Outright International has called out the United Nations for excluding LBQ women and gender-diverse people in a new report. The LGBTQ global nonprofit countered the absence of these people in the U.N.'s femicides report by queering the conversation this week.
U.N. Women, the U.N. organization dedicated to gender equality, lumped all types of gender-related killings of women and girls together in its definition of femicide in its new report, "Femicides in 2023: Global estimates of intimate partner/family member femicides," released November 25.
Outright said LGBTQ voices should also be heard.
"We want to ensure that when there are discussions of gender-based violence that take place, that LGBTIQ voices are also at the table," said Neela Ghoshal, senior director of law, policy and research at Outright, opening a virtual conversation November 26, "so that we can address this scourge on our communities holistically and in partnership with women's rights activists, feminist movements, and others."
U.N. Women's "16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence," launched November 25, comes five days after the Transgender Day of Remembrance, November 20.
Ghoshal explained that while the report's title is "very inclusive," the "reality is that a lot of the work that happens around the 16 days is very cis and heteronormative." She pointed out that the documentation produced for the action by the U.N. and by other organizations "tends to conflate gender-based violence with violence against women and girls, and in fact, most of the reporting by the U.N. this year refers exclusively to violence against women and girls."
"We believe that women and girls absolutely should be centered in discussions of gender-based violence," she continued, "but that when these discussions just include women and girls and leave out LGBTIQ people of different genders, that something is missing."
That missing piece, Ghoshal said, "is looking at the root causes of gender-based violence," and that "it's about reinforcing harmful gender binaries and norms that can impact anyone."
Gender-based ideology and violence
U.N. Women launched the action to mark the 25th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and to bring awareness of violence against women around the world from November 25 to December 10, according to a news release.
According to the website for the report, the number of countries reporting on femicides has decreased by 50% in the past five years. However, U.N. Women wants to ensure "that every victim is counted" to "ensure that perpetrators are held to account and justice is served."
"It is by improving understanding of all types of gender-related killings of women and girls, that we can strengthen prevention and improve responses," according to the site.
On Transgender Day of Remembrance, communities around the world held vigils to remember the 350 transgender and gender-diverse people reported killed between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024, according to the Transgender Murder Monitoring Project, which is produced by Transgender Europe. The number of killings increased by 29, up from 321 reported murders in 2023, according to the project.
The project noted 94% of the reported killings were femicides, meaning the victims were transgender women or transfeminine people, consistent with previous years' figures. However, transgender and gender-diverse people as well as queer women were glaringly absent from the U.N. Women report.
TDOR was founded by Bay Area Reporter Transmissions columnist Gwendolyn Ann Smith 26 years ago, as the Remembering Our Dead project. It came after Rita Hester, a young Black trans woman, was found dead in Alston, Massachusetts in 1998, reported the B.A.R.. November 20, the day observing and paying tribute to the hundreds of trans people killed in the U.S. and around the world, now caps off Transgender Awareness Week, observed annually November 13-19 since 2004.
Global backlash
Outright isn't the only organization taking note of the surge of violence against women, LBQ, and gender-diverse people. Organizations like the Institute of Development Studies, based in the United Kingdom, and Argentine feminist journalist Luciana Peker, are documenting the global backlash and issuing a rallying cry to all people who care about women and gender-diversity.
Sohela Nazneen, IDS research fellow and co-author of the organization's report, expressed her concern in the rise of violence against women and the rollback of LGBTQ rights in a November 21 blog post from the organization.
"We are concerned to see a rise in violence against women and a roll back of hard-won LGBTQI+ rights," she wrote. "We fear the recent election of Donald Trump and victory of many right-wing political parties in Europe may embolden a push back against women's rights and gender equality agendas."
IDS pointed to well-funded interconnected global movements against gender rights. According to the organization's November 20 news release, these interconnected movements against gender rights receive three times more funding than feminist and queer movements ($3.7 billion for the former, compared to $1.2 billion). This funding is directed at a growing network of think tanks and organizations, including in Europe, Russia, and the US, all promoting anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-abortion agendas.
"It is not a pandemic, nor a virus that spreads. 'Gender ideology,' poetically painted as a villain, sneaks across borders. It's not an exception; it's an international orchestration," wrote Peker in Global Voices. Peker has been living in self-imposed exile since 2023 due to threats to her safety after Argentine President Javier Milei was elected.
Translated excerpts from Peker's article documenting the backlash against women and LGBTQ people in Latin America were republished by Global Voices. Muy Waso, a Bolivian media partner of Global Voices, translated the article.
Holding up her own country, Argentina, as an example of how left and right elected leaders perpetrate violence against and strip away women's and LGBTQ people's rights, Peker wrote, "Latin America is going against progress and backtracking after decades of moving forward."
TGEU's project reported almost three-quarters (73%) of all reported transgender killings were committed in Latin America and the Caribbean. For the 17th consecutive year, Brazil leads the country rankings, with 30% of total cases.
"Argentina went from being a vanguard country to being the vanguard of attacks against women and sexual diversity," Peker wrote. "The mirror that had expanded Argentina's green tide for women's reproductive rights to the whole region is now legitimizing a global phenomenon of regression."
In May, an arsonist attacked two lesbian couples while they were sleeping in the room they rented in a Buenos Aires boarding house, the B.A.R. previously reported. Two of the women burned to death. The third woman died at the hospital. The fourth woman, Sofia Castro Riglo, survived, reported CNN. A suspect was arrested. Feminist and LGBTQ activists condemned the attack and blamed Milei and government officials for the growing wave of anti-LGBTQ hate.
Recalibrating
On the second day of the U.N. Women's activism campaign, Outright brought together four of its experts in a webinar, "New Insights on Gender-Based Violence Against LGBTIQ People," discussing the different ways queer and transgender women are affected by gender-based violence.
The experts were Madhura Chakraborty, senior global researcher based in Thailand; Kimberly Zieselman, J.D., senior adviser for Global Intersex Rights based in the U.S.; Thiruna Naidoo, Africa project officer based in South Africa; and Alberto de Belaunde, program adviser of Global Advocacy. Chakraborty uses they/them pronouns. Ghoshal, who is based in the U.S., moderated the global discussion.
Outright published a series of reports focused on violence against intersex children around the world, online gender-based violence against LBQ women in Asia, and so-called conversion therapy practices as a form of gender-based violence in Africa and Latin America.
The researchers advocated for education campaigns and proposed targeted legislation to combat gender-based violence after they discovered stigma and a lack of awareness about queer and gender-diverse people across the world.
Through their individual studies, the researchers also found in many cases a dearth of data, laws, policies, lacking recognition of gender-based violence used against LBQ women from conversion therapy to "corrective rape," and ill-equipped legal frameworks to criminalize or prosecute perpetrators.
(Conversion therapy seeks to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Corrective rape occurs when a person is raped because of their perceived sexual orientation.)
Chakraborty spoke about the lack of identifying LBQ women in gender-based violence research. They noted in their research into online gender-based violence against LBQ women in the five Asian countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam) there is a deficiency of data in the region. It isn't that there isn't any data on gender-based violence against women, they said. Since 2020 and the COVID pandemic, research on gender-based violence focused on women and girls "blew up," but LGBTQ communities are only footnotes in the research.
"What we are seeing is a lack of focus on the specific kinds of violence online that LBQ women face and there is almost no data on this," Chakraborty said. However, they noted "there are some recent studies on trans feminine experiences and nonbinary people's experiences."
Speaking about intersex people, Zieselman, who is intersex, said it's difficult to collect quantitative data, but she has "plenty of anecdotal evidence" from rural areas in Africa to major cities in the United States where intersex children in worse case scenarios are killed or undergo "corrective genital" surgeries.
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates as many as 1.7% of children are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.
"Despite many countries passing laws banning female genital mutilation and cutting, there are very few laws protecting intersex babies and girls around the world," said Zieselman, calling corrective genital surgeries not only gender-based violence but also sexual-based violence due to the negative mental and physical damage caused.
The surgeries "usually do way more harm than good, causing severe, irreversible, lifelong, physical and emotional harm," she said.
She estimated that about seven countries and two territories have banned corrective genital surgeries on intersex babies in the last decade.
"That's just not good enough," Zieselman said. "Our bodies are not the problem. These interventions are the problem."
De Belaunde stated that the "research is quite clear that conversion practices are a form of gender-based violence" in Latin America and "these practices are rooted in rigid and aggressive ideas of gender and sexuality."
In a machismo environment like Latin America, where there is "toxic masculinity," there is also "a clear trend that shows us how gender-based violence also includes conversion practices," he added.
However, de Belaunde argues that criminalization and other punitive measures don't work, stating punishment has failed. The former Peruvian legislator advocated for targeted legislation and education.
"I think that we should try to get away from that punitive approach," said de Belaunde. "A punitive approach in gender-based violence is not giving us the results."
Chakraborty also noted that when it comes to criminalization of gender-based violence, online advocates might be wading into murky waters due to the fact that for many in the LGBTQ community, online spaces are most often safe spaces to find and build community.
"It doesn't matter if you have the best legislation around this issue, if we still have homophobia and transphobia in our countries," de Belaunde said.
"In Latin America, if you have machismo and toxic masculinity, you are going to find some sort of conversion practices," he added.
"I think that trying to have a preventive approach in this issue is maybe a more intelligent and efficient way of thinking around this issue if you are going to legislate," de Belaunde said, pointing out that "you can also argue that you already have all the legal tools to confront this problem."
Naidoo, in Africa, agreed, stating she believes the African Union's Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, which was adopted in 2003, can be used to combat conversion therapy as well as other gender-based violence used against LBQ women, such as corrective rape in Africa.
"I think that having access to this mechanism could provide various opportunities," she said, pointing to opportunities to "contributing to strengthen gender sensitive reporting processes, the framing of conversion practices as sexual violence for these specific forms that are rooted in sexually violent behaviors, as well as encouraging different avenues for reporting, advocacy and lobbying.
"There is a broader framework within the protocol which specifically speaks to gender-based violence and the factors driving it," she added.
"If you are going to legislate," de Belaunde said, "you want to generate awareness in society.
"When we are talking about minors that have been exposed to conversion practices, they were taken there by their parents," he said, noting that in many cases, it's not because the parents are homophobic or transphobic, "you hear the testimonies, and in a lot of cases, they love their kids, but they are really worried what's going to happen to them in the future."
De Belaunde and Zieselman suggested leveraging testimonials of survivors of gender-based violence and conversion therapy to change people's hearts and minds.
Naidoo believes in Africa coalition building for "intersectional advocacy efforts" and "building stronger relationships with other key movement actors" to support and hold institutions engaged in monitoring and addressing gender-based violence accountable could be the path forward for combating gender-based violence.
Got international LGBTQ news tips? Call or send them to Heather Cassell at WhatsApp/Signal: 415-517-7239, or [email protected]
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