Indonesia's Top Clerical Body Wants to Rename LGBTQ+ People — and Then Criminalise Them

The most revealing thing about the Indonesian Ulema Council’s latest proposal is not the criminal penalties it wants. It is the acronym.

The council, known by its Indonesian initials MUI, has proposed dropping the term “LGBT” in favour of “LGSP” — lesbian, gay, sodomy and obscenity. Two identities, then two offences, collapsed into a single four-letter label. Asrorun Niam Sholeh, who heads MUI’s Fatwa Commission, announced the framing in Jakarta in late July alongside news that the council is preparing an academic paper and a draft bill to put to the government and to members of parliament, as the Washington Blade reported this week.

Purba Widnyana, who chairs the Indonesian LGBTQ+ organisation GAYa Nusantara, told the Blade the change should not be read as a matter of vocabulary. “The change shifts how Indonesians understand or perceive LGBT+ issues, moving from identities, rights and existence to behavior, morality, and criminality,” he said. He added that the council was “mixing identities, in this case sexual orientation, with sexual behavior and actions that are understood as violations or offenses.”

That is precisely what an acronym can do that an argument cannot. You do not have to persuade anyone that being a lesbian is equivalent to sexual abuse if you have already built a term in which the two sit side by side as a matter of ordinary usage.

What is proposed and what is actually law

This distinction matters, and a lot of international coverage blurs it.

MUI is not a legislature and has no power to enact anything. It is a council of Islamic scholars, formed in 1975, whose principal instrument is the fatwa — a religious ruling that carries no criminal force in Indonesian law. What it does carry is influence. MUI fatwas have historically shaped government policy, licensing decisions and public sentiment, and its pronouncements are treated in Indonesian media as authoritative religious guidance. A draft bill from MUI is a lobbying document, not a statute. But lobbying documents from MUI have become law before.

On 7 August, the Fatwa Commission issued a statement declaring men’s cross-dressing “haram” during Independence Day festivities, and linking it to what it called the “LGSP movement.” The context is a widely loved national tradition: on 17 August, Indonesian neighbourhoods hold competitions called lomba tujuhbelasan — sack races, greased-pole climbing, cracker-eating contests — and in some communities men play football in sarongs or daster, the loose house dresses associated with women. It is comedy, not identity. The fatwa reframed a village football match as evidence of an infiltration campaign.

What is enacted law is a separate and more consequential matter. Indonesia began enforcing its new national criminal code on 2 January this year, replacing the Dutch-era penal code that had governed the country for more than eighty years. Parliament passed the 345-page text in December 2022 after years of protest. Article 411 makes sex outside marriage punishable by up to a year in prison; Article 412 makes cohabitation outside a legally recognised marriage punishable by up to six months.

Both can only be prosecuted on a complaint from a spouse, parent or child, which is often cited as a safeguard. For same-sex couples it is not much of one. Indonesia does not recognise same-sex relationships, so every same-sex relationship in the country is by definition extramarital — and the complaint mechanism hands a prosecutorial trigger to any estranged relative. Same-sex intimacy is not named in the code, but the code does not need to name it.

Aceh, the only province permitted to apply sharia law, sits outside this framework entirely. Its Islamic criminal bylaws prohibit same-sex relations and are enforced by public caning, a punishment that has been carried out on men convicted of consensual sex.

The regulation that made LGBTQ+ people a security threat

The other piece of enacted law is Presidential Regulation No. 111 of 2025, signed by President Prabowo Subianto in October 2025. It sets out Indonesia’s General National Defence Policy for 2025–2029, and it classifies the spread of LGBTQ+ culture as a non-military threat to the state — in the same category as terrorism, radicalism, separatism and the spread of prohibited ideologies.

The provision drew little notice until Indonesian media reported on it in July. Amnesty International Indonesia called for its repeal, warning it risks institutionalising discrimination. ILGA Asia, the Indonesian federation Arus Pelangi and Human Rights Watch have been campaigning for the same outcome.

A defence-policy designation does not create an offence. What it does is give every security agency in the country a written authorisation to treat queer people as a matter within its remit — and that shows up long before any court does. Human Rights Watch reported in July that attacks on LGBTQ+ university students escalated during Pride Month, with at least ten public universities adopting discriminatory regulations and restricting student media coverage and online discussion of gender and sexual diversity.

What the vagueness is for

Widnyana’s specific concern about the proposed bill is not the penalties. It is the words “campaigning,” “promoting” and “spreading LGBT+ culture,” none of which have settled definitions.

Read broadly, those terms could reach HIV and sexual health information, legal assistance for survivors of violence, research on discrimination, professional training on sexual orientation and gender identity, and academic discussion. They could plausibly reach a gay man saying publicly that he is gay, or a trans woman describing discrimination she has experienced. That ambiguity is not a drafting flaw. A law that nobody can confidently comply with produces compliance far beyond its actual scope, because organisations stop doing anything that might qualify.

Some of that has already happened without legislation. Widnyana said organisations now build security and risk-mitigation plans before any public event, and that the threats have expanded from raids and venue cancellations to WhatsApp hijacking, account hacking and the risk of being targeted after going viral. “We are constantly in alert mode,” he said. “It’s been limiting our movements.”

He also made a point worth holding onto against the framing of queerness as a foreign import. Indonesia’s own traditions include the bissu, calalai, calabai and waria — gender roles and identities documented across the archipelago long before anyone arrived with a colonial penal code. Widnyana cautioned against flattening those traditions into modern Western categories, but was clear that gender and sexual diversity are not new to Indonesia. What is new is the vocabulary being built to prosecute them.

What to watch

MUI’s draft has not been introduced in the House of Representatives, and there is no indication that the government intends to adopt it. The realistic near-term risks lie elsewhere: in how the new criminal code’s morality provisions are applied in their first full year, in whether Regulation 111 is repealed or quietly entrenched, and in whether “LGSP” migrates from a fatwa commission’s press statement into the language of ministries and courts.

That last one is the tell. Terminology is the cheapest thing a state can adopt and the hardest thing to undo — and the Indonesian organisations doing the work are watching for it, which is why they are arguing about a four-letter acronym rather than waiting for a bill.