Conversion practices - LGBT+ people of colour and minority ethnic faith experiences: research report

Reconciliation of identity and religious identity

We heard from Sarbat Sikhs that “family, religion and life are one within a person, they are indistinguishable” and to attempt to separate these entities would have profound existential effect on any given individual. Where it is often the case in Western/ Christian culture that one’s life and faith institution may be separate enough to allow distinct perspectives, this may not be the case within minority faith communities.

Asma talked to us about how hard it could be going home for family and religious occasions. They described going home for Eid, and how their parents had noticed that their hair was short when they took off their headscarf, and that their parents had commented on this negatively. Asma stated that “when it’s family it really gets to you”, “when people all stare at you”, noting the serious impact that this can have on young people particularly, even more so when they “have fears that they will be ex-communicated or isolated.”

We heard from Sarbat Sikhs, and from Shakti Women’s Aid, that LGBT+ people of minority faith often struggle to reconcile their sexual orientation and/ or gender identity with their religious identity, or with their families’ sense of who they ought to be and how they ought to live their lives. This was also a common theme within the literature:

“British Pakistani lesbians precariously inhabit a sociocultural environment that constrains the expression of female sexuality. Women who oppose and contravene heteronormative values and ideals unsettle comfortable assumptions of heterosexuality. Being in the closet keeps lesbians isolated and marginalised from their ethnic and cultural communities. […] Being in the closet is a source of considerable conflict, strain and anxiety, which has an impact on the women’s readiness to embrace individual choice, freedom and desire”.^[46]

And;

“Muslim women’s self-acceptance of their sexuality necessitates an inevitable distancing from their heterosexual family, religion, and community. Their narratives also foreground their marginality and exclusion because of their failure to conform to cultural, traditional, familial, and religious customs”.^[47]

Within Fry et al’s^[48] work they cited Hajra. She spoke about how she negotiates her seemingly conflictual identities as an Indian woman, as an English woman, and as a lesbian:

“It’s hard sometimes to just be gay and Asian because you, even though I live within the culture, I live on the margins of the culture[…] I think [what] has made me more acceptable is because I am not Westernised […] I think that’s what makes me acceptable because my dad saw that she still speaks the language perfectly, she still wants to go to India erm, she wants to have an Indian life”.^[49]

And they also cited Adeela and her experiences as a gay Indian woman with a Hindu family;

“It really is a double life; I’ve always felt like that […] I’ve always had to watch where I am, which were the wrong people to know, who in my family knows? With such an extended family it’s difficult actually because there are people that know who I am and I don’t know who they are.[…] I do so say I’m the worst Hindu in the world but I don't identify as Hindu, I feel, if I ever have to be at a mandir (Hindu temple) for anything religious I feel soooooo uncomfortable, I feel so out of place, I feel so, I feel like a fraud, I feel like I’m not a Hindu, I’m not an Indian, I feel like a complete fraud…” ^[50]

And in Rehman et al, similar was seen;

“I used to feel very uncomfortable going to the Sikh temple. I used to feel I was wrong and what I was feeling and how I was behaving was not in line with the religion”.^[51]

And;

“The majority of Pakistani people are Muslim and their faith, the family or themselves are not able to resolve their sexual orientation with their religion - their faith”.^[52]

Tehara echoes these comments and highlights previous studies telling the same story. He states that south Asian LGBT+ people often feel this tension, what is referred to as “acculturation”^[53] – it is the case that this kind of conflict is a factor in minority stress.^[54] Fry et al also found that their participants experienced a feeling of disconnect between their ethnicity and family religion and being LGBT+, and how this led to a lacking feelings of connectedness, social Isolation and invisibility.^[55]