Small But Not Silent

Before we dive in, let us understand why organizations like Pride Bhutan exist. We exist because we serve as the bridge between our members and the institutions, agencies, and systems that shape their lives. Founded by LGBTI+ individuals alongside non-LGBTI+ people who care deeply, people who understood the issues not just intellectually but through lived experience. Pride Bhutan was built on a single, urgent conviction: that the barriers our community faces must not be passed on to future generations. Our foundation was rooted in the belief that access should never be a privilege. Access to government programs, social services, healthcare, and legal protections are not gifts to be granted selectively, they belong to every person. Pride Bhutan was created to walk alongside our members so they could fully benefit from the systems that exist to serve all citizens, and equally, to make it easier for the government and other agencies to reach our members when delivering those very programs and services to the people of Bhutan.

At the heart of it all was a simple understanding, that the Gross National Happiness is only meaningful if it includes everyone. Happiness is not a national average, it is the lived reality of each individual person, and if even one person is left behind, the promise of a happy nation remains incomplete. Inspired by the vision of His Majesty the Great Fourth and guided by Their Majesties' enduring commitment to a compassionate Bhutan, Pride Bhutan was founded on the faith that our country's greatest strength lies in the dignity and happiness of every one of its people, without exception.

For us, it was simple; we wanted to ‘do something’ for our people and our country. It was never about resentment towards the system, nor was it about fighting the system. It was about working within it, alongside it, and strengthening it, so that no one would be left out.

Despite this conviction and simple understanding, we were never prepared for what came our way. Perhaps we were naive. We did not anticipate the politics, the pushbacks, or the quiet, persistent bullying that small organizations like ours routinely face, a kind that does not always announce itself loudly, but slowly erodes morale, trust, and ultimately the very people we exist to serve.

One of the most painful patterns we encountered was being reduced to a token. Under the pretext of "inclusion" or the increasingly hollow word "partnership," larger organizations including well-established Civil Society Organizations would reach out with warmth and enthusiasm. "Please come, we would like to partner with you," they would say. And so we would show up. Consultations would follow, sometimes many of them. Our people would share their experiences, their pain, their insights. These would be carefully noted, shaped into interventions, and folded into a proposal. And then, once the funding is secured, we would disappear from the process entirely. No consultation during implementation. No voice in the design. No seat at the table we helped build. We would resurface only as participants, counted in attendance sheets and referenced in reports to satisfy a donor's checkbox for inclusivity.

The worst instances are not even that generous. Some organizations submit proposals without any consultation, secure the funding, and then invite a handful of our members to attend a single event, only to submit a report proudly declaring, "we included marginalized communities" or "we are an inclusive organization." Our people's identities, struggles, and presence are used as evidence of good work that was never done for them. That is not partnership. That is extraction, dressed up in the language of solidarity.

Then there is another kind entirely, perhaps the most dishonest of all. These are organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with LGBTIQ+ issues, have never worked with our community, and have no genuine understanding of or commitment to our lives. Yet they have learned that the word "inclusivity" opens doors and more importantly, unlocks funding. So they wear it like a badge, slipping LGBTIQ+ language into their proposals just enough to satisfy a criteria box, with no intention of ever doing the work it implies. They do not advocate for us. They do not show up when it matters. They will not stand beside us in rooms where it is uncomfortable to do so. But when there is money on the table framed around inclusion and diversity, they are first in line.

This is not a misunderstanding or a difference in approach, it is a deliberate misuse of our community's visibility and vulnerability for financial gain. Our existence, and our struggles which our members face daily become, in their hands, nothing more than a line item in a budget narrative. And when the project ends and the report is submitted, they move on, having extracted value from a community they never truly saw, never truly served, and never truly respected.

But the exploitation does not stop at funding. There is something even more insidious that we have witnessed, the quiet theft of representation itself. Seats at tables, that are specifically created to hear the voices of marginalized communities, including ours, are routinely occupied by people who do not belong to those communities and were never meant to fill those seats. These are spaces carved out precisely because our voices have historically been absent from decision-making. They exist as a correction, a deliberate effort to include those who have been excluded. And yet, time and again, those seats are taken by individuals and organizations who appoint themselves as spokespeople for communities they do not live in, do not belong to, and do not answer to.

The consequences of this are profound and deeply damaging. When someone who has never experienced discrimination speaks on behalf of those who face it every day, the policies and interventions that follow reflect their assumptions rather than our realities. When our seat is occupied by someone else, we are not just absent from the room, we are actively displaced. The decisions made in those spaces shape laws, programs, and services that directly affect our members' lives. To be spoken for, rather than heard, is its own form of silencing. It is representation without accountability, and it serves the system's need to appear inclusive far more than it serves our community's need to be genuinely heard.

True representation means nothing if the people in the room do not reflect the people being discussed. A seat reserved for our community is not a seat for whoever finds it convenient to sit in.

And then there are those who call us simply to listen or so it appears. They invite us to consultations, roundtables, and meetings, asking us to share our needs, our struggles, and our experiences. We show up, we open up, and we pour out the realities of our community with the hope that something will come of it. But nothing ever does. These gatherings become a ritual of extraction without action, a performance of concern that never translates into courage. They will listen, nod, and take notes, every single time, across meeting after meeting, year after year. But they will not lift a single finger to do something about what they have heard. Because doing something requires courage, the courage to advocate in uncomfortable rooms, to challenge systems that push back, to stand beside a community that the world has not always made it easy to stand beside. Listening without action is not empathy. It is, in its own quiet way, another form of abandonment.

If you have come this far, you may be wondering why did Pride Bhutan entertain this for so long? It is a fair question, and the answer is as simple as it is heartbreaking: hope. The hope that perhaps this time, something would be different. The hope that even an imperfect collaboration might yield something, anything, that would ease the lives of our members. It was never about money for us. Though we have struggled for years to keep ourselves afloat, scraping together resources just to remain operational, our eyes were always on our beneficiaries, never on our own survival. We endured the tokenism, the sidelining, and the empty consultations because we could not bear the thought of closing a door that might, even slightly, even imperfectly open something for the people we serve.

But we have come to understand that this hope, as sincere as it was, has come at a cost we can no longer afford to pay. The resources, the funding, the opportunities, the platforms, the seats that are meant for our community are not reaching our community. They are being absorbed, redirected, and consumed by those who positioned themselves as gatekeepers. Every project that bypasses us, every seat that is taken from us, every consultation that goes nowhere is not just an injustice to Pride Bhutan, it is a direct harm to the very people those resources were meant to serve. We can no longer allow our patience and goodwill to be the mechanism through which our community is denied what belongs to them.

That era ends right here, right now. Pride Bhutan is drawing a clear and firm line. We will no longer accept being reduced to a token, a checkbox, or a footnote in someone else's narrative of inclusion. We will no longer offer our community's trust, time, and lived experiences to those who treat them as resources to be mined rather than realities to be addressed. We will no longer fill seats at tables where our presence is decorative and our voice is unwelcome. And we will no longer mistake the performance of partnership for the real thing.

We are not ending our commitment to collaboration, we are raising the standard for what collaboration must mean. Genuine partnership requires mutual respect, shared power, honest consultation, and the courage to show up even when it is difficult. Anything less is not partnership. It is exploitation with better branding.

To every organization, institution, and individual that wishes to work with Pride Bhutan and the community we serve, we remain open, we remain willing, and we remain hopeful. But we come to the table as equals, or we do not come at all. Our community's dignity is not negotiable. Our members' lives are not a project deliverable. And our presence is not a favor we owe anyone.

That era is over. This one begins with us standing fully in our worth, for our people, for our country, and for the Bhutan that belongs to all of us.