History
IDAHO was conceived in 2004 to commemorate the WHO’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1990. A year-long campaign culminated in the first IDAHO on May 17, 2005. 24,000 individuals as well as organizations such as the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the World Congress of LGBT Jews, and the Coalition of African Lesbians signed an appeal to support the IDAHO initiative. IDAHO activities took place in many countries, including the first LGBT events ever to take place in the Congo, China, and Bulgaria.
In 2009 transphobia was added to the name of the campaign, and activities that year focused primarily on transphobia (violence and discrimination against transgender people). A new petition was launched in cooperation with LGBT organizations in 2009, and it was supported by more than 300 NGOs from 75 countries, as well as three Nobel Prize winners (Elfriede Jelinek, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and Luc Montagnier). On the eve of the 2009 IDAHO day, France became the first country in the world to officially remove transgender issues from its list of mental illnesses .
Organizations in more than 70 countries in the world now include the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia as part of their annual mobilization plan. In some of them, IDAHO has become the major focal point of action.
Louis-Georges Tin and two other IADHO members started a hunger-strike on June 2012 to urge the French president Hollande to introduce a UN resolution decriminalising homosexuality.
Read more about this topic: International Day Against Homophobia And Transphobia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)