Non-profit industrial complex and neocolonial philanthropic entities are working toward their own self-preservation rather than fundamentally restructuring power and society.
Since Donald Trump became the U.S. president on January 20, the White House issued an executive order, among dozens, to temporarily suspend The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) operations in over 100 countries, including Bangladesh, escalating an already polarized U.S. foreign policy.
In the aftermath of this abrupt decision, various members of Bangladesh’s LGBQ and trans community reported having had their jobs terminated as USAID funded a significant portion of the country’s largely non-governmental organization-run HIV medicinal access and gender/sexuality human rights-based interventions. Many community members took to social media to mourn the sudden loss of their livelihoods and agonize over the dire future of Bangladesh’s queer and trans advocacy efforts.
For many years, I have witnessed how marginalized activists living in the Global South have, unbeknownst, felt a sense of inclusion whenever Western superpowers such as the U.S. have extended charitable aid toward their feminist causes. The sentimental mythologies that surround Western neoliberal aid have been debunked by feminists of color worldwide, especially on how such charitable acts further increased hierarchies of power and staggered movements for meaningful liberation.
The false promises of liberty and progressivism that have long been enshrined within America’s faltering democracy are now stifling worldwide political struggles due to the colonial assimilationist tactics that foreign aid has imposed on poorer nations that the West has deemed to possess ‘backward’ governments. These tensions are present in how trans resistance movements in Bangladesh and South Asia have (dis)organized themselves due to their reliance on foreign aid.
This act of generosity obscures how the very same Western donors are committing human rights atrocities and are further emboldened in their imperial roles. It becomes essential at this stage to delve into how the U.S. emerged to be Bangladesh’s largest funder and the construction of the Bangladesh trans person as an ‘other’ by the local government.
How the U.S. is Portrayed as a Safe Haven for Human Rights
The United States and Bangladesh have had diplomatic relations since 1972 and have held important trade relationships. For the past five decades, the U.S. has provided development assistance to Bangladesh in areas such as education, health, and economic growth. The U.S.’s advanced late-stage capitalist interests compared to its trading partner, Bangladesh, allowed it to dictate the terms of trade and dominate key decision-making strategies in defense, climate resilience, and human rights sectors.
Using people’s identities to create organizational issue areas and strategic plans has brought incremental ground-level changes, yet every year, the funding portfolio and staff headcount of human rights NGOs are significantly increasing with fewer resources reaching marginalized communities.
The growth of global trade, particularly in the garments industries, turned Bangladesh into an extension of the U.S. neocolonial market and also created dependency in the 50-year-old nation, which heavily relied on what the U.S. was prepared to buy, sell, and, most importantly, assert in the name of human rights. At present, the U.S. is Bangladesh’s third-largest trading partner, the largest market for its Ready-Made Garments (RMG), the largest source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and the largest investor in its energy sector.
USAID in Bangladesh is the largest program operating in Asia and features some of the world’s most important food security and health programs. It is also responsible for overseeing Bangladesh’s vital humanitarian assistance portfolio to tackle the ongoing Rohingya refugee crisis.
In terms of queer and trans inclusion, the U.S. has long branded itself as a champion for LGBTQ+ rights, from enshrining same-sex marriage laws in 2015 to more contemporary rulings in 2020 where trans employees nationwide were guaranteed protection from employment discrimination. However, pinkwashing tactics, a term coined originally by Jasbir Puar, have been part of settler-colonial nations’ public relations maneuvers to showcase to the world that ‘everyone is free to love’ and gender minorities are protected on U.S. soil.
Pinkwashing is a term activists have been using for the past two decades to describe Israel’s strategy to rebrand the country’s image and promote it as a safe refuge for gay rights and gay tourism. The goal behind the ‘Brand Israel’campaign was to transform the negative public perceptions that Israel has held in the global sphere in its brutal occupation of Palestine and to be popularized as a nation that upholds minority rights.
The same rebranding logic has also been deployed by Israel’s closest ally, the U.S., in using public relations campaigns, legislations, and events to be viewed as an LGBTQ+ friendly country while supporting Zionist settlement expansion of Palestine backed by U.S. military aid.
Displaying the government’s altruism under the banner of ‘gay rights’ eclipses the pervasive anti-black dehumanization efforts and justification of the genocidal campaign that has been waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023. Despite the recent slate of anti-trans bills that are poised to restrict trans youth from accessing gender-affirming healthcare, the U.S. is still globally recognized as a beacon for queer and trans progress.
There have been significant costs associated with maintaining this image of diversity and inclusion where any backlash against U.S. foreign policy is used to galvanize support for increased militarization and policing. Even as recently as the expulsion of 22 Columbia University pro-Palestine student activists, American government officials can more easily frame their acts of state-sanctioned aggression as a function of the country’s inherent benevolence and superiority.
Trans Politics and Victimhood in an NGO Landscape
Negotiations over who ‘deserves’ rights and who doesn’t are more pronounced in international development schemes where the U.S. has inevitably become the world’s largest investor in humanitarian projects while directly and, at times, indirectly contributing to grantee countries’ destabilization, particularly those of minorities.
Bangladesh is no exception: for two decades, the country’s trans community has sought refuge and employment under the various streams of foreign aid that were channeled toward MSM (men having sex with men) and HIV access initiatives. As a result, a small subset of hijras, kothis, and trans women appeared as poster children for mainstream NGOs and became ‘NGO-ized’ where activism became diluted into a long-term career trajectory, a sharp turn away from what the word originally stood for, which is to end systems of coercion and violence.
The same NGOs are predominantly led by cisgender urbanized individuals who view trans workers as disposable and suitable for entry-level, low-salaried positions, a subtle form of dehumanization that has become hard to dismantle within institutional settings. Discrimination and transphobic microaggressions are rampant in the workplace, yet its daily mission is rooted in securing rights (e.g. education, employment) for the most marginalized communities.
A majority of these organizations have not been able to materially improve the conditions of Bangladeshi trans people within their institutions and outside of it. Trans NGO workers have also become complacent, given the lack of resources, support, and coaching in the workplace. Trans rights and any genuine methods towards its advancement have been institutionalized within the hierarchical, undemocratic, and unaccountable state-backed systems of Bangladesh.
The focus on ‘visibility’ campaigns of a few NGO trans workers and ‘success stories’ of independent activists at the expense of a stealth ecosystem of trans people working in survival economies have also contributed to Bangladesh’s deteriorating trans rights movement and the rising distrust of government power.
Over the years, the educational vacuum and victimhood media narratives have also created deep divides amongst community members where ‘intersex’ and ‘transgender’ terms became conflated in policy-making decisions. Trans people are still afraid to publicly align with ‘trans’ terminologies, given there is a degree of autonomy in choosing one’s gender identity, a choice that defies the country’s repressive chokehold on its minorities.
Consequently, aligning with an ‘intersex’ identity is more acceptable in Bangladeshi society rather than being perceived as ‘trans’ as the former implies more biologically and unintended induced characteristics that are permissible in the eyes of the state.
Once the U.S. executive order on funding suspensions came into effect, USAID-led Bangladeshi projects worth $200 million decisively paused, leaving the country’s trans rights leaders to ponder over what’s to come. Instead of NGO executives taking a pay cut to their salaries, trans workers were the first to lose their jobs and assignments. This demonstrates the dependency the decades-long Western funding landscape has created on Bangladeshi trans livelihood, where being ‘trans’ equated to an identity associated with receiving foreign aid.
This vicious cycle of dependence has created a country-wide hostile environment where Bangladeshi trans people’s identities have been demonized by local institutions and politicians as ‘Western sacrilegious influences,’ thereby not worthy of dignified living. The infantilization of trans men and transmisogyny wielded on trans women remains largely unspoken in Bangladesh’s mainstream feminist circles. Yet, time and time again, particularly in moments of rupture and socioeconomic crises, those wielding power have declared war on trans people.
No amount of foreign aid has created safety measures, educational mobility, and financial sustenance for the country’s trans population. So, where has all that money gone and why hasn’t it led to gender-diverse people feeling a sense of belonging in Bangladesh?
Is Identity Politics Making Us Safer?
Identity and positionality have been misused within philanthropy and government welfare/charity distribution. Decisions are being made over which identities are deserving of aid without taking into account the Western governments’ extractive role within failing nation-states. In the case of Bangladesh, NGO desperation over the end of USAID funding reflects the deeply exploitative narrative of a decades-long global south crisis and is part of the ongoing harm in the country’s development narratives and beyond.
Using people’s identities to create organizational issue areas and strategic plans has brought incremental ground-level changes, yet every year, the funding portfolio and staff headcount of human rights NGOs are significantly increasing with fewer resources reaching marginalized communities.
On a personal level, knowing and understanding one’s identity can instill a sense of belonging and ignite movement-building on some scale. However, on a macro scale, philanthropy and government aid agencies need to assess their use of restrictive categories that not everyone can box themselves into and are immediately discarded in the face of social upheaval. This is because philanthropy’s perpetuation of identity-based decision-making cannot defeat fascism and stand in the way of authoritarian governments whose goal is to suppress base-building efforts that don’t adhere to the status quo.
This begs the question: Have these decision-making factors been intentionally set to create a system where one side maintains all power while the other constantly fights for survival? The same systems trans and marginalized communities living in the Global South are fighting against are the ones writing the checks in the name of advancing collective liberation.
Navigating these contradictions has led to most activists and radical changemakers working harder than ever on the ground but feeling disillusioned about their lack of power and impact. Social justice leaders, particularly trans and gender non-conforming contingents, must reckon with the reality that the non-profit industrial complex and neocolonial philanthropic entities that are an extension of government regimes have become self-perpetuating institutions: they are working toward their own self-preservation rather than fundamentally restructuring power and society.
Moving Toward Mutual Aid and a Pro-Trans Ideology
With the never-ending debates around U.S. trans rights, the mystery lies not in whether the public views trans existence to be ethical or morally justifiable according to state-sanctioned laws or religion. The reality remains that we do exist in all our beauty and contradictions. Trans people have existed since time immemorial because our ancestors have existed and survived unspeakable horrors.
False assertions by contemporary politicians and TERFs that trans people are a new phenomenon to legitimize banning trans women from sports and cutting USAID funding to trans activists globally need to be challenged using counternarratives, movement lawyering, and, most importantly, by everyone participating in mutual aid.
Given the precarity surrounding the future of wealth distribution and financial aid amid a hostile U.S. political climate, leftist resistance movements are facing numerous crises in keeping the momentum going. Right-wing populist entities are capitalizing from the escalating trans panic in their goals to terrorize and shorten trans people’s chances of living.
In this scenario, expanding our networks of mutual aid can eliminate relying on systems of domination and build the infrastructures needed to take care of one another. Throughout human history, mutual aid has been a balm in difficult times: it is a form of collective care in which communities meet the needs of everyone within that community and share resources with one another rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves.
Engaging in mutual aid would mean acknowledging the unshakeable truth that trans people cannot be destroyed — by our families or the state — in any tangible way because we will revolt and multiply in generations to come. This is because trans people have always cared for one another in the face of state abandonment. Mutual aid within communities would also mean asking ourselves, “What would it take for you to actively and enthusiastically wish for and want there to be trans people in our current world?”
Only when we start excavating the deepest unknown parts of ourselves (including the impermanence of the gender binary) and truly band together to fight for our decaying planet’s future will the anti-trans panic finally conclude and recede into the dark passages of human history.
