Pride and Prejudices: Queer Lives and the Law

Unlike women’s rights, disability rights, and the rights of numerous other protected groups, there is no binding international treaty guaranteeing LGBTQ+ rights, notes international human rights lawyer Yoshida (How Many More Women?) in this informative, at times heart-wrenching survey of laws pertaining to LGBTQ+ people around the world. Beginning with Oscar Wilde’s 1895 indecency trial, Yoshida spotlights past and ongoing legal battles that have led to the current state of affairs, wherein 69 countries penalize private same-sex activity, including 11 that call for the death penalty. Throughout, Yoshida emphasizes how these laws, even when less drastic, serve to ostracize and exclude LGBTQ+ people from normal civic life, such as Italy’s ban on gay couples being named the parents of the same child on a birth certificate, which compels couples to travel to other countries to give birth. Yoshida ties each legal case back to their own life experiences coming out as a lesbian and later as trans and nonbinary, reflecting on how the legality or illegality of one’s identity impacts one’s deepest sense of self. (“I felt despair,” they write of their teen years in Northern Ireland. “I didn’t understand then the difference between a crime and a sin.”) It’s an enraging window on the ongoing battle to secure LGBTQ+ rights. (Mar.)