Fikrat Huseynli, an Azerbaijani journalist and former political exile, has made a social media post about the migration of LGBTİ+ people from Azerbaijan to Western countries. In his post, he claimed that transgender people’s hormones are being altered through food and liquids, and that people are changing their sex and getting married.
On his Facebook account, Huseynli wrote that while Azerbaijanis who moved to Western countries for political reasons once made up the majority of emigrants, he believes the number of sexual minorities is now on the rise. He linked this alleged trend to baseless claims about people being sterilised through food and liquids, men being turned into women, and women into lesbians.
These claims have no scientific basis. Gender identity and sexual orientation are two distinct concepts. Being transgender does not determine a person’s sexual orientation. Nor is there any scientific evidence that people can be made transgender or lesbian through food or drinking water.
There is an interesting contradiction here: Fikrat Huseynli himself is among the journalists who left Azerbaijan because of political persecution. After being attacked by unidentified individuals in Baku in 2006, he moved to the Netherlands in 2008, where he was granted political asylum. He obtained Dutch citizenship in 2014. Huseynli worked for many years at the opposition-oriented Azadliq newspaper before going on to head Turan TV’s Amsterdam bureau.
In October 2017, he was detained in Ukraine following an international arrest request submitted by Azerbaijani authorities through Interpol. Huseynli regarded the charges brought against him by the Azerbaijani authorities as politically motivated persecution linked to his journalistic work.
Yet today, rather than viewing the migration of LGBTİ+ people from Azerbaijan through the lens of personal safety and human rights, he portrays it as an artificial demographic intervention by the very West that once provided him with refuge, allegedly targeting Azerbaijani society. Although human rights must be guaranteed to everyone, not just those who hold particular political views, Huseynli appears unwilling to acknowledge this reality in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, where he has lived for years.
Huseynli’s latest post about LGBTİ+ people has once again brought into question the stance of a journalist who fled political persecution and found protection in another country, but now comments on the rights of other vulnerable groups. We are particularly concerned that someone working as a journalist would disseminate such claims without relying on any statistical sources, research or scientific evidence.
