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What 2025 Looked Like for LGBTIQ Rights Around the World
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May 26, 2026
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In a year of devastating funding cuts, rising backlash, and escalating attacks on trans people's rights, LGBTIQ movements kept going. Here is what Outright International witnessed, what we did about it, and why the fight is far from over.
In January 2025, Thailand became the first Southeast Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. Hundreds of couples lined up in Bangkok on the first day the law took effect. Some had waited decades.
That same month, the U.S. government terminated foreign aid. Programs providing HIV treatment, safety resources, and legal support for LGBTIQ people disappeared overnight. Outright International was forced to suspend 120 grants in nearly 50 countries.
Two things happened at once. One was a breakthrough. The other was a crisis. That tension defined the entire year.
The funding cliff
The U.S. aid termination pulled $125 million from the global LGBTIQ human rights ecosystem. Organizations running emergency shelters, providing legal defense, and documenting violations lost funding mid-program. Staff were laid off. Community spaces closed. Emergency shelters shut down. Health programs halted.
Outright lost 30 percent of its budget and had to reduce staff by 20 percent. Many partner organizations lost their primary funding source in contexts where local fundraising is constrained by stigma, criminalization, or political hostility.
Within weeks, Outright published Defunding Freedom, a rapid-response report surveying over 100 organizations across 42 countries. The Board of Directors designated $500,000 for emergency grants. New agreements with the governments of Norway, Iceland, and Sweden brought over $2.25 million to support frontline organizations. And Outright launched its Funding Our Freedom campaign with a goal of raising $10 million by the end of June 2026: half for direct grants to LGBTIQ organizations worldwide, half to sustain the research, documentation, and global advocacy that protects them.
By early 2026, Funding Our Freedom had raised more than $5.2 million from donors worldwide. Outright initiated 165 new grants, committing $2.53 million to 133 organizations across 61 countries. On par with the prior year's 160 grants. That means Outright mobilized resources when it mattered most.But 20 to 25 percent of grantee partners still face the risk of closure. Once that infrastructure is gone, it does not come back quickly.
Crisis & Response Stats
Research that replaced what was lost
When the U.S. State Department stopped including LGBTIQ issues in its human rights reports, activists, diplomats, media, and asylum decision-makers lost a tool they had relied on for years. Outright built an independent alternative: comprehensive human rights assessments for LGBTIQ people in every UN member state, launched around IDAHOBIT in May 2025.
It was one of 18 research reports Outright published in 2025, covering 197 jurisdictions. Eight additional reports were published by partners with Outright's support.
Queering Democracy examined the 2024 super-election year and found that in 51 of 61 jurisdictions studied, candidates weaponized anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric. It also documented LGBTIQ people running for office in 36 countries. A Year in Attacks on Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex People's Human Rights, released on Transgender Day of Remembrance, documented constitutional amendments, legislative rollbacks, and policy attacks across at least 15 countries.
Other publications addressed digital violence against LBQ women in Asia, LGBTIQ-inclusive gender-based violence laws, legal gender recognition, and legislating against conversion practices. A new Policy Brief Series was launched to tackle contested debates from bodily autonomy to family recognition.In a year when disinformation about LGBTIQ people intensified worldwide, rigorous evidence became the antidote. The research gave activists, policymakers, and journalists the facts they needed to push back.
On the ground, in 100+ countries
Outright's work reached more than 100 countries in 2025. The organization trained 6,427 activists across 71 countries: 4,998 directly and another 1,429 through partners.
Some of the year's most consequential work happened where the global spotlight rarely reaches.
In Ukraine, Outright established the LGBTIQ Communities Technical Working Group within the UN's humanitarian coordination structure, a global first. Fifteen LGBTIQ leaders were trained as trainers to deliver 22 sessions across five cities, reaching 304 humanitarian professionals. Ukraine's 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan now includes a dedicated section on LGBTIQ people. UN agencies committed to integrating LGBTIQ inclusion into all of their programs. In a country where 12.7 million people need humanitarian assistance, that sets a standard the world can replicate. The work is documented in Advocating for LGBTIQ Inclusion in Ukraine's Humanitarian ResponseA.
In Indonesia, partners advocated in five cities for local anti-discrimination ordinances to counter a wave of anti-LGBTIQ bylaws and a new penal code that criminalizes all sex outside marriage. In Burundi, a partner launched an initiative to strengthen civic literacy and LGBTIQ democratic participation, including a database to help voters track candidates.
When Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in October, Outright mobilized emergency relief with local LGBTIQ groups to reach communities excluded from mainstream aid.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Inclusive Economies program supported entrepreneurship and financial inclusion in nine countries. The results: 1,324 people with improved capacity to pursue employment, 795 trained on legal rights and business regulations, 613 provided psychosocial support. Similar projects ran across eight countries in Asia and the Pacific and seven in Latin America and the Caribbean.In five African countries, Outright completed a two-year project on conversion practices that produced the first locally grounded research in Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi, developed a toolkit with the Psychological Society of South Africa, and provided counseling to hundreds of survivors.
Advocacy at the United Nations
Outright serves as the secretariat of the UN LGBTI Core Group, a coalition of more than 40 member states. In 2025: seven formal UN submissions, 34 activists supported to engage directly with UN processes, 16 coalitions, 15 panel discussions and visibility events, and 4,390 media mentions.
In November, a vote of 74 to 70 at the UN Third Committee defeated a hostile amendment seeking to delete sexual orientation and gender identity protections from a disability-rights resolution. In December, that vote was reversed at the General Assembly plenary: 81 to 77, erasing LGBTIQ people from the final text. The 77 countries that held the line are building a coalition that will be back.
In September, the UN released a groundbreaking report on discrimination and violence against intersex people. Outright's Global Intersex Program Senior Advisor Kimberly Zieselman presented recommendations to member states in Geneva. The program supported the first-ever intervention by an intersex activist at the General Assembly in New York.
In Lesotho, following Outright's support for trans-led advocacy, the government adopted a recommendation to advance self-determined legal gender recognition. In Ecuador and Peru, Outright submitted amicus briefs and presented oral arguments before Ecuador's highest court defending the rights of trans adolescents, and supported a challenge to a Peruvian decree that pathologizes trans identities.These milestones prove that the system can change, even in a year when it felt like the system was breaking.
Impact Stats
The global landscape, right now
More than 65 countries still criminalize consensual same-sex intimacy. At least 17 escalated attacks on trans people's rights through law and policy in 2025. In the 2024 election cycle, 85 percent of jurisdictions studied saw candidates use anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric.But 38 countries now recognize marriage equality. Seventy-seven provide legal protection against discrimination in employment. Six have adopted bans on nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children.
Progress and backlash are happening at the same time, in the same year, often in the same country. The movements driving that progress were built over decades. That work can vanish in months when funding disappears, and political conditions shift. Whether it endures depends on what happens now.
Landscape Stats
Everyone, Everywhere
This Pride season, Outright carries a message rooted in over 35 years of global solidarity: LGBTIQ rights belong to everyone, everywhere.
Across every border. For every person in our communities. The fight for freedom and dignity is universal. It requires showing up across borders, across movements, and across moments of both celebration and crisis.
Outright's Funding Our Freedom campaign continues through the end of June 2026. Download the full 2025 Annual Report to see everything Outright accomplished in the hardest year the global LGBTIQ movement has faced, and learn how Funding Our Freedom is closing the gap.
Everyone, everywhere. Together, for better LGBTIQ lives.
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