Insights

The Architecture of Exclusion — and How We Fight It

Region(s)

Global

TOPIC(s)

Human Rights

Type

Commentary

Author(s)

Maria Sjödin

Publish Date

February 24, 2026

The attacks have become architectural. Anti-gender movements are embedding exclusion into constitutions, health care funding structures, and athletic policy, building systems designed to outlast any single government. Hungary's escalation from legislation to constitutional entrenchment is a template being watched worldwide.
A five-stage sequence is emerging in countries experiencing backlash following the recognition of some rights. Restrict health care, make us less visible, weaken civil society, deny legal recognition, erase constitutional existence. Each stage makes the next easier. The U.S. is moving through it faster than expected.
Where queer people's rights have never been recognized, new criminalization is being constructed. From Iraq's new penal code to Burkina Faso's first-ever criminalization law to digital surveillance across Southwest Asia and North Africa, exclusion is being built through expanding penal codes, weaponizing technology, and framing LGBTIQ identity as a foreign threat.
Progress is real and concurrent. Thailand won marriage equality. Kenya's Eldoret High Court ordered transgender recognition. LGBTIQ candidates ran for office in 36 countries. The Council of Europe unanimously adopted the first comprehensive intersex rights framework. Outcomes are not predetermined; they are shaped by organized, sustained advocacy.
The funding crisis threatens the infrastructure of resistance. An estimated $125 million vanished from global LGBTIQ funding in 2025. Organizations are closing, cutting staff, and running on reserves. Outright's Funding Our Freedom campaign exists because the people on the front lines cannot wait for political winds to change.

I've spent over 25 years in this movement. I've watched moral panics rise and fade, laws passed to win elections and later repealed, and communities written off as lost causes go on to win marriage equality.

What's happening now feels different.

It's not that the attacks are worse everywhere. In some places, we’re winning. Thailand legalized same-sex marriage in 2025. Austria just expanded nonbinary recognition. The Council of Europe adopted the first comprehensive international framework for intersex people's rights, with 46 member states committed to implementation.

The difference is that the attacks have become architectural.

Anti-gender movements are no longer content to pass laws that can be repealed after the next election. They're embedding exclusion into constitutions, health care funding structures, and international athletic policy: systems designed to outlast any single government. They're building permanent infrastructure.

You can't counter a strategy you haven't named, so I'll name it.

What the Architecture of Exclusion Looks Like

Hungary: The Template

Hungary shows how the architecture of exclusion is built layer by layer, over the years.

In 2020, a law effectively outlawed legal gender recognition by replacing "sex" with "sex at birth" in the civil registry, making it impossible for trans and intersex people to change their documents. In 2021, the government adopted a so-called "child protection" law banning the “display and promotion of homosexuality” and of gender transition to minors in schools, media, and advertising, widely compared to Russia's "propaganda" legislation. Then, in 2025, a constitutional amendment enshrined recognition of only two sexes and created a basis to ban all public events that acknowledge sexual and gender diversity, effectively targeting Budapest Pride. The law authorized the use of facial recognition to identify participants, with fines of up to 200,000 forints (about €500) and potential criminal penalties for organizers.

The escalation from legislation to constitutional entrenchment matters. Laws can be repealed by a simple majority. Constitutional amendments require supermajority consensus. Embed exclusion in a constitution, and you don't need to keep winning elections to maintain it.

Hungary is a template for other countries around the world.

The framing is instructive, too. Each measure positions "child protection" as a supreme value, superseding assembly rights and gender dignity. This rhetorical move, casting exclusion as protection, appears across every region where these movements gain ground. The rhetoric travels even when specific policies don't.The EU's case against Hungary's 2021 propaganda law is now proceeding through the Court of Justice. A ruling against Hungary could create legal leverage that extends beyond that single law, establishing that EU member states cannot use "child protection" framing to override fundamental rights obligations. But Hungary's refusal to comply with EU norms thus far suggests this will be a protracted struggle, and one worth watching closely.

The Pattern: Health Care, Athletics, Recognition, Existence

In countries where politicians are pursuing rollbacks on rights, I keep seeing the same elements appear, not always in this order, but reinforcing each other in ways that form a recognizable pattern.

Restrict health care, particularly gender-affirming care for minors. Frame it as protecting children.
Restrict participation: ban transgender athletes from competition, exclude LGBTIQ content from schools and media. Frame it as protecting fairness, or protecting minors from "ideology."
Weaken the organizations that protect rights: restrict legal registration, defund civil society, criminalize advocacy, and stigmatize organizations as "foreign," "extremist," or harmful to national interests. Frame it as protecting sovereignty or national values.
Deny legal recognition: refuse document updates, block name changes, and eliminate nonbinary options. Frame it as protecting administrative clarity.
Erase constitutional existence: amend foundational law to recognize only binary gender. Frame it as protecting natural order.

Each element makes the others easier to implement. Once the state can deny someone medical care based on identity, banning them from sports feels smaller. Once you've excluded them from competition, excluding them from public life follows a logic already accepted.

None of this is inevitable. It can be interrupted at any stage. But recognizing these as interconnected elements of a single strategy, rather than unrelated policy debates, is how you interrupt it.

The United States: Acceleration

The U.S. is moving through this sequence faster than I expected.

In late January, major Colorado hospitals halted gender-affirming services to minors. This followed the Trump administration's proposal to ban Medicare and Medicaid funding for any hospital offering such care. The policy doesn't ban care directly; it makes it economically unfeasible to provide it.

Private providers report being flooded by calls from families seeking alternatives. Doctors describe abandoning patients mid-treatment, ending what many called the most meaningful work of their careers.

Twenty-seven states have already banned transition care for minors. Now, federal policy is nationalizing that patchwork through funding conditions rather than legislation. On January 12 and 13, the Supreme Court heard arguments on transgender athlete bans and appeared ready to uphold them. A ruling is expected by June.

What's built in the U.S. will be exported. American policy frameworks and legal arguments have historically shaped global debates. The infrastructure being constructed now will create templates and precedents that travel. We have also seen the reverse: once a restrictive model is introduced abroad, it often resurfaces in U.S. policy discussions soon after.

Violence as Context, Not Footnote

These policy attacks do not happen in a vacuum. They unfold in societies where LGBTIQ people already navigate endemic violence and social exclusion.

Policy restrictions and street-level violence reinforce each other. Every law excluding transgender people from health care, education, housing, or athletics sends a signal that these lives matter less, a signal that shows up in emergency room visits, mental health crises, forced displacement, and lives cut short.

Black queer communities and other racialized LGBTIQ groups, from Brazil to South Africa to the United States, face gendered and sexualized violence compounded rather than mitigated by policing, asylum, and criminal legal systems nominally meant to provide protection.Similar patterns emerge for migrants, sex workers, Indigenous and caste-oppressed queer and trans communities, who experience both targeted attacks and institutional neglect. When politicians debate health care or legal reform as if they were abstract policy questions, they obscure the fact that many people are navigating immediate physical danger daily.

Where Progress Is Happening

The picture isn't uniformly dark. Some advances are happening right now, in the same months as the most aggressive rollbacks.Thailand's 2025 marriage equality victory followed years of organized work, not uniquely accepting conditions. Botswana has a same-sex couple in court this month arguing for marriage rights. In Kenya, the Eldoret High Court ruled that transgender people must be legally recognized, ordering authorities to end arbitrary detention and forced medical examinations, a landmark decision in a country where colonial-era criminalization remains on the books.

Across Latin America, the architecture of inclusion is being built alongside the architecture of exclusion. Outright's Queering Democracy report found that LGBTIQ political representation reached new heights in 2024's global super election year. In Brazil, the Superior Electoral Court collected data on candidates' sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time, and civil society organization VoteLGBT identified 3,524 LGBTIQ candidates, more than doubling the number of openly queer elected officials from previous cycles. In Mexico, cuotas arcoíris (rainbow quotas) contributed to a record 1,212 LGBTIQ candidates across federal and local elections. But these gains carry real costs: trans and queer candidates were murdered in both countries during the election cycle, and LGBTIQ candidates across the region reported hate speech, lack of party support, and difficulty securing campaign funding. Legal inclusion does not automatically mean safety. As Outright's Rights Retrograde Vol. 7 documented, Latin America illustrates this tension sharply: in the same period that LGBTIQ candidates reached record numbers, Peru advanced legislation to dismantle gender equality frameworks and criminalize gender-affirming care, while Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled to reinstate trans women athletes and Chile secured its first conviction for lesbophobic femicide. Progress and backlash occupy the same political moment, often in the same region.

The Council of Europe's October 2025 Recommendation on Equal Rights for Intersex Persons represents the gold standard: comprehensive, unanimous, and monitored. It creates legal leverage that domestic advocates can use for years. The next phase, translating that framework into national legislation and enforcement, will depend on sustained political pressure and civil society engagement across member states.

While Hungary embeds a two-gender framework in its constitution, Austria expands nonbinary recognition under the same European Convention. Same legal framework, opposite outcomes. The difference isn't effort or courage; Hungarian civil society has shown extraordinary resilience under conditions far more hostile than Austria's. The difference is that one government is receptive to advocacy and the other is actively hostile.This is precisely why international legal mechanisms matter. In countries where domestic politics are closed to rights of LGBTIQ people, regional courts and treaty bodies become the primary avenue for accountability. The EU's case against Hungary's propaganda law concerns whether there are consequences for enshrining exclusion in national law within a rights-based legal order. Until political environments shift, these international mechanisms are one way in which the groundwork activists have laid gets traction.

Beyond the Pattern: How Exclusion Is Built Where Rights Have Never Been Recognized

The pattern I described earlier reflects dynamics most visible in countries that had already begun expanding rights. In those contexts, exclusion is constructed by rolling back existing protections, layer by layer.

But in much of the world, the architecture of exclusion takes a different form. Where same-sex conduct is still criminalized, or where criminalization is being newly introduced, the building blocks are different: expanding penal codes, weaponizing digital surveillance, and building legal infrastructure where none previously existed. Some tactics, particularly the scapegoating of LGBTIQ communities during political instability and the framing of queer identity as a foreign threat, appear across both contexts, as Outright's Queering Democracy report documented. The logic is the same, building systems designed to outlast any single government, but the materials are often different, and so are the strategies required to counter them.

Southwest Asia and North Africa

Iraq's 2024 amendments marked a significant escalation, criminalizing consensual same-sex relations with 10 to 15 years' imprisonment and gender-affirming care with 1 to 3 years. This was not continuity but construction: new legal architecture in a country that previously had no explicit criminalization of same-sex conduct.

Across the region, states are building a digital infrastructure of exclusion. In Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, state-coordinated digital targeting enables surveillance and entrapment through dating apps and social media. Vague "public morality" laws, originally written for physical public space, are now being applied to online activity, justifying arbitrary arrest based on digital profiles and private messages even where same-sex acts aren't formally criminalized. The technical sophistication of these surveillance systems and their coordination across borders represents a newer, more systemic threat than the legal frameworks alone.Political and religious leaders continue to frame LGBTIQ identities as a "foreign Western ideology," complicating how solidarity is received locally and requiring movements to develop strategies rooted in local language and cultural context.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa's landscape defies any single narrative. Southern Africa continues to lead on decriminalization and legal recognition, while new threats emerge elsewhere.

In Burkina Faso, a new law criminalizing same-sex conduct represents the expansion of the architecture of exclusion into a country that previously had no such law, part of a broader pattern in which political instability and authoritarian consolidation open the door to scapegoating LGBTIQ communities.

In Ghana, the Promotion of Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, which would tighten colonial-era criminalization by expanding penalties and criminalizing advocacy, has followed a turbulent path. After initial passage in 2024, then-President Nana Akufo-Addo failed to sign the bill, even though a court had given the bill the green light. Members of parliament reintroduced the bill in 2025, but it did not advance until February 2026, when a new version was introduced. The bill's trajectory remains uncertain, and that uncertainty is itself a window for advocacy.In Uganda, the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act still provides for the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," after the Constitutional Court upheld its core provisions in 2024. Across the region, many queer people say the most damaging effects are often not courtroom prosecutions but social and economic consequences: landlords refusing to rent or increasing rents because housing a queer tenant is seen as legally or socially risky, effectively imposing what activists sometimes call a "queer tax."

Bodily Autonomy: The Connecting Thread

One framework connects these seemingly disparate issues: bodily autonomy.

Gender-affirming care restrictions in the United States. New criminalization in Iraq and Burkina Faso. Constitutional erasure in Hungary. Digital surveillance and entrapment across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Athletic bans are moving through the U.S. Supreme Court. The "queer tax" makes daily life unaffordable across much of Africa. These are all expressions of the same contested question: who decides what happens to a person's body, and who gets to exist fully in public life?

Anti-gender movements frame intervention as "protection" of children, families, nations, and fairness. Rights movements frame these issues as matters of autonomous decision-making: the right of individuals to make informed choices about their own bodies, identities, and futures.Whether the tool is a funding condition that shuts down a hospital, a constitutional amendment that erases a gender identity, or a surveillance app that targets someone for who they love, the effect is the same: narrowing who is allowed full control over their own body and full participation in society. The defense cannot afford to be as fragmented as the attacks appear to be.

What Determines Which Direction Wins

The simultaneous progress and regression reveal something important: outcomes aren't predetermined.

Places where rights advance aren't inherently more favorable. They're places where movements had resources, strategy, and sustained pressure over time.

Places where rights collapse aren't necessarily more hostile in nature. They are places where opposition mobilized faster, often with coordinated international support.

What makes the difference is capacity. Funding. Strategy. The ability to be present in legislative debates, court cases, and international forums year after year.This is why the funding crisis matters.

What Outright Is Doing

When an estimated $125 million vanished from global LGBTIQ funding in 2025, it did more than shrink budgets. It hollowed out the infrastructure that keeps people safe and movements alive.

It meant organizations in Myanmar could no longer fully document abuses, get evidence and testimonies out of high-risk areas, or sustain the community-based protection networks that help people survive military rule. It meant a leading intersex group in Nigeria had to contemplate cutting core staff and clinics just as demand for accurate information and care was rising. It meant trans organizations in Chile and Brazil, already under attack from far-right narratives, had to choose between keeping their doors open and paying the people who provide legal accompaniment, counseling, and safe spaces.

Partners lost funding mid-program, mid-crisis, mid-case. Some closed. Others cut staff by half. Many are running on reserves that will not last the year. They did not walk away from their communities. They are still documenting abuses, still showing up in courtrooms and ministries, still keeping community centers open, but with far less.

Funding Our Freedom exists because they cannot wait for political winds to change.

The opposition is building permanent structures of exclusion: constitutional amendments that erase gender diversity, funding conditions that penalize inclusive health care, and policy frameworks that criminalize expression and assembly. Our side needs permanent structures of support:

Emergency resources when activists are arrested or threatened,
Research and documentation that create accountability and narrative power,
And steady funding that reaches organizations across the Eastern Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and North Africa.

The question is not whether these fights will continue. They already are. The real question is whether the people on the front lines will have what they need to win.

2026's Decisive Moments

Several pending decisions will significantly shape LGBTIQ human rights this year:

U.S. Supreme Court ruling on transgender athletes — expected by June 2026. An adverse ruling would validate state bans and could accelerate similar policies globally.
Hungary's EU propaganda law case — the Court of Justice proceedings could establish whether EU member states face consequences for using "child protection" framing to override fundamental rights, with implications well beyond Hungary.
Botswana marriage case — hearings this month could establish a precedent for the region.
Ghana's Family Values Bill — a new version was introduced in parliament in February 2026 after years of turbulence. Whether it advances will signal how far the Mahama administration is willing to go under pressure from parliamentary supporters.
Burkina Faso's new criminalization — a test case for whether the international community and regional bodies will respond to the expansion of criminalization in West Africa.

None of these outcomes is predetermined. Each will be shaped by advocacy, litigation, political pressure, and public engagement happening now.

The Movement's Challenge

The opposition has learned to think structurally. They're not just passing laws but building systems. Not just winning elections, but amending constitutions. Not just debating policy but defunding organizations that would oppose them.

Countering this requires structural thinking too.

Health care access, athletic inclusion, legal recognition, bodily autonomy, violence prevention, asylum protection, criminalization: these aren't separate issues. They're interconnected elements of the same principle, that LGBTIQ people deserve to exist fully, with dignity and institutional recognition.

I've been in this work long enough to know that movements with fewer resources can still win. Thailand won marriage equality. Namibia decriminalized. The UN adopted intersex protections that seemed impossible a decade ago. None happened because the political environment was favorable. They happened because people organized and refused to stop.

This movement makes progress. Not fast enough. Not visibly enough. But it moves the needle.The question is whether we'll have what we need to do it.

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