celebration of otherness began to feel like an exposure after the Facebook event page created by Basher Kella (an Islamic militant group) went viral on Facebook.
On the morning of 14 April, we decided to gather at Madhur Canteen (a historical cafe on the Dhaka University campus, close to Shahbagh Square). The plan was to inform people that the rally would not happen and to distribute the materials prepared over several weeks at Xulhaz’s apartment: hand fans, rainbow-colored eyewear, masks, balloons, and small objects made almost like an art project around visibility and celebration. When we arrived, people were still coming. Some did not know the rally had been cancelled. Some had traveled from outside Dhaka. Some were dressed for the rally, including friends in drag.
We handed them the materials so that they could still feel part of the day in some way. After that, a small group of us moved toward Shahbagh. We did not form a procession like previous years. There were maybe ten to fifteen of us, walking together without a clear formation. I remember Xulhaz wearing black sunglasses, trying to manage the situation and speak to people. At one point, I noticed he was crying as he walked. He did not explain it, but it was clear that he was overwhelmed by the failure of something he had tried so carefully to hold together.
After the Mongol Shobhajatra ended, we returned to Xulhaz’s apartment. I remember sitting on his bed while his BlackBerry phone kept ringing. He went to the bathroom and asked me to pick up one of the calls. When I answered, a young person asked if I was Xulhaz. I said no, Xulhaz was in the bathroom. The person told me he was in Ramna police custody. He and others had been detained, accused of being part of a “rainbow gang,” and someone needed to come speak to the police. I told Xulhaz immediately. He was shocked, but not entirely surprised. By then, because of the phone calls the night before, the online threats, and the police inquiries, we had already sensed that something might happen. But sensing danger and hearing that people we had just seen that morning were in police custody were not the same thing.
That call changed the scale of our fear. Until then, most of our fear had been about harassment—being stopped, questioned, maybe intimidated. We knew this happened regularly to kothis, hijras, and sex workers in public spaces. But it had not happened so directly to people we knew, not in the middle of Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year), not through the very visibility we had been trying to create. We were a relatively middle-class, mostly closeted group of kotis and gay men. Even Xulhaz, because of his work and association with the American embassy, had a certain degree of mobility and social access.
Many of us had been moving through Dhaka with the uneasy belief that risk could be managed through class, discretion, language, and networks. That belief collapsed very quickly after the news arrived through the phone call. The room began to empty. People left in different directions, each with a reason, but the discomfort was clear. In Bangladesh, going to a police station is itself frightening. Nobody wanted to be associated with something that could lead to police involvement, family exposure, or public scandal.
I went to Shahbagh police station with Xulhaz and Tonoy. We took a rickshaw, three of us together, and went near the National Museum, where the station sits close to the Shahbagh circle. When we arrived, we were not allowed to enter. The officer at the gate asked why we were there. Xulhaz introduced himself and said he was there as a guardian of the people who had been detained. By then, the news had already started circulating online. Early Facebook posts and local online media were reporting that “rainbow-colored homosexuals” had been arrested.
The event page associated with the rally had also posted updates. Xulhaz tried calling the detained individuals, but most phones were unreachable. The police had contacted some of their families. Xulhaz began calling lawyers, NGO contacts, and allies, but it was a public holiday, and most people were unavailable. Those who responded explained that no formal case had been filed, but the police were holding them and would likely release them only if family members came and signed statements promising that they would not participate in such activities again.
Some of those detained had come from outside Dhaka and had no immediate family nearby. Xulhaz tried to present himself as their guardian. We stood outside the station for a long time—me, Xulhaz, Tonoy, and a few others—while the rest of the morning crowd had already dispersed. Phone calls and messages kept coming from across the city. People wanted updates, but they were also afraid of their own proximity to the event.
What had started as a celebration turned into panic and distance. By mid-afternoon, I went back to my parents’ apartment, only about fifteen minutes away, and stayed inside. That was unusual for me on Pohela Boishakh. Usually, my family and I would be outside, moving through the city. But that day I could not move. I kept thinking about how easy it had been: someone could be seen, identified, taken into custody, and exposed to their family. I felt, maybe for the first time in that direct way, how quickly queerness could be converted into a public accusation.
Later that evening, I returned to Shahbagh with two friends. By then, Xulhaz and Tonoy had managed to gain some access to the police station. Some of the detained people had been released after family members or local guardians arrived and signed statements. They had been verbally harassed, abused, and mentally pressured. The condition of release was clear: they should not take part in anything like this again.
The arrests themselves were not random. In at least one case, two people had been giving an interview to a local television channel about coming to the Mongol Shobhajatra. One of them was wearing a rainbow-colored mask we had distributed earlier. The police used that as a reason to question them, asking whether they were part of the Rainbow Rally or trying to organize others. This was not simply moral panic. It was surveillance operating through clothing, color, gesture, and association.
The following ten days were marked by fear. Xulhaz and I were in contact constantly, trying to understand what could happen next. We visited local NGOs and community stakeholders. We learned that the 14 April detention was not an isolated incident. In the days before Pohela Boishakh, community activists had already been picked up and questioned by the Detective Branch at Dhaka. They had been asked about funding sources, NGO connections, and the structure of queer organizing. Some organizations were warned that their association with this kind of activity was under scrutiny.
I remember sitting in a room at a local feminist NGO with several people discussing security and risk. I said that I was not formally protected by any organization, not deeply connected to embassy or NGO circuits, and that I was making artwork openly about queerness. What would happen if someone picked me up? Where would I go? Who would answer the phone? No one had a clear answer. That was when we realized how unprepared we were. There were networks, friendships, projects, courage, and visibility, but there was no reliable infrastructure for protection.
During those same days, I was also trying to leave Bangladesh. I had applied for a visa through the Indian embassy because I was planning to travel to Goa for an art residency. I had also been selected for an ICCR scholarship to pursue a master’s program at Santiniketan. India was not only an educational or artistic possibility; by then, it had become an exit strategy, a way to step out of Dhaka for a few months while the tension settled. Xulhaz and Tonoy were also planning to travel to Mumbai for an LGBTQ conference, and we had talked about meeting somewhere between Mumbai and Goa, as if leaving, even temporarily, could help us breathe. Then my visa was rejected. That option closed.
On 25 April, Xulhaz and Mahbub Tonoy were murdered inside Xulhaz’s apartment. I was present during the attack at the apartment and managed to escape. For the next two months, life felt less like ordinary time and more like survival inside a criminal thriller or horror story that had become real. I left Bangladesh on 28 June 2016 and arrived in Maine. That departure ended the immediate nightmare, but not the condition that had been revealed.
I am not recounting this only because the personal history of this time is rarely available in this form, though that matters too. Much of April 2016 still circulates through fragments, gossip, misinformation, and partial accounts, especially for younger queer and trans Bangladeshis who did not live through it directly. I am returning to it because the events of that month show a longer structure: how queer visibility in Bangladesh is allowed to appear only under fragile conditions, and how quickly that appearance can be turned into evidence of threat, immorality, or criminality.
The phrase “rainbow gang,” used by the police, was meant to accuse. But it also captured something about the way we existed then—not as a formal organization, but as a temporary formation held together by desire, risk, joy, fear, and the effort to create a livable social world where none had been promised to us. It felt like a gang only in the sense that survival itself had become collective, improvised, and suspect.
This is where I begin to understand “forever becoming” not as a poetic phrase, but as a political condition. Queer and trans life in Bangladesh is often forced into an unfinished state of emergence. It becomes visible in fragments: in cruising spaces, in friendships, in NGO workshops, in cultural events, in online networks, in art, in whispered recognition, in the bravery of appearing in public with a mask, a fan, a color, a gesture.
But that visibility rarely settles into safety. It does not accumulate into stable recognition. It remains vulnerable to interruption. The state does not need to fully criminalize every act through a formal criminal case for criminalization to operate. Criminalization also works through suspicion, police questioning, family exposure, public shame, religious incitement, online harassment, and the idea that queer and trans bodies are demonic, foreign, immoral, or socially contagious. The law may be one layer, but the deeper mechanism is social and political: the body is read before it speaks, and once read, it can be disciplined.
A decade later, Shahbagh appears again in a similar formation. On 11 April 2026, just days before the Bengali New Year, reports emerged that several people were attacked near the gate of the National Museum by a group allegedly operating under the name “Azadi Andolon.” According to reports and social media circulation, the group had moved through Shahbagh chanting anti-homosexual slogans and demanding that the area be cleared of what they called “homosexual programs.”
A group of people sitting at a roadside tea stall was surrounded. Victims said they had done nothing to provoke the assault. Women were sexually harassed, several people were beaten, and a transgender person was reportedly struck on the head. One victim asked how a person’s sexual orientation could be determined from clothing or appearance. That question sits at the center of the problem. In both 2016 and 2026, appearance became enough. Color became enough. Presence became enough. A body did not need to declare itself; it only needed to be read.
I write about the 2026 incident from a distance. I was not physically present in Shahbagh that evening. What I know comes from news reports, social media, and conversations around networks I still recognize from earlier years of activism and community life. That distance matters. I do not want to pretend to have witnessed what I did not witness. But distance does not erase recognition.
The pattern is too familiar: the location, the timing before Pohela Boishakh, the proximity to the National Museum and Charukola, the naming of bodies as homosexual, the violence that follows, and the lack of immediate legal consequence. In 2016, police detained people accused of being part of a rainbow formation and released them through family pressure and promises of non-repetition. In 2026, a group attacked people publicly while the language of moral cleansing circulated around Shahbagh. In both cases, public space became a site where queer possibility was not simply rejected but actively disciplined.
This is why the current language of democratic return feels incomplete. The July uprising and the fall of authoritarian rule matter deeply. The demand for democracy in Bangladesh is not abstract; it comes from real histories of silencing, enforced fear, political disappearance, student death, and public exhaustion. But a democracy measured only through elections, party transition, or institutional reform will fail to account for those whose lives are regulated before they ever enter formal politics.
The question is not whether queer and trans people are acceptable within religious, social, or nationalist sentiment. The more basic question is whether a state can offer safety to its citizens even when parts of society disagree with how those citizens live, love, dress, gather, or name themselves. The promise of democracy cannot depend on the moral approval of the majority. If the state waits for social acceptance before offering protection, then protection will always arrive too late.
The violence at Shahbagh in 2026 does not simply repeat 2016, but it activates its memory. Communities like ours carry public memory differently because so much of our history is not archived in official records. It lives in messages, warnings, changed routes, avoided spaces, stories told quietly, and names remembered with caution.
For those who were there in 2016, Shahbagh is not only a cultural center or protest site. It is also a place where the boundary between celebration and danger became terribly thin. For a younger generation, the 2026 attack may produce another layer of that memory: a reminder that even in a transitional political moment, visibility can still be turned against them. These memories do not only document harm. They shape behavior. They teach people when to leave, how to dress, whom to call, what not to post, and where not to stand too long.
Perhaps this is what forever becoming means: not a beautiful unfolding of identity, but the repeated attempt to make life possible under conditions that keep withdrawing the ground. Queer and trans Bangladeshis continue to create language, kinship, art, friendship, desire, and political imagination, but the social and state structures around them repeatedly interrupt that becoming.
They are told to wait, to hide, to translate themselves into acceptable forms, to become cultural but not sexual, visible but not demanding, symbolic but not embodied. And when they appear outside these permitted forms, they are marked as criminal, immoral, foreign, or demonic. Forever criminalized does not mean that every queer person is always arrested; it means that the possibility of being treated as a criminal remains close enough to shape life.
I do not want to end with a clean conclusion, because the condition itself is not clean. Between 2016 and 2026, Bangladesh has changed, and it has not changed. Governments fall. Public slogans shift. New democratic language appears. Yet in Shahbagh, the same question returns through different bodies: who can gather, who can be seen, and who will be protected when visibility becomes dangerous?
If democracy is to mean more than a transition of power, it must answer that question not only for its most legible citizens, but for those whose lives have been made illegible by law, religion, family, class, and public fear. Until then, queer, kothi, hijra, trans, faggot, dyke life in Bangladesh will continue to move through this unfinished space—appearing, retreating, remembering, returning—forever becoming, and too often, forever criminalized.
