The Broadening Down of Freedom: Barbadian LGBTQ+ People Need Explicit Constitutional Protection

Ark Ramsay (Bridgetown, 1994) is a trans writer currently based in Barbados.

Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The A-Line: Journal of Progressive Thought, Small Axe, Gertrude Press, Meridian, The Rumpus, Passages North, and The Gulf Coast. They have also been a finalist for the Inaugural Story Foundation Prize through Story Magazine, and received an honorable mention in Ninth Letter’s 2021 Literary Award for Nonfiction.

They received an MFA from The Ohio State University.

Barbados is undergoing a process of Constitutional Reform which has resulted in a tidal wave of antiLGBTQ+ rhetoric at the highest levels, and that is irresponsibly reported in the press. Without explicitly worded protection under the constitution, the government of Barbados is enabling discriminatory persons and fuelling discriminatory practices. It is imperative that we take these threats seriously, and envision a constitutional project that is more inclusive.

It is a powerfully enduring myth in Barbados that members of the LGBTQ+ community are somehow already protected under the current constitution. That a document, with its celebratory opening remarks of a colonial legacy, presupposes that all persons are sheltered by the state—and LGBTQ+ people are simply grasping for ‘extra’ rights. This is an effective and nefarious untruth designed to block any attempts at protecting this minoritized community. In fact, Barbados adopted a ‘savings clause’ into its 1966 constitution which was intended to act as a transitional tool— protecting hereditary laws, and allowing them to supercede any new edicts that might contravene human rights. Except, as Lord Nichols observed in his judgement Matthew V State of Trinidad and Tobago (2004) (what year?), these savings clauses, “were intended to smooth the transition, not to freeze standards forever.” In reality, the savings clauses have been used as a justificatory tool for discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, alongside Sections 9 and 12 of the Barbados Sexual Offences Act. Section 9 ruled that males engaging in same-sex sexual intimacy could risk life imprisonment, whereas Section 12 threatened homosexual men and women with up to ten years of incarceration. Under this Sword of Damocles existence,

LGBTQ+ people had to build lives within the knowledge that their identities and sexual activities could be punishable by imprisonment. Only in January 2023 did the written judgement come down, overturning these ‘buggery’ and ‘indecency laws’ which were aged remnants of a colonial machinery. However, freedom to perform a particular sexual act without being jailed for a decade is not equity. A constitution which is entrapped by a colonial ‘savings clause’, and which privileges outmoded ways of thinking over modern ideas of nationbuilding, can never produce equity.

We must first examine the lived realities of LGBTQ+ persons in Barbados to dispel this enduring myth that they are ‘already protected’, before we can begin to put to test a more inclusive constitutional project. In August of 2022, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) commissioned the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute at the Cave Hill Campus to undertake a national survey of the LGBTQ+ community. The results are a serious indictment of a nation which rises with such confidence to sing its national anthem, ‘These fields and hills beyond recall are now our very own’. According to said report, made public on July 13th, 2023, 55% of respondents did not believe that government officials supported or protected their community; 84% saw religious groups as a major barrier to their human rights and acceptance; 77% considered leaving Barbados to build a life abroad, that is an endless outflow of queer teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and so many other contributing members of society. The 40% of those who chose to stay behind described exclusion and harassment at their workplace.

This is a portrait of multi-layered discrimination. And it only gets darker. Around 13% of respondents noted that at some point in their lives they were forced out of their homes by those they trusted to look after them— the majority of those individuals were under 18 years old. 17% reported that they had recently suffered an act of physical violence, and a staggering 70% admitted to experiencing suicidal ideation. It is a health crisis when the treatment a community receives engenders thoughts of death in more than half of its population. In a separate 2019 research study conducted by Michele Lanham, which collated 76 interviews conducted with transgender women in various Caribbean countries, including Barbados, study leads recorded participants’ negative interactions with state apparatus. According to the authors, “To respect, fulfill and promote trans women’s human rights, governments should enact and enforce antidiscrimanation and gender-affirming laws and policies.”

The above examples articulate the lived experience of LGBTQ+ persons in Barbados, and clarify how sexual citizenship—that is, the legal recognition of certain necessary freedoms surrounding the interplay of sexuality and gender expression—has long been undermined. The historical process of nation-building has sidelined the LGBTQ+ community at best, and actively villanized them at worst. Therefore, this minoritized group cannot be thought of as being safeguarded under the current constitution of Barbados.

This data should inform the work of the Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC), appointed in June 2022 to act as a liaison between government stakeholders and the public towards crafting a more representative document. This work builds on previous commissions which were tasked with overhauling the constitution of Barbados, so this project has historical roots—but does it have the capacity to imagine a future where Barbados can be truly representative? At the time of writing the CRC was already supposed to have gazetted its recommendations to parliament, but this has been pushed forward to April, 2024.

In the interim, the commission has anonymously made public many of the submissions it has received. It is now possible to gauge the temperature of how some of the Barbadian public would like the new constitution to treat the LGBTQ+ members of this society. For example,

Submission 27 questions if there is some malignant force directing LGBTQ+ people:

...I recommend that more scientific studies be carried

(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)

out in the LGBTQ community to discover if BEINGS are predominantly missed matched with the wrong body during knitting together in their mother’s womb, as this can be cries for help or it can be adversarial forces whispering in their heads that what they are doing is right.

Sumission 54 provides no justification for their thoughts, only clear opposition:

NO legislation should be brought into being to condone/promote (1)same-sex marriages,(2)same-sex unions,(3)LGBTQQ+,(4)gender fluidity.

However there are dissenting voices, such as Submission 59,

Remove the buggery law that criminalises the act of sex, between two consenting adults, of same sex and add laws that protect them from hate crimes, workplace discrimination and more. These are PEOPLE who are just as human as anyone else and shouldn’t be treated as animals. We as black people, a minority, should know how it feels to be treated unkindly, unfair and unjust over things you can’t control.

Or Submission 20, which includes data from a survey collating the responses of 341 LGBTQ+ community members, polling certain needs as well as language within the constitution as it currently exists. Refuting claims for mere ‘tolerance’, the writers of Submission 20 argue that,

It is factually incorrect to state in the [Constitution] preamble that we are equal according to the laws of the land. There are laws which do not reflect the fact that we are equal. Furthermore, equality does not stem from the laws. It’s the other way around, the laws should reflect equality.

It is clear from many of the submissions that there is disproportionate concern regarding the influence or rights that LGBTQ+ persons should be afforded under this new document. There are submissions which demonize the group, and others which try to absolve them from this demonization. Altogether, it is evident that this community needs to brace itself for April 2024, when the CRC publishes its recommendations. Because if the commission argues that the LGBTQ+ community—like all other contributing communities—deserves explicitlyworded protections under the constitution, then the backlash will be enormous. In this way, the process of protecting minoritized communities has to be a holistic project which takes into account the build up, and response, to safeguarding measures.

The preamble to the current Constitution of Barbados opens by celebrating hollow flag plantings: the 1639 creation of a local parliament, and the 1651 declaration of independence from the Commonwealth of England during the interregnum. The language of these declarations is haunted by the bodies who were not afforded such protections under these sacrosanct documents. As the preamble continues, one arrives at a fundamentally disunited premise: in this newly sculpted constitution, freshly minted for an independent nation in 1966, there is a claim to a broadening down of freedom:

“And Whereas with the broadening down of freedom the people of Barbados have ever since then not only successfully resisted any attempt to impugn or diminish those rights and privileges so confirmed, but have consistently enlarged and extended them.”

While this 1966 constitution did expand the wing of its protection—such as with the inclusion of Chapter III which affirms protections for an individual based on race, place of origin, political opinions, colour, creed or sex—it was resoundingly silent about sexuality and gender expression. Curiously, the architecture of the phrase, the broadening down of freedom, seems disjointed from the rest of the language. It reads as if it is borrowed, or lifted from somewhere else entirely— and indeed it just might be.

In fact, it bears striking resemblance to the wording employed by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, “You Ask Me, Why, Tho’ Ill at Ease” in which the poet lays out a political manifesto for why freedom has chosen Britain, “A land of settled government/A land of just and old renown/Where Freedom slowly broadens down”. The irony of this is inescapable, because Tennyson also presented limitations on who he believed should benefit from such broadening down of freedoms. He sided with the WellingtonPeel Ministry in their opposition towards the Great Reform Act (1832), which would have seen enormous changes to the electoral system of England and Wales— opening the franchise to tenant farmers, shopkeepers, etc. It is telling then that the language of the current constitution of Barbados borrows freely from a poem which is also masking half-measures.

As Barbados celebrates its 57th independent year, its second as a Republic, and as it fosters its third commission for constitutional reform, the nation has entered into a moment of reckoning wherein this broadening down can no longer be conditional. As the English-speaking Caribbean attempts to move forward out of a colonial past, there are two choices available. Unburden ourselves from the machinery designed to un-human all of us. Or be caved-in under the weight of our building hatred for the most vulnerable amongst us.