God Made Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve: Conceptualising the Legality of Sexual Minority Identity Highlighting Judicial Interpretations

This research aims to addressing the status of Sexual and Gender Minority (SGM) identity in a society. The paper pivots on three key parts- firstly, theorising minority identity and extreme social abhorrence and structural discrimination faced by SGM; secondly, assessing the legal vacuum in the existing international human rights law; thirdly, examining the judicial interpretation on right to sexual freedom as human rights and finally investigating the legality of sexual identity. For critical understanding, the study analysed how the contradictory usage of ‘public morality and decency’ creates a legal bar to avail human rights protection for SGM. For that, the paper reconnoiters ample human rights instruments and landmark US constitutional judgements to portray the nexus between sexual minority rights and human rights. The paper found SGM as a vulnerable status quo identity group who faces substantially systematic, sexuality targeted, institutional discrimination on a different scale, in extensive range and acute level which the normative binary identity minority group does not face in a heterogenous society. Court opined that sexual diversity opens newer dimension of human rights that contextualise the idea of respect to sexuality, sexual privacy, sexual freedom, sexual integrity as human rights reemphasizing SGM people’s entitlement to exercise these rights as equally as the binary people. The author primarily proposes cogent role of judicial interpretation and the establishment of an International Gender and Sexuality Protection Charter to be efficacious strategy to address sexual minority discrimination and their rights’ recognition.