I know not whether Laws be right,
  Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
  Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
  A year whose days are long.

(Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”)

Around the globe, whether you can expect toleration or imprisonment for being LGBTIQA+ largely depends on where you live. As of today, one-third of all countries (32 per cent) continues to criminalise consensual same-sex sexual acts. In Uganda, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, those accused of crimes relating to homosexuality face the death penalty.

For the last few decades in the west, LGBTIQA+ rights have been on the ascendant. Anti-discrimination protections, rainbow family rights and access to specialist queer and trans healthcare followed the decriminalization of same-sex intimacy and community gatherings. Queers flocked to London, San Francisco and New York City to party, raise families and work in colourful “gaybourhoods” across the world. In 2014, the “trans tipping point” was announced, with the glamourous trans Orange is the New Black actress Laverne Cox featuring in TIME magazine.

But 2025 brought a backlash that had been brewing for some time, and our newly-won protections began to evaporate. In the US, Trump cut access to gender-affirming healthcare, (re-)banned trans people from serving in the military, defunded all diversity and inclusion initiatives and engaged in an all-of-government effort to define “transgender” out of existence. In the UK, their Supreme Court ruled that the meaning of sex for the purposes of discrimination protections is confined to so-called “biological sex” – excluding trans women from the same legal protections that other women enjoy.

Right-wing populist governments around the world have hit on a winning strategy to misdirect anger against falling living conditions by demonising LGBTIQA+ people, caricaturing “gender ideology” as a threat to their cultural values, social orders and religious beliefs. In Hungary, for example, authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has blocked legislation that protects the rights of transgender people under the pretext of protecting “family values” and outlawed Pride marches, claiming that “the woke movement and gender ideology… artificially cut the nation into minorities in order to spark strife among the groups.” Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni describes homosexuality as “a big threat and danger to the procreation of human race.” Here in Australia, over the last decade a carousel of socially conservative Australian federal politicians — from ex-Prime Minister Scott Morrison to former Labor leader Mark Latham — has attempted to mobilise arguments opposing LGBTQIA+ rights’ issues for electoral advantage.

It’s into this uncertain moment that the UK-based international human rights lawyer Keio Yoshida’s optimistic Pride and Prejudices: queer lives and the law saw its release. The book’s core argument is that domestic and international laws need to be strengthened to create the conditions for LGBTIQA+ people to “move openly in the world with the person that we love and in the clothes that we want to wear.”

For a book about the law, Pride and Prejudice is disarmingly readable, full of touching human stories and personal reflections. Yoshida has a talent for turning dense legal judgments into punchy, approachable case summaries, which should satisfy the lawyers without overwhelming the general reader with an overabundance of procedural detail. Yoshida weaves their personal narrative from a closeted, lesbian-identifying teen in a repressive 1990’s Northern Ireland to non-binary transmasculine rainbow parent and leading human rights advocate with a series of case studies to chart the ongoing struggle for LGBTIQA+ rights across the globe.

The book opens with a tour of Trinity College, where Yoshida studied law, before heading off to Oscar Wilde’s childhood home to reflect on the Irish poet’s cruel persecution under British sodomy laws.  Yoshida shares the trauma of their own queer outing at age thirteen, as a result of their mother reading their diary. This springboards in turn into the story of how the police breaching the privacy of a gay Belfast shipping clerk by accessing his diary led to a groundbreaking European Court of Human Rights case, which ultimately resulted in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland.

Through the lens of the Ireland’s seven hundred years rule by England, Yoshida explores the profound impact that laws against sodomy, buggery and gross indecency imposed by Great Britain on parts of Africa, India, East Asia, Australia and the Pacific has had on global LGBTIQA+ rights to this day — laws that activists in over sixty countries are still fighting to repeal.

One example is the case that LGBTQ+ activist Rosanna Flamer-Caldera took to the United Nations against the government of Sri Lanka, arguing that the British-colonial era laws criminalising same-sex acts were violating her right to live a life free from gender-based violence. In 2022, the Committee for the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) agreed and recommended the abolition of these laws.

Another major colonial export of Great Britain has of course been Christianity, which continues to act as a barrier to the quest for LGBTIQA+ equality in many nations. Yoshida deftly summarises the state of international jurisprudence on the topic of “gay wedding cakes”, two of which became the subject of leading human rights cases in the UK and US regarding the question of how to balance the LGBTIQA+ communities’ right to non-discrimination in the provision of services versus the rights of religious people not to be forced to do things prohibited by their faith. Australians could be forgiven for mistakenly believing that we, too, experienced a slew of “gay cake” refusals by Christian bakers here in this country in the post-marriage equality era, given how often this hypothetical scenario was cited in law reform submissions for and against during the many years of debate over the (currently shelved) Religious Discrimination Bill.

In fact, the most memorable legal case to date in Australia on the topic of religious freedoms versus LGBTIQA+ rights was an unfair dismissal claim following the sacking of former Wallabies fullback Israel Folau by Rugby Australia for writing anti-gay social media posts. This case, which is explored in detail in both Malcolm Knox’s 2020 Truth Is Trouble: The strange case of Israel Folau, or How Free Speech Became So Complicated (Scribner Australia) and Josh Bornstein’s 2024 Working for the Brand: How Corporations are Destroying Free Speech (Scribe Publications) would have been a fascinating case study for Yoshida, as it touches on the legacy of Great Britain’s colonial importation of homophobic laws and the teachings of Christianity to Tonga, where Folau’s family hails from.

Another topical question for Australian LGBTIQA+ communities considered in Pride and Prejudices is the ongoing relevance of Pride celebrations like Midsumma and Sydney Mardi Gras in the face of their corporatisation. On this, Yoshida’s position is clear: “Pride is not bullshit.” They go on to write urgently about the importance of these events in places like Sri Lanka, Serbia and Georgia, where attendees continue to meet annually despite being routinely assaulted, imprisoned and subjected to group chants calling for their death.

To explore the complex state of affairs in the area of rainbow family rights, Yoshida recounts their cross-border efforts to conceive with their then-partner — a story that illustrates the wide variations and lack of harmony between the laws of different countries in relation to LGBTIQA+ people rights to access to IVF, adoption and surrogacy. One sad case involving a lesbian couple — one born in Gibraltar but who had British citizenship by descent, the other from Bulgaria — exposes the human cost: the couple’s Spanish-born child was rendered stateless after the UK, Spain and Bulgaria all refused to issue the child with citizenship or travel documents, with Bulgaria explicitly refusing to recognise “non-conventional families”. The Court of Justice of the European Union ordered that Bulgaria issue the child with identity documents so that the family could exercise their right to free movement in the EU but, as Bulgaria chose not to comply, the family remain unable to travel. This is just one of many examples of the shortcomings of international law when it comes to enforcement.

As a lawyer who had dedicated their career to seeking justice in the international courts and their associated bodies, Yoshida is clearly a true believer in their power to create change. One key moment in Australian legal history does provide a compelling case for this. In 1991, Nicholas Toonen complained to the United Nation’s Human Rights Committee that Tasmanian sodomy laws criminalising private consensual sex between adult males were a violation of his right to privacy, and meant that gay men in Tasmania were unequal before the law. Following his complaint, Toonen lost his job as General Manager of the Tasmanian AIDS Council after the Tasmanian Government threatened to withdraw the council’s funding. The UN Committee found that, due to the Tasmanian laws, Australia was in breach of its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In response, the Commonwealth Government passed a law overriding Tasmania’s criminalisation of gay sex, ending a 200-year prohibition following Britian’s invasion.  

However in most of the international human rights law case studies, what is most striking is the unenforceability of the rulings, as well as the inexplicably long time it takes to get an outcome. As Yoshida puts it, “obtaining international justice is a long waiting game,” and examples of this abound. In 2003, a lesbian mother in Chile lost custody of her children after the Supreme Court found that they were better off with their father because her decision to live with another woman might cause her children “potential confusion over sexual roles.” In response, the mother lodged an appeal with Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It took nine years later for the court to decided in her favour, with no power to compel the Chilean Supreme Court to reverse their ruling. In 2012, after a targeted arson attack against the Armenian bar DIY, it took the European Court of Human Rights an entire decade to find that these acts may have breached Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) against degrading treatment towards minorities. The legal maxim “justice delayed is justice denied” springs to mind.

Long timeframes notwithstanding, it is evident from Pride and Prejudices that this kind of social change lawyering through international treaties and domestic legislative change is work that Yoshida is passionate about. They write: “I … believe in the lifeblood of the law, its potential to be a living, breathing, curious and creative mechanism that understands and celebrates the range of our human diversity.”

It is Yoshida’s belief “that the law must move from a place of non-discrimination to positive affirmation.” Their vision is for a binding global LGBTIQA+ rights treaty enshrined in international law, so that queer and trans people “may live our lives to the beat of our own drums and dictate our own scripts.” This is certainly a welcome vision of the future. But reading Pride and Prejudices in this moment, at same time as genocide of the Gazan people is live-streamed as Israel and the US continues to flagrantly ignore international human rights bodies designed to prevent collective punishment and ethnic cleansing, the dream of a UN sanctioned queer utopia is a very hard one to believe in. It’s hard to think of a time when the international human rights legal system has failed humanity so comprehensively.

An important question left out of Pride and Prejudices is how to grapple with the problem of right-wing governments and influential forces using the very LGBTIQA+ law reform campaigns we are hoping to enact as fodder for their false claims of a “woke minority” seeking to impose “radical gender ideology” on the unsuspecting masses. It’s thus worthwhile reading Pride and Prejudices in conversation with another 2025 UK release Minority Rule – Adventures in the Culture War (Bloomsbury) by Ash Sarkar, which argues that social justice campaigners need to communicate in ways that cut through these false claims, and foster genuine solidarity across racial, class and gender lines.

Similarly, while Shon Faye’s 2021 The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (Penguin) concurs with Yoshida’s belief that we need to seek to go beyond an LGBTIQA+ rights-based framework and move towards the broader goal of “self-fulfilment”, its author characterises this as the “liberation” of trans people, before concluding that “there can be no liberation under capitalism.” Whether Yoshida’s vision of queer joy, enabled by “the full protections of the state” or Faye’s conception of the post-capitalist liberation of both trans and cisgender people alike is the more likely scenario remains to be seen.

The elements of memoir contained in Pride and Prejudices, from Yoshida’s evolution from shame to pride, shifting self-conception from lesbian to genderqueer and professional success as an out trans masculine person, are important to capture, as are the many stories of brave individuals and groups working together to seek freedom and dignity for LGBTIQA+ people across the world. Visibility and storytelling matters, Yoshida reminds us, because “by living our lives and living our truths, we are battling for a different world, even though it can be hard at times. It gets and will get better.”

Image: a detail from the cover of the book
 

This is part a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.