There are international conferences, and then there are international conferences in Dhaka. The latter traditionally involve large hotels, larger banners, some diplomatic courtesies, a lot of loosely tailored suits and enough talk of “dialogue” to make disagreement seem almost indecent.

The Bay of Bengal Conversation is supposed to be different.

Organised annually by the Centre for Governance Studies, it has become one of Bangladesh's most prestigious international gatherings. This year's fifth edition brings more than 200 speakers, 300 delegates and 1,000 participants from more than 100 countries to the Pan Pacific Sonargaon. 

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman inaugurated it. Former presidents, former prime ministers, diplomats, military officials, academics, journalists and business leaders have come to Dhaka to discuss the difficult questions of a fractured world.

CGS calls it an “inclusive, non-aligned space” where diverse voices can “challenge assumptions”. Splendid. Then somebody challenged an assumption. And apparently that was quite enough diversity!

Bangladeshi trans feminist and rights activist Ho Chi Minh Islam had been scheduled to participate on October 5, the final day of the conference, in a discussion titled — with an irony that would embarrass a satirist — “Governing Diverse Societies”.

She will no longer participate.

A source closely associated with the conference said CGS President Zillur Rahman personally called Ho Chi Minh and advised her not to attend. Her photograph and details of her participation were subsequently removed from promotional materials and the conference website, as Daily Waadaa reported.

Zillur disputes the description of Ho Chi Minh as a conference “speaker”. She was, he told Waadaa, due to participate in a closed-door discussion involving a moderator and two speakers. Fine.

Will she participate in that? “No.”

Facebook is where the trouble began. National Citizen Party leader Md Sarjis Alam objected to Ho Chi Minh's scheduled presence and claimed that Dr Zubaida Rahman, wife of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, would be “sharing the stage” with transgender activists.

There was a slight difficulty with this accusation. It wasn't true. Shahadat Hossain Shadhin, a deputy press secretary to the prime minister, publicly corrected it. Yet the factual mistake became almost secondary to the moral accusation wrapped around it.

Sarjis invoked the Islamic account of the people of Prophet Lut and warned religious people to take note of those who “implement, promote or facilitate” what he regards as agendas hostile to family, religion, society and the state.

“Homosexuality or the so-called transgender ‘disease’ should be treated and people should be rehabilitated,” he wrote, “but there should be no indulgence or promotion.”

There are several things tangled together here that ought to be untangled.

Sarjis has the right to his religious beliefs. Bangladesh is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. Millions of Bangladeshis hold conservative views on sexuality and gender. Liberalism cannot mean that Ho Chi Minh Islam is entitled to her convictions but Sarjis Alam is not entitled to his.

Nor should disagreement with contemporary gender politics automatically be dismissed as hatred. But there is an enormous difference between disagreeing with somebody's ideas and deciding that the person herself should disappear from a very ‘international’ and ‘liberal’ conference. 

Ho Chi Minh's presence at a conference is not compulsory agreement with Ho Chi Minh. Sitting beside a transgender woman does not make one transgender and a conference badge is not a theological endorsement.

These distinctions ought to be elementary. Yet the debate around transgender people in Bangladesh frequently collapses homosexuality, transgender identity, sexual behaviour, gender dysphoria, hijra communities, Western LGBT politics and political activism into one enormous suspicious foreign package.

It is a remarkably convoluted way of discussing human beings. Sarjis's intervention illustrates that confusion particularly well. He is not alone in it. The problem is much larger than one politician. The whole Bangladesh badly lacks sensitisation about transgender people.

They are often discussed as a “phenomenon”: something to approve, condemn, cure, tolerate, fear or defend. Ho Chi Minh Islam, inconveniently, is a person. She is a registered nurse. She previously worked at Square Hospital.

She founded Krishnachura, a community organisation working to create spaces for gender minorities, particularly outside Bangladesh's metropolitan elite. She has been an International Visitor Leadership Program fellow of the US State Department.

And CGS knew perfectly well who she was.

She had participated in two of its policy dialogues as recently as January, including discussions on gender equality, inclusive democracy and minority rights. Which makes the obvious question unavoidable. If Ho Chi Minh was sufficiently respectable to discuss minority rights before an election, what transformed her into an unacceptable presence afterwards?

Facebook?

There is an even more uncomfortable precedent.

In 2023, Ho Chi Minh was invited to speak at a career event at North South University. Opposition emerged over her participation. Her appearance was eventually cancelled, with concerns about her safety cited.

The affair caused an uproar. The exclusion was widely condemned. Commentators questioned what sort of university invites a speaker and then retreats when students object to the speaker's identity. North South University subsequently described the incident as regrettable and spoke of inclusion.

Three years later, something remarkably similar has happened at one of Bangladesh's most prestigious international conferences, and many of the people who can normally locate the vocabulary of inclusion at impressive speed appear to have temporarily misplaced the dictionary.

The silence is instructive.

Ho Chi Minh herself shared a post asking whether anybody participating in the conference would at least raise what had happened to her.

Principles, unfortunately, become most interesting when practising them costs something. It is easy to support free expression when the speaker is fashionable and it is easy to celebrate diversity when the diverse person is decorative. And it is easy to write “inclusive” on a conference website.

The test arrives when somebody important complains.

Bangladesh's transgender population already knows rather more about this distinction than conference organisers do.

The country formally recognised hijras as a third gender more than a decade ago. Yet formal recognition has hardly abolished social exclusion. Transgender and gender-diverse Bangladeshis continue to encounter barriers in employment, education, housing and ordinary public life.

They are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible…stared at in public, yet rarely permitted to enter public institutions as ordinary citizens.

The Bay of Bengal Conversation explicitly sells itself as an arena for difficult ideas. CGS says the conference exists because political polarisation has made meaningful dialogue harder and because trusted spaces are needed where diverse voices can meet and challenge assumptions.

Yet an institution hoping to navigate the Indo-Pacific apparently found navigating Facebook rather harder. That is the damaging part.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa