The Weight of Resilience: A Reflection for IDAHOBIT 2025

Author: Marline Oluchi policy and advocacy lead, CHEVS

“Resilience” has long been the word used to describe LGBTQI+ people. A badge. A compliment. A survival story. For LGBTQI+ communities in West Africa, resilience has become the fabric we’re expected to wear  daily, without question. It has come to symbolize strength under fire, endurance in the face of violent laws, eroded rights, and escalating hate.

But today, on IDAHOBIT -  the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, we ask: What does it mean to keep calling us resilient in a world determined to break us?

Across our region, LGBTQI+ people are under siege. Anti-LGBTQI+ laws and policies are spreading like wildfire. Hard-won advocacy gains  often built on feminist and human rights frameworks  are being stripped away. Anti-rights movements are bolder, louder, and better funded than ever. They organize. They legislate. They kill.

And still, we’re called resilient.

But resilience, while real, is not infinite.
It is not a shield.
It should not be the condition for our dignity.

When we laud the resilience of LGBTQI+ people without naming the violence that demands it, we risk normalizing the expectation that we will simply endure again, and again, and again.

Let’s be clear: LGBTQI+ people in West Africa are not just resisting in courts or on protest lines. Every single day, we get up and live through systems designed to erase us. We work, pay taxes, care for our families, navigate public transport, healthcare, security checkpoints, digital platforms, and hostile streets all while carrying the weight of criminalization, stigma, and exclusion.

It’s getting harder.
Harder to find safe spaces.
Harder to get healthcare.
Harder to speak, move, organize.
Harder to exist,  let alone thrive.

And all the while, anti-rights actors use myths like “African Family Values” to mask their hate in nationalism, spreading disinformation that paints queerness as foreign, dangerous, un-African. They use religion, culture, and law as weapons. And yet, the world keeps applauding our resilience.

No, LGBTQI+ people do not have an endless well of strength to draw from.
No, we should not be expected to survive just because we have survived before.

There is a thin, dangerous line between celebrating resilience and ignoring the brutality that makes it necessary.

Resilience is not just a compliment. It’s a burden. It implies we can take more and that the world can do less.

So today, as we honour IDAHOBIT, let’s interrogate this word.

Let us not romanticize resilience while our communities are bleeding.
Let us not uplift strength and ignore suffering.
Let us not expect survival when what we owe each other is justice.

We do not want to be resilient.
We want to be free.