By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-08-14 19:25:44 | Updated at 2026-08-14 21:40:40
14 hours ago
In October 2025, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto issued a presidential decree outlining the country’s national defense policy and the nonmilitary threats his administration identified as important to the nation’s security. Listed in the latter category, alongside terrorism, radicalism, and drug addiction, was “the promotion of LGBTQ+ culture,” as reported in the Jakarta Post.
While the decree drew concern from civil society organizations in Indonesia, particularly pro-democracy and queer rights groups, it initially received limited attention outside Indonesia. Last month, however, a wave of hate crimes targeted transgender women across the country, highlighting Prabowo’s decree and what activists have described as the worsening conditions for LGBTQ+ people in Indonesia.
Several transphobic incidents took place during July 14-16 of this year, all of which involved mobs attacking trans women specifically. In one particular instance in the West Java city of Bogor, over 15 trans women were doused with urine, forced to strip naked, and physically beaten in an incident that was recorded and later shared to social media. The online footage itself attracted more hate from some Indonesian netizens, who used slurs and called for further such attacks against trans people.
While Indonesia lacks explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ laws, several legal frameworks still indirectly discriminate against queer people, and stigma remains prevalent, largely as a result of conservative Muslim forces in the country. Transgender individuals are permitted to change their legal gender only if they have undergone sex reassignment surgery and subsequently received judicial approval. Same-sex sexual activities, meanwhile, can be criminalized under moral laws. The westernmost province of Aceh, the one Indonesian region governed by syariah law, stands as the most conservative on the issue, punishing homosexual acts with flogging, fines, or even jail time.
As such, Prabowo’s October 2025 decree represents a first step toward codifying anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination into federal law, using the language of securitization to justify this decision as necessary to preserve the peace, unity, and safety of Indonesia. According to Febi Ramadhan, a lecturer and researcher in social anthropology at Universitas Indonesia, this move is less than surprising. His research focuses on anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in Indonesia’s political leadership, and highlights that such attitudes have significantly hardened over the last ten years.
“Starting in 2016, we saw a moral panic around queer people created by the government, sparked by proposed bills to criminalize LGBTQ+ behaviour, and key political leaders openly classifying queer identities as a form of mental illness,” he said. According to Febi, the transphobic attacks witnessed last month are just the latest such hate crimes to target the community, which have become more frequent over the past decade.
For Febi, periods of economic turmoil are key drivers of homophobia and transphobia in Indonesia, with queer people being demonized to divert attention from other issues the government doesn’t want to address or take responsibility for. In this case, the legacy of the nationwide 2025 protests, which saw large-scale public unrest as a result of the stagnating economy and sinking currency, is undoubtedly at play.
“At the same time, we have seen a shrinking of civil spaces across Indonesia, as a result of various laws restricting freedom of speech and assembly,” Febi added. “The community is facing the same crises again and again, but with diminishing resources, meaning we’re fighting several issues on many fronts at the same time.”
Among the laws targeting freedom of speech in the country, few have a bigger impact on public discourse than the Broadcasting Bill. In line with the government’s moral panic in 2016, the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission issued circulars explicitly banning television and radio stations from broadcasting content that features LGBTQ+ content, under the guise of protecting public morality and shielding children.
Rifki Lafayette, a queer Indonesian journalist, highlights how these restrictions have paved the way for the government’s further amplification of anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes among the general public. “Professionally, there is a constant chilling effect: pitching a story addressing LGBTQ+ persecution will likely be killed by editors afraid of government reprisal or backlash from religious hardliners,” he said.
Rifki said that in order to avoid toeing the line and potentially face backlash from the government or their editors, many journalists choose to self-censor, cementing a culture of silence and taboo with regard to queer debates and issues.
He added that, over the years, the normalization of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by the state has emboldened public vigilantes, who target and sometimes attack queer individuals, as was witnessed in Bogor. This, in turn, makes it more challenging for journalists like Rifki to report on LGBTQ+ stories in the field. “[We] are actively watched and scrutinized in public spaces, and if [we] are perceived to fit a queer stereotype, [we] risk immediate verbal harassment, being targeted with slurs, or the threat of physical intimidation from crowds,” he said.
Cornelius Prabhaswara, a public policy student and human rights activist with online advocacy group Social Justice Indonesia (SJI), echoed this sentiment when discussing the ways in which the grassroots have tried to adapt and respond to the various hate campaigns against the local queer community.
SJI focuses on social media campaigns raising awareness on difficult and troublesome issues in the Indonesian context, including the death penalty and LGBTQ+ rights. Cornelius, who joined the nonprofit in 2023, described one of their key purposes as “making civil society more connected to the younger Gen Z activists.” One such example was mobilizing resources for student activists during the anti-government protests in 2025.
With public sentiment now increasingly turning against trans people, Cornelius pointed to the dangers of public mobs and vigilantes, which has impacted the ways in which nonprofits like SJI can mobilize for the community. “During the 2016 moral panic, attacks came primarily from religious authorities and political leaders, but today those attacks are perpetrated by random individuals, which makes it hard for us to know who we are up against,” he said.
Faced with these new challenges, SJI turned to working with legal NGOs to manage online discourse and curb the growing reality of queer people being doxxed online. As evidenced by the comments left on the video of trans women attacked in Bogor, public mobs aren’t just a threat to queer people in the streets, but also follow them at home via social media.
Despite the pressure from homophobes and transphobes online, digital platforms remain crucial in allowing for grassroots organizing within Indonesia’s queer community, particularly during crises. In the aftermath of the Bogor hate crimes, fellow transgender women took to social media, namely Twitter and Instagram, to facilitate crowdfunding efforts to support the victims.
Cornelius identified mutual aid campaigns as a core part of community organizing within Indonesia’s queer community today, especially since U.S. President Donald Trump defunded USAID last year, resulting in thousands of international NGOs across the globe losing most or even all their funding.
“Many gender and sexuality advocacy groups received funding from either USAID or UNAIDS, both of which have now dried up entirely, forcing those groups to think of new ways to provide for the community,” he said.
Additionally, he praised younger Indonesians, many of whom have become more comfortable openly expressing their queerness despite the less-than-favorable social climate, for wanting to step forward during this crisis.
“We are seeing more young LGBTQ+ come forward asking how to help and mobilize, including people who were never involved in activist circles before this,” he said. He also emphasized the need for new faces to get involved and continue advocacy work in the long run, particularly amid the shift to digital activism.
Social media thus becomes a double-edged sword for queer people in Indonesia. On the one hand, the digital realm makes hate crimes more visceral and prolongs the effects by exposing the victims to further backlash from netizens ganging up online. On the other, it also provides younger Indonesians with platforms such as TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, to not only find community and come to terms with their gender and sexual identity, but also find ways to support collective efforts for fellow queer individuals.
With the looming threat of further hate campaigns, fueled by the state and emboldened by vigilantes on the ground, the mobilization capabilities of Indonesia’s LGBTQ+ population will prove crucial to respond to future crises, as well as push back against the codification of homophobia and transphobia into law. As Febi puts it: “LGBTQ+ people feel that [we] have no one but [ourselves], so [we] have to fight even harder on our own.”
