World
Advocacy groups renew calls for U.S. to help LGBTQ Afghans
New report details Taliban abuses
Advocacy groups on Wednesday renewed calls for the U.S. and other countries to do more to help LGBTQ Afghans who remain inside Afghanistan after the Taliban regained control of it.
A report from OutRight Action International and Human Rights Watch that details the plight of LGBTQ Afghans includes a series of recommendations for the U.S. and other “concerned governments.”
– Use any diplomatic leverage to press the Taliban to recognize the rights of everyone in Afghanistan, including LGBT people.
– Recognize that LGBT Afghans face a special risk of persecution in Afghanistan and neighboring countries and expedite their applications for evacuation and resettlement.
– Support and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Afghans in need, and support organizations providing humanitarian assistance, including programs specifically designed to assist LGBT Afghans.
– Ensure that support to organizations working in Afghanistan is directed to organizations that commit to gender-sensitive programming, nondiscrimination, and inclusion of LGBT beneficiaries.
– In engagements with formal and informal civil society groups in Afghanistan, including human rights organizations, women’s rights and feminist organizations, and organizations focused on health, education, or youth, raise concerns about abuses against LGBT Afghans and urge such groups to be inclusive of LGBT Afghans.
– Engage with civil society organizations directly or indirectly addressing LGBT issues in Afghanistan, informal groupings of LGBT people, and community leaders who are well networked within LGBT communities to best help them protect their rights.
The report also includes recommendations for countries from which LGBTQ Afghans have asked for asylum.
– Fully respect the rights of Afghan people who are or are perceived to be LGBT to claim asylum where they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution.
– When considering asylum claims and other requests for protection from LGBT Afghans, fully consider all evidence regarding violations of the rights of LGBT people in Afghanistan, who faced severe discrimination previously and especially since the Taliban takeover.
– When considering asylum claims for LGBT Afghans, take into consideration that LGBT individuals often conform to societal norms, such as entering into different sex marriage, in order to survive. Married status should not be taken as an indication of someone not being LGBT.
The report’s other recommendations include calls for international aid organizations inside Afghanistan to “provide targeted and specialized assistance to LGBT people” and for the Taliban to “urgently end any and all forms of discrimination or violence against anyone based on a person’s perceived or actual sexual orientation or gender identity.”
OutRight Action International and Human Rights Watch released their report less than six months after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.
A Taliban judge last July said the group would once again execute gay people if it were to return to power in the country. The report notes a Taliban official later said the group “will not respect the rights of LGBT people.”
The report includes interviews with 60 LGBTQ Afghans inside Afghanistan and in five other countries that OutRight Action International and Human Rights Watch conducted between October and December 2021.
A 20-year-old man with whom the groups spoke said Taliban members “loaded him into a car” at a checkpoint and “took him to another location where four men whipped and then gang raped him over the course of eight hours.” The report notes the man went into hiding, but the Taliban continued to target him and his family.
A lesbian woman with whom OutRight Action International and Human Rights Watch spoke said her parents “arranged for a speedy wedding” with a man before the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. The report notes her parents beat her when she “tried to refuse to go through with it.”
The woman’s parents, according to the report, paid her husband to take her out of Afghanistan. They now live in another country, and he “beats her nearly every day and will not allow her to leave the house.”
The report also details an incident in which the Taliban beat a transgender woman and “shaved her eyebrows with a razor” before they “dumped her on the street in men’s clothes and without a cellphone.” She had been living with other trans women in an abandoned youth hostel in Kabul, the Afghan capital, when the Taliban regained control of the country.
“Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Afghanistan, and others who do not conform to rigid gender norms, have faced an increasingly desperate situation and grave threats to their safety and lives since the Taliban took full control of the country on Aug. 15, 2021,” reads the report’s summary.
‘More needs to be done’
Two groups of LGBTQ Afghans that three advocacy groups — Stonewall, Rainbow Railroad and Micro Rainbow — evacuated from Afghanistan with the help of the British government arrived in the U.K. last fall. Some of the dozens of Afghan human rights activists who Taylor Hirschberg, a researcher at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who is also a Hearst Foundation scholar, has been able to help leave the country since the Taliban regained control of it are LGBTQ.
Rainbow Railroad; the Council for Global Equality; the Human Rights Campaign; Immigration Equality; the International Refugee Assistance Project; the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration in a letter they sent to President Biden last September called for his administration to “prioritize the evacuation and resettlement of vulnerable refugee populations, including LGBTQI people, and ensure that any transitory stay in a third country is indeed temporary by expediting refugee processing.”
Rainbow Railroad Executive Director Kimahli Powell on Wednesday during a webinar on the report noted his organization has “had really encouraging conversations with” Jessica Stern, the special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBTQ rights who was previously OutRight Action International’s executive director, and “her team and with the U.S. government and the Canadian government as well” about the evacuation of LGBTQ Afghans.
“More needs to be done,” said Powell.
Powell added there “are concrete things that we’ve asked to be done within the context of Afghanistan that can be done.”
“It’s encouraging that governments signaled early on that they want to help out Afghans at risk,” he said. “That signaling has led to many folks in Afghanistan who have enough social media to read those messages to ask how (sic) does that look like, including reaching out to us at Rainbow Railroad. And what we’re asking governments to do now is to help us answer that question, help us answer the question as to what we can do to protect people who are still stuck in Afghanistan, help people who are displaced outside of Afghanistan awaiting resettlement and partner with us to do it.”
OutRight Action International Senior Fellow J. Lester Feder echoed Powell.
“Regardless of the identity of the vulnerable people involved, not enough has been done to help vulnerable people,” said Feder during the webinar.
Feder also urged the U.S. government to do more to help LGBTQ Afghans and other vulnerable groups who remain inside the country.
“We know with the amount of support — either with people who had direct connections to the U.S. government or the U.S. military when they left — have been left stranded in Afghanistan,” said Feder.
“People who are supporting and support vulnerable Afghans in the United States need to speak up and show support for the government processing (asylum) cases faster and for more spaces being made available,” he added.
Kazakhstan
Kazakh lawmakers advance anti-LGBTQ propaganda bill
Measure likely to pass in country’s Senate
Lawmakers in Kazakhstan on Wednesday advanced a bill that would ban so-called LGBTQ propaganda in the country.
Reuters notes the measure, which members of the country’s lower house of parliament unanimously approved, would ban “‘LGBT propaganda’ online or in the media” with “fines for violators and up to 10 days in jail for repeat offenders.”
The bill now goes to the Kazakh Senate.
Reuters reported senators will likely support the measure. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has also indicated he would sign it.
Kazakhstan is a predominantly Muslim former Soviet republic in Central Asia that borders Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China.
Consensual same-sex sexual relations are decriminalized in Kazakhstan, but the State Department’s 2023 human rights report notes human rights activists have “reported threats of violence and significant online and in-person verbal abuse towards LGBTQI+ individuals.” The document also indicates discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity remains commonplace in the country. (Jessica Stern, the former special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights under the Biden-Harris administration who co-founded the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, in August condemned the current White House for the “deliberate erasure” of LGBTQ and intersex people from the State Department’s 2024 human rights report.)
Russia, Georgia, and Hungary are among the other countries with propaganda laws.
Turks and Caicos Islands
Turks and Caicos government ordered to recognize gay couple’s marriage
Richard Sankar and Tim Haymon legally married in Fla. in 2020
The Turks and Caicos Islands’ Court of Appeal has ruled the British territory’s government must recognize a same-sex couple’s marriage.
Richard Sankar, a realtor who has lived in the British territory for nearly three decades and is a Turks and Caicos citizen, married Tim Haymon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2020.
Haymon, who is American, in August 2021 applied for a spousal exemption under the Turks and Caicos’ immigration law on the basis of his status as a spouse that would have allowed him to legally live and work in the territory.
The Turks and Caicos’ Director of Immigration initially denied the application because its definition of marriage used does not include same-sex couples.
Haymon and Sankar filed their lawsuit in October 2021. The Supreme Court heard the case in November 2022.
The court in March 2024 ruled the government’s refusal to issue a work permit exemption for Haymon violates the Turks and Caicos’ constitution that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. The government appealed the decision, and the Court of Appeal heard it in January 2025.
The Court of Appeal in September dismissed the government’s appeal. It released its decision on Oct. 27.
Stanbrook Prudhoe, a law firm in the Turks and Caicos, represents Haymon and Sankar.
“Just like any other spouse coming to the Turks and Caicos Islands and marrying a Turks and Caicos islander, we’re just wanting the same rights,” Haymon told the Blade during a March 2024 interview.
Haymon told the Blade he has received his “spousal certificate that gives me residency and the right to work” in the British territory in the British territory. The government appealed a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ordered it to give him the certificate, but the Court of Appeals denied it.
The Supreme Court ordered the Director of Immigration to grant Haymon a residence permit. He told the Blade he received it on Monday.
The Turks and Caicos are a group of islands that are located roughly 650 miles southeast of Miami.
Consensual same-sex sexual relations have been decriminalized in the British territory since 2001.
The constitution states “every unmarried man and woman of marriageable age (as determined by or under any law) has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex and found a family.” The constitution also says “every person in the islands is entitled to the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual, that is to say, the right, without distinction of any kind, such as race, national or social origin, political or other opinion, color, religion, language, creed, association with a national minority, property, sex, sexual orientation, birth, or other status.”
Then-Cayman Islands Grand Court Chief Justice Anthony Smellie in 2019 ruled same-sex couples can legally marry in the Cayman Islands. The Caymanian Court of Appeal later overturned the decision, and the British territory’s Civil Partnership Law took effect in 2020.
Then-Bermuda Supreme Court Justice Charles-Etta Simmons in 2017 issued a ruling that paved the way for gays and lesbians to legally marry in the British territory. The Domestic Partnership Act — a law then-Gov. John Rankin signed that allows same-sex couples to enter into domestic partnerships as opposed to get married — took effect in 2018.
Bermuda’s top court later found the Domestic Partnership Act unconstitutional. The Privy Council, a British territories appellate court in London, upheld the law. It also ruled same-sex couples do not have the constitutional right to marry in the Cayman Islands.
The Turks and Caicos government has until Nov. 24 to appeal the Court of Appeals decision. It remains possible the Privy Council’s Judicial Committee could hear Haymon and Sankar’s case.
El Salvador
El Salvador: el costo del silencio oficial ante la violencia contra la comunidad LGBTQ
Entidades estatales son los agresores principales
En El Salvador, la violencia contra la población LGBTQ no ha disminuido: ha mutado. Lo que antes se expresaba en crímenes de odio, hoy se manifiesta en discriminación institucional, abandono y silencio estatal. Mientras el discurso oficial evita cualquier referencia a inclusión o diversidad, las cifras muestran un panorama alarmante.
Según el Informe 2025 sobre las vulneraciones de los derechos humanos de las personas LGBTQ en El Salvador, elaborado por el Observatorio de Derechos Humanos LGBTIQ+ de ASPIDH, con el apoyo de Hivos y Arcus Foundation, desde el 1 de enero al 22 de septiembre de 2025 se registraron 301 denuncias de vulneraciones de derechos.
El departamento de San Salvador concentra 155 de esas denuncias, reflejando la magnitud del problema en la capital.
Violencia institucionalizada: el Estado como principal agresor
El informe revela que las formas más recurrentes de violencia son la discriminación (57 por ciento), seguida de intimidaciones y amenazas (13 por ciento), y agresiones físicas (10 por ciento). Pero el dato más inquietante está en quiénes ejercen esa violencia.
Los cuerpos uniformados, encargados de proteger a la población, son los principales perpetradores:
- 31.1 por ciento corresponde a la Policía Nacional Civil (PNC),
- 26.67 por ciento al Cuerpo de Agentes Municipales (CAM),
- 12.22 por ciento a militares desplegados en las calles bajo el régimen de excepción.
A ello se suma un 21.11 por ciento de agresiones cometidas por personal de salud pública, especialmente por enfermeras, lo que demuestra que la discriminación alcanza incluso los espacios que deberían garantizar la vida y la dignidad.
Loidi Guardado, representante de ASPIDH, comparte con Washington Blade un caso que retrata la cotidianidad de estas violencias:
“Una enfermera en la clínica VICITS de San Miguel, en la primera visita me reconoció que la persona era hijo de un promotor de salud y fue amable. Pero luego de realizarle un hisopado cambió su actitud a algo despectiva y discriminativa. Esto le sucedió a un hombre gay.”
Este tipo de episodios reflejan un deterioro en la atención pública, impulsado por una postura gubernamental que rechaza abiertamente cualquier enfoque de inclusión, y tacha la educación de género como una “ideología” a combatir.
El discurso del Ejecutivo, que se opone a toda iniciativa con perspectiva de diversidad, ha tenido consecuencias directas: el retroceso en derechos humanos, el cierre de espacios de denuncia, y una mayor vulnerabilidad para quienes pertenecen a comunidades diversas.
El miedo, la desconfianza y el exilio silencioso
El estudio también señala que el 53.49 por ciento de las víctimas son mujeres trans, seguidas por hombres gays (26.58 por ciento). Sin embargo, la mayoría de las agresiones no llega a conocimiento de las autoridades.
“En todos los ámbitos de la vida —salud, trabajo, esparcimiento— las personas LGBT nos vemos intimidadas, violentadas por parte de muchas personas. Sin embargo, las amenazas y el miedo a la revictimización nos lleva a que no denunciemos. De los casos registrados en el observatorio, el 95.35 por ciento no denunció ante las autoridades competentes”, explica Guardado.
La organización ASPIDH atribuye esta falta de denuncia a varios factores: miedo a represalias, desconfianza en las autoridades, falta de sensibilidad institucional, barreras económicas y sociales, estigma y discriminación.
Además, la ausencia de acompañamiento agrava la situación, producto del cierre de numerosas organizaciones defensoras por falta de fondos y por las nuevas normativas que las obligan a registrarse como “agentes extranjeros”.
Varias de estas organizaciones —antes vitales para el acompañamiento psicológico, legal y educativo— han migrado hacia Guatemala y Costa Rica ante la imposibilidad de operar en territorio salvadoreño.
Educación negada, derechos anulados
Mónica Linares, directora ejecutiva de ASPIDH, lamenta el deterioro de los programas educativos que antes ofrecían una oportunidad de superación para las personas trans:
“Hubo un programa del ACNUR que lamentablemente, con todo el cierre de fondos que hubo a partir de las declaraciones del presidente Trump y del presidente Bukele, pues muchas de estas instancias cerraron por el retiro de fondos del USAID.”
Ese programa —añade— beneficiaba a personas LGBTQ desde la educación primaria hasta el nivel universitario, abriendo puertas que hoy permanecen cerradas.
Actualmente, muchas personas trans apenas logran completar la primaria o el bachillerato, en un sistema educativo donde la discriminación y el acoso escolar siguen siendo frecuentes.
Organizaciones en resistencia
Las pocas organizaciones que aún operan en el país han optado por trabajar en silencio, procurando no llamar la atención del gobierno. “Buscan pasar desapercibidas”, señala Linares, “para evitar conflictos con autoridades que las ven como si no fueran sujetas de derechos”.
Desde el Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad (CIS), su cofundadora Leslie Schuld coincide. “Hay muchas organizaciones de derechos humanos y periodistas que están en el exilio. Felicito a las organizaciones que mantienen la lucha, la concientización. Porque hay que ver estrategias, porque se está siendo silenciado, nadie puede hablar; hay capturas injustas, no hay derechos.”
Schuld agrega que el CIS continuará apoyando con un programa de becas para personas trans, con el fin de fomentar su educación y autonomía económica. Sin embargo, admite que las oportunidades laborales en el país son escasas, y la exclusión estructural continúa.
Matar sin balas: la anulación de la existencia
“En efecto, no hay datos registrados de asesinatos a mujeres trans o personas LGBTIQ+ en general, pero ahora, con la vulneración de derechos que existe en El Salvador, se está matando a esta población con la anulación de esta.”, reflexiona Linares.
Esa “anulación” a la que se refiere Linares resume el panorama actual: una violencia que no siempre deja cuerpos, pero sí vacíos. La negación institucional, la falta de políticas públicas, y la exclusión social convierten la vida cotidiana en un acto de resistencia para miles de salvadoreños LGBTQ.
En un país donde el Ejecutivo ha transformado la narrativa de derechos en una supuesta “ideología”, la diversidad se ha convertido en una amenaza política, y los cuerpos diversos, en un campo de batalla. Mientras el gobierno exalta la “seguridad” como su mayor logro, la población LGBTQ vive una inseguridad constante, no solo física, sino también emocional y social.
El Salvador, dicen los activistas, no necesita más silencio. Necesita reconocer que la verdadera paz no se impone con fuerza de uniformados, sino con justicia, respeto y dignidad.
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