Greece boat tragedy exposes Pakistan's migration problem


Pakistani citizens accounted for the largest number of victims in the recent migrant boat disaster. DW spoke with victims' families about why so many are choosing to risk their lives for an uncertain future in Europe.

Haroon Janjua in Islamabad

DW
June 26,2023

Officials said around 350 Pakistani migrants were aboard the capsized boat. Here, survivors are seen at a holding station in Greece

Image: Angelos Tzortzinis/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

On the evening of June 14, Muhammad Gulfam was at home in a rural mountain village in northern Pakistan when he received a call from his cousin about a migrant boat that had capsized that day off the coast of Greece.

His younger brother, Aakash Gulzar, had been on board. Jobless, and without many prospects in cash-strapped Pakistan, 21-year-old Gulzar had made up his mind that he would pay smugglers to embark on a monthslong journey across thousands of miles through arduous land and sea routes to Italy.

The journey was not cheap, and Gulzar's family had cobbled together €7,000 ($7,640) to pay a trafficking agent to smuggle him to Europe, where they hoped he would find a better life.

Late one afternoon in March, Gulzar hugged his mother and brothers goodbye and set off.

"We don't want it to be the final goodbye, we want to see him again and we hope he is one of the injured in the hospital," Gulfam told DW.

Naseem Begum, Gulzar's mother, said she had spoken to her son on the phone before he boarded the overloaded vessel.

"My son requested prayers on the phone call and said 'I will call you after reaching my destination,'" Begum told DW.

Pakistan's migration problem

Witness accounts described the vessel carrying Gulzar as a 30-meter (100-foot)-long fishing boat that was crammed with over 700 people. It had departed from Libya and sank 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) off the coast of Pylos, a small Greek coastal town on the Ionian Sea.

Gulzar is still missing and presumed dead. Begum has sent DNA samples to aid in identification of her son's remains, if they are found.

According to Pakistan's Interior Ministry, 350 of those on board were Pakistani citizens. They are among the thousands of people fleeing an economic crisis in the South Asian country that has left many people without hope.

According to data from Frontex, the European Union's border and coast guard agency, a record number of nearly 5,000 Pakistanis were detected on the "central Mediterranean route" into Europe in the first five months of 2023.

"We know that it is a combination of a lack of decent work and a general disillusionment about the future of the country which pushes young Pakistanis to use dangerous and illegal migration as a means to a better life. The victims on that boat must have been aware of the risks they were taking," said Imran Khan, country director for Pakistan at the United States Institute of Peace, a US federal agency.

The victims "could be alive today if there were better employment opportunities, economic security and political stability in Pakistan," he told DW.

In a village near Gulzar's home in northern Pakistan, a local district official, Sardar Mushtaq Ahmad, told DW that 24 young men from the area were reported missing after the boat accident. Relatives have provided DNA samples to aid in the identification of recovered bodies.

Among the missing is 31-year-old Sajid Yousaf, who was running a crockery shop in the local market but failed to make ends meet. Yousaf's two brothers already settled in Italy, one of them having taken the same route across the Mediterranean.

"We paid €7,100 to the smuggling agent to send Sajid to Italy where two of my sons are already living and earning well," Muhammad Yousaf, Sajid's father, told DW.

Osama Malik, a Pakistani immigration and refugee law expert, told DW that there are multiple push and pull factors that drive people to risk their lives for a chance to reach Europe.

Refugee tragedy: 'We hope the tragedy will spur some action'   01:14

"The rapid depreciation of the already weak Pakistani rupee against foreign currencies over the past 18 months has probably been a huge factor," he said, adding that political and economic uncertainty has led to "desperation" among young Pakistanis.

"Most young men, and now increasingly women, are willing to invest their savings, borrow money, and risk their lives just to get out of the country to what they perceive as greener pastures," Malik said.

How do traffickers in Pakistan operate?

Approximately 90% of Pakistanis who in recent years arrived in Italy have used a human smuggler, according to a 2022 survey by the Mixed Migration Centre, a Europe-based migrant research group.

Smugglers and middlemen work by canvassing poor towns and villages and promising youth a bright future in Europe in exchange for a lump sum of €6,000 to €10,000, which is paid to "bosses" living in European destination countries.

Gulzar and Yousaf's families told DW that they dealt with several local "trafficking agents" and paid a boss living in Italy for the journey.

One of these "agents" told DW under condition of anonymity that the market for smuggling has increased as Pakistan's economy has deteriorated, and foreign currency grows in value against the Pakistani rupee.

"Those wishing to flee Europe are aware of the hardship, life threatening risks and dangers but they neglect those risks and opt for the voyages," he said.

A grainy shot from the Greek Coast Guard of the overloaded fishing boat before it capsized

IOS/picture alliance

Pakistan cracks down on human trafficking

As the number of migrants continues to increase, Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has been tasked by the government with cracking down on smugglers and agents, particularly in the wake of the tragedy.

"We have arrested 27 human smugglers across the country and 70 cases have been registered against those smugglers," FIA spokesperson Abdul Ghafoor told DW.

Pakistan has signed on to international protocols to prevent human trafficking, and in 2018, passed the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act (PTPA), but this has failed to put a dent in international human trafficking organizations.

"While legislation has improved over the years, its implementation is abysmal and needs to be improved if Pakistan is to counter the trafficking of citizens," said immigration expert Malik.

He said that the few prosecutions have only netted small middlemen, while allegedly complicit government officials and trafficking bosses are left untouched.

"It is the foot soldiers of the human trafficking mafia who are occasionally arrested, but convictions are rare even in these cases. The human trafficking cartels are known to have very strong links with certain influential political families in central Punjab, and also have links with the military and bureaucracy," he said.

"The main solution to this problem is for Pakistan to improve its governance, adherence to rule of law, and lift the economy so that young people do not feel the need to take such risks to escape," he added.

Wellbeing in humanitarian action: what food, sex and death can teach us about supporting meaningful lives


Written by  Oliver Lough, Sarah Phillips, Alexandra Spencer, Megan Daigle, Sara Hussain

26 June 2023

ODI | ODI: Think change

Hero image description: refugee woman creating mosaic

Image credit:UN Women/Christopher Herwig Image license:CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

What makes our lives liveable? We all have different answers to this – myriad aspects give our lives meaning and value. But what if our needs, desires, aspirations and agency were routinely overlooked, and instead our lives were reduced to mere survival? This is the case for countless people in situations of protracted crisis: the humanitarian aid system works to keep them alive in the most ‘efficient’ way possible, but it often fails to consider what kinds of lives it is saving.

The unintended but very real harms of humanitarian action

People affected by crises are not passive – they demonstrate adaptation and resistance in countless contexts. They endeavour to make life liveable beyond survival by maintaining hope for the future, developing a sense of place and belonging in displacement, or reconstructing the social relationships and connections that ascribe meaning and purpose to their actions. However, the decisions and assumptions aid actors make about who and what to prioritise, the mechanisms and techniques they use to administer and deliver assistance, and the nature of their relationships with affected people can often end up working against these efforts.

Wellbeing: a more comprehensive approach

The concept of wellbeing helps us think more clearly about how humanitarian aid might better enable people to live the kinds of lives they want to live. Wellbeing takes as its starting point the idea that humanitarian experience needs to be understood holistically. It’s an active process, where people’s efforts to lead good and flourishing lives involve the interplay of material, subjective and relational dimensions of life, played out in specific places, and over time.
The interplay of wellbeing and humanitarian action: food, sex and death

We’ve recently published a working paper exploring how struggles for wellbeing play out in humanitarian crises. To make things as tangible as possible, we zoomed in on three crucial aspects of the human experience – food, sex and death – to understand how people’s efforts to live good, meaningful lives can often clash with what humanitarian action considers important.

Food is a subjective experience – it tastes of something and inspires certain sensations or feelings – as well as a relational phenomenon – how people consume and share these calories helps give life shape and meaning. Liberian refugees have described how ‘nutritious’ food to them was food that tasted good and felt nourishing – it wasn’t just about ‘sustaining biological life’. Food also has cultural meaning, with certain dishes, ingredients or methods of cultivation linked to specific and significant places, memories or practices. These elements can be critical in enabling people to piece together a semblance of a normal life in protracted crisis settings. Yet with humanitarian organisations tending to envision effectiveness in terms of reach and cost per beneficiary, food tasting good or being culturally appropriate is not high on their list. Being given the same, tasteless food every single day is often experienced in stark terms by affected people, who may feel that this is evidence of the limited value humanitarians place on their lives, that they are being deliberately disciplined or dehumanised.

Similar issues come into play when it comes to growing and producing food. For example, Karen refugees in Thailand go to significant and often expensive lengths to grow herbs, crops, and other plants native to their pre-displacement home in Myanmar. But the relevance of gardening and food production for refugees is often ignored by humanitarian actors; the phenomenon may even be suppressed as a nuisance and potential safety hazard disrupting the orderly layout of a planned camp.

Questions of sex and intimacy in humanitarian settings tend largely to be framed within the language of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). This encompasses, for example, maternal, newborn and child health; preventing sexually transmitted infections, especially HIV; and mitigating the impact of gender-based violence with a focus on sexual violence. But reading between the lines of how most approaches to SRHR tend to handle sex, we can also see two problematic assumptions emerging: first, that sex in crisis settings is universally fraught with risks and harm; and second, that certain groups of people – namely, those who may be subject to safeguarding concerns, such as adolescents or people with disabilities – have no sexuality at all.

Focusing on sex as a problem to be solved or a risk to be avoided ultimately reflects a poor understanding of the central role it plays in people’s efforts to live meaningful lives and to pursue healthy, fulfilling relationships. A more wellbeing-centred approach would address harms, yes, but it would also place more emphasis on making space for people to explore and foster healthy sexualities – and not necessarily just heterosexual, monogamous sex. Part of this would involve thinking through in more depth how different aspects of humanitarian action might impact these dynamics – such as the role of privacy in shelter and settlement design, or how information and behaviour-change campaigns around child protection handle the thorny subject of adolescent sexuality.

Death is as much a part of life as living, and is crucial to its understanding. In a study of displaced Georgians, for example, rituals of death and mourning offered a powerful, if painful, opportunity to repair some of the ruptures brought about by crisis and displacement, and re-establish some sense of normal life. Stuck as they were in displacement camps, burying their dead according to the proper rites in the soil of the camp offered a symbolic way to reimagine the blank, sterile space they inhabited as at least partially contiguous to the meaningful place of the villages they had left behind.

Humanitarian action can play an important role in enabling or constraining how people are able to process the difficult experience of death and dying in a crisis setting. For Mozambican refugees in Malawi, the provision of resources by humanitarian organisations to enable an appropriate burial represented a ‘valuable service’ and was a significant advance in humanitarian programming, but this only occurred on an organisation-by-organisation basis and was not systematically part of programming. Instead, ‘the use of blankets for burial has frequently led to friction between refugees and assistance agencies’.

Beyond survival: wellbeing as ethical obligation in humanitarian action

In protracted crises in particular, humanitarian assistance that starts out with the goal of saving lives inevitably ends up sustaining and shaping them as well. While engaging with issues beyond survival might seem like a secondary priority or ‘out of scope’, failing to do so can result in programming that is ineffective, wasteful, harmful, and that misses out on valuable opportunities to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

We’re not arguing here for opening up a new area of expertise in humanitarian action – doing ‘wellbeing programming’ or opening up a ‘wellbeing sector’ is all too likely to replicate the same old problems. Rather, we believe that wellbeing offers value for humanitarian actors as a way to think and act more carefully, in ways that make good on the often-repeated but seldom realised promise to put people at the centre of humanitarian action. This means, for example, having open and potentially uncomfortable conversations with people about what the future holds, and enabling them to lead in defining and pursuing their preferred ways through it. It means extending conversations around localisation beyond questions of financing and risk to acknowledge and support types of assistance delivered through contextually grounded idioms and values. And it means moving beyond the humanitarian–development–peace nexus, beyond questions of financing and coordination to a basic operating principle, acknowledging that people’s needs in crises always exist on a continuum with their wider experiences, desires and aspirations.

Trump accuses Biden of 'environmental extremism' over electric cars

Former US president says the Democrat leader's 'maniacal push' for EVs will decimate the auto industry

BySusie Coen, 

US CORRESPONDENT

26 June 2023 •

Donald Trump was the keynote speaker at the Oakland County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner in Detroit on Sunday 

CREDIT: AL GOLDIS/AP PHOTO

Donald Trump has taken aim at electric cars and accused Joe Biden of carrying out “environmental extremism” to “decimate” the traditional auto industry.

Speaking to a crowd of 2,500 at a dinner in Michigan on Sunday, the former US president said the “maniacal push” for electric vehicles would take away jobs and empower China.

In his first visit to Michigan since he launched his 2024 presidential bid, Mr Trump, 77, warned the Democrats would “decimate” the state to a level “you can’t even imagine”.

He said the Democrat leader was a “catastrophe” for the state and that “his environmental extremism is heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker, and you’re starting to see it”.

The former US president was presented with a Man of the Decade award at the Lincoln Day Dinner CREDIT: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

During an hour-long speech at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner in Detroit, Mr Trump criticised Mr Biden’s “ridiculous regulations”, which he said would “kill more than half of US auto jobs and decimate the suppliers that they decimated already, decimate the suppliers and it’s going to decimate your jobs, and it’s going to decimate more than anybody else, the state of Michigan”.

The Republican 2024 frontrunner, who was presented with a Man of the Decade award at the event, added: “The push for all electric cars, it’s killing the United States, it’s killing Michigan and it’s a total vote for China.”

Michigan is one of three states that flipped in 2020 to help Mr Biden win the election. The state had more than 175,000 car manufacturing jobs in 2021, according to the Mackinac Centre for Public Policy.

A busy Los Angeles freeway during the evening rush hour 

CREDIT: FREDERIC J BROWN/GETTY IMAGES

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that two thirds of new car sales could be electric by 2032 under a new proposal released by the White House this year.

Mr Trump also criticised Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, for approving $700 million development incentives for a battery plant that is expected to create thousands of jobs.

He said: “The governor of your state is now giving away hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Michigan taxpayer dollars to Chinese companies and one in particular, Gotion, to build batteries in Michigan.

“That sounds good, but the money’s going to Chinese companies and then they’re gonna leave. They’re planning to take our money and then they say, ‘Bye bye, you stupid fools’.”

Joe Biden highlighted his investment in electric vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show last year 

CREDIT: KATIE McTIERNAN/GETTY IMAGES

Mr Biden has been pushing Americans to switch to electric cars as part of his “Green New Deal”. His promotion for the industry included holding a photo call in which he was filmed driving an electric truck at breakneck speed.

There are about 130,000 charging points for the three million electric vehicles on the road in the US. Electric cars account for 5.8 per cent of sales in the US, compared with 16.2 per cent of cars sold in Britain.

Twenty years after a breakthrough Texas case launched a new era of gay rights, trans people are still in the fight

William Melhado, The Texas Tribune
June 26, 2023

The rights of transgender people have become a cultural and political lightning rod in the United States

(AFP)

LONG READ

"Twenty years after a breakthrough Texas case launched a new era of gay rights, trans people are still in the fight" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Seated on a parade float winding its way through Montrose, the heart of Houston’s LGBTQ+ community, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner temporarily assumed the status of queer icons when they served as grand marshals in the city’s 2003 Pride parade. Just days earlier, the two quiet men with working-class roots fused their names to a pivotal moment in America’s gay rights movement.

“They were like celebrities,” said Brad Pritchett, who now works as the field director for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Texas.

Twenty years ago Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Texas’ ban on sodomy, ruling that states could not criminalize homosexuality. Lawrence and Garner were the plaintiffs in that watershed ruling. Pritchett remembers Houston’s Pride parade a few days later feeling different than it normally did, thanks to that 6-3 opinion.

Until then, LGBTQ+ people living in Texas and 13 other states lived under a dark cloud cast by laws that allowed law enforcement to arrest them for participating in consenting behavior among adults conducted in their private residences.

Lawrence and Garner were arrested and hauled to jail almost five years prior on the suspicion of having sex in the privacy of Lawrence’s apartment. The Supreme Court ruling voiding such laws was received by LGBTQ+ Americans as a long-awaited rainbow of recognition in the form of hard-fought constitutional protection. A ban on gay sex remains on the Texas books today.

In the 20 years since, advocates have secured major victories and cemented key rights including marriage equality, employment protections and the ability to serve in the military — victories that likely would not have been achieved without the foundation of Lawrence v. Texas.

Yet not all members of the LGBTQ+ community have equally benefited from evolving attitudes toward — and legal protections for — the queer community. Notably, transgender people still face discrimination and violence at higher rates than their lesbian, gay and bisexual peers.

In recent years, as trans people have gained visibility in the public sphere, familiar anti-LGBTQ+ tropes have emerged in efforts to alienate this community. Advocates say this attention has prompted a new wave of legislation in recent years that targets LGBTQ+ people — with particular focus on transgender Texans — largely pushed by Republicans who have campaigned on these issues.

Andrea Segovia, the senior field and policy adviser for the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said the virulence and frequency of transphobia have increased alongside this political focus. Texas lawmakers for years have targeted trans Texans with a litany of legislation, to mixed results. But earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbottsigned into law one of the Republican-dominated Legislature’s most consequential victories: a ban on hormone therapies and puberty blockers for trans minors over the outcries from parents and medical groups that say gender-affirming care saves young lives.

Segovia said hostility toward trans people reached new heights during this recent legislative session and called it a “boldness of people to feel as though they can take other people’s lives in their hands and not have repercussions … for causing harm to trans people.”

“Good, average guys”

Before the landmark Supreme Court case, Lawrence and Garner were not celebrities. They both lived on the margins of society, away from the limelight, like so many other LGBTQ+ Texans in the 20th century.

“They were just good, average guys just trying to get through life with the hand that was dealt ’em,” said Lane Lewis, a longtime gay rights activist in Houston who identified their case as an opportunity to challenge the state’s sodomy ban.

The political climate in which Lawrence and Garner were arrested for allegedly having sex was not friendly to LGBTQ+ Houstonians, Lewis recalled. He remembers instances in the ’90s in which trucks full of young men would drive around the city looking to assault queer people.


Longtime LGBTQ+ activist Lane Lewis in his home in Houston on June 21, 2023. 

Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune

In 1991, a 27-year-old Houston resident named Paul Broussard was murdered in a gay-bashing incident. In response, the Houston Police Department organized an undercover operation in Montrose to catch gay-bashers, but the effort was quickly discontinued because of safety risks to officers.

Furthermore, gay, lesbian and bisexual Texans were not free from some law enforcement officers’ disdain for their community. For decades leading up to that fateful arrest of Lawrence and Garner in 1998, the Houston Police Department sometimes raided gay bars and harassed those congregating in some of the only safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people at the time.

Although anti-sodomy laws were rarely enforced, their impact cast a shadow over the lives of LGBTQ+ Texans — both privately and publicly.

“These laws were designed to justify rampant discrimination against queer people,” said Wesley Phelps, a University of North Texas associate history professor who recently authored a book on the queer rights movement in Texas.

Phelps points to numerous examples prior to Lawrence in which LGBTQ+ Texans were denied employment, public assistance, housing and child custody because of their sexual orientation. There were simply no protections against those forms of discrimination, he said.

Lewis, the LGBTQ+ activist, said overturning Texas’ anti-sodomy law wasn’t the end goal for the gay rights movement. He was after occupational equality, which was a necessary step for queer people to live without fear of losing their jobs, their housing or custody of their children because of their sexual orientation.

“Can you imagine the Supreme Court wanting to protect the marriage rights of gay and lesbian citizens when gays and lesbians were still considered criminals in 13 states?” Phelps said.

Private lives

Accounts of what happened in Lawrence’s apartment on Sept. 17, 1998, differ drastically according to the men arrested and the officers. Two Harris County sheriff’s deputies each claimed to have seen Lawrence and Garner having sex, though their reports varied considerably as to what type of sex Lawrence and Garner were having.

Alternatively, Lawrence and Garner maintained from the beginning that they weren’t having sex (though this detail wasn’t public until after the 2003 decision for fear it would derail the case). An abundance of evidence supports their version of events, said Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law who wrote a book on the case. But ultimately that detail wasn’t relevant to the outcome of the case at large.

What can be confirmed is that on that late Thursday night, Garner’s on-again, off-again boyfriend at the time, Robert Eubanks, called the police on Lawrence and Garner, claiming that a Black man was “going crazy with a gun” inside the apartment. Eubanks was reportedly jealous of the flirtatious relationship between Lawrence, who was white, and Garner, who was Black.

When Harris County sheriff’s officers responded shortly after, they entered Lawrence’s apartment anticipating an armed individual and instead found the two men and pornographic material in the home.

Regardless of whether Lawrence and Garner were having sex, officers arrested the men on the premise that they had violated the state’s law that considered sexual acts between people of the same sex to be “deviate sexual intercourse.”

On the night of the arrest — and in the years following — Lawrence was indignant that police had entered his private residence and arrested him and his friend. Both felt a deep sense of injustice at their arrests, and the discriminatory law’s continued existence.

“For an outdated law like that to make it all right for the police or government to walk into your house … you know, uninvited. I think that was a wrong thing on the police part,” Garner told Carpenter in a 2005 interview. “I felt like I had been taken advantage of.”

Lawrence and Garner were released from jail the day after the arrests.

When Lewis was faxed the police report from the arrest, he was stunned because for so long the gay rights movement had been waiting for a case like this one to appear. Activists wanted to challenge sodomy laws, like the one in Texas, on constitutional grounds. Lewis immediately called Lawrence, who was then a stranger to him.

“I said, ‘John, I think we have a Supreme Court case here,’” Lewis recalls telling Lawrence shortly after his arrest.


Lewis shows a copy of the original police report of John Lawrence's and Tyron Garner's arrest. 

Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune


A photo in Lane Lewis' Houston home of Lewis, John Lawrence, Tyron Garner and others central to the Lawrence v. Texas case. 

Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune

First: Lewis shows a copy of the original police report of the arrests of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner. Last: A photo in Lewis’ Houston home of himself, Lawrence, Garner and others central to the Lawrence v. Texas case. Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune


Lewis with his dogs AJ and Potter in his home. 

Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune

The case was considered a good one to challenge the constitutionality of criminalizing homosexuality because there was only one charge — based on Section 21.06 of the Texas penal code, the ban on same-sex intercourse — filed against Lawrence and Garner.

Lewis turned to a Houston attorney widely known in the LGBTQ+ community for his work with people with HIV and AIDS facing discrimination, Mitchell Katine, who enlisted the help of constitutional lawyers from Lambda Legal, a group focused on LGBTQ+ rights, who would argue the case in front of the Supreme Court.

After winding through the Texas courts and eventually rising to the attention of the nation’s highest court, on June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court handed down a decisive 6-3 victory for LGBTQ+ activists and sent a clear message about the unconstitutionality of sodomy bans.

“The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion.

By establishing the precedent that all of the constitutional rights that were available to other people are now available for gay people — rights previously denied under the Bowers v. Hardwick decision that enabled states to maintain sodomy bans — Lawrence v. Texas laid the groundwork for all of the benefits and protections of the Constitution to be equally applied to everybody.

“Because they were brave enough to let us do this, the whole country, and to some extent the world, changed as a result of their bravery,” Katine said of Lawrence and Garner’s participation.

Different worlds

Although Lawrence and Garner were both plaintiffs in the case, they lived in different worlds, Lewis said. Lawrence had stable employment as a medical technician at the time of this arrest. Garner wasn’t employed and didn’t have access to stable housing. Lewis recalls having difficulty reaching Garner after the arrest because the phone number listed on the police report was disconnected.

“He was a Black, feminine, gay male,” Lewis said. “There weren’t any safe spaces for Tyron.”

Three years after the decision, Garner died from complications of meningitis at age 39. Lawrence lived five years longer, until he was 68. He died from complications of a heart ailment.

The Lawrence decision kicked off decades of advances in civil rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual people. Yet the catalyst for the gay rights movement, the 1969 Stonewall riots, were largely led by transgender people of color, a part of the LGBTQ+ community that is still fighting for equal treatment.

Segovia of TENT said Lawrence set a precedent for the right to privacy for lesbian, gay and bisexual people, but the transgender community has not secured the same freedoms and protections to privately make health care decisions.

“What has been the growth for lesbian, gay, bi people versus trans people?” Segovia asked, pointing to the heightened level of discrimination and violence directed at trans people.

Trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than their cisgender peers, according to a 2021 study from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Williams Institute. This violence poses a particular threat to trans women of color. The National Center for Transgender Equality reported 70% of the trans women killed in 2022 were Black.

“It’s a lot easier as a white, gay male to walk through Montrose now than it was in the early ’90s. Simultaneously, it’s just as unsafe for a trans or cross-dressing person to walk down the street today as it was in the early ’90s,” Lewis said.

[Texas lawmakers pursued dozens of bills affecting LGBTQ people this year. Here’s what passed and what failed.]

Despite the persistent threats to the safety of transgender people, the state Legislature has made several attempts to regulate the lives of trans Texans. This year, lawmakers restricted the rights of transgender youth to access gender-affirming care and of transgender college athletes to participate on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

“We saw over 140 bills, anti-LGBTQ+ bills, with the majority of those … focused on the trans community,” said state Rep. Venton Jones, D-Dallas.

Jones said he and his Democratic colleagues spent a significant amount of time during the legislative session trying to educate the public about issues like gender-affirming care and dispelling myths that drag queens were sexualizing and grooming children. He characterized the Republican-led efforts as perpetuating misinformation and hate.

Issues relating to transgender people have grown more prominent over the last decade as Republicans have realized the political benefits of pushing issues that more closely regulate the lives of trans people.

Recent polling from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that almost 80% of Republicans surveyed thought athletic participation should be based on sex assigned at birth in both K-12 and university sports. Researchers also found issues related to transgender Texans are relatively unknown to voters; nearly 60% of Texans don’t personally know a transgender person.

While three prominent bills impacting the LGBTQ+ community passed this session — including one that supporters say will restrict children from seeing drag shows — a proposal to remove Texas’ unconstitutional sodomy ban didn’t make it out of the House. Jones’ bill would have removed Section 21.06 from the Texas Penal Code, which was used to arrest Lawrence and Garner almost 25 years ago.


State Rep. Venton Jones, D-Dallas, in the open-air rotunda a few steps from his office in the state Capitol in Austin on Jan. 19, 2023. 

Credit: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune

While unenforceable, these laws are at least a harsh reminder of the state’s oppression of LGBTQ+ people.

“At a minimum, these laws are hanging on the wall like an unused whip,” Carpenter said.

In the worst-case scenario, if the Supreme Court overturned Lawrence, consensual gay sex could again be illegal in Texas. That future seems less far-fetched in the wake of last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which revoked the constitutional protection for abortion and allowed Texas’ near-total ban on the procedure to go into effect.

In Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion of the Dobbs decision, he wrote that previous cases involving the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause should also be reconsidered and overruled. Those included Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriages legal across the country, and Lawrence v. Texas.

Some people, like Carpenter, don’t believe Lawrence or Obergefell are at risk of being overturned given how same-sex couples have come to rely on these relationships for financial stability. But others, like Phelps, point to the conservative composition of today’s Supreme Court — which tilted further to the right after former President Donald Trump appointed three justices in his four years in office — as evidence that marriage equality is not a settled issue.

April polling from the Texas Political Project found that 62% of Republicans surveyed did not think same-sex marriage should be legal in Texas — evidence that continued advocacy to protect all LGBTQ+ people is an ongoing battle in Texas, even decades after major victories like Lawrence.

“The work is not done,” Segovia said.

Disclosure: Equality Texas, Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Austin and University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/26/lawrence-v-texas-lgbtq-rights/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Sarah McBride announces candidacy to become first openly transgender member of Congress

McBride is a longtime friend of President Joe Biden and his late son Beau
Eric Garcia
June 26,2023

Sarah McBride attends "Out in Office" panel at Tribeca Celebrates Pride Day at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival at Spring Studio on May 4, 2019 in New York City.
(Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

Delaware state Sen Sarah McBride announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Delaware’s sole congressional district, which would make her the first openly transgender member of Congress.

Ms McBride announced her candidacy in a video on Monday morning.

“My commitment is to the people in Delaware who aren’t seen, who don’t shout the loudest or fund political campaigns,” she said. “Everyone deserves a member of Congress who sees them and respects them.”

Ms McBride became the first openly transgender state senator in the United States when she won her election in 2020. Prior to that, Ms McBride worked for the Human Rights Campaign and was also the first openly transgender person to speak at a major party’s convention when she spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Pioneering transgender lawmaker has advice for pushing back against transphobic bills

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She first came out as transgender in an op-ed for the student newspaper of American University, where she had served as student body president. Ms McBride also worked for former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, who represented Delaware in the Senate for 36 years before he became vice president.

“When I came out, it was support from Beau – and the rest of the Biden family – that made me feel safe in Delaware, like I belonged here,” she tweeted in 2019, to which Mr Biden’s account tweeted: “Thanks Sarah. I'm proud of you and so is Beau.”

In 2018, Ms McBride released her book Tomorrow Will be Different, which detailed her life and the loss of her husband Andy who was also transgender. Mr Biden wrote the foreword for the book.

Ms McBride’s candidacy comes shortly after Rep Lisa Blunt Rochester, the state’s incumbent congresswoman, announced she would run for Delaware’s Senate seat after Sen Tom Carper announced that he would not seek another term in the Senate.

Delaware is a solidly Democratic state, meaning that the winner of the Democratic primary will most certainly win the general election in 2024.

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride is running to become the nation's first transgender member of Congress

Madison Hall

Business Insider
Jun 26, 2023

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride is running for a seat in the US House of Representatives.
If she wins, she'll be the nation's first openly transgender member of Congress.
McBride previously interned for the Obama Administration and was the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign.

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride announced her plans to run for Congress on Monday. If she wins in November 2024, she'll become the nation's first openly-transgender member of Congress.

McBride, 32, is running to replace current Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who recently announced a Senate run to replace outgoing Sen. Tom Carper, in the state's at-large congressional district.

Elected as a state senator in 2020, McBride is the highest-ranking transgender legislator in the United States. In 2022, she ran again for her seat, but instead unopposed.

In an interview with Bloomberg Government, an adviser to McBride said her campaign would focus on "kitchen-table issues" like her work passing paid family and medical leave during her short stint in Delaware's statehouse.

McBride, who publicly came out as transgender in 2012 in a student newspaper op-ed as the outgoing student body president of American University, previously interned in the Obama Administration, becoming the first openly transgender person to work in the White House.

McBride also has ties to current President Joe Biden and his family. She worked on Beau Biden's campaigns for attorney general. The president (then vice president) also wrote a forward for her memoir in 2018.

She's also no stranger to the national political scene, having spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 2016.

Outside of politics, McBride has also served as the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.

When asked how she'll fare against a barrage of verbal and political attacks as she seeks to become the nation's first openly transgender federal legislator, she told the New York Times that "there will certainly be attacks, but I'm no stranger to those."

"What I've demonstrated over the last few years is that I'm able to move past those attacks and focus on what matters to the people I represent.

About half of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults have used online dating

BY RISA GELLES-WATNICK

Willie B. Thomas via Getty Images

The internet has often provided a place for lesbian, gay and bisexual people to connect with one another when in-person venues are unavailable or unwelcoming. Lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans are far more likely than those who are straight to say they have ever used a dating site or app (51% vs. 28%), according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. That includes 13% of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who say they are currently using an online dating platform, 11% who have used one in the past year and 27% who have done so more than a year ago at the time of the survey.

How we did this

Responses for lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are combined because of small sample sizes. Additionally, since this research is focused on sexual orientation – not gender identity – and because the transgender population in the U.S. is very small, transgender respondents are not identified separately. Read the Center’s full online dating report for more details.

As Pride month ends, this analysis looks at how experiences with online dating differ by age and gender within the lesbian, gay and bisexual population.

Age and gender differences

Younger lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are more likely than their older counterparts to have tried online dating. Among lesbian, gay and bisexual adults, 54% of those ages 18 to 49 have ever used a dating site or app. That compares with 39% of those ages 50 to 64 and 30% of those 65 and older.

However, lesbian, gay and bisexual adults in the age groups under 65 are all equally as likely to say they are currently using a dating site or app. This is distinct from the pattern among straight adults, where those ages 18 to 29 are roughly three times as likely as those 30 to 49 or 50 to 64 to be currently using a dating site or app.

There are also differences by gender. Among lesbian, gay and bisexual adults, men are more likely than women to have ever used an online dating platform (57% vs. 46%) and to say they are current users (17% vs. 9%). These gender differences are also present among straight adults.

When it comes to finding a committed relationship, 24% of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who are partnered – that is, married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship – say they met their significant other through online dating. Among this group, men are more likely than women to say they met their significant other through a dating site or app (37% vs. 18%).

Most commonly used dating sites and apps

Lesbian, gay and bisexual men and women who date online also use specific apps and sites at different rates. Lesbian, gay and bisexual women users are more likely than their male counterparts to have ever used HER, a dating app for queer women and gender-diverse people. However, Tinder is the most common app among lesbian, gay and bisexual women users – six-in-ten say they’ve used it.

While Tinder is also popular among lesbian, gay and bisexual men, they are most likely to have used Grindr, a dating app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. About six-in-ten lesbian, gay and bisexual men who have dated online (62%) say they have used Grindr.

About equal shares of lesbian, gay and bisexual men and women who have used an online dating platform have tried OkCupid, Match, Hinge or eharmony.

Online dating experiences and attitudes

In terms of personal experiences on online dating platforms, lesbian, gay and bisexual adults have mixed reviews. A majority of them who have used online dating platforms (61%) say their experience has been positive overall, with statistically similar shares of men (64%) and women (56%) saying this. But most lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who have used these platforms in the past year report feeling excited (85%) and report feeling disappointed (84%) about the people they encounter there.

Some lesbian, gay and bisexual online dating users also encounter negative behaviors. One-third or more say they have been sent sexually explicit messages they didn’t ask for (56%), had someone continue to contact them after they said they were not interested (42%) or had someone call them an offensive name (33%). Among lesbian, gay and bisexual users, the shares who say they have experienced each of these are not statistically different between men and women. Half of lesbian, gay and bisexual online dating users also say they’ve encountered someone they think was trying to scam them on these platforms, though this experience is significantly more common among lesbian, gay and bisexual men than women (60% vs. 41%).

Lesbian, gay and bisexual adults also have mixed feelings about online dating in general, outside of their own personal experience. They are more likely to say online dating has made finding a partner or spouse easier rather than harder (40% vs. 22%). Still, when asked what type of effect these sites have had on dating and relationships, roughly equal shares of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults say they have had a mostly positive (20%) or mostly negative (19%) effect.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.

Topics

 LGBTQ Attitudes & ExperiencesRomance & DatingOnline Dating

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Risa Gelles-Watnick  is a research assistant focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center.

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Estonia legalizes same-sex marriage

A Step Toward Greater Equality in the Baltics

Andres Burgos
Coordinator, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program


Annual gay pride parade in Tallinn, Estonia, July 8, 2017. © 2017 yegorovnick/Shutterstock

In a significant step toward greater equality, Estonia’s parliament voted Tuesday in favor of new legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, making it the first Baltic country to do so.

The bill expands existing partnership recognition in Estonia by amending the 2016 Family Law Act, which allowed for same-sex civil unions and recognized same-sex marriages performed abroad. Under the new legislation, which will come into force on January 1, 2024, same-sex couples will also have the option to marry and adopt children.

The bill was approved on Tuesday, June 20 in a 55-34 decision within the 101-seat parliament.

Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, leader of the center-right Reform Party, successfully created a liberal-oriented coalition to cement a parliamentary majority with the centrist Estonia 200 Party and Social Democrat Party earlier this year. The coalition has taken a strong pro-Ukraine, pro-European Union stance — and one that supports same-sex marriage rights.

In Estonia, support for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people has gained traction, according to a recent poll conducted by the Estonian Human Rights Centre. The poll shows 53 percent of Estonians support marriage equality, up from only 34 percent in 2012.

Still, many LGBT persons in Estonia face harassment and discrimination. Comparatively, legislation recognizing same-sex partnerships in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania has not progressed.

In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to extend the option of marriage to same-sex couples. Today, Estonia joins 34 other countries that have already embraced marriage equality. Eleven additional countries allow civil unions for same-sex couples. Estonia has set an example for other Central European nations in extending marriage equality.

Estonia passes law to allow same-sex marriage

Prime Minister Kaja Kallas says she is ‘proud of Estonia’ after the bill received 55 votes in the 101-seat parliament.

Revellers take part in a Baltic gay pride parade in Riga, Latvia 

[File: Ilmars Znotins/AFP]
Published On 20 Jun 2023

Estonia’s Parliament has passed a law to legalise same-sex marriage, making it the first Central European country to do so.

The bill received 55 votes in the 101-seat parliament with 34 votes against.

“This is a decision that does not take anything away from anyone but gives something important to many,” Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said after the vote on Tuesday.

“Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love and want to commit to,” Kallas added, saying she was “proud of Estonia”.

Same-sex marriage is legal in much of Western Europe but not in Central European countries that were once under communist rule and members of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact alliance but now are members of NATO and, largely, the EU.

Same-sex couples have been able to enter a civil union in Estonia since 2014. But it has taken until now for parliament to fix legal loopholes that prevented same-sex partners from enjoying the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

In the largely secular Baltic country of 1.3 million people, 53 percent of the population supported same-sex marriage in a 2023 poll by the Centre for Human Rights. A decade ago, the number was 34 percent.

However, 38 percent of Estonians still consider homosexuality to be unacceptable. Same-sex marriage is opposed by the ethnic-Russian minority, which constitutes a quarter of the country with only 40 percent of them supporting it.

‘Good opportunity’

Gay people in Estonia tend to remain discreet about their identity, and half have experienced harassment recently, according to the government.

“This was a good opportunity for the government because the public opinion on same-sex marriage has turned to positive, and after this year’s election, it has the numbers to overcome the conservative opposition,” said Tomas Jermalavicius, head of studies at the International Centre for Defence and Security.

Latvia and Lithuania, the other two Baltic countries, which were annexed by the Soviet Union, have same-sex partnership bills stuck in their parliaments.

Annely Lepamaa, a lesbian, told the Reuters news agency that it felt like the state was “finally accepting me”.

“Until now, I needed to fight for everything. I had to go to court to adopt my own children, which is like, why?” the 46-year-old said. “Now, I’m a human with rights.”

Speaking to Reuters after the vote, Lepamaa’s partner of six years, Eeva Koplimets, 36, proposed they should get married.

“Yeah, we are switching [to marriage]. We made our decision on TV!” she said.