In another blow to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Hungary, on July 13, the Hungarian government proposed a bill that excludes transgender women from a women-only pension scheme. The bill is expected to go to parliament in September.
The proposed bill comes on the heels of a court ruling on behalf of a transgender woman, obliging the local authority to recognize the plaintiff as a woman, making her eligible for the women-only pension benefit. The benefit is available to women who have worked 40 years but not yet reached retirement age.
The verdict caused a meltdown in Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz. The deputy Fidesz faction leader publicly criticized the judge while pro-government media regurgitated trans- and homophobic messaging. As it has done with previous unfavorable rulings, the government is seeking to amend legislation to sidestep the courts. The proposed bill blatantly discriminates against trans women who have legally changed their gender marker and is another stark example of how the government abuses its power by eroding the rule of law. The bill is also on a collision course with case law by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights, as it flouts common European values. It is another case for why EU member states should sanction Hungary under article 7 of the Treaty on European Union for persistent disregard for the norms and principles upon which the EU is founded.
The anti-trans bill follows a streak of recent anti-LGBT incidents in Hungary. On the same day the government proposed the bill, the Consumer Protection Authority fined Lira, one of the country’s largest bookstores, 12 million Forints (roughly US$36,000) for failing to wrap in plastic foil the British webcomic “Heartstopper” that includes LGBT content. The government body said Lira had breached the 2021 anti-LGBT law prohibiting display of LGBT content to children – a law that the European Commission referred to the CJEU in July 2022 because it violates the fundamental rights of LGBT people.
Amid this anti-LGBT onslaught during Pride month, some 35,000 people took part in the Budapest Pride march on July 15 to defend their rights.
Instead of discriminating and fueling intolerance, parliament should redouble efforts to protect the basic human rights of everyone in Hungary, including people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. If they instead adopt this bill, the European Commission should immediately launch infringement proceedings.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines face bias-motivated violence and discrimination in their daily life, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The authorities should repeal the country’s colonial-era laws that criminalize consensual same-sex conduct and pass comprehensive civil legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The 58-page report, “‘They Can Harass Us Because of the Laws’: Violence and Discrimination against LGBT People in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines,” exposes the physical and verbal assaults, family violence, homelessness, workplace harassment, bullying, and sexual violence that sexual and gender minorities face under the shadow of discriminatory laws. Those responsible for mistreatment include people close to LGBT people – family members, neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and teachers – as well as strangers and police officers.
“The criminalization of gay sex gives tacit state sanction to the discrimination and violence that LGBT people experience in their daily lives and compels many to look abroad to live freely and fulfill their dreams,” said Cristian González Cabrera, LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The lack of public policies in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines acknowledging the needs and capacities of LGBT people has furthered their social and economic marginalization, barring them from contributing fully to society.”
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is one of six countries in the Western Hemisphere that still criminalizes gay sex. It punishes “buggery,” or anal sex, with up to 10 years in prison and “gross indecency with another person of the same sex,” with up to 5 years. These laws single out consensual gay sex in the “sexual offences” section of the criminal code that is otherwise reserved for crimes like rape, incest, and sexual assault. While there have been no recent reported convictions on the basis of these criminal provisions for consensual gay sex, the laws stigmatize LGBT people and create an obstacle to full equality.
The other countries in the region that still criminalize gay sex are Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia.
Human Rights Watch conducted most of the 30 interviews for this report during a research trip to Saint Vincent in October 2022. Human Rights Watch conducted additional remote interviews, reviewed documentary evidence and a range of secondary sources, and carried out legal analyses in early 2023.
Archaic laws outlawing consensual same-sex conduct, although dormant, contribute to a climate in which discrimination and violence take place with impunity. As a 25-year-old gay man from Saint Vincent told Human Rights Watch, “People feel they can harass us because of the laws. If people are having an argument, that’s [their] justification for homophobia. They say it’s the laws, that it’s illegal.”
Nearly all LGBT people interviewed reported at least one recent incident of physical or verbal abuse, threats, sexual violence, or harassment. Some had sought police assistance, but in most instances, the authorities were not helpful, and in some cases they were openly discriminatory towards them, those interviewed said.
Most of the LGBT people interviewed said their family members had physically and verbally abused them. For many, family violence deprived them of a social safety net, sometimes leading to a precarious life, including homelessness. Some said that family rejection was often couched in moralistic terms, echoing the homophobic rhetoric preached in some churches, which are a cornerstone of social life and shape social attitudes in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
For LGBT job seekers, employment discrimination is common. While unemployment is generally high in the country, LGBT people face additional barriers. Many people interviewed said they were not hired, or they had been fired explicitly because of their sexual orientation. Some lesbian and bisexual women interviewed said they faced sexual harassment in the workplace because of their sexual orientation, gender, or both.
At school, most of those interviewed had experienced stigma and discrimination from teachers and fellow students. Most also endured physical and verbal bullying, which led some to leave school early, setting them on a path to economic and social marginalization. For some, bullying was often accompanied by sexual harassment and violence.
Every LGBT person interviewed said they wished to leave the country and envisioned their future abroad due, in part, to the homophobic or transphobic violence and discrimination in the country.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has ratified international human rights treaties that obligate the government to protect the rights of everyone, including LGBT people, to life and security, freedom from ill-treatment, non-discrimination, housing, work, and education. Consensual sexual relations are protected under multiple rights, including the right to freedom from discrimination, the right to privacy, and the right to protection of the law against arbitrary and unlawful interference with, or attacks on, one’s private and family life and honor.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines should repeal the buggery and gross indecency provisions in the criminal code and pass comprehensive civil anti-discrimination legislation that includes protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The National Prosecution Service and the National Security Ministry should develop policies to ensure prompt, thorough, and independent investigations into crimes and discrimination against LGBT people and hold those responsible accountable, including law enforcement officers. Ministries responsible for labor and education should initiate public campaigns to educate employers, educators, and the general public on the basic human rights of LGBT people.
“Saint Vincent and the Grenadines should move closer to equality by recognizing and protecting sexual and gender diversity, thereby strengthening the rule of law for everyone,” González said. “It should also shake off relics of its colonial history and contribute to making the Western Hemisphere free of laws that punish people for whom they choose to love.”
In January, Italy’s right-wing government ordered state agencies to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples. Now they’ve taken it a step further: a state prosecutor in northern Italy has ordered the cancellation and re-issuance of 33 birth certificates of lesbian couples’ children, endangering access to medical care and education.
Non-gestational mothers are receiving letters informing them that they are being retroactively removed from their children’s birth certificates. New birth certificates are being issued listing the name of only one of the child’s mothers.
In February, Human Rights Watch released the first global report on violence and discrimination against lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) women, which found access to fertility treatment and the rights of non-gestational lesbian mothers were two of the top concerns for LBQ+ activists across 26 countries. In January 2022, a United States court removed lesbian mother Kris Williams from her child’s birth certificate, replacing it with the name of the sperm donor, who petitioned for custody. In December 2022, a Japanese draft law proposed prohibiting doctors from providing fertility treatment to any woman not married to a man.
In Italy, lesbian couples cannot access fertility treatment, same-sex couples cannot marry, and the law does not explicitly regulate whether same-sex parents can both be registered. Many lesbian couples go abroad for fertility treatment and even to give birth, then bring home their child’s birth certificate for registration with the local municipality. Italy’s recent moves attack this already expensive, precarious, and difficult path to legal parenthood.
In interviews I conducted for the 2023 investigation, queer women’s concerns about parental rights often superseded hallmark LGBT rights issues, like marriage equality or the decriminalization of same-sex conduct. Lesbians want to create and protect their families, regardless of if, when, and how the government decriminalizes their lives and recognizes their relationships.
The right to create a family is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the European Convention on Human Rights – all of which Italy has ratified.
Italy should immediately reinstate the women removed from their children’s birth certificates and drop its ban on the registration of children born to same-sex couples. Authorities should pass inclusive parental recognition bills that explicitly recognize the legal parenthood of non-gestational lesbian parents.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in Cameroon are all too aware of homophobic rhetoric and violent attacks against them. This has been highlighted once again in the outpouring of vitriol before a scheduled visit by Jean-Marc Berthon, the French ambassador for the Rights of LGBT+ Persons.
Berthon was due to visit Cameroon later last month for an event on gender and sexuality hosted by the French Institute in Yaoundé, the capital. Cameroon’s government officially registered its objection to the visit, and Foreign Minister Lejeune Mbella Mbella said in the media that the visit would contravene Cameroonian law, which forbids consensual same-sex relations.
The visit was then cancelled.
Since the visit was announced, many people have called for mob justice and violence against LGBT persons on social media. Some government and political officials, as well as public figures, referred to LGBT people as “against nature,” “an anomaly,” “vampire citizens,” “destructive of the family,” “destructive of the state,” or as using “satanic and demonic practices.” In addition to this online hatred, people perceived as LGBT live with constant threats of harassment and physical violence every day.
Tamu (not their real name), an LGBT activist living in Yaoundé, told me, “The situation is very tense. People are scared. Everywhere you go you hear: ‘We have to burn them all.’ … There are young [LGBT] people calling me from everywhere. They don’t know what to do.”
The foreign minister claimed that there are no LGBT people in Cameroon, which is patently false. LGBT groups exist in Cameroon and several even manage to work with the government on initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS. But Cameroon has a dismal track record on upholding the rights of LGBT people. Security forces have failed to protect LGBT people from violence and in some instances have been responsible for acts of violence, or complicit in them. The Cameroonian government should unequivocally condemn violence and incitement to violence against LGBT people, investigate such crimes against LGBT persons, and bring those responsible to justice.
In June, the Japanese Diet, the national legislature of Japan, passed its first-ever law on sexual orientation and gender identity. It seeks to “promote understanding” and avoid “unfair discrimination.” The law states that “all citizens, irrespective of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, are to be respected as individuals with inherent and inviolable fundamental human rights.” While a good start, the measure falls short of the comprehensive nondiscrimination legislation called for by a number of Japanese rights groups.
The legislation obligates the national government to draw up a basic implementation plan to promote understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, and to protect them from “unfair discrimination.” It also stipulates that government entities, businesses, and schools “need to strive” to take similar action.
A first draft of the bill had to be shelved following opposition from conservative members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which included prejudiced statements and political posturing. But in early 2023, LGBT rights groups united to revive the bill, launching a new Group of Seven (G7) engagement group, Pride7, to establish a dialogue between civic groups and G7 governments about LGBT-related policies. With encouragement from peer G7 nations, the LDP submitted a revised bill to the Diet on May 18, a day before the G7 summit began in Hiroshima. But again, facing opposition from lawmakers, the bill was subject to delays and revisions.
The long journey for equality for Japan’s LGBT community is not over. This new law, while advancing the rights of LGBT people, falls well short of ensuring them equal protection from discrimination.
A court in the Kurdistan region of Iraq dealt independent civil society a blow on May 31, 2023, by ordering the closure of Rasan Organization over “its activities in the field of homosexuality,” Human Rights Watch said today. Rasan is the only human rights organization willing to vocally support lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), in addition to its work on women’s rights and domestic violence.
“Shuttering Rasan is not only an attack on civil society in Kurdistan but is also a direct threat to the lives and wellbeing of the vulnerable people they support,” said Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “By closing Rasan, the government has sent a clear message that it does not respect freedom of association.”
Tanya Kamal Darwish, CEO of Rasan Organization, told Human Rights Watch that the purported reason for closing the group down was not because of its activities, but because the judge took issue with its logo, which contains the colors of the rainbow. The court order states that “the expert committee confirmed that the logo of the organization is a complete expression of its activities in the field of homosexuality.”
Rasan has appealed but is unable to continue operating while the appeal is pending.
The closure of Rasan is part of a broader pattern of oppression and targeting of LGBT people and activists by local Kurdish authorities in recent years. Human Rights Watch has previously documented the targeting of LGBT people online and violence against LGBT people by armed groups in Iraq, including the regional government.
The closure is the result of a lawsuit filed against Rasan in February 2021 by Omar Kolbi, a member of the Kurdistan Parliament, who accused Rasan of “promoting homosexuality,” and “engaging in activities that defy social norms, traditions, and public morality.” Kolbi also submitted a complaint to Barzan Akram Mantiq, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Department of Non-Governmental Organizations, an official body responsible for registering, organizing, and monitoring all nongovernmental organizations in the region.
After the suit was filed, local police issued arrest warrants for 11 LGBT rights activists who were either current or former employees at Rasan based on article 401 of the penal code, which criminalizes “public indecency.”
“The Department of Non-Governmental Organizations is supporting MP Kolbi’s complaint against us, but that is backward,” Darwish said. “The department should have been supporting us, not standing against us.”
Darwish said that the trial, which took place last year, focused on the activities of Rasan and never mentioned any issues with the group’s logo. “They were asking about our activities, and we told them what we do,” Darwish said. “We focus on human rights. Anyone who comes to us with a problem we help without any discrimination.”
Rasan found out about the issue with the logo only when the court decision was published. “We weren’t expecting them to take any action against us, since we weren’t doing anything illegal. They used the logo as an excuse because they couldn’t find anything illegal in our activities,” Darwish said.
Rasan, which has operated in Sulaimaniya, a city in the Kurdistan region, for nearly two decades, has faced increasing threats and official retaliation for its activism and work. The group provides legal, psychological, and social support for women and LGBT clients, raises awareness of LGBT and women’s rights, and collects and compiles data relevant to LGBT people and gender-based violence.
In September 2022, members of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament introduced the “Bill on the Prohibition of Promoting Homosexuality,” which would punish any individual or group that advocates for the rights of LGBT people. Under the bill, the vague provision against “promoting homosexuality” would be a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to one year and a fine of up to five million dinars (US$3,430). The bill would also suspend, for up to one month, the licenses of media companies and civil society organizations that “promote homosexuality.”
Momentum for adopting the bill appears to have stalled, but in the context of repeated targeting of LGBT people, local LGBT rights activists fear it could be quickly revived and passed at the whim of local authorities.
“By going after Rasan, authorities are effectively scapegoating activists working to protect among the most vulnerable members of society, who should not fear reprisals for speaking up about abuses,” Coogle said. “The Kurdistan Regional Government should take immediate steps to ensure that organizations like Rasan are permitted to operate freely and cease harassment and targeting of LGBT advocates.”
A community center that has become a lifeline for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Ukrainians – and hub of humanitarian activity since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – was broken into and vandalized on Tuesday. Photos show that the door of the Insight office in the northwestern city of Lutsk was shattered, with broken glass and paper covering the entryway. Activists say no electronics or documents appear to be missing.
Insight is a feminist organization that provides medical care, legal aid, and psychosocial services to queer community members. Since February 2022, the group has housed hundreds of people in three emergency shelters run by LGBT human rights defenders, and, together with the Women’s March volunteer team, distributed more than 25,000 emergency aid parcels.
Ukrainian authorities should conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the attack in consultation with Insight’s human rights defenders, who have long been targeted for their work. In April 2022, two unidentified assailants teargassed Insight chair Olena Shevchenko on the streets of Lviv while she was delivering humanitarian aid. This followed a 2016 far-right attack on the Equality Festival in Lviv, LGBT defenders being teargassed at Kyiv Pride in 2018, and two attackers physically beating Shevchenko in 2019 while shouting slurs at her.
Despite the clear pattern of harassment, police did not properly investigate last year’s attack. Lviv Regional Police Department #1 formally launched a criminal investigation and Shevchenko underwent a forensic medical examination, but the police neither informed her of the results of the exam nor did they collect her victim statement. In March 2023, Shevchenko’s lawyer sent a motion to police requesting that they collect her overdue statement from the 2022 attack, and in April her lawyer filed a claim to a Lviv court regarding police inaction.
The authorities need to properly investigate the break-in and damage to Insight’s office, as well as other abuses against Ukrainian LGBT human rights defenders. Such incidents might be reduced if the government were to enact comprehensive legislation that protects people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.
Elected officials in Russia have proposed a new law that would ban transgender people from accessing gender affirming health services – including voluntary surgeries – while allowing operations on intersex children to be carried out without their consent. The bill also prohibits people from changing their name and gender marker on official documents.
The bill essentially infringes on the rights of both transgender people and intersex children. Consenting transgender adults who seek medical interventions to affirm their gender identity will be barred from those services while children born with variations in their sex characteristics – also known as intersex children – will continue to be subjected to medically unnecessary, nonconsensual surgeries to “normalize” their healthy bodies. These provisions are not only discriminatory but also violate the rights to physical integrity and privacy.
The hypocrisy of not allowing adults to make decisions about their bodies while allowing irreversible, unnecessary, and high-risk operations to be carried out on children is not unique to Russia but rather part of a cynical and exploitative anti-rights tilt politicians around the world are taking.
In recent years, officials in state governments across the United States have introduced dozens of bills that limit gender-affirming care for transgender people while allowing nonconsensual interventions on intersex children. Intersex people are usually described in this legislation as “children with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development,” which is a pejorative term for intersex variations. In Russia, lawmakers are using the phrase “congenital physiological anomalies of sex formation in children,” which carries the same harmful impact.
Deputy Petr Tolstoy said of the bill: “We preserve Russia for posterity, with its cultural and family values, traditional foundations, putting up a barrier to the penetration of Western anti-family ideology.”
This rhetoric is emblematic of President Vladimir Putin’s wholesale rejection of universal human rights. In December 2022, ten months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Duma extended the scope of Russia’s harmful “gay propaganda” law forbidding the public portrayal of “non-traditional sexual relations.” Previously focused on young people under 18, the prohibited exposure would now apply to any age group.
Russian politicians are harming transgender and intersex people by continuing to deploy cynical “family values” rhetoric to uphold regressive ideas about gender and sexuality while assaulting informed consent rights for adults and children.
Lawmakers in South Korea have introduced legislation that would extend the right to marry to same-sex couples. This important legislation would finally enshrine the rights of same-sex couples in the country.
The bill would amend the gendered definition of marriage in the country’s civil code, allowing same-sex couples to marry and extending them the same rights and benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples. Meanwhile, the National Assembly is also considering legislation that would create civil partnerships as an alternative to marriage for both same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.
In the absence of partnership recognition, same-sex couples in South Korea are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and rights violations, including discrimination in taxation, inheritance, and family law.
Earlier this year, South Korea’s High Court ruled that denying health insurance benefits to same-sex couples that were provided to heterosexual couples constituted discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
South Korea also lacks general legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. While comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation is widely popular in South Korea, it has been stymied by legislative inaction and opposition from a small but vocal segment of the population.
Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today. Have it sent to your inbox. The marriage equality bill comes as lawmakers in other countries in the region are considering more protections for same-sex couples. In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize marriage equality. Lawmakers in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand are considering proposals to legally recognize marriages or civil unions for same-sex couples.
There is growing consensus among human rights bodies that states must offer some form of recognition for same-sex relationships to protect their rights. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that, “States have a positive obligation to provide legal recognition to couples, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics, as well as to their children,” and to ensure that benefits traditionally offered to heterosexual married couples are extended without discrimination.
South Korea’s National Assembly should embrace this opportunity to protect the rights of same-sex couples and enact the marriage equality bill into law.
In December 2022, ten months into the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, the Duma extended the scope of Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ law forbidding the public portrayal of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. Previously focused on minors, the prohibited exposure would now apply to any age group. Why would Russia’s parliament do this in the middle of a war?
The amendment might appear to have been a trivial effort to distract the public from Russian military losses in Ukraine. But the restrictions, which render life precarious for LGBT+ individuals in Russia, have a much more ambitious purpose—to consolidate conservative support at home and position Russia as the defender of ‘traditional values’, in opposition to ‘the west’.
The ‘gay propaganda’ law has been at the heart of Russia’s domestic politics and foreign engagement—a symbol of its wholesale rejection of universal human rights. Its extension is but one further step in representing LGBT+ rights as a foreign threat and a Trojan-horse ‘enemy within’.
In 2020, lawmakers went so far as to include an explicit ban on same-sex marriage in Russia’s constitution. And the following year they designated several LGBT+ organisations, including the Russian LGBT Network, an umbrella group, as ‘foreign agents’—a term which in Russian has connotations of spying—accused of undermining the social order.
Galvanising issues
It is at face value extraordinary that the rights of members of a small minority, in this case LGBT+ individuals, should come to hold such symbolic resonance. Yet as the anthropologist Gayle Rubin has observed, ‘Disputes over sexual behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.’
Contestations around gender and sexuality are thus galvanising issues of our time, intersecting with broader geopolitical conflicts in novel and unlikely ways. And the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the Orthodox patriarch, Kirill I, have mobilised the rhetoric of ‘traditional values’ to legitimise the war in Ukraine.
In a televised address announcing the invasion in February last year, Putin represented the ‘so-called collective West’ as a neo-colonial, existential threat:
‘They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.’
In endorsing the invasion, the patriarch was still more explicit:
‘Donbas has fundamentally refused to accept the so-called values that are being offered by those aspiring for worldwide power. There is a specific test of loyalty to these powers, a requirement for being permitted into the happy world of excessive consuming and apparent freedom. This test is very straightforward and at the same time horrifying—the gay parade … It is about something different and much more important than politics. It is about human salvation, about on which side of God the Saviour humankind will end up.’
‘Marker of modernity’
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And when the Ukrainian lawmaker Inna Sovsun introduced a bill to legalise same-sex civil partnerships in March, she explained the rationale thus: ‘Because Putin made homophobia such a big part of his political agenda and [Russian] national ideology, people automatically associate him with homophobia. So, if we are different from him, then we should be different in that area as well.’
For better or worse, the rights of LGBT+ people have become what the Australian scholar Dennis Altman has described as a ‘marker of modernity’, increasingly framed as a litmus-test for liberal democracy. This has negative as well as positive implications.
On the one hand—if we take a long view—in many regions of the world there has been rapid progress in recent decades, consolidating rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The flipside of a symbolic association with modernity and progress, as in liberal democracies, is that LGBT+ rights can be misrepresented elsewhere as the antithesis of ‘family’ values.
Authoritarian populists
Russia has been most adept at adopting the mantle of protector of such ‘traditions’, building alliances with like-minded rulers to extend its sphere of influence globally. Elsewhere in Europe, the spectre of LGBT+ rights has become central to the playbook of authoritarian populists.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Andrzej Duda in Poland have attacked the rights of LGBT+ individuals, as part of a strategy to build political support on the foundation of conservative sexual politics and undermine democratic institutions. In Poland local authorities have declared themselves ‘LGBT-ideology-free zones’, excluding the Other in an attempt to produce a particular version of Polish society aligned with the vision of the ruling party.
In Hungary Orbán has rallied against LGBT+ rights as a ‘foreign’ and supposedly destructive influence, successfully mobilising a moral crusade, while distracting attention from the erosion of democratic norms, as part of his strategy for re-election last year. LGBT+ rights thus readily become shorthand for broader geopolitical contestations which, while rooted in questions of gender or sexuality, have much wider implications.
Competing visions
At the heart of these acrimonious conflicts is individual autonomy and the relationship of the self to society. At play are different visions of society and the world, and the place of individual rights within them.
On one side is the vision of a social order in which the individual is subordinated to a static notion of ‘culture’ and tradition, brooking no dissent. The competing vision is rights-based and accommodating of diversity.
What proponents of ‘traditional values’ are calling for is a world in which individual freedoms—including bodily autonomy and freedoms of expression and association—are curtailed by the state. In this scenario LGBT+ issues are relegated to the domain of moral stigmas, not elevated as human rights. Hence authoritarian regimes seek to restrict reproductive rights, sexuality education, domestic-violence legislation, legal gender recognition, and innovations in family structures and sexual mores. Those who fall outside gender and sexual norms then become symbolic shorthand.
When Russian lawmakers doubled down on attacking the rights of LGBT+ individuals, that symbolism was primary. Advancing ‘traditional values’ is central to Russia’s ideological justification for its war in Ukraine and activities beyond. Its systemic attacks on the rights of LGBT+ people have proved the canary in the coalmine, portending a much more dangerous global agenda.
