Report finds LBQ women face discrimination, violence in countries around the world

Lesbian, bisexual and queer (LBQ) women and non-binary people assigned female at birth face discrimination and violence across the globe stemming from long-standing patriarchal norms and systems that prevent them from building relationships, homes and families, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Tuesday in a new report.

Tuesday’s report is the culmination of interviews with 66 LBQ women and gender non-conforming people assigned female at birth in 26 countries and is the organization’s first to focus exclusively on LBQ women.

A majority of respondents are human rights advocates at the local or national level, according to Human Rights Watch.

“Lesbian, bisexual and queer women are renowned for leading human rights struggles around the world,” Erin Kilbride, an LGBTQ and women’s rights researcher with Human Rights Watch and the author of Tuesday’s report, said in a news release. “But the scale of brutal violence, legal discrimination, and sexualized harassment these communities face is rarely documented.”

The LBQ research gap matters, Kilbride writes in the report, “because it drives — and is driven by — a system of mutually reinforcing gaps: the lack of research into violations and abuses of LBQ+ people’s rights; the lack of laws and policies that explicitly protect the rights of LBQ+ people; barriers to accessing justice for LBQ+ victims of human rights abuses; and the lack of funding for LBQ+-led movements.”

A 2020 World Bank report found that women in 40 percent of countries worldwide do not have equal access to own, rent, administer or inherit property, presenting an often insurmountable economic and legal barrier to LBQ couples.

According to Tuesday’s report, in places where authoritative legal regimes require women to obtain a male guardian’s permission to rent or purchase a home, partners in an LBQ relationship are often forced into marriages with men.

“There is no path to freedom if you don’t get married [to a man],” Liliya, an LBQ rights activist in Kyrgyzstan, said in Tuesday’s report. “Usually, it’s not as obvious as the family forcing you to marry someone. But you will be under pressure from the family and have to run away with no money and no place to go.”

Another respondent, from Lebanon, said one lesbian in her community was attempting to gain her independence by marrying a gay man.

“He doesn’t need it. As a man, he has freedom without her; this will just be a step up on the social ladder for him,” they said. “But she literally needs it.”

Many respondents also highlighted the prevalence of discrimination based on gender expression and its long-term harms on particular groups of people, specifically “masculine-presenting” LBQ people assigned female at birth.

LBQ advocates in Argentina, El Salvador and Kyrgyzstan said masculine-presenting – or “butch” – LBQ people in their communities often face employment discrimination that forces them into dangerous careers with poor working conditions, like farming or sex work, or into male-dominated fields, where they are more likely to face physical and sexual violence.

“Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes,” Rosa, a lesbian and sex worker rights defender in El Salvador, said in Tuesday’s report, adding that a lack of employment opportunities has led “many of us to become sex workers.”

Police are also “far more brutal” to masculine-presenting queer women during arrests or raids of places like brothels, Rosa said. “The masculine lesbians get treated ‘like men.’ This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off.”

“If you are butch-presenting, there’s an attitude from men of ‘you think you’re a man, we’re going to treat you like one, but we know you can’t handle it,’” Nadia, a human rights activist in Lebanon, similarly said. “If your girlfriend is being harassed in a bar and you try to protect her; if you’re femme, you’ll be sexually harassed along with her. But butches get punched.”

Other respondents from countries including the U.S. said they were taught from an early age that dressing in a manner deemed masculine, gender-nonconforming or androgynous would make them vulnerable to physical or verbal attacks – including calls from parents for LBQ youth to be removed from school.

Kilbride in her report on Tuesday called for government authorities to conduct thorough and transparent investigations into reports of violence and discrimination against LBQ individuals and couples and establish new laws, policies and protocols that explicitly protect queer women and gender-nonconforming people.

That includes rolling back discriminatory property and inheritance laws and male guardianship laws, Kilbride said, as well as enacting new measures to protect marriage equality and decriminalize same-sex conduct.

International donors and non-governmental organizations should also lend financial support to movements led by LBQ activists for land and human rights, Kilbride said, as well as groups that are advocating for LBQ rights worldwide. Research into LBQ economic marginalization and violence should also be better funded and prioritized.