Thursday’s Guardian reported on the number of politicians using homophobic or transphobic rhetoric during elections last year. Last year was a super election year, with more than 1.5 billion votes cast in at least 89 countries – involving nearly half the world’s population. Apparently politicians in 51 countries (out of the 60 countries plus the EU taking part in the study) used using homophobic or transphobic language – from depicting LGBTQ+ identity as a foreign threat to condemning “gender ideology”.
However, there were also gains for the LGBTQ+ community. Openly gay, bisexual and transgender people ran for office in at least 36 countries, including for the first time in Botswana, Namibia and Romania – albeit unsuccessfully – according to the report.
The paper reported that, “as the visibility of LGBTQ+ people has risen in many countries in the last decade, so too has a backlash from conservative parts of societies, fuelled in many cases by far-right activists and politicians using gay and transgender people as scapegoats for other problems.”
An example given was the 2024 US election, where Republican campaigns spent $200m on anti-transgender adverts on network TV. Another example given was the former Soviet republic of Georgia where the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed that LGBTQ+ activists were “foreign agents” of the west, out to corrupt the country’s “traditional values”.
The report, by Outright International, said that rises in discrimination against minorities had come hand in hand with growing authoritarianism: “In 2024, as in previous years, LGBTIQ communities and other marginalised groups were among the first casualties of these anti-democratic attacks.”
Read the story in the Guardian here. Read the Outright International report here.