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This article is part of a series exploring how colonialism shaped ideas about gender, sexuality and belonging in the Caribbean. 

How did colonial power enter everyday life, and who gets to define tradition today?

When we hear the word colonialism, we may think of stolen land, slavery, foreign government and economic exploitation.

That is only part of the story. Colonialism also entered the home.

Brazilian anthropologist Estêvão R. Fernandes shows how colonial institutions sought to regulate names, clothing, hairstyles, work, education, marriage, reproduction, family life, and the roles expected of men and women.

Why would colonizers care about such personal matters?

Because family life is connected to power. It shapes who works, who owns and inherits property, who raises children, and how the next generation comes to understand itself.

Fernandes calls this the colonization of Indigenous sexualities. Here, sexuality means more than sex. It includes relationships, marriage, gender roles, family structures, desire, and the ways people understand their own bodies.

Colonial authorities promoted one European model as normal and civilized: heterosexual couples, clearly defined roles for men and women, and family life organized around Christian moral standards. Other ways of living were labelled sinful, primitive, unhealthy or unnatural.

This was not simply the prejudice of a few individuals. Governments, schools, laws and religious institutions worked together to shape society.

We can see this clearly in Curaçao’s history after slavery.

In Di ki manera?, anthropologist Rose Mary Allen examines Afro-Curaçaoan life between 1863 and 1917. She describes the colonial state and the Roman Catholic Church as major forces of social control after emancipation. Their influence reached beyond public life into the material, social and spiritual lives of formerly enslaved people and their descendants.

Historian Margo Groenewoud continues this history into the twentieth century in Nou koest, nou kalm. She shows how the Dutch colonial government supported the Catholic Church’s powerful role in education, healthcare, social support and access to information. Together, church and state helped preserve the existing social order while restricting opportunities for much of the Afro-Curaçaoan population.

Allen and Groenewoud do not write specifically about LGBTQI+ identities. Their work does, however, demonstrate how ideas about morality, respectability and proper family life gained authority through colonial institutions.

Fernandes helps us understand why this matters for sexuality. Institutions that shape education, family life and social belonging also help define which bodies, relationships and ways of living are accepted as normal.

Over time, norms introduced or reinforced through colonial systems can begin to feel naturally Caribbean.

That is why we should question the claim that LGBTQI+ identities are foreign while strict heterosexual and gender norms represent untouched local tradition.

Traditional since when, and shaped by whom?

Caribbean people were never merely passive recipients of colonial rule. They resisted, adapted and transformed what was imposed upon them. Our cultures were shaped not only by oppression, but also by Indigenous histories, African resilience, migration, creativity and movement between islands.

Caribbean scholars Rosamond S. King and Andil Gosine show that sexuality in the region is expressed and negotiated through our own art, music, languages, migration, national identities and everyday life. Caribbean LGBTQI+ movements are not copies of Europe or North America. They respond to local families, politics, histories and communities.

Queer Caribbean people are therefore not standing outside the culture asking to be admitted. They are our children, siblings, parents, cousins, colleagues, artists and friends.

They speak our languages. They carry our histories. They care for our families. They also have the right to help shape what Caribbean culture is, and what it can become.

This is the irony at the heart of today’s debate.

LGBTQI+ protection is dismissed as a colonial import, while ideas that gained authority through colonial institutions are used to argue that queer Caribbean people do not belong.

A society may gain greater political control while continuing to reproduce ideas about bodies, gender and family that were formed under colonial rule.

That is why tradition should never be treated as beyond question. We must ask who defined it, whose lives it includes, and who is told to change in order to belong.

By Arroz ku Batata
Kralendijk, Bonaire — July 20, 2026

Read more

• Fernandes, Estêvão R. Existe Índio Gay?, especially pp. 18–24 and 80–169.
• Groenewoud, Margo. Nou koest, nou kalm: De ontwikkeling van de Curaçaose samenleving, 1915–1973. Van koloniaal en kerkelijk gezag naar zelfbestuur en burgerschap. 2017.
• Groenewoud, Margo. Social Exclusion and the Entanglement of State, Religion and Civil Society in Mid-Twentieth Century Curaçao. 2022.
• Allen, Rose Mary. Di ki manera? A Social History of Afro-Curaçaoans, 1863–1917. 2007.
• Gontijo, Fabiano S., Barbara M. Arisi & Estêvão R. Fernandes. Queer Natives in Latin America: Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History.
• Rosamond S. King. Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination.
• Gosine, Andil. CAISO, CAISO: Negotiating Sex Rights and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago. 2015.

This article is part of a series exploring how colonialism shaped ideas about gender, sexuality and belonging in the Caribbean. You can read the introduction and the other articles on this website. 

What does history tell us about sexual and gender diversity before European colonisation?

Imagine that it is the early 1400s. No European ship has yet arrived in the Caribbean. You walk through an Indigenous community. You see people raising children, preparing food, fishing, building homes and forming relationships.

What do you imagine their families looked like?

Do you automatically picture one man, one woman, strict roles for each gender and the same rules about sexuality that many people follow today?

If so, where did that picture come from?

We know too little about sexuality in the precolonial Caribbean to describe it with certainty. Colonisation destroyed communities, interrupted the passing down of knowledge and placed European missionaries, explorers and officials in control of much of the written record.

They described Indigenous people using European words and beliefs. Historical records therefore contain terms such as “sodomy,” “sin,” “vice” and “savagery,” while the words Indigenous people used for themselves were often suppressed, mistranslated or lost.

But losing a word does not mean the people or experiences it described never existed.

Fernandes studied colonial records from Brazil. From the sixteenth century onward, European writers described same-sex relationships and people who lived outside European gender roles. The writers usually condemned what they saw. But their shock reveals something important: they encountered forms of gender, sexuality and relationships that did not fit their worldview.

Researchers Gontijo, Arisi and Fernandes found similar evidence in other parts of Latin America. European colonisers did not bring sexual and gender diversity to a uniformly heterosexual continent. The colonisers found diversity already there, and often tried to control, punish or erase it.

Native North American history offers a living example of Indigenous queerness that cannot be reduced to European categories: Two-Spirit people.

Two-Spirit is an English-language term chosen by Indigenous activists in North America. For some, being Two-Spirit means carrying both feminine and masculine qualities. For others, it refers to a gender, spiritual or community role that does not fit Western categories such as man, woman, gay or transgender. Its meaning differs between people and Indigenous nations, many of which also have their own older words and traditions.

Two-Spirit people exist today. The movement helps people reclaim identities and community roles that colonial rule tried to suppress.

But the Caribbean was not shaped by Indigenous histories alone. Enslaved Africans were forced across the Atlantic, and their descendants became central to Caribbean societies. African histories of gender and sexuality therefore also matter to this conversation.

Africa was never one culture with one system. Still, researchers have documented many societies in which gender and relationships did not fit the strict European model.

Among the Langi of northern Uganda, people known as mudoko dako were treated socially as women and could marry men. In Angola, chibados or quimbandas were gender-nonconforming spiritual figures whose roles European observers struggled to understand. Woman-to-woman marriage was also recorded in more than forty African societies, often connected to family, inheritance, social status and the continuation of a family line.

These traditions were not all equivalent to today’s identities. A woman marrying another woman was not necessarily what we would now call a lesbian relationship. But the evidence shows that European ideas about men, women, marriage and sexuality were not universal in Africa either.

European observers often replaced African meanings with words such as “deviance,” “filth” and “sodomy.” Once again, they did not simply record difference. They judged it through their own worldview and tried to make it disappear.

This matters because European words can create the false impression that queerness itself came from Europe.

A Caribbean person may today use the word gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer. Those words may have international histories. But the language used to describe an experience is not the same as the origin of that experience.

Modern LGBTQI+ language travelled across borders. Human diversity did not arrive with that language; it was already here.

By guest writer: Arroz Ku Batata

Read more

• Fernandes, Estêvão R. “Existe Índio Gay?”, especially pp. 25–49 and 170–175. https://journals.openedition.org/aa/4400

• Gontijo, Fabiano S., Barbara M. Arisi and Estêvão R. Fernandes. Queer Natives in Latin America: Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History. 2021. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5

• Human Rights Campaign. Understanding Native LGBTQ+ Identities. https://www.hrc.org/resources/understanding-native-lgbtq-identities

• Jonathan Ned Katz. Native American LGBTQ+ People, 1528–1976. OutHistory. https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/naga

• Library of Congress. LGBTQ+ Studies: Native American Resources. https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/subject/native-american

• Elnaiem, Mohammed. “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned.” JSTOR Daily. 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/

• Tamale, Sylvia. “Confronting the Politics of Nonconforming Sexualities in Africa.” African Studies Review. 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43904926

This article is part of a series exploring how colonialism shaped ideas about gender, sexuality and belonging in the Caribbean.

When LGBTQI+ protection is described as colonial, what definition of colonialism is being used?

On 18 June 2026, Bonaire.nu published an article titled “Bonairian calls ban on conversion practices ‘colonialism’. The article reported the view that the Netherlands was imposing not only a law, but also a foreign ideology on Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba.

There are valid reasons to question how decisions are made in The Hague. Are island communities properly consulted? Do Dutch politicians understand our realities?

Those questions matter. But they are not the same as the question of whether conversion practices should be allowed.

Conversion practices are attempts to change or suppress someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. They begin with one basic idea: that an LGBTQI+ person should become different.

The United Nations has found that these practices have no sound medical basis and can cause serious psychological and physical harm. They may involve counselling, repeated pressure, shame, threats, isolation or other attempts to make a person reject part of themselves. These practices are not always physically forced. But that does not make them freely chosen.

Imagine being young and believing that you may lose your family, home, community, safety or future if you remain who you are. You may ask to be changed. But that request was not made in an environment free from pressure, fear or the threat of rejection and violence.

This is where Fernandes’s work becomes important. He explains that colonial systems often presented the destruction of difference as help. Indigenous people were told that their cultures, relationships and bodies needed to be corrected, their own good. The colonizer acted as if erasing part of a person was a form of civilization or salvation.

That history gives us an uncomfortable question:

What looks more like colonial correction: protecting someone from being changed, or using power to make that person fit one approved way of living?

Those who oppose the ban may answer this question differently. They may believe that queerness is the harm, that conversion practices offer help and that religious communities need protection from Dutch interference.

But this is exactly why our understanding of colonialism must go beyond asking where a law comes from.

We must also examine power within our own communities. Whose beliefs are treated as the norm? Who has the authority to define another person as confused, disordered or in need of correction? Who can speak openly, and who risks losing family, safety and belonging?

Religious freedom includes the right to hold and express beliefs and to pass values on to children. It does not automatically include the right to subject another person to sustained practices intended to suppress or change who they are.

This does not mean that every law from the Netherlands is right. It means that the lens through which we view colonialism must be wide enough to include both the political power of The Hague and the power that majorities, families and institutions can exercise over vulnerable people within our own communities.

We can criticize the political relationship with the Netherlands while still saying clearly that LGBTQI+ people should not be subjected to practices designed to erase who they are.

Read more

• Bonaire.nu. “Bonairian Calls Ban on Conversion Therapy ‘Colonialism’.” 18 June 2026.https://www.bonaire.nu/nieuws/algemeen/91332/bonairiaan-noemt-verbod-conversietherapie-kolonialisme• Fernandes, Estêvão R. “Existe Índio Gay?”: A Colonização das Sexualidades Indígenas no Brasil, especially pp. 175–185.https://journals.openedition.org/aa/4400• United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Practices of So-Called “Conversion Therapy”. 2020. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity• World Health Organization. Resources on LGBTIQ+ health, medical ethics and human rights.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/ds