Violence Against Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Women and Non-Binary e
There are specific types of violence that target queer women, even when we’re closeted. Machorra, that’s the Spanish version of dyke. We do things men do not like. I love to drive my truck. Friends hop in and out. Men don’t like it. Because it means that I move on my own; I do not need them. I’m not sure if it’s a queer women specific trait, but when we work with men in activist spaces, we do not seek their approval. If we don’t aim to please them, they call us violent. We make men angry.[1] – Sofía Blanco, indigenous land defender, Mexico
“I think one queer woman’s story can change those that come after it. That is why I agreed to talk to you, to tell you what happened.[2] – Amani, lesbian activist and writer, Tunisia
In June 2021, Amani’s girlfriend ended their relationship. Amani told Human Rights Watch that for months prior to the breakup, her girlfriend’s parents had been “refusing to let her leave the house” and “pushing her to marry a man.”[3] They ultimately succeeded, and the woman left Amani. Amani said it was “not the first” time in her life that a woman left her due to “the simple, disturbing fact that because I am not a man, I am not a good enough partner for the woman I love.”
While speaking to Human Rights Watch, Amani only mentioned Tunisia’s well-documented,[4] violent[5] treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people once.[6] Most of the conversation was about her writing and her love life.
Amani knows that as a lesbian, she is at risk of physical violence, sexual harassment, and arbitrary arrest by police in Tunisia. In fact, she has experienced all three of these abuses. However, despite having received significantly less attention from the media and NGOs around the world, coercive marriage practices also harm queer women’s rights, freedoms, and opportunities for joy, in direct violation of international human rights laws that protect the right to free and full consent to marriage.[7] According to Amani, the queer women she knows have “either been coerced into marrying a man or been broken up with by a girlfriend who was coerced into marry a man. It’s everywhere. It’s the backdrop to our lives.”
Her words echoed stories told to Human Rights Watch by other lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) people[8] around the world affected by marriages to men they did not want to enter or cannot leave, including in Indonesia, Malawi, and Kyrgyzstan. Liliya, the founder of an LBQ+ organization in Kyrgyzstan, was forced to marry a man by her parents at age 19. Asante, a lesbian in Malawi, has been physically assaulted twice by the husband of her bisexual partner, a woman who wants, but does not have the money to get, a divorce. Dali, a bisexual youth activist in Indonesia, says her community has lost “dozens of queer women mentors who are pressured into marrying men.”[9]
Read a text description of this video
Natpop: We will always remember those lesbianswho are in the front lines in so many cities today trying to resist.
When we think about LGBT rights, we don’t often think about women’s rights to land and inheritance, girls’ access to education, or freedom of movement.
These women’s rights issues are critical for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, but don’t usually rank high among LGBT rights movements’ priorities. At the same time, LBQ+ women are also underrepresented in women’s rights research and advocacy.
The global scale of discrimination and violence against them has fallen through the cracks.
A Human Rights Watch global investigation uncovered the most critical forms of violence against LBQ+ women.
Forced Marriage:
The pressure to marry men and forced marriage were the most frequently reported abuses experienced by LBQ+ people around the world.
Liliya: Bride napping and forced marriages are common practices in Kyrgyzstan. And my story is not unique, unfortunately. Since I was a kid, I was dreaming to travel all over the world. And when I was 18, I wanted to move out from the house. But my mama always said you will leave this house with a husband. Or after my death. So I have to get marriage. I kept thinking if I tried hard enough I would probably like staying with a man But it was terrible. It was torture to share a bed with a person you don’t really like.
Land Rights:
Women face barriers or challenges in accessing and controlling land and property in about 40 percent of the world. This makes it much harder for two women to start a life together if neither can inherit, own or access land on equal terms with men.
For example, in Mexico, women often do not have a say over how communal lands are managed, particularly in rural and Indigenous communities.
Sofía: We all defend the land, but not all of us can access the land.
Those who mainly have access to land continue to be men. The other thing is that, in our communities, they legitimize us by being wives. When we are not wives, when we are not mothers… the legitimacy is not the same.
Violence Against Masculine-Presenting LBQ+ People
Masculine-presenting women are often targeted with threats, physical attacks, sexual violence and harassment for not looking feminine enough and for daring to occupy masculine space in the world.
Whitney: Violence you experienced is very convoluted and understanding what it means to separate your blackness from your sexual orientation and your gender identity. As a Black woman who is masculine presenting, people see you as this masculine presenting person, that kind of gives you these characteristics to be able to take or be strong or do anything.
They also give people permission to then be more aggressive with you. When I lived in St Louis where I was physically attacked by the police and still to this day, I don’t know if it was because I do present as a male, or if it was just because of my blackness.
Violence at Work:
LBQ+ women face sexual harassment, violence and threats by male colleagues at work, as well as discrimination in hiring practices, and widespread economic inequality.
Andrea:
We have received complaints from lesbians who work in the fields. The first problem they encounter [after the assault] is who to turn to, most times they are not believed.
The other problem is they could always suffer repercussions or another rape, or sexual assault. They might also have to travel 300 or 400 kilometers to make a report.
Ultimately the social message, the message of institutional violence, is that you deserve it.
Freedom of movement:
30% of the 187 economies examined by the World Bank have laws that limit women’s freedom of movement. Laws criminalizing same-sex relations also restrict LBQ+ women’s movement and empower police to harass LBQ+ women and activists in public.
Amani:
It took me a lot of time to accept myself because here in Tunisia, it’s a huge taboo. It’s something that it’s like people would prefer to die to not let that secret get out.
Societal pressure or religious pressure and, uh, the legal pressure like being like homosexuality it is punishable by law. Up to three years, well, in prison. I started to avoid the checkpoints of the police, even though I did nothing.
Did you run from your parents? Why is your hair short? Are you a lesbian?
I don’t feel safe in my own country. At moments of my life, I didn’t feel safe in my own bed.
Indiscriminate Attacks:
LBQ+ activists are leading political, land, environmental, economic, gender, and racial justice movements — beyond what is typically considered “LGBT rights” work.
But many lack international visibility and funding, and their human rights work makes them targets for violent attacks.
Gloriya:
Last October we had a really, really small event for the trans community. It was a Saturday afternoon. Like half an hour in, someone knocked on the door… a group of ten people yeah, the police identified them as 11 people, were entering and this guy was running for president. I was like, “no, no, you can’t enter.” And in that point, he just punched me. And I realized in that moment that they are here to fight.
I believe that the attack in the rainbow was also part of the elections campaign because the person who was leading the group was running for president, he’s a very famous neo-Nazi.
We are not making it up like all the talk about discrimination and hate crimes.
Recommendations:
Governments around the world should abolish sexist laws and create protocols that explicitly protect the rights of LBQ+ people.
Donors should fund LBQ+ rights organizations and LBQ+ led movements for environmental, racial, economic, and migrant rights.
Documentation of forced heterosexual marriages of LBQ+ women is scarce. In 2019, queer feminist group Mawjoudin[10] released a three-minute creative film Until When?[11] in which a Tunisian woman is waxed and groomed ahead of her (presumably arranged) marriage to a man. She storms out of the house mid-video and announces to the camera, “I love someone. … And she is not a man.”
The film is a rarity. In Tunisia and elsewhere, forced marriage research[12] and policy is largely situated within women’s rights[13] and children’s rights[14] discourses, and rarely if ever explicitly acknowledges the existence of queer people.[15] NGOs, donors, governments, and policy makers working to end forced marriage seldom address issues related to sexuality, or forced marriages specifically of LBQ+ women. The presumption of heterosexuality in forced marriage studies, policies, and funding precludes an analysis of how a coerced heterosexual marriage makes it impossible or dangerous for an LBQ+ person to live a queer life.
According to interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with 66 lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) activists, researchers, lawyers, and movement leaders in 26 countries between March and September 2022, forced marriage is one of ten key areas of human rights abuses most affecting LBQ+ women’s lives. Human Rights Watch identified the following areas of LBQ+ rights as those in need of immediate investigation, advocacy, and policy reform. This report explores how the denial of LBQ+ people’s rights in these ten areas impacts their lives and harms their ability to exercise and enjoy the advancement of more traditionally recognized LGBT rights and women’s rights:
the right to free and full consent to marriage;
land, housing, and property rights;
freedom from violence based on gender expression;
freedom from violence and discrimination at work;
freedom of movement and the right to appear in public without fear of violence;
parental rights and the right to create a family;
the right to asylum;
the right to health, including services for sexual, reproductive, and mental health;
protection and recognition as human rights defenders; and
access to justice.
This investigation sought to analyze how and in what circumstances the rights of LBQ+ people are violated, centering LBQ+ identity as the primary modality for inclusion in the report. Gender-nonconforming, non-binary, and transgender people who identify as LBQ+ were naturally included. At the same time, a key finding of the report is that the fixed categories “cisgender” and “transgender” are ill-suited for documenting LBQ+ rights violations, movements, and struggles for justice. As will be seen in this report, people assigned female at birth bear the weight of highly gendered expectations which include marrying and having children with cisgender men, and are punished in a wide range of ways for failing or refusing to meet these expectations. Many LBQ+ people intentionally decenter cisgender men from their personal, romantic, sexual, and economic lives. In this way, the identity LBQ+ itself is a transgression of gendered norms. Whether or not an LBQ+ person identifies as transgender as it is popularly conceptualized, the rigidly binary (and often violently enforced) gender boundaries outside of which LBQ+ people already live, regardless of their gender identity, may help to explain why the allegedly clear division between “cisgender” and “transgender” categories simply does not work for many LBQ+ communities. This report aims to explore and uplift, rather than deny, that reality.
Beyond Women and LGBT
The desk review and interviews conducted for this report finds that when LBQ+ experiences of violence are discussed and documented, it is most often as a sub-violation of broader LGBT rights abuses or, less frequently, a sub-violation of women’s rights abuses. This conceptualization presents LBQ+ women as merely a variation on a theme that was not built for them. It perpetuates their marginalization for two main reasons:
Policies and research focused on “women’s rights” often address the ten issues above, but rarely explicitly name LBQ+ women as rights-holders or analyze how their unique experiences of violence warrant more specific laws, policies, and protocols to protect them. Specifically, women’s rights research and policies related to forced marriage and property rights implicitly assume heterosexuality and a binary construction of gender, and rarely address abuses experienced by queer women.
LGBT rights research and policies are significantly more likely than women’s rights research to explicitly name LBQ+ women as rights-holders and victims. However, they are significantly less likely to address the broader societal and legal restrictions on people assigned female at birth which prevent their enjoyment of “LGBT rights” advancements.
In 2017, the World Economic Forum published an article entitled “What you need to know about LGBT rights in 11 maps.”[16] The color-coded quick guide to various legal statuses, protections, and prohibitions of LGBT rights included maps showing the criminalization of homosexuality, marriage equality, legal gender change, legal adoption, protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, prohibition of housing discrimination, bans on military service and blood donations, “age of consent for homosexual sex” equality.[17]
Advancing these rights issues is necessary but not sufficient for the full recognition of rights for LBQ+ individuals and communities. The decriminalization of same-sex practices, for example, may have a decidedly small impact on the life of a queer woman in a country where sexist laws and policies prohibit her from inheriting her parent’s property, renting an apartment without a male guardian’s permission, or seeking a divorce from a marriage she was coerced into.
Normative conceptualizations of LGBT rights have not effectively incorporated fundamental areas of women’s rights investigation and policy work, such as forced marriage of women and girls, women’s property rights, and their freedom of movement. In other words, basic restrictions on women’s freedom, autonomy, and economic empowerment, which are often key barriers to LBQ+ rights, are not considered relevant to the progression of LGBT rights. There is an immense opportunity for future investigations into the nine rights areas covered in this report, with the aim of improving LBQ+ rights and lives.
In addition to increasing the number of LBQ+ women interviewed or consulted for future LGBT or women’s research projects, research topics should intentionally center the issues that LBQ+ women say most affect their lives (Sections III-X). This will allow for a deeper, more complex analysis of how and in what circumstances LBQ+ rights are violated and reveal the multiple ways in which states are failing LBQ+ women.
Policy and Recommendations
Concurrent to these research gaps, Human Rights Watch found a clear lack of laws and policies that explicitly name LBQ+ women as rights-holders in the ten areas covered in the report. This lack of legal protection and the alleged “invisibility” of LBQ+ women in national and international law are barriers to their ability to access justice.[18]
This report finds that the LBQ+ research gap matters because it drives—and is driven by—a system of mutually reinforcing gaps: the lack of research into violations and abuses of LBQ+ people’s rights; the lack of laws and policies that explicitly protect the rights of LBQ+ people; barriers to accessing justice for LBQ+ victims of human rights abuses; and the lack of funding for LBQ+-led movements.[19]
The gaps implicate governments and donors as stakeholders who should take specific steps to address these problems in order to protect LBQ+ people from a lifetime of intersectional violence and discrimination. Key recommendations are:
Governments should develop laws, policies, and protocols that explicitly protect the rights of LBQ+ people. Authorities should also reform patriarchal systems of control, including male guardianship laws, policies, and practices; discriminatory property and inheritance laws; and other restrictions on women’s autonomy, movement, and freedom, which limit LBQ+ access to other more traditionally conceptualized “LGBT rights.”
Donors should fund LBQ+-led movements, rather than seeking to fund only LBQ+ groups working on “LGBT rights” as they are normatively conceptualized. This funding should manifest in two ways: 1) Fund LBQ+-led groups working on land, environmental, and indigenous rights, humanitarian response, disability rights, and forced marriage, and LBQ+ women living in poverty. This will support LBQ+ activists in documenting and advocating against the multiplicity of violations their communities endure and in building allies to surmount the structural barriers they face to accessing justice. 2) Fund LBQ+-led movements working specifically for LBQ+ rights, and ensure that grantees are not pressured to expand their work to accommodate broader, normative conceptualizations of “LGBT rights.”
Researchers should conduct targeted investigations into how restrictions on women’s freedom and autonomy impede the advancement of LGBT rights. This research should be done in partnership with LBQ+ organizations to produce knowledge about specific violence they experience. This will inform what specific law and policy changes will best support safety, justice, and rights for LBQ+ women in particular contexts, beyond those identified in this report.
Forced Marriage (Section III)
Compulsory heterosexuality, the pressure to marry men, and coercive marriage practices were the most frequently reported abuses experienced by LBQ+ interviewees, including in Canada, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malawi, Mexico, Poland, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Tunisia, and Ukraine. There is an immediate need to develop laws, policies, and protocols that explicitly protect LBQ+ people from forced marriage or coercive marriage practices. Interviewees reported abuses including forced marriage as a conversion practice; punishment from family for failure to conform to heteronormative markers of adulthood; psychological abuse and humiliation as coercive tactics; the infantilization of unmarried or divorced LBQ+ women; and violence against the partners of LBQ+ women married to men.
States should produce national action plans to end forced and coerced marriage practices that explicitly include an intersectional approach to the elimination of all forms of conversion practices, and collaborate with local and national LBQ+ organizations and unregistered collectives at each stage of conceptualization, drafting, and implementation. Governments should ensure that violent intimidation and retribution against people for refusal to marry are punishable under law and that survivors have access to adequate, gender- and SOGIE-sensitive legal, medical, and psycho-social services. Finally, states should end discriminatory divorce laws, which make it significantly easier for men to divorce their wives than for women to divorce their husbands and thus harm LBQ+ women who wish to leave their husbands without fear of retribution, violence, or losing custody of their children.
Property Rights (Section IV)
According to recent World Bank Group studies, two-fifths of countries worldwide limit women’s property rights,[20] and in 44 countries, male and female surviving spouses do not have equal rights to inherit assets.[21] There exists a chronic lack of research into how LBQ+ women’s rights are impacted by patriarchal laws, policies, and customs like these, which limit women’s rights to own and administer property.
In a preliminary scoping, this report finds that violations of women’s property rights are a queer issue because they harm LBQ+ women’s ability to live queer lives free from violence and discrimination. This includes by forcing them to hide their sexualities, partners, and queer lives from their biological families to avoid further discrimination in inheritance regimes that already privilege sons; requiring LBQ+ women to marry men in order to have access to land and property (reinforcing the coercive marriage practices above); preventing LBQ+ couples from pursuing a life together; and violating their rights to freedom of association and assembly, which compounds existing barriers to queer organizing and community building.
In many countries, discriminatory laws restricting women’s access to property are relics of, or were heavily influenced by, colonial property laws.[22] These often intersect with and compound harmful traditional practices and customary laws. While analyzes of the effects of colonialism on LGBT rights typically focused on the criminalization of same-sex conduct and the imposition of binary constructions of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (SOGIE) as forms of social control,[23][24] colonial property laws have impacted LBQ+ women’s lives as much as, if not more than, colonial anti-homosexuality laws.
States should revoke discriminatory property laws, restrictions on women’s labor, and sexist family codes, including those that persist in formerly colonized countries. States should also amend family law to articulate the concept of marital property and allow for its division on an equal basis between spouses, recognizing financial and non-financial contributions made by women.
Violence Against Masculine-Presenting LBQ+ People (Section V)
Gender expression is a critical component of how, why, and in what circumstances LBQ+ people are attacked and have their rights violated. LBQ+ people interviewed for this report repeatedly named gendered discrimination against masculine-presenting people assigned female at birth in particular as the catalyst for a lifetime of economic, social, workplace, psychological, physical, and sexual violence.
LBQ+ advocates in Argentina, El Salvador, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and the US reported that from a young age, styles of dress read as masculine, gender-nonconforming, or androgynous resulted in threats from parents to remove such girls from school, compounding the already precarious access to education that girls face globally. According to Rosa, a sex worker rights defender and lesbian woman in El Salvador, police are “far more brutal” to masculine-presenting queer women during arrests and street harassment, which, Rosa said, is particularly dangerous because employment discrimination based on their masculine-presentation is a large part of what originally forced many LBQ+ people into sex work.
Violence against masculine-presenting people assigned female at birth weaves throughout the report, continuing to indicate the need for greater focus on gender expression, in particular, in analysis of abuse, violence, and crimes committed based on SOGIE.
States should pass comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation that prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, and explicitly add gender expression to legislation that already prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Interviews indicate that states should also introduce legal protections for gender non-conforming primary and secondary students, the absence of which can impact a lifelong trajectory of violence and discrimination for masculine-presenting LBQ+ people, and immediately investigate and end violent policing and arrest tactics that discriminatorily impact their lives.
Violence and Harassment at Work (Section VI)
Rosa’s account of violence against masculine-presenting sex workers echoed reports from LBQ+ activists in Ghana, Kenya, and a regional network in Central Asia who spoke of the multiple forms of economic marginalization that, they say, force LBQ+ women, non-binary people, and trans men into sex work, where many are denied basic protection of their rights.[25] During interviews in other countries, LBQ+ activists told Human Rights Watch about other forms of violence at work against LBQ+ women and their lack of access to redress, including in Kenya, Argentina, and Kyrgyzstan.
Research is needed into violence and harassment of LBQ+ women, non-binary people, and trans men at work, including abuse perpetrated by male coworkers, employers, supervisors, and third parties. Interviews indicate that groups at particular risk include masculine-presenting people assigned female at birth, unmarried women, feminine queer women who are out at work, and LBQ+ people who are openly in a queer relationship. Working with LBQ+ movements, future research should investigate labor rights violations in fields of work that LBQ+ people say are important, popular, or common among their community members. This will allow for labor rights reform in fields critical to the economic survival of LBQ+ people, couples, and communities, without necessitating the sort of radical “outing” that often makes including LBQ+ people in workplace research dangerous.
States should enact labor rights laws that explicitly protect LBQ+ workers from violence, harassment, and discrimination at work, including laws which protect workers from discrimination because of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.
Freedom of Movement (Section VII)
LBQ+ interviewees in El Salvador, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Tunisia, and the US reported extreme, gendered constraints on LBQ+ women’s freedom of movement. As in other areas, there is an urgent need for more intersectional research that addresses, for example, what it means for LBQ+ women that “legal provisions limiting women’s freedom to decide where to go, travel and live still exist in 30% of the 187 economies examined”.[26]
As women’s advocates have documented and argued, states should end patriarchal legal systems, such as male guardianship laws that restrict women’s rights to marry, study, work, rent or own property, reproductive health, and travel, and refrain from issuing laws, policies, decrees, and emergency measures that discriminatorily restrict women’s freedom of movement. Researchers and advocates are encouraged to view these issues not only as women’s rights reforms, but as central to the advancement of LGBT rights.
Additionally, interviewees said restrictions on their freedom of movement stemmed not only from the application of sexist, patriarchal legal regimes, which impact LBQ+ women’s ability to travel and move freely, but also from violence against LBQ+ individuals and couples in public, which cause them to limit when and how often they leave the house, and if they do so with their partner. Human Rights Watch compiled accounts of nine LBQ+ couples murdered or brutally attacked in just five countries (Italy, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the US) since 2015. Interviewees say that such attacks cause them to “self-police” their movements, due to fear of leaving the house together with their partner.
States should conduct thorough, transparent investigations into reports of violence against LBQ+ individuals and couples and establish human rights desks at police stations to provide a safe environment for LGBT persons to report police abuses and for complaints to be processed and investigated without delay.
Parental Rights (Section VIII)
Parental rights and reproductive rights were raised as key concerns among LBQ+ organizers and lawyers in Argentina, El Salvador, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine, and the US. Critically, LBQ+ people want to create and protect their families, regardless of the criminalization of same-sex conduct or legalization of same-sex marriage. LBQ+ interviewees in several countries where same-sex conduct is criminalized, such as Kenya and Malawi, told Human Rights Watch that creating families was a top priority, but that they lack information on how to safely do so.
The report calls on states to revoke laws that prevent single women and unmarried couples from adopting, and to pass LGBT-inclusive parental recognition bills that explicitly recognize the legal parenthood of non-gestational LBQ+ parents and protect them from discriminatory demands that they adopt their own children. States should also reform discriminatory adoption laws and policies that make adoption unfairly difficult for racialized and economically marginalized LBQ+ parents, and introduce anti-discrimination legislation prohibiting insurance policies that discriminate against LBQ+ couples and individuals from accessing reproductive treatments, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, and sperm donation.
Asylum (Section IX)
Interviews conducted for this report indicate that LBQ+ parents and couples fleeing situations of conflict or seeking asylum for a range of other reasons face unique and potentially life-threatening barriers. Additionally, LBQ+ families also face unique barriers to being resettled abroad as a family unit. When interviewees discussed migration and asylum issues, they most often spoke about threats to family unity during resettlement.
Many asylum regimes require refugee couples to be married, in civil partnerships, or able to provide proof of living together in a relationship akin to marriage for a certain period of time prior to applying for reunification. This makes family unity incredibly precarious for all LGBT families. Compounding this, what little targeted research exists on the barriers faced by individual LBQ+ asylum seekers offers insight into unique struggles families face when both parents are LBQ+ people.
States should develop clear asylum and refugee resettlement family reunification guidance for LGBT family unity that allows LBQ+ asylee and refugee parents and families to reunite with separated children and other family members. Additionally, states should train asylum decision makers to recognize the intersection of membership in the LBQ+ social group with the risk of persecution in the context of a range of discriminatory economic, legal, and social issues faced by LBQ+ asylum applicants as individuals, parents, and families.
Health (Section X)
LBQ+ advocates reported a severe lack of consistent, safe access to a wide range of health services, including mental health support,[27] reproductive health care,[28] fertility treatment,[29] maternal health,[30] routine testing for cancer,[31] and access to services for people living with HIV.[32] In interviews, Human Rights Watch found that LBQ+ organizations are particularly focused on addressing the lack of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) services available to LBQ+ women, including sexual and reproductive health care, testing, and treatment for LBQ+ survivors. Tamara, an intersex lesbian activist in Malawi and founder of a queer foundation, dedicated her life to ending SGBV against LBQ+ women after surviving what she called “corrective rape” at the age of 19.[33] She told Human Rights Watch that LBQ+ women in her community are dying of untreated sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other complications related to sexual assault due to their inability to safely seek care at public hospitals due to lesbophobia on the part of medical professionals, while private hospitals remain financially out of reach for many LBQ+ women.
Activists in Canada, Kenya, Indonesia, and Malawi reported a lack of LBQ+-informed therapy and addiction recovery services. States should enact policies and protocols supporting LBQ+ survivors of sexual assault and introduce nondiscrimination protections for LBQ+ women in access to health care. Governments should also work with LBQ+ organizations to establish a complaints procedure through which LBQ+ women who experience human rights violations or abuses in a health care setting, including discrimination, denial of services, or conversion practices aimed at changing their SOGIE, can file complaints and seek support and redress. Donors are encouraged to work with LBQ+ groups to support the establishment of community-based mental health programs and queer-informed recovery services for substance abuse, taking into account the particular privacy needs of LBQ+ women who are married to men.
Human Rights Defenders (Section XI)
LBQ+ activists interviewed for this report are leaders in a wide range of social, political, land, environmental, economic, gender, and racial justice movements, beyond the bounds of what is typically conceptualized of as “LGBT rights” work.[34] The report identified three key challenges to the protection of LBQ+ human rights defenders: risks related to their intersectional work and identities (including the criminalization of LGBT people in many countries); their lack of international visibility and perceived legitimacy; and a lack of funding.
Despite the global trend toward increasing visibility and protection for human rights defenders,[35] LBQ+ activists are often not recognized as defenders and therefore are denied access to protection frameworks. States should adopt human rights defender protection and recognition laws that explicitly affirm the rights of LBQ+ human rights defenders and establish human rights defender protection mechanisms with staff trained on the specific risks and needs of LBQ+ human rights defenders. Staff at these mechanisms should conduct outreach to LBQ+ organizations and unregistered collectives, and have dedicated supports in place for the physical, sexual, digital, and verbal threats received by LBQ+ defenders. Police and security forces need to ensure that LBQ+ human rights defenders who report attacks and threats to police are not sexually, physically, or verbally harassed or assaulted by officers, and that defenders are able to file incident reports without fear of retaliation.
Donors should reform restrictive funding requirements that force LBQ+ organizations to demonstrate exclusive work on LGBT issues and allow LBQ+-led organizations and collectives to apply and receive funding for intersectional work in a range of human rights areas including women’s rights; land, environmental, and indigenous rights; disability rights; migrant rights; housing and homelessness; right to health and health care access; and humanitarian aid. Additionally, donors should ensure that funding for LBQ+ organizations include budget lines for human rights defender security, and cover the costs of physical meeting spaces and transportation for training, community-building, and wellness. Finally, donors are encouraged to support programs and services for LBQ+ well-being and psychosocial care, and explicitly ask local organizations what their mental health needs are.
Access to Justice (Section XII)
LBQ+ women face multiple systematic barriers to accessing justice, including those that women and non-binary people face more generally—such as discrimination based on gender in state and non-state institutions, limitations on their time and resources due to care responsibilities, and violations of their rights to education and freedom of movement—and those that LGBT people face more generally, such as a lack of lawyers trained and willing to work with queer communities, courts that discriminate against LGBT people and families, and a wide range of laws criminalizing LGBT people that make reporting to police a dangerous act.
In addition to facing both these sets of barriers, the report interrogates five additional barriers to accessing justice that stem from a lack of: laws and policies protecting LBQ+ rights, documentation of anti-LBQ+ violence, understanding of what constitutes anti-LBQ+ violence, sustainable funding, and research into specific structural barriers.
