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The right to asylum on grounds of sexuality and/or gender-based persecution is frequently seen as synonymous with the right to "exit" one's oppressive religious community. This article aims to critique this assumption through a focus on LGBTQ+ asylum claimants, refugees and support providers everyday negotiations with and between faith, religion, sexuality and gender identity in the UK. Drawing on critical scholarship on religion, gender, sexuality, difference, and asylum, as well as empirical research with asylum claimants and secular and religious support organizations in the UK, this article shows how LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum claimants respond to experiences of marginalization through processes of "transformative accommodation" between faith traditions and liberal LGBTQ+ rights. Such accommodations highlight the instability of assumptions that view LGBTQ+ rights in conflict with faith and religious belief, in turn contesting the basis on which racialized, secular and gendered differences that pervade contexts of LGBTQ+ asylum are maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, LGBTQI rights have become central to debates around international development, human rights, refugee protection, and diversity. Yet research and experience in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) reveals significant problems with LGBTQI as a way of identifying individuals who do not conform to heterosexual and binary gender norms, in order to support their rights. In this article, we draw on experience of working to advance gender and sexual rights to illustrate the shortcomings of LGBTQI identity categories, and use findings from the Centre for Transnational Development and Collaboration’s (CTDC) four-year programme of research into LGBTQI rights in the MENA region to support our argument further. This research identified major problems in policies and debates on the rights of individuals whose sexual orientation and/or gender identity differs from the norm. In response to this, CTDC has developed a tool to address rights in programme development and advocacy, using a new approach, Sexual Practice and Gender Performance (SPGP), for work in the MENA region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]