Same-sex couples in Hong Kong will now be allowed to own subsidised housing together after a landmark High Court ruling which saw a gay widower take on the government.
Henry Li was not able to inherit the government-subsidised flat his late husband Edgar Ng bought in 2018 after they wed in the UK because the city’s housing policies deny same-sex partners joint occupancy and ownership rights.
The court said that the refusal to acknowledge married same-sex couples in Hong Kong’s subsidised housing policies “constitute[s] unlawful discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation”.
Justice Anderson Chow, who presided over the case, said that denying joint occupancy and ownership rights to same-sex couples was in violation of Hong Kong’s constitution and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights.
In 2019, Ng had brought two judicial review proceedings against Hong Kong’s government, one seeking equal rights for same-sex couples in subsidised housing. The other review challenged inheritance and intestacy laws, as he was concerned his husband would not inherit his property if he died without a will.
The High Court ruled in Ng’s favour in September last year to grant he and Li equal ownership of their home. However, the government attempted to appeal against the decision.
Ng died by suicide in December 2020, and the hearings for his two judicial reviews began in April this year.
Benali Hamdache, Green Party spokesperson for migration and refugee support, looks at the issues facing LGBT+ refugees on World Refugee Day.
In too many places, this pandemic has allowed regimes to crackdown on LGBT+ people. Cameroon, Ghana, Philippines and Uganda have all seen outbreaks of arbitrary arrests and violence. LGBT+ refugees in Kenyan camps have experienced assault and murder.
Here in the UK the Home Office’s social media is currently adorned with the rainbow flag and Boris Johnson has acknowledged that COVID has worsened the situation for LGBT+ people globally. We have a government that professes inclusivity, openness and action.
But Priti Patel’s New Plan for Immigration threatens to close the door on countless LGBT+ refugees. At a time when refuge is in greater need, our Home Secretary is out selling harsh new proposals on refugees during Pride Month.
Earlier on in the year, the Home Secretary released a 46 page policy statement on her vision for changing the asylum process. These represent the biggest changes proposed in two decades. Nowhere in the document is the impact on refugees seeking support because of their gender or sexuality considered.
But those impacts are real and have been laid out by Rainbow Migration, one of the country’s leading charities working with LGBT+ refugees.
The first concern is the demand that all evidence for an asylum claim must be laid out at the beginning of the case. It is suggested that anything disclosed later will be given “minimum weight”.
This will mean many more LGBT+ asylum seekers will have their claims rejected. The reality is that not everyone is able to tell a stranger everything that has happened to them immediately. Many will carry huge amounts of shame and trauma about the experiences that brought them to flee. This harsher process will result in people being sent back to danger.
There is no need to dramatically shorten the process in manner. People deserve a fair hearing and the time to open up and share their journey.
The second concern is around how refugees will be detained. Detaining people in “reception centres” will be doubly damaging for a range of asylum seekers.
There’s huge amounts of evidence that LGBT+ asylum seekers face discrimination and intimidation in refugee holding centres. While out in the community people have been able to find support and begin to express their gender and sexuality freely.
We’ve seen what mass detention of refugees looks like in Australia. Unbelievably hostile spaces that re-traumatise the traumatised. We should not be emulating that here.
The final concern, also laid out excellently by Rainbow Sisters (a collective of LGBT+ women and non-binary refugees), is around routes to the UK.
The new proposals threaten to send back anyone who could have claimed asylum somewhere on their way to the UK. They make arbitrary decisions about what constitutes a safe harbour for LGBT+ refugees and emphasise the value of resettlement plans. But many LGBT+ people have to flee their homes suddenly and quickly. What constitutes a safe country may differ widely from person to person and across the EU not all countries guarantee the same level of rights to LGBT+ people.
These proposals also threaten the plight of trafficked people. Punishing refugees for being brought here “illegally” would add another layer of cruelty.
In reality Priti Patel’s proposals that asylum seekers can be sent back to their first “safe” harbour seem unlikely. EU countries in the wake of Brexit seem unwilling to sign any kind of reciprocal deal along these lines. LGBT+ refugees deserve more than empty threats and being treated like a political football.
We already have an undoubtedly harsh asylum system. A Freedom of Information request looked at how many claims based on gender or sexuality had been rejected between 2016 and 2018. More than 3,100 LGBT+ asylum claims had been rejected from countries where gay sex is criminalised. From Pakistan and Nigeria to Bangladesh.
Priti Patel’s proposals to make the system harsher are wrongheaded and mean spirited. This Pride, our government cannot claim to be allies, but then turn its back on LGBT+ people in danger.
A trans woman was reportedly beaten and brutally dismembered by her friends after going for drinks in an attack that has fuelled fear in Miranda, Venezuela.
Elizabeth Rondón, a 33-year-old vegetable seller, was slain Monday morning (13 June) after at least three people beat her, according to activists and witnesses.
Loved ones described Rondón as a quiet but charismatic person who traded vegetables for food in the Santa Cruz del Este neighbourhood of the Baruta municipality.
But her friends, they said, “bothered her a lot” for being trans, often harassing her for it.
On Sunday night (12 June), Rondón went to drinks with her friends who proceeded to cruelly mock her for being trans, witnesses told police, according to Agencia Carabobeña de Noticias.
Rondón, upset from the comments, hit back and a scuffle reportedly ensued. She then allegedly left with the group who beat her unconscious, police said.
The morning after, passers-by found her dismembered body in El Pozo. Her head had been severed off, her jaw detached, and her arms and legs all detached, a coroner report said.
Rondón is the fourth LGBT+ slain in Baruta this year, according to data collected by LGBT+ advocacy group Never Stop Dreaming. Fearing the “growing wave of violence” in the municipality, it tweeted: “They are killing us.”
Never Stop Dreaming called for “competent authorities to carry out an exhaustive investigation” while urging police to consider the killing a hate crime, considering that “trans women are not recognised” in Venezuela.
To Movimiento SOMOS, an activist group working from Mérida, the killings represent the “importance of Pride as a political response to systematic hatred”.
The group took aim at what it called the “indifferent” authorities, it wrote in a Twitter statement.
“Trans lives matter,” it added. “We demand justice for this and all crimes against LGBT+ done with impunity.”
The Bank of England began circulating its new £50 bank notes featuring World War II codebreaker Alan Turing on Wednesday, which would have been the pioneering math genius’ 109th birthday.
Often referred to as the “father of computer science and artificial intelligence,” Turing was hailed a war hero and granted an honor by King George VI at the end of the war for helping to defeat the Nazis. Despite this, however, he died as a disgraced “criminal” — simply for being a gay man.
“I’m delighted that Alan Turing features on our new £50 bank note. He was a brilliant scientist whose thinking still shapes our lives today,” Sarah John, Bank of England’s chief cashier, told NBC News. “However, his many contributions to society were still not enough to spare him the appalling treatment to which he was subjected simply because he was gay. By placing him on this new £50, we are celebrating his life and his achievements, of which we should all be very proud.”
Born in London on June 23, 1912, Turing graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1934. At the start of WWII, he joined the British government’s wartime operation, designing a code-breaking machine known as “Bombe.” Bombe went on to supply the Allied Forces with significant military intelligence, processing, at its peak, 89,000 coded messages per day.
Former operator Jean Valentine, 82, with a restored and fully functioning Turing Bombe during it’s unveiling at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire on Sept. 6, 2006.Rui Vieira / PA Images via Getty Images file
At the end of the war, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an honor granted by the royal family to a selected few for their contribution to science, arts and public service.
In the years that followed, Turing carried on working as a computer scientist. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE, would have been the first and most advanced computer for his time. But his colleagues at the National Physical Laboratory feared the engineering was too complex and decided to build a much smaller pilot ACE instead. Their competitors at Manchester University consequently won the race, and the disheartened Turing had joined their forces as deputy director. Turing also wrote the first programming manual.
“What we really don’t realize is how this moment and Turing’s vision changed the entire world. Before this, literally nobody in the world had imagined that a single machine could apply countless strings of abstract symbols. Now we know them as programs,” according to David Leslie of the Alan Turing Institute.
But being an outstanding computer scientist and a war hero didn’t spare Turing from what some have called a “witch hunt” of gay and bisexual men in the U.K., which led to the imprisonment of thousands of gay men and those suspected of being gay throughout the 1950s.
In January 1952, Turing was prosecuted for indecency over his relationship with another man in Manchester. Despite being referred to as a “national asset” during this trial by character witness Hugh Alexander, the head of cryptanalysis at the Government Communications Headquarter, Turing was persecuted.
The Bank of England began circulating its new £50 bank notes featuring World War II codebreaker Alan Turing on Wednesday.Bank of England
In March of that year, Turing pleaded guilty and, to avoid imprisonment, had to agree to be chemically castrated by taking a hormonal treatment designed to suppress his libido.
His criminal record disqualified him from working for a governmental intelligence agency. Disgraced and disenfranchised, he took his own life by cyanide poisoning June 8, 1954, in his home in Manchester. He was 41.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in the U.K. more than a decade later June 14, 1967.
Despite his tragic end, Turing’s legacy as a wartime hero and the father of computer science has lived on, and the British government has attempted to right its past wrongs. In 2009, more than a half century after Turing’s death, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking on behalf of the government, publicly apologized for Turing’s “utterly unfair” treatment. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon.
Featuring him on a £50 bank note marks another milestone. This is the first time that a gay man is featured on a British bank note. It has been welcomed by parts of the LGBTQ community as a symbol of the country facing up to its dark past of the horrific persecution of gay men.
This visionary computer and artificial intelligence pioneer, once criminalized and disgraced, is now widely celebrated. In Turing’s own words from 1949: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”
Thousands rallied in Warsaw for the largest Pride parade in central Europe, taking a defiant stand against the rising tide of homophobia in Poland.
Marchers gathered amid a sea of rainbow flags for the Warsaw equality parade on Saturday (19 June), with the city’s mayor Rafal Trzaskowski marching at the head in a prominent sign of support.
Postponed for two years due to COVID, the event marked the 20th anniversary since Warsaw’s first ever Pride – yet the celebrations were tinged with fear for the future in the heavily Catholic, largely conservativenation.
“The day of the parade is always a bittersweet moment for our community,” said Rafal Wojtczak, a spokesman for the organisers, adding that “our community has been used in a political war”.
He described feelings of sadness and helplessness that LGBT+ people have not achieved rights like same-sex partnership or marriage in Poland, while also facing new threats.
Just days before the march, Hungary’s nationalist government, strongly allied with Poland, passed a chilling law that bans any discussion of LGBT+ people in schools and in the media. Just a single independent lawmaker voted against it.
One prominent Polish LGBT+ activist, Bart Staszewski, marched with a Hungarian flag as message to the EU: “Poland will be next.”
It’s a legitimate fear in a country that’s becoming ever more polarised by its far-right government, which persistently positions LGBT+ people as a corrosive threat to so-called traditional values.
Among the latest threats is a horrifying new bill that would ban Pride parades altogether; it’s backed by Poland’s influential Catholic church, the leader of the governing party and more than 200,000 other homophobes.
“We’ve been through a very, very rough time,” said Miroslawa Makuchowska, vice director of Campaign Against Homophobia. “But at the same time we are going out in the streets and we are saying we are stronger, and we are not going to give up.”
Hungary’s parliament passed legislation on Tuesday that bans the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and transgender issues, amid strong criticism from human rights groups and opposition parties.
Hardline nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who faces an election next year, has grown increasingly radical on social policy, railing against LGBTQ people and immigrants in his self-styled illiberal regime, which has deeply divided Hungarians.
His Fidesz party, which promotes a Christian-conservative agenda, tacked the proposal banning school talks on LGBTQ issues to a separate, widely backed bill that strictly penalizes pedophilia, making it much harder for opponents to vote against it.
The move, which critics say wrongly conflates pedophilia with LGBTQ issues, triggered a mass rally outside parliament on Monday, while several rights groups have called on Fidesz to withdraw the bill.
Fidesz lawmakers overwhelmingly backed the legislation on Tuesday, while leftist opposition parties boycotted the vote.
Under amendments submitted to the bill last week, under-18s cannot be shown any content that encourages gender transition or homosexuality. This also applies to advertisements. The law sets up a list of organizations allowed to provide education about sex in schools.
Restrictions
Gay marriage is not recognized in Hungary and only heterosexual couples can legally adopt children. Orban’s government has redefined marriage as the union between one man and one woman in the constitution, and limited gay adoption.
Critics have drawn a parallel between the new legislation and Russia’s 2013 law that bans disseminating “propaganda on non-traditional sexual relations” among young Russians.
Poland’s conservative ruling party Law and Justice (PiS), Fidesz’s main ally in the European Union, has taken a similarly critical stance on LGBTQ issues. Budapest and Warsaw are at odds with the European Union over some of their conservative reforms.
The European Parliament’s rapporteur on the situation in Hungary, Greens lawmaker Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, slammed the new law on Tuesday: “Using child protection as an excuse to target LGBTIQ people is damaging to all children in Hungary.”
Orban has won three successive election landslides since 2010, but opposition parties have now combined forces for the first time and caught up with Fidesz in opinion polls.
Hungary’s parliament should reject a bill that would prohibit discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation, and violates Hungary’s international legal obligations, Human Rights Watch said today. The law targets content “promoting” or “portraying” sexual and gender diversity and could have sweeping consequences for health providers, educators, and artists, among others.
The draft “Laws enabling stricter action against pedophile offenders and the protection of children” bans the “portrayal and the promotion of gender identity different from sex at birth, the change of sex and homosexuality” aimed at people under 18. The bill, sponsored by Fidesz, the ruling party, is due for a vote in parliament on June 15, 2021.
“Hungary’s ruling party is cynically deploying a ‘protection of children’ narrative to trample on rights and try to render LGBT people invisible,” said Neela Ghoshal, associate LGBT rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Children do not need to be protected from exposure to diversity. On the contrary, LGBT children and families need protection from discrimination and violence.”
The draft law is the latest in a series of attacks on LGBT equality under Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government. In May 2020 the government rushed through an omnibus bill that included provisions preventing transgender and intersex people from changing their gender marker on official documents, in defiance of their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In December, parliament adopted an amendment to the constitution effectively banning same-sex couples from adopting children.
Orban’s government has sought to scapegoat LGBT people as part of a wider strategy to sidestep human rights obligations and cement Orban’s brand of authoritarianism.
In the case of the current bill, Fidesz members of the legislative committee added language on “portrayal and promotion” of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations at the last minute to an existing draft bill on pedophilia. The bill already contained provisions hostile to LGBT people, including one that the state should protect “family relations based on parent-child relations where the mother is a woman, the father is a man,” and another aimed at “ensuring the right of children to an identity in line with their sex at birth.”
The new provisions take aim at any discussion of diversity, and seem to stem in part from efforts by artists and advertisers to promote inclusion and acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. In 2019, Fidesz threatened a boycott in response to Coca-Cola advertisements featuring same-sex couples sharing a soft drink. In 2020, when Labrisz, a lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’s organization published a fairy tale anthology entitled “Wonderland is for Everyone” featuring some LGBT protagonists, the government forced it to attach stickers to the books with the disclaimer that they contained “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles.”
Hungary’s draft pedophilia law introduces provisions into the Child Protection Act, the Act on Business Advertising Activity, the Media Act, the Family Protection Act, and the Public Education Act that would establish administrative sanctions for licensed professionals or institutions that violate it, threatening the right to education and the right to health, including the explicit right to health information under international law. In addition, the law is likely to contribute to violence and other forms of harassment against LGBT youth, in violation of the rights to security of person and freedom from violence.
Fidesz efforts to silence speech acknowledging the existence and human rights of LGBT people echo the so-called “gay propaganda” law passed in Russia in 2013. Human Rights Watch has extensively documented how that law exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people and stifled access to LGBT-inclusive education and support services, with harmful consequences for children.
Russia’s propaganda law has been used to shut down online information and mental health referral services for children and to discourage support groups and mental health professionals from working with children. It stigmatizes LGBT children and their families and has had a chilling effect on mental health professionals who work with LGBT youth. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2017 that the law was discriminatory and harmful to children. It held that authorities adopting such laws are seeking to reinforce stigma and prejudice and encourage homophobia, which is incompatible with the values of a democratic society.
The proposed bill in Hungary similarly violates the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch said. As the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee for Human Rights has observed, “authorities have a positive obligation to take effective measures to protect and ensure the respect of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons who wish to … express themselves, even if their views are unpopular or not shared by the majority of the population.”
The right to freedom of expression includes the right to seek and receive information and ideas of all kinds. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has noted the right to seek and receive information includes “information on subjects dealing with sexual orientation and gender identity.” In recognition of children’s particular need for information, the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to ensure children’s “access to information and materials from a diversity of national and international sources.”
In June 2020 the European Court of Human Rights found that Hungary violated its obligation under the European Convention on Human Rights to respect transgender people’s private lives, and has to provide a procedure to allow them to have their gender identity legally recognized on documents.
The EU Commission adopted in November 2020 its first-ever five-year LGBTIQ Equality Strategy and in March, the European Parliament declared the EU an “LGBTIQ Freedom zone.” This latest anti-LGBT attack in Hungary triggers a responsibility for the European Commission and other EU member states to take action and hold Hungary’s government to account. EU’s Equality Commissioner, Helena Dalli, should strongly denounce Hungary’s latest attack against non-discrimination, a core right under the EU treaties, and call on the Hungarian parliament to reject the draft bill.
“Equating sexual and gender diversity with pedophilia is in itself a frontal attack on the basic dignity and humanity of LGBT people, and poses real risks to their safety and well-being,” Ghoshal said. “Hungarian members of parliament should reject this effort to silence marginalized people and should instead redouble their efforts to protect the basic human rights of everyone in Hungary, including people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
An increasing number of young adults identify as nonheterosexual and noncisgender, according to a new global survey from Ipsos.
The results, released Wednesday, are based on internet surveys of more than 19,000 people in 27 countries ages 16 or 18 (depending on the country) to 74. The surveys were conducted in the languages of each country.
Respondents in Generation Z, which includes people born after 1997, were nearly four times as likely than those over 40 (4 percent compared to 1 percent) to identify as transgender, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, gender-fluid or “in another way.”
They were also the age group most likely to identify as something other than heterosexual. Overall, 9 percent of respondents identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual or asexual; for Generation Z, the figure doubles to 18 percent.
Previous surveys of young Americans have pointed to this phenomenon: In a Gallup poll last year, 5.6 percent of U.S. respondents overall identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, while 16 percent of those in Generation Z reported being LGBTQ.
“The patterns that we see in the U.S. are definitely not unique to the U.S.,” Nicolas Boyon, senior vice president of public affairs at Ipsos, said of the higher rate of gender and sexual fluidity among Gen Z. “It’s a global phenomenon.”
Worldwide, 1.4 percent of those surveyed identified as gender minorities, with Sweden (2.9 percent), Germany (2.5 percent) and Argentina (2.3) having the highest percentages of respondents who identify as transgender, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, gender-fluid or “in another way.” South Africa (0.3 percent) and Belgium (0.5 percent) had the lowest.https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20210608-lgbtq-survey/index.html?initialWidth=560&childId=embed-20210608-lgbtq-survey&parentTitle=Nearly%201%20in%205%20young%20adults%20say%20they%27re%20not%20straight%2C%20global%20survey%20finds&=
India (17 percent), Brazil (15 percent) and Spain (12 percent) had the highest percentages of respondents who identified as nonheterosexual. China and South Korea had the lowest.https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20210608-lgbtq-survey-orientation/index.html?initialWidth=560&childId=embed-20210608-lgbtq-survey-orientation&parentTitle=Nearly%201%20in%205%20young%20adults%20say%20they%27re%20not%20straight%2C%20global%20survey%20finds&=Exposure to sexual and gender minorities
Worldwide, 42 percent of survey respondents said they have a gay or lesbian relative, friend or colleague, while 24 percent said they know someone who is bisexual; 10 percent said they known someone who is transgender, and 9 percent said they know someone who is nonbinary, gender-nonconforming or gender-fluid. The likelihood is higher among women than among men in all four groups, and there is wide national variation. In Brazil, for example, 66 percent report having a gay or lesbian relative, friend or colleague, but in Japan and South Korea, the number is only 7 percent.
When it comes to speaking out on behalf of LGBTQ people, nearly one-third of all respondents around the world said they had done so. Consistent with the other findings, the survey found that Gen Z is much more outspoken than older generations, with 40 percent saying they have spoken out against anti-LGBTQ prejudice.
Eleven percent of respondents across all 27 countries reported having attended a same-sex wedding, from over 20 percent in Mexico and Argentina to 1 percent in Russia.
The survey asked about participation in pro-LGBTQ events, like Pride marches. Globally, 13 percent of all respondents said they had attended such an event, including 54 percent of lesbian and gay respondents and 10 percent of heterosexuals. In Australia, more than 20 percent of respondents reported having attended an event in support of LGBTQ rights, but in Russia, only 1 percent did.
“I’m not surprised that Russia stands out,” said Emil Edenborg, an associate senior lecturer at Stockholm University and an expert on Russia. Edenborg, who was not involved in the survey, said the low level of participation in Pride events in Russia is due, in part, to the country’s so-called gay propaganda law.
“Pride parades are banned in Russia since 2013, as are public expressions in favor of LGBT rights,” he said.
The law not only affects activists, Edenborg said — it also targets social media and any kind of public information, including sexual education information.
“The most harmful effect of this law is the way it impacts young people,” he said. “It really has put a harsh form of censuring on young people, especially limiting their ability to speak out about their sexuality and gender identity.”Same-sex marriage and parenting
The survey found that a global majority are in favor of same-sex marriage. In only two of the 27 countries surveyed, Russia and Malaysia, researchers found majorities in opposition.
Edenborg said same-sex marriage has become a political flashpoint in Russia.
“Same-sex marriage and parenting have been the main features of the homophobic and stigmatizing discourse of the state. Those issues have been highlighted as the biggest threats,” he said.
Worldwide, women are more likely to support same-sex marriage than men. One’s level of education did not play a role in attitudes. Since Ipsos’ last global survey of opinions on same-sex marriage, in 2013, there has not been a drop in support in any country. There was growth in support in most countries, with the U.S. having the second-highest growth, following Argentina, where support grew by 25 percent.
Latin American countries demonstrated relatively high levels of support for same-sex marriage, with 82 percent of respondents in Chile and 76 percent in Mexico in favor of same-sex marriage or some type of legal recognition of gay unions. Jordi Díez, a professor of political science at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, said it is a common misconception that Latin America is uniformly conservative.
“You have much higher levels of tolerance in Latin America than in the U.S. There is no question about that,” he said.
He also pointed to the long history of gay and lesbian activism in Latin America. “Gay and lesbian mobilization in Latin America is actually quite old. The visibility has been there, and these demands have been there for a long time,” he said.
Several Latin American countries — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Costa Rica — have adopted same-sex marriage laws. The laws, Díez said, have a “normalizing effect,” increasing support for the policies and acceptance of homosexuality.
Support for equal parental rights is also high worldwide, with 61 percent of respondents saying same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. In only four countries — Russia, Malaysia, Poland and Peru — were there majorities in opposition to adoption by same-sex couples.
Overall, the survey found that women are more supportive of parental rights for same-sex couples and that boomers are more likely to support adoption rights than Gen X. Canada and the Netherlands stand out as having the most support for the parental rights of same-sex couples, with 81 percent of Canadians and 83 percent of Dutch in favor of equal rights for same-sex parents.Visibility and equality
Around the world, a majority support lesbians’, gays’ and bisexuals’ being open about their sexual orientation (51 percent in favor compared to 16 percent in opposition). There is strong support for laws banning discrimination at 55 percent worldwide, but support is more muted on public affection, with 37 percent supporting and 27 percent opposing.
There is also global support for openly lesbian, gay and bisexual athletes on sports teams. In the U.S., 53 percent of respondents support athletes’ being out, similar to the global average of 50 percent.
The same level of support does not appear to exist for transgender athletes’ competing in accordance with their gender identities. On average across the 27 countries, as many respondents support as oppose the idea (32 percent compared to 32 percent).
“The U.S. is one of the countries where there is the most opposition,” said Boyon of Ipsos, with only 27 percent of U.S. respondents in support.
In the U.S., state legislators have introduced a slew of bills this year to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in school sports.Obstacles and next steps for a global survey
Boyon acknowledged that global surveys have their limitations. In particular, he cited the difficulty in crafting a survey to adequately capture the diversity of people’s gender identifications.
“In designing the questionnaires, we realized that no matter what we do, we will miss people,” Boyon said. “We are aware of the challenges of using labels.”
Another issue is translation, Boyon said. “We did not use the word ‘queer’ in the survey, because it doesn’t really translate in a lot of languages.”
Relatedly, the survey was designed in English by researchers based in the U.S. and the U.K. “This is a survey that is designed by Westerners,” Boyon said.
The survey does not claim to be nationally representative in all counties. In countries where the internet is not as accessible, for example, the survey captures the opinions of a relatively urban and digitally connected group.
Boyon said that going forward, he’d like to explore whether Generation Z retains its gender and sexual openness.
“One big question about the trends that we see among younger people is whether the patterns we see in Gen Z will stick over time,” Boyon said, “or whether it just reflects youth and as time goes by they may have more defined identities.”
Gay, lesbian and transgender candidates are competing for votes in Mexico’s midterm election, aiming to upset politics as usual in the largely Roman Catholic, socially conservative Latin American country.
A total of 117 candidates, or nearly 2 percent of more than 6,000 hopefuls running for office on Sunday who responded to a survey by national electoral institute INE, identified as part of the LGBTQ community.
About 21,000 local and national races are being contested in the vote, including 15 governorships and all 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, in a pivotal election for the agenda of leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador during the second half of his six-year term.
Mexico’s political parties were already required to nominate equal numbers of men and women, and new INE rules adopted last January added the obligation to also nominate candidates from vulnerable groups, including the LGBTQ community.
Candidate for deputy for the Citizens’ Movement party, Aurelien Guilabert, speaks during an interview with Reuters, ahead of the mid-term elections on June 6, in Mexico City on May 30, 2021.Carlos Jasso / Reuters
Like others aiming for jobs in politics, LGBTQ candidates are emphasizing public safety and the economy, but also specific obstacles for those who are often marginalized.
“That’s exactly why I want to serve in Congress, to fight discrimination everywhere and shake things up with a representative voice,” said Maria Garcia, a transgender candidate for Congress in Mexico City.
Garcia is running under the banner of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) of Lopez Obrador, who has seldom championed LGBTQ causes and has sided with conservatives on same-sex marriage.
Gay activist-turned-candidate Aurelien Guilabert said the need to tackle a growing number of hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people helped motivate him to run for the capital’s local congress.
“We’re suffering through one of the worst crises,” he said.
Guilabert is with the Citizen Movement (MC) party. According to the INE survey, nearly 32 percent of the LGBTQ candidates running on Sunday are from the party, the highest percentage of any party.
A court in India ordered state and federal officials on Monday to draw up plans for sweeping reforms to respect LGBTQ rights, in a ruling that went far beyond the narrow terms of a case brought by a lesbian couple who said they had been harassed by police.
Judge Anand Venkatesh of the Madras High Court ruled in favor of the couple, who had complained that police had subjected them to harassing questioning after their parents filed a missing persons report.
But the judge also used the opportunity to issue a broad ruling that called for the elimination of what he described as illegal discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community. He ordered state and federal government departments to report back with steps they intend to take to comply.
Among his recommendations: police and government officials should be given awareness training to ensure they respect LGBTQ rights. Medical practitioners who claim to be able to “cure” homosexuality should have their licenses revoked.
Schools and colleges should make gender neutral restrooms available, and gender-nonconforming or trans prisoners should be housed separately if needed to protect them from sexual assault.
“Ignorance is no justification for normalizing any form of discrimination,” Venkatesh wrote in his order. Educators should reach out to parents, to help “sensitize parents on issues of LGBTQIA+ community and gender nonconforming students, to ensure supportive families,” his order read.
Activists hailed the order as a major step toward equality for marginalized groups. Although the court could not by itself impose such widespread change with a single ruling, government departments could not ignore the order to report back on the steps they plan to take to comply, and the arguments raised by the judge could serve as precedent for future cases.
“This is the first major order that addresses most challenges concerning the whole LGBTQIA+ community and issues specific directions,” said L Ramakrishnan, vice-president at SAATHII, a Chennai-based public health advocacy group.
“I am hopeful of change given the judge has indicated he would follow up on the directions on a regular basis,” he said.
In reaching his ruling, the judge said he had sought information on same-sex relationships from a psychologist. The judge described himself as not “fully woke” and said he belonged to the majority in India, who are “yet to comprehend homosexuality completely”.
