My Country: Queerness and Internalised Mental Enslavement

The UK Privy Council  sits as the top judicial body for several independent Caribbean countries previously colonised by the UK empire. This month, the Privy Council reviewed Jason Jones' appeal of Trinidad and Tobago's 2025 overturning of the 2018 landmark ruling that legalised same-sex relations and intimacy, effectively decriminalising homosexuality in Trinidad and Tobago 93 years after its criminalisation.

Jason Jones,  an openly gay Trinidadian man, first succeeded with this case through judicial ruling in 2018, where the Trinbagonian High Court effectively legalised same-sex relations, not marriage. In 2018, Jason Jones was facing the Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago [Faris Al-Rawi], as the case was made against the state.

In 2025, after appealing this ruling, the same legal bodies of the state of Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the Council of Evangelical Churches in TT, overturned the 2018 ruling. Jason Jones, represented by another former Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago [Anand Ramlogan] has now appealed this to the highest court in the Trinbagonian juridical system, the UK Privy Council. The results of this ruling are expected in three to six months’ time.

A Brief Timeline: Who? What? Where When?

Jason Jones started working on this legal case in 2015. It has since been over a decade fighting for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Trinidad and Tobago. Jones is championing a fight that has brought him in confrontation with respective Trinbagonian governments as well as certain religious bodies. More importantly, this is a fight about the respect, unalienable right to love and to be loved. 

In the 20th century, the 1925 British empire implemented this so-called 'buggery law' in Trinidad and Tobago. It was later entered into the 1986 Sexual Offences Act [SOA]  after the passing of the respective 1962 and 1976 Independence and Republic constitutions of our twin-island state. The 1925 law cemented what was already a colonial attitude towards homosexuality, towards queerness overall. The 1986 SOA kept these 'offences', in particular the act of anal sex between men. The 1986 SOA however added in the criminalization of anal sex between men and women as well. It is perhaps evident, but this added act is not policed or socially sidelined as an ‘offence’. In the 1986 SOA, exceptions to what are considered 'sexual offences' apply to relations between a husband and his wife, and between consenting men and women above the age of 16.

As a ‘soverign’ nation, the preservation of colonial-era laws, despite its apparent unconstitutionality, happens ‘arguably’ due to what is called the 'savings clause'. 'Arguably', as defining the 'savings clause' and its application is the main point of contention on which the July 2026 appeal is being discussed. 

In the 2018 ruling, Jones made his case based on his constitutional rights to privacy and physical intimacy between two adult consenting partners. The respondent at the time, the Attorney General for Trinidad and Tobago [Faris Al-Rawi] appears to have built his case around the fine details of legal wording [point 7.2 p.1433-34], which is part of what appears to have prompted the re-criminalisation of certain sexual acts in 2025. 

In the July 2026 appeal, the respondent [the Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago] is joined by the Trinidad and Tobago Council of Evangelical Churches [CEC]. The CEC has long fought against 'buggery and acts of sexual indecency'. Jones’ legal team is strengthened with the support of the Trinidad and Tobago Equality Opportunity Commission, who joined the case as an ‘interested party’, and several LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in the Caribbean and Latin America.

"Criminalisation of whom a person loves – and with whom they may express that love through physical intimacy – does not merely limit a person’s ambit of actions: it denies them a core feature of their identity. ", p.9 p.1497 of the Intervener's Case to the Privy Council, July 2026

There are several violences, traumas gripped within that brief timeline. The first is one commented one by the Jason Jones himself: that the government "have wasted millions of taxpayers’ money fighting me". Fighting this, a very basic right to consensual love and intimacy that is confronted by daily, microaggressive to outright lethally aggressive violences in Trinidad and Tobago. The bodies that developed this outlook through oppressive and dehumanising violence are the same bodies that called our ancestors chattel and treated their freedom from enslavement as a gift our ancestors should be thankful for. These are Christian faith religious bodies, administrative bodies whose infrastructure now has inherited, and to a great extent reproduced, the violence of this outlook. 

There is dangerous historical and current precedent to rates of IPV in Trinidad and Tobago, with quantitative data from the 19th century that Brereton outlines in Shepherd & Bean co-ed Gender-Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities. Brereton's argument traces how the foundational annihilation of First Peoples' indigenous civilisations in Trinidad and Tobago, the genocidal conditions of chattel enslavement created the foundations for a culture of violence in Trinidad and Tobago that was further validated, indeed deliberately sustained by colonial administration and authorities after Emancipation and through to the handover of executive power at the time of independence. Brereton's discourse not only tracks GBV as exercised by colonial authorities and bodies but outlines the psychic internalisation of a system of dehumanisation on the patterns of behaviour of the descendents of enslaved persons.

Today, rates of IPV, GBV, abuse and assault are recorded and documented, nonetheless between 2018 and 2024, where 51.4% of total reports of domestic violence were for assault by beating, only an average of 2.5% were actually charged. 

While conducting that research, part of what I noticed was the consistent underreporting of any instance of GBV by Trinbagonian bodies, with a particular lack in State-reporting to international bodies and organisations in compliance with international law. This was valid across the other countries in the Caribbean on which I conducted that research to understand the regional framing of GBV today. 

Further, in the historical roots to GBV in Trinidad and Tobago, as for instance analysed by Brereton, Husein, Mohammed, as in the systematic dehumanisation of African persons for the purpose of extractive labour, the roles of churches were key in exercising the social training of that outlook. Churches were crucial in validating, participating in the violence of chattel enslavement. Physically, institutionally, but perhaps more importantly in the wiring of our ancestors' and therefore our mentality in our own oppression. The different bodies of colonial infrastructure went hand in hand in developing a racial patriarchal system of dominance that functioned so ‘well’ our communities, our cultures could internalise it, reproduce it to the detriment of our health, well-being and humanity. It is therefore extremely interesting to note that the Trinidad and Tobago Council of Evangelical Churches joined the Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago in arguing for keeping the 2025 ruling in place, re-affirming the criminalisation of same-sex relations. This decision targets queer communities overall, and validates keeping a subconscious to openly harmful culture of gender-based violence in all its forms in Trinidad and Tobago. My country. Our country.

For those of us who are queer Trinbagonians, and/or who are part of organisations fighting and advocating for the betterment of gender justice, reproductive health and rights in our country and in our region, this ruling is significant. What decision the UK Privy Council makes later this calendar year will affect the communities we are a part of and work with/for, as well as affect the institutional challenges we face at all levels of power in doing our work. Because even if this case, in wording, concerns same-sex relations between men and assigned male homosexuality, the psychic rot that fights for its continued criminalisation, is a part of us, and fights against all of us, regardless of our sexual orientation.