Anwar Government Joins in the Scapegoating of Queer Malaysians
People carry placards as they took part in a Womens Day March asking for their rights in gender equality, end child marriage and recognition of LGBT in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 12, 2023 | Credit: Zahim Mohd/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
In an article for East Asia Forum, Vilashini Somiah and Indramalar Satkunasingam assert that the Malaysian government is enacting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in an attempt to placate conservative Islamist coalition partners and political factions.
In February 2026, the Malaysian government announced it would replace the term ‘LGBT’ with ‘deviant culture’ (budaya songsang) in public discourse and on social media to prevent the ‘normalisation’ of what it considers deviant practices. This rhetoric is neither isolated nor new, and is part of a state strategy targeting LGBTQ+ individuals through increased enforcement, censorship and physical restrictions.
In Malaysia, anti-queer policies and policing seem to affirm the government’s moral high ground of retaining ‘Asian values’ — a framework that excludes queer narratives as imported Western constructs. Such narratives legitimise hate and discrimination and signal an escalation in state-sponsored misinformation about queer lives, casting queer people as dangerous outliers who threaten the moral fabric of society. While the Federal Constitution of Malaysia protects citizens’ fundamental rights — with Article 8(2) specifically prohibiting gender-based discrimination — this protection rarely extends to LGBTQ+ individuals.
At the federal level, offences listed under Section 377 of the Penal Code are used to criminalise same-sex intercourse. Malaysia’s Syariah laws, applicable only to Malaysian Muslims, separately prohibit conduct such as ‘men impersonating women’. But as the Federal Court clarified in 2024, such Syariah provisions cannot constitute criminal offences, since criminal legislative power rests exclusively with the Constitution — a ruling that saw several states’ attempts to criminalise ‘unIslamic’ conduct struck down as unconstitutional.
