LGBT+ Asylum: a perspective of “progress” and a matter of time

LGBT+ asylum started its ‘recognition trajectory’ around the 1980’s and 1990’s (disputed between the Netherlands and Canada)2 via jurisprudential understandings that recognized sexual orientation and gender identity (hereinafter: SO and GI, respectively) as identity markers of social groups, lying under the scope of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Since then, human rights organizations3, United Nations4, academicians5 and activists, have generated some normative considerations towards ‘what is’ – expressing severe concerns, human rights breaches, denouncing the need of urgent reforms in a recommendation-style format – and ‘what should be’ – pointing out how some countries are successfully improving this experience in a best practice sharers format and how to professionalize the asylum system. A growing body of scholarship explores local realities in a national context, particularly in the Euro-American axis, rare theorization efforts are found to explain this shift from a total negation of rights to eligibility/recognition – Puar (2013), Millbank (2013) and Dustin & Held (2012) gave contributions in this area. In a theoretical reflection style, adding temporal characters to this discussion, instead of understanding this own logic of ‘evolution’ in asylum legislation over the last 30 years, we assert that ‘LGBT asylum’ is currently flourishing in countries that have endorsed pro-identity regimes. This phenomenon is unique to Liberal democracies and is not a reflection of the ‘progress’ logic debated by some contemporary authors. Therefore, we propose clustering countries into LGBT-sceptical, LGBT-identitarian, and LGBT-quietist.