Georgia’s decision to work towards EU integration hastened the government’s implementation of new democratic reforms and initiatives in close collaboration with civil society organizations. Thanks to the country’s political aspirations and development assistance from the West, the non-governmental sector has recently become stronger and more vocal, adopting a human rights agenda similar to that of established Western democracies. During this process, closer ties with international human rights organizations have also been strengthened. Thus, in Georgia today NGOs are much more capable of putting pressure on the Georgian government. Alongside these positive developments, the more recent economic and political shifts and subsequent crises, as well as military conflicts over Georgia’s breakaway regions, still delay the strengthening of a democratic vision of Georgian society and the way that it should function. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, just as it was a characteristic of Soviet Georgia, the capitalizing on the strict division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Georgia’s political discourse is still prevalent today, in particular, at times when social and political anxieties intensify, such as during elections.

The Georgian government is quickly adopting new democratic laws, strategies and action plans, but is still reluctant to engage in re-shaping public opinion into something less violent and more inclusive. Instead, together with oppositional parties, the Orthodox Church and other public actors it is still using marginalized groups, such as LGBT people, as tokens to serve its narrow interests. Media monitoring conducted by various NGOs shows that hate speeches against LGBT people (as well as ethnic minorities) escalated around the time of elections or other important events that involve the distribution of power (Aghdgomelashvili 2012; Kintsurashvili 2016). It is problematic that, while politicians and government officials may differ about the homophobic initiatives or statements of their colleagues, the official discourse remains purely related to party politics and hardly anyone inside the political elite raises the question of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, showing complete disregard for the correlation between hate speech, discriminatory language and hate crimes.

Exploring the politicization of LGBT issues and how it affects the visibility of LBT women, I argue that Georgia is still recovering from its recent traumatic past and here (just as in many other countries) the conversation around conflict and security is for the most part dominated by the military and physical dimensions of these two concepts. Although the idea of human security has been more publicly discussed lately, little research has been done on the political use of marginalized groups in post-war (or post-armed conflict) societies and identity building. Noteworthy here is that there is no empirical data on the impact of such politicization on lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, who in Georgian society today often end up at the bottom of the social ladder. While the lives of lesbian and bisexual women have remained under-researched, however, the experiences of transgender women, for example, have become more visible, due to the recent rise in everyday violence against them. Issues involving LBT women have become more politicized, yet stories of violence and discrimination, which affect their mental health and well-being, have been largely absent from public discourse and have not been addressed in the media either. To close this gap, this chapter analyses instances of the politicization of LGBT rights and its impact on the lives of LBT women in Georgian society . First, this chapter provides some background information on the everyday struggles of LGBT people in Georgia. Second, it analyses the politicization of LGBT issues in public discourse . It goes on to show how this politicization makes LBT women invisible in public discourse , which then impacts negatively on their everyday lives. The chapter concludes by exploring the possible reasons for the invisibility of LBT women and calling for systematic research on the issue in the future.

LGBT People in Georgia

Georgia is often praised as a successful example of transition from communism to a system of democratic governance with a market-oriented economy. In its aspiration to move politically and economically close to the European Union, the country has made improvements on many levels of governance including the legislation related to human rights. Significant success was achieved in fighting corruption and crime, reforming the law enforcement agencies, improving the educational system and making the country safer for both residents and tourists. 1 Yet, to date, closer regular communication between civil society activists and the government still needs to improve, especially in regard to the human rights issues of such social groups as LGBT people, in Georgian society .

In line with the improvement of human rights legislation following the efforts to focus on EU integration, homosexuality was decriminalized with the adoption of the revised Criminal Code but only in 2000 (Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group 2012, p. 54). Since then legal protection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity has been improved by various laws, such as the Labour Code or the Law on Patients’ Rights as well as the Criminal Code—which lists homo/bi/transphobic bias as an aggravating circumstance (Ratiani et al. 2015). In 2014, Georgia adopted a widely debated law on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, which, unlike similar laws in Moldova and Ukraine, protects people from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity not only in employment, but in most other spheres of life (Civil Georgia 2014). Moreover, the National Human Rights Strategy and action plan were introduced in the same year. These two new strategies explicitly address the rights of LGBT people and can be seen as a public declaration of the government’s will to work on improving the human rights situation in the country (Jalagania 2016).

Many of these changes, however, turned out to be more cosmetic and the actual daily fate of those belonging to a minority social group has not significantly improved. For example, the Law on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination has a very weak implementation mechanism. The main difficulty is that a person facing discrimination has either to file a lawsuit and maintain the burden of proof, or to address the Public Defender’s Office, which tries to be more sensitive to the discrimination against marginalized groups, but cannot make legally binding recommendations either to the State or the private sector. The same applies to cases of hate crime, where law enforcement agencies repeatedly show their ineptitude and unwillingness to seriously address the wrongdoing. Often their investigation of incidents is biased from the first instance. Noteworthy here is that transgender people are almost barred from the reforms since full recognition officially restricts them to legally filing a case only as a man or a woman. To do so, they would need to identify themselves as one or the other, which requires full gender reassignment surgery, because the law does not recognize the transgender category. In short, the law, discriminatory in itself, precludes the very people who need it from invoking it.

In order to sign the Association Agreement with the EU and get access to visa-free travel, Georgia had to enact a list of reforms, including an improved legal framework and a higher level of inclusiveness of minorities (EU-Georgia Relations Factsheet 2017). But as soon as one looks beyond this numerous gaps appear in the implementation mechanisms (Jalagania 2016), as well as inconsistencies in political rhetoric. Despite the legal progress, members of Parliament and government officials are still making homophobic comments and the media keep reproducing the distorted image of so-called ‘sexual minorities’ that the Church 2 and state promote. This image of LGBT people as sick and perverted is contrasted with the values of the traditional, nuclear family propagated by the Church and many groups connected to it. They act, for instance, by lobbying to have marriage defined in the Constitution as a union between a man and a woman, 3 opposing an introduction of courses in school that would speak of gender equality and liberal politics (Minesashvili 2017) and appropriating May 17 as a day for ‘family purity’ (Civil Georgia 2014) specifically in opposition to the LGBT activists who year after year try to use this day for peaceful rallies. Since there is rarely any political opposition to the Church’s stance on minority issues, it becomes clear to many Georgian citizens that the commitment to protecting marginalized communities is slight. Some of them, of course, interpret this in the way that best suits either their political interests or xenophobic beliefs. The double message of adopting LGBT-inclusive laws and policies, but never condemning violence against this community or taking any proactive steps to tackle the problems facing it results in a sense of impunity, which in turn permits, and may even encourage, violence and discrimination against LGBT people.

The lack of commitment mentioned above, is also evident in the fact that law enforcement agencies in Georgia keep no data on violence and discrimination against LGBT people and human rights defenders have to rely heavily on data collected by NGOs. According to research conducted by the Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group (WISG) in 2012, every third member of the LGBT community faces violence due to sexual orientation and gender identity. This dynamic had fallen slightly in terms of physical violence by 2014, but was replaced by the increased frequency of physical assaults per person (Aghdgomelashvili 2016). At the same time, 72% of the surveyed community members were afraid to come out because of increasingly hostile public opinion (ibid.). Indeed, major opinion polls and other research on values in Georgian society indicate that LGBT people form one of the most hated groups here. The results of the World Value Survey Study Five (2008) and Six (2014) show that the number of people who feel that ‘homosexuality is never acceptable’ drastically increased between 1996 and 2008. The sections of this research that measure the distance between different social groups showed that in 1996, 77% of the respondents were opposed to having homosexuals as their neighbours. This percentage increased by 2008, reached 92% and had gone down again to 86.6% by 2014 (ibid.).

It is assumed that this reduced percentage between 2008 and 2014 may have been caused by an attack in 2013 on May 17 (Civil Georgia 2013) on a group of LGBT activists and allies, who had planned a peaceful demonstration to mark the International Day against Homo/bi/transphobia. The fact that a crowd of approximately 20,000 people, led by the orthodox clergy, attacked a group of not quite 100 activists and their friends, injuring many people (including police officers, journalists and of course the activists), caused a strong social outcry. The scale of the violence managed to shake up the segment of the Georgian society that hitherto had usually chosen to remain neutral when it came to the rights of different marginalized groups; many more public figures than usual condemned this act of violence.

Since then, freedom of assembly for LGBT people has become one of the most widely discussed topics in Georgian society . As opposed to the 1990s, when LGBT issues were not part of public discussion and homosexuality was mentioned only as one way of insulting politicians or public figures (Aghdgomelashvili 2012), in 2006 an LGBT movement was established, starting with the first community-based NGO; it addressed a range of issues concerning the situation of LGBT people. Raising these issues in public debates raised public awareness and the visibility of LGBTs in everyday life . In addition, non-governmental organizations working with the community started systematically to review the Georgian legislation on sexual orientation and gender identity, researching different aspects of the lives of LGBT people (including violence, discrimination, access to healthcare and access to legal gender recognition). 4 Alongside freedom of assembly, the main questions raised and debated have included discussions about hate crimes and discrimination and, most recently, the legal gender recognition of transgender identities.

However, while LGBT people have all of a sudden stopped being a mythical faceless group, their activism has met even greater resistance or backlash. Research exploring the correlation between attitudes to LGBT people and the belief systems and social situation of Georgians shows that 67% of the survey participants believe that LGBT people should not work with children, 74% disagree that same-sex couples should be allowed the right to adopt a child that other couples have, 82% disagree that marriage should be accessible to LGBT people and 66% believe that LGBT rallies should be banned by law (Aghdgomelashvili 2016). The above numbers speak of the situation of LGBT people in Georgia in practice, illustrating the vicious cycle in which events move. While the same research showed that acquaintance with a member of LGBT community is negatively correlated with a high level of homophobia, most of the community members, as mentioned above, are not able to come out even to their closest social circle, because of the high level of stigma (ibid.).

The Politicization of LGBT Issues

The negative public opinion and opposition to allowing LGBT people to enjoy their guaranteed rights and freedoms are partly the result of a lack of general knowledge and awareness of gender and sexuality (neither the Georgian educational system nor the media provides adequate information on the matter). The high politicization of these issues also seems to play a crucial role. According to Rubin (2011), conflicts over sexuality have become ‘the vehicles for displacing social anxieties’ and thus it is argued that, in Georgia, the cause of such anxieties has been the country’s political and economic transformations, as well as the ongoing armed conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In other words, in the past two decades, Georgia has experienced major changes in its political and economic system (including an economic crisis), a civil war and two armed conflicts in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It should be remembered, too, that Georgian society spent the first 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a precarious state, meeting challenges to its security at all levels.

Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the making of the ‘other’ (de Beauvoir 1997), in attempts to shape and manipulate the idea of Georgian identity, has been used successfully by conservative and populist politicians and the Church, which all tend to use the emotions of their adherents to stir them in specific directions. The leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, has repeatedly stated that homosexuality is an ‘anomaly and disease’ (McLaughlin 2013). The Georgian Orthodox Church is an important political actor and opinion-maker in Georgian society (BBC News 2013), so it is no wonder that over time more clerics and public figures have begun to employ more and more populism, building on the general fear and doubts that people have about homosexuality and portraying it as damaging for the moral fabric of the country’s identity.

A similar strategy was employed in the Soviet Union, after consenting male homosexual relations were re-criminalized in 1933 and the regime decided to change its liberal attitude to marriage and citizens’ private lives and strictly enforce the norm of the nuclear family (Stella 2016). Yet, in contradistinction to Soviet Georgia’s silence about female homosexuality, before Stalin came to power, female homosexuality received substantial attention from doctors and researchers, fascinated by the attempts of their Western (especially German) counterparts to ‘cure’ homosexuality through therapy and various kinds of surgery (Healey 2001). Lesbian women were also more widely represented in literary circles in Soviet Russia than in Soviet Georgia, with Lidia Hannibal and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only two prominent figures.

After this re-criminalization, the Communist propaganda machine started to use male homosexuality to typify Western decadence. During Stalin’s repressions homosexual men were declared ‘spies’, ‘enemies of the revolution’ and ‘declassified elements, while women were accused of asocial behaviour and continued to be treated by psychiatrists (Healey 2001). In 1934, one of the most popular Soviet writers, Maxim Gorky, who was also very popular in Georgia, declared that homosexuality was one of the results of fascism’s detrimental effect on European youth and that a country that is bravely and successfully ruled by the Proletariat finds such behaviour criminal and unacceptable. He ends his pronouncement with the phrase ‘Exterminate homosexuals and fascism will disappear’. With this level of propaganda, we can understand how Article 121 of the USSR Criminal Code was used not only against men who had sex with other men, but often against political activists and others undesirable to the regime (Healey 2001). Just as in Georgia today, homophobic anti-Western rhetoric accompanied a stronger promotion of the nuclear family, stricter control on women’s reproductive rights and strict limits on women’s gender role, serving a double shift for the motherland and for their husbands. This was enough to force lesbian women back into invisibility.

In the Georgian media, public discussions on homosexuality started only in the 1990s. Nonetheless, to date, the Soviet myth of the Western origins of homosexuality has remained strong. Starting from 1998, in Georgia, the idea of homosexuals/homosexuality was transformed into something ‘foreign’ and ‘sick’ and is then portrayed as a social deviation. Between 1998 and 2003 homosexuality joined a list of objects for political speculation, such as ethnic and religious minorities, and the myth of the ‘homosexual conspiracy’ emerged. The panic about this ‘conspiracy’, soothed after the Rose Revolution in 2003, had reappeared with renewed force by 2011–2012 (Aghdgomelashvili 2012). The reason for this lies in the higher level of politicization of the issue, as well as the increased visibility of the LGBT movement itself. This visibility was gained through its public rallies in 2012 and 2013 and the appearance of LGBT activists on public television and certain public platforms (Gvianishvili 2017).

Media monitoring conducted at various stages between 1999 and 2011 shows that the media’s interest in homosexuality was not stable; the peak of hate speech coincided with important political events and times of the distribution of power (ibid.). It is interesting to note that while between 1999 and 2003 the arguments against homosexuality were at least rational on the surface, after this period the Church began actively to spread the idea of homosexuality as opposed to Orthodox Christian values. This is the same argument used by the Church in its war to ‘clear the public space from sin’ (ibid.). It is also not surprising to find the Church’s stance on issues related to sexuality affecting public opinion, given that, as the World Values Survey shows the importance of religion for Georgians increased from 49% in 1996 to 84% in 2014 whereas the importance of politics, which at the best of times has never been high enough dropped from 13.2% in 1996 to 10.2% 2014.

This makes the use of discriminatory language and homophobic hate speech all the more acceptable for politicians and public figures as well as certain types of media. Hateful rhetoric is employed to stereotype, humiliate, create negative images, blame members of a social group for their negative impact on society, accuse them of treason and the abuse of power (in their secret domination of politics and/or show business, propaganda, etc.) and call covertly or openly for violence and discrimination. Although the media have changed significantly in the last decade and journalists oppose hate speech and discriminatory language more strongly, the main problems are still that the media confuse the terminology (for instance, mixing up sexual orientation and gender identity), quote homophobic texts, point out or emphasize someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity when not necessary, and most importantly choose respondents who are aggressively homophobic and make little or no attempt to restrain them (Khorbaladze 2015).

In the last three years, unfortunately, the tendency of politicization has shown no sign of receding, despite the active work of the LGBT movement, increased access to information and steady dialogue between government and civil society. This resistance to change can be found in reports on political hate speech. According to the regular media monitoring conducted by the Media Monitoring Fund (MDF) in 2012–2015, 331 cases of homophobic hate speech were documented in the printed media, internet media and TV, hereby TV being the most important outlet for hate speech. Homophobic statements were made by media representatives (100), political parties (70), officials (6), former officials (9), clerics (42) and other public figures (96). Among the political parties, Georgian Dream Coalition (the ruling coalition at the time), Burjanadze—United Democrats and Patriot Alliance held the top three positions.

The situation grew worse as 2016 approached, especially in the period before the parliamentary elections (Kintsurashvili 2016), when out of 868 cases of hate speech 52% (454) were related to homophobia. Political parties (139) and the media (152) were the top two sources of hateful statements. With the political parties, things were similar to the previous cycle, Burjanadze—United Democrats and Patriot Alliance, Georgian Dream (a party holding the constitutional majority in the Parliament from October 2016) and Erovnulebi being the top three. Another study conducted by the MDF shows that one of the most popular ploys was to equate the West with the promotion of homosexuality, incest and paedophilia, along with the false dichotomy of homosexuality vs Euro Atlantic integration employed by xenophobic media and politicians.

Many of the examples mentioned above were connected to the initiative of the ruling coalition to amend the constitution and include a gender-specific definition of marriage (Civil Georgia 2016; Synovitz 2017). This is a very interesting example, since the initiative was and remains purely related to party politics. It was not a conservative response to the agenda of the LGBT movement, since none of the LGBT groups has so far advocated marriage equality. The official explanation of the government’s deciding to take up this issue was allegedly to avoid any further speculations about allowing gay marriage as a prerequisite for Georgia’s Euro Atlantic integration (Morrison and Waller 2016). Thus, one can say that the main discourse around sexuality in Georgia is a political one. It uses sexualized identities to present an image of a threat to the nation, culture and religion, as well as, very specifically, to demography (Tsereteli 2010) and makes it acceptable to ‘sacrifice’ these identities for the ‘greater good’.

Invisible Women—Invisible Battlefields

It is true that in discussing the politicization of LGBT issues we did not touch upon specific identities. Public discourse still does not discriminate between different sub-groups of the community. Generally speaking, however, the sexualized identities of women have a history of being invisible. Even in Soviet times, the more overt punishment was given to men who had sex with men, leaving female homosexuality to the sphere of psychiatry and ‘sexopathology’ (Stella 2016). While we now witness increasing attention to the situation of transgender women, very few empirical data have been collected in relation to lesbian and bisexual women in Georgia and these sub-groups literally have no agenda inside the movement. Most research done in the field is dedicated to exploring general, or policy—and advocacy-related, experiences of violence and discrimination, leaving out social practices and other issues relevant to LB women and transgender persons.

Gabunia (2010) conducted research on the use of virtual platforms by lesbian residents in Tbilisi and showed that lesbian women are often closeted and tied to virtual spaces (which they use to create and maintain relationships with each other) and indoor spaces. These findings suggest that such practices contribute to their general invisibility. This tendency is connected to their need to maintain social status, depending also on financial factors (ibid.). In addition, it is argued that their absence from the public sphere also depends on the gendered socialization of men and women in Georgia. Gay men have cruising areas outdoors (Gabunia 2009) but women do not, since their lives are usually more controlled by their family members. Research conducted in 2014, endorses this argument by reporting that, in terms of socialization, 68% of lesbian and bisexual women preferred ‘visiting a friend at home’ and/or attending regular meetings organized by the community-based organization (58%), while 78% of gay and bisexual men who were interviewed preferred frequenting LGBT-friendly clubs/bars (78%) and used the Internet for dating (76%) (Aghdgomelashvili 2016).

An article exploring the representation of lesbians in public discourse in Georgia argues that (generalized and abstract) sexualized identities other than those of gay men are almost completely excluded from public discourse (Kharchilava 2010). Kharchilava (2010) states that lesbian identities are subjected to the logic of representation which is based on legitimization through building stereotypes upon experienced social phenomena. Lesbians (on the rare occasions when they are mentioned in public discourse ) go through this process of legitimization transferring from completely marginalized spaces to the new semiotic zones where they are considered along the lines of heterosexuality and not in opposition to them. This logic of representation is in line with patriarchal principles. Since the roles and functions of men and women are seen as ‘given’ and any deviation is perceived as a social problem, women and men are charged with maintaining both biological and symbolic reproduction.

However, since female sexuality in general is seen as passive (recipient), lesbianism is not taken as seriously or tragically as male homosexuality, since a lesbian can still ‘find a right way’ and have a ‘normal’ family (Kharchilava 2010). This gives the impression that as far as lesbian or bisexual women are concerned, there is not much to talk about. This argument is supported by a recent research project From Prejudice to Equality conducted by the NGO WISG to examine respondents’ attitudes to LGBT people and the various stereotypes connected to these identities. It is interesting to see that while participants are more decisive when it comes to the stereotypes that target gay men, their usual response to the stereotypes surrounding lesbians is ‘I don’t know’ (Aghdgomelashvili 2016).

Despite the general closeted nature of lesbianism and the absence of lesbian identities from public discourse , there seems to be quite a strong activist base of lesbian, bisexual and queer women. A study conducted by WISG in 2015 reports that lesbian and bisexual women show greater readiness to engage in activism (50% of the LB group vs. 40% of the GB group) than in their gay male counterparts. In addition, 58 and 40%, respectively of the interviewed lesbian and bisexual women attend regular meetings and are involved in the activities of the organizations, a number that is three times higher than the number of their gay and bisexual counterparts (Aghdgomelashvili 2016). This can be explained by the fact that women in general represent the core of many social movements in Georgia and are on the front line when it comes to alternative forms of activism. For instance, the first activist group in Georgia refusing to become an NGO in order to respond to sexism and homophobia without formal constraints was the Independent Group of Feminists. The reason why it refused was that NGOs were not vocal in challenging the public expressions of sexism, for instance, by politicians, and also did not pursue an explicitly feminist agenda. The core of this group was represented both by straight and queer women. It is also interesting that lesbian, bisexual and queer women show a higher level of public identification with their sexual orientation than is shown in the gay male community (Gvianishvili 2012). This is confirmed by looking at the coming out dynamics, which show that lesbian and bisexual women are mostly out with their friends (also present in the activist groups), but the two most stressful spaces for them are the work environment and the family and they avoid coming out there (Aghdgomelashvili 2016). Thus, it is argued that the active segment of the LBQ community balances concealment in certain spaces by openness in other circles especially tied to activism, given that both concealment and coming out are considered to be at the same time stress factors and coping mechanisms (Gvianishvili 2012).

While lesbian and bisexual women are invisible, the visibility of transgender women has increased over the past 3 years, but it has done so at the expense of the extreme victimization of trans identities. Violence against transgender women has been highlighted recently (very much thanks to the increasingly active role of trans sex workers in the movement). However, the brutal violence that they constantly face has prevented much reporting on the lives of lesbian and bisexual women. The public discussion around the lives of transgender women started in 2014 when a young trans woman was murdered in Tbilisi (Popovaite 2014). Another trans woman shared the same fate in 2016 (DFWatch 2017). Both were brutally murdered by men who were arrested and tried, but bias as a motive was neither investigated properly, nor, of course, proven. After this case, the number of trans women speaking openly about the violence and discrimination they face increased. Transgender men and non-binary transgender people (especially those assigned female sex at birth) are also left out of public discourse . Because Georgian society is very patriarchal and men (biologically speaking) are the primary recipients of aggression outdoors (the situation in the family is wholly different), the problems that lesbian and bi women face remain largely invisible.

The issues regarding the agenda of the LGBT movement and its public reception form a hierarchy: if you are brutally attacked outdoors, your issue ends up in the spotlight but if the same thing is threatened at home, you either do not come out or you deal with the whole range of problems on your own. While violence against women in the LGBT community is often underestimated, research shows that by 2014 violent incidents against LBT women, especially in correlation with activism, had exceeded that in previous years. The frequency of physical violence against LB women in terms of the number of violent incidents per person outran the violence against the gay and bisexual community (LB women—36%; GB men—22%) (Gvianishvili 2012). In this hierarchy, the mental and emotional well-being of lesbian, bisexual women and transgender persons is scarcely addressed. Yet several studies suggest that stigma and discrimination damage these areas of LBT lives. For instance, along with concealment of one’s identity and difficulties in coming to terms with one’s sexuality , the constant expectation or actual experience of physical and psychological violence based on one’s sexual orientation or gender identity remains an important stress factor for the LBT community (Gvianishvili 2012).

In a research project exploring the situation of transgender persons in Georgia, we see that the index of depression in the community is higher than normal (Gvianishvili 2014). Each of the respondents who scored high on the Depression Scale were in the years preceding or concurrent with the research, experiencing depression to which physical and psychological violence, based on their gender identity and expression, contributed. Another research project which explores the needs of LGB persons in terms of healthcare showed that lesbian and bisexual women showed greater inclination to suicidal ideation and self-harm than their male counterparts did (Aghdgomelashvili 2016) According to the results 44% of all the respondents had had suicidal thoughts (56% lesbian and bisexual women and 32% of gay and bisexual men) in the years before the research, of whom 7% had attempted to take their own lives and 16% had engaged in self-harm behaviour. Lesbian and bisexual women reported higher numbers of attempted suicides and forms of self-harm behaviours (32%) than their male counterparts (8%) (ibid.).

The data reported above show that the environment of hostility and politicization of LGBT issues has directly affected the lives of lesbians, bisexual women and transgender persons, despite the fact that these identities remain to a large extent invisible. This invisibility is caused by the general disregard for female sexuality and gender variance both inside and outside the movement. The concerns are higher as regards legal frameworks and more overt expressions of violence, leaving low emotional well-being and stigma, together with discriminatory social practices, unaddressed and stifling many women. There is still no explicit agenda for women in the community, even though the above studies speak of the closer attachment to the community among LBQ women, which could be connected to the lack of variety in women only spaces. We can argue that because lesbian, bisexual and queer women are more open to the diversity in the community, and show higher empathy for various gender expressions (Gvianishvili 2012), they too readily accept the given hierarchy of problems and take on an agenda which is more important to other social groups instead of paying attention to working on their own representation and positive visibility.

Conclusions

This chapter contributes to the growing, yet still sparse, literature on LGBT people in the South Caucasus. It has explored the dynamics of the politicization of LGBT issues in Georgia and how it impacts on the everyday life of lesbian, bisexual women and transgender persons. The foregoing discussion brings out four concluding observations to be made. First, as yet the issues relating to LGBT people’s rights are highly politicized in Georgia. The discourse on homosexuality dominating the public space in recent years consists of tactics, such as the portrayal of homosexuality as abnormality, deviation; making parallels between homosexuality and behaviour perceived as deviant in the society; statements saying that homosexuality is a vice originating in the West, which puts traditions and religion at risk; discussions about same-sex marriage as a threat to the moral fabric of society; calls for discrimination and violence against LGBT people and a generally implied message that, while homosexuals may be allowed to exist, they should not express themselves in public space (Khorbaladze 2015).

Second, this discourse follows a patriarchal logic of making women invisible and focusing on male homosexuality and everything that is perceived to express the ‘loss of manhood’. The instances in which the most socially marginalized subgroup of the community—transgender women—is able to gain some visibility point to the overtly brutal violence that they face. The cause for such visibility has been two murders of transgender women in Tbilisi in 2014 and 2016, which caused both the higher engagement of NGOs in the issue and the more active participation and criticism of transgender women themselves. However, the representation is very seldom empowering, since it is based primarily on the victimization of transgender identities.

The third observation, which follows from the first two, is that lesbian, bisexual and queer women, while being very active inside LBT, form a movement which continues to be invisible, since the general agenda of the movement does not cover issues that are more significant to individual identities; rather, they act in general. So, in a way the agenda of the movement (or different components of it) follows the dominant discourse leaving the battles of LB women and most of the trans community tied into the hidden domestic sphere.

The final observation relates to avenues for future research. Acknowledging the limitations of this chapter, it has become clear that more empirical research is needed to document the everyday experiences of lesbian, bisexual women and transgender persons in connection with politicization and their hostile environment. Such research should also serve the purpose of bringing out the perspective of these groups and increasing the positive visibility of their identities, thus shaping an agenda that is more inclusive of the issues that matter to the sub-groups of the community.

Notes

  1. 1.

    After the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003, the Georgian government implemented important reforms including one of the police and one of the taxation laws. The government imposed zero tolerance of corruption and gang violence, which helped improve the situation (World Bank 2012).

  2. 2.

    According to the World Value Survey (2014) and Pew Research Centre (2017) religion is very important for Georgians and the Georgian Orthodox Church is named as the people’s most trusted institution. The Church and the State in Georgia are formally separated. However, the Orthodox Church has privileges defined by a special contract with the State, which include receiving significant annual contributions from the state budget, as well as full tax exemption. The Orthodox Church is currently an important political player, expressing strictly conservative opinions and providing inputs on a variety of subjects from education to women’s reproductive health and rights. The Church’s power over politics is also quite strong.

  3. 3.

    The initiative came from the Church and traditionalist groups and was endorsed by the Georgian Dream Coalition and later the Georgian Dream party. Despite fierce opposition from civil society and a very few politicians, the amendment was adopted. This happened despite the fact that none of the Georgian LGBT organizations or activists ever advocated marriage equality or civil partnerships. Some politicians from the ruling party stated that the amendment was intended to prevent marriage equality in future, while others stated that it would put an end to polarizing political speculations on the issue of Western values and same-sex marriage.

  4. 4.

    Organizations such as the Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group (WISG), Identoba and Human Rights Education and Monitoring Centre EMC, have regularly researched the situation of LGBT people in Georgia since 2012, with separate research on the situation of transgender people, and also prepared a number of reports on the legal conditions and implementation of laws that apply to SOGI issues.