Insights
The Work Does Not Stop
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Commentary
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Publish Date
August 20, 2026
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Two weeks ago, I marched through Amsterdam with thousands of people from every region of the world. March For All, our campaign with Deutsche Bank, moved through the city to Museumplein as the Global Unity concert began. Around me were activists who organize against criminalization, diplomats who defend them in multilateral rooms, and business leaders working out the part their institutions can play in defending human rights. For a few hours, one city held a visible cross-section of a movement that spans more than a hundred countries. Most of that movement was not in Amsterdam and could not be, and that is exactly why the moment matters.
Outright has documented public Pride events in more than half of UN member states. Elsewhere, the barrier is rarely marching itself: LGBTIQ people march for other social movements all the time. What is policed, prohibited, or dangerous is assembling for LGBTIQ people’s human rights. When we march in a city where it is possible, we hold that space open for everyone who cannot, and we insist that their right to march is not negotiable. Pride began as a demand, and in 2026, it still is one.
The strategy has a name
At the WorldPride Human Rights Conference, our team convened a workshop called "LGBTQIA+ Heritage and Culture Under Attack: Countering Gender Panic and Authoritarian Erasure." The argument sits in the title. The global wave of anti-trans laws and policies, from bans on gender-affirming care to attempts to write a strict sex binary into national law and UN language, is an attack on trans, intersex, and broader LGBTIQ identity, culture, and visibility, and it follows an authoritarian playbook: target a small minority, manufacture a moral panic, then use the panic to tighten control over courts, schools, media, and collective memory.
The pattern is easy to trace. In 2025, at least sixteen countries passed or considered laws restricting the rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. In 2024, anti-LGBTIQ messaging appeared in election campaigns in 85% of the countries Outright examined. And in early 2026, the United States proposed a resolution at the UN Commission on the Status of Women that would have defined gender as strictly male and female. Member states voted it down, and similar proposals will surface in other multilateral spaces.
The most useful part of the session came when the room got specific. Activists from Türkiye described holding off hostile legislation one judicial package at a time, while censors work to scrub gender diversity, including its long Ottoman history, from cinema, television, and public memory. Activists from India traced a retreat on trans people's rights that sits uneasily beside centuries of gender diversity in the country's own literature, mythology, and temples. Participants then broke into regional groups to compare how the playbook looks at home and what pushes back against it.I want to be honest about what pushing back looks like right now. The strategies the room kept returning to rarely produce quick wins in an environment this hostile: litigation, public education, and alliances with feminist and other civil society movements measure their progress in years. When progress comes, though, it tends to hold. In Bulgaria, the Supreme Court of Cassation restored legal gender recognition after years of prohibition, affirming that trans people have the right to change their legal gender marker and name. In Ecuador this year, the Constitutional Court ruled that trans adolescents cannot be automatically denied a change to the name and sex marker on their identity documents. And Botswana moved decriminalization from a 2019 court victory into the written penal code, closing the door on reversal. Each of those outcomes took years of patient, unglamorous work, and each one shows that the playbook can be beaten.
The bill is coming due
Under nearly every conversation in Amsterdam ran the same current: money. Before the United States terminated its foreign assistance in 2025, an estimated third of global funding for international LGBTIQ advocacy came from the U.S. government, and even that pool was pennies on the dollar of overall global aid and philanthropy. The termination hit fast. Within weeks, Outright documented 120 suspended grants to LGBTIQ organizations in 42 countries, from grassroots groups to regional networks, and that count reflects only what we could see directly. Across the movement, the number of defunded organizations almost certainly runs past a thousand. The Human Rights Funders Network projects that human rights-focused foreign aid will fall by as much as 1.9 billion dollars a year by the end of 2026, nearly a third below what governments provided in 2023. And the decline is no longer a projection: this June, the “Global Resources Report” documented the first drop in global funding for LGBTIQ communities in its twelve-year histor
Figures like these capture the scale of the cuts. They say nothing about what the cuts unravel on the ground, and that is where our forthcoming report begins. "Breaking Point: The Urgent Case for Investing in Global LGBTIQ Movements" draws on a survey of 229 organizations across more than 90 countries, and it documents what happens when the infrastructure of a movement is defunded: shelters close, legal aid stops, security protocols lapse, and staff who took years to train walk away. The takeaway fits in one sentence: the infrastructure this movement spent decades building is fraying at the seams, and the cost of rebuilding it later will far exceed the cost of sustaining it now.
Governments, foundations, individual philanthropists, and companies each hold part of the answer, and the will to act is not evenly spread among them. In Amsterdam, solidarity was easier to find than new commitments. But some funders and some governments understand exactly what is at stake, and for them the task is concrete: turn that understanding into budget lines, multi-year grants, and flexible support that reaches the frontlines.
What investing looks like
In the fiscal year that ended in June, Outright made 246 grants to LGBTIQ organizations in 82 countries, committing more than $5.5 million. It was the largest grantmaking year in our history, and it came in the middle of the sharpest funding retreat this movement has ever faced. No single organization can replace what governments withdrew, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can do is show what happens when resources reach the people doing the work.
In Southern Africa, our grants support a regional litigation organization that works with national partners to challenge criminalization and defend access to healthcare and education, exactly the kind of legal infrastructure that court victories and penal code reforms grow from. In Southeast Asia, a youth organization is training newly elected LGBTIQ officials to be effective in office, because where anti-gender campaigns try to turn LGBTIQ people into a wedge, representation is the counter. In Central America, an economic empowerment organization has trained hundreds of the most marginalized LGBTIQ people, who now hold jobs or run small businesses, with results that hold over time.In a partner's hands, a grant becomes impact: a case argued, an official prepared, a livelihood that lasts. That is the argument “Breaking Point” will make at scale. This movement turns resources into results, and results require resources.
Where we gather next
Every year, Outsummit brings together the people doing this work. Last year, activists, civil society leaders, diplomats, donors, and allies from more than 70 countries joined us to compare strategies across regions and take them home. This year, the assignment is sharper. Our theme, “The Future We Claim,” takes on both halves of the funding problem at once: how this movement secures the resources the work requires, and how we organize, adapt, and share capacity where resources fall short. Details are coming soon, and I hope you will be in the room or join us virtually from anywhere in the world.
WorldPride has ended. The stages are packed away, and the delegations have gone home, though Amsterdam, being Amsterdam, keeps plenty of rainbow flags flying all year. What the march fades into memory, what was always there remains: a movement that is creative, disciplined, and unwilling to wait for permission. The work does not stop. Neither do we.
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