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.
More than 40 openly LGBTQ athletes are expected to compete in the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics that open on Friday.
Outsports.com notes eight Americans — including speedskater Conor McDermott-Mostowy and figure skater Amber Glenn — are among the 44 openly LGBTQ athletes who will compete in the games. The LGBTQ sports website also reports Ellis Lundholm, a mogul skier from Sweden, is the first openly transgender athlete to compete in any Winter Olympics.
“I’ve always been physically capable. That was never a question,” Glenn told Outsports.com. “It was always a mental and competence problem. It was internal battles for so long: when to lean into my strengths and when to work on my weaknesses, when to finally let myself portray the way I am off the ice on the ice. That really started when I came out publicly.”
McDermott-Mostowy is among the six athletes who have benefitted from the Out Athlete Fund, a group that has paid for their Olympics-related training and travel. The other beneficiaries are freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, speed skater Brittany Bowe, snowboarder Maddy Schaffrick, alpine skier Breezy Johnson, and Paralympic Nordic skier Jake Adicoff.
Out Athlete Fund and Pride House Los Angeles – West Hollywood on Friday will host a free watch party for the opening ceremony.
“When athletes feel seen and accepted, they’re free to focus on their performance, not on hiding who they are,” Haley Caruso, vice president of the Out Athlete Fund’s board of directors, told the Los Angeles Blade.
Four Italian LGBTQ advocacy groups — Arcigay, CIG Arcigay Milano, Milano Pride, and Pride Sport Milano — have organized the games’ Pride House that will be located at the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan.
Pride House on its website notes it will “host a diverse calendar of events and activities curated by associations, activists, and cultural organizations that share the values of Pride” during the games. These include an opening ceremony party at which Checcoro, Milan’s first LGBTQ chorus, will perform.
ILGA World, which is partnering with Pride House, is the co-sponsor of a Feb. 21 event that will focus on LGBTQ-inclusion in sports. Valentina Petrillo, a trans Paralympian, is among those will participate in a discussion that Simone Alliva, a journalist who writes for the Italian newspaper Domani, will moderate.
“The event explores inclusivity in sport — including amateur levels — with a focus on transgender people, highlighting the role of civil society, lived experiences, and the voices of athletes,” says Milano Pride on its website.
The games will take place against the backdrop of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s decision to ban trans women from competing in women’s sporting events.
President Donald Trump last February issued an executive order that bans trans women and girls from female sports teams in the U.S. A group of Republican lawmakers in response to the directive demanded the International Olympics Committee ban trans athletes from women’s athletic competitions.
The IOC in 2021 adopted its “Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations” that includes the following provisions:
• 3.1 Eligibility criteria should be established and implemented fairly and in a manner that does not systematically exclude athletes from competition based upon their gender identity, physical appearance and/or sex variations.
• 3.2 Provided they meet eligibility criteria that are consistent with principle 4 (“Fairness”, athletes should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity.
• 3.3 Criteria to determine disproportionate competitive advantage may, at times, require testing of an athlete’s performance and physical capacity. However, no athlete should be subject to targeted testing because of, or aimed at determining, their sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.
The 2034 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place in Salt Lake City. The 2028 Summer Olympics will occur in Los Angeles.
China
Two Chinese men detained over AI-generated picture of pandas engaging in same-sex behavior
Arrests part of increased online surveillance, LGBTQ rights crackdown
Chinese authorities have detained two men after they shared an artificially altered image that linked queer identity with a specific city.
The Washington Post on Jan. 21 reported the men — who are 29 and 33 — circulated an AI-generated picture depicting pandas engaging in same-sex behavior in Chengdu, a major city in southwestern China often referred to as the “panda capital” due to its association with giant panda conservation. Local officials described the sharing of the image as “malicious,” and police in Chengdu took the men into custody.
Authorities also suspended the two men’s social media accounts, accusing them of spreading misinformation presented as legitimate news. According to the Post, the artificially generated image was posted alongside a fabricated headline, giving the appearance of an authentic news report. The image depicted two male pandas mating.
According to an official police report, police said the fabricated image was presented in the format of a legitimate news article and accompanied by a false headline. The caption read, “Chengdu: Two male Sichuan giant pandas successfully mate for the first time without human intervention,” authorities said.
Chinese regulators have in recent years tightened oversight of AI and online content.
Under the Interim Measures for the Administration of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services, issued in 2023, providers and users of generative AI systems are required to comply with existing laws, adhere to social and ethical standards, and refrain from producing or disseminating false or misleading information. Additional rules that took effect on Sept. 1, 2025, require online platforms to clearly label AI-generated content, a measure authorities have said is intended to curb misinformation and maintain order in digital spaces.
Police under Chinese law are permitted to impose administrative detention of up to 15 days for offenses deemed to disrupt public order, a category that includes the fabrication or dissemination of false information online. Such cases are handled outside the criminal court system and do not require formal prosecution.
According to a statement the Chengdu Public Security Bureau’s Chenghua branch released, police opened an investigation after receiving public reports that online accounts were spreading false information about the city. Authorities said officers collected evidence shortly afterward and placed the two individuals under administrative detention.
The detentions are not an isolated case.
The Washington Blade in July 2025 reported a Chinese female writer was arrested and subjected to a strip search after publishing gay erotic fiction online. At least 30 other writers — most of them women in their 20s — in the months that followed publicly described similar encounters with law enforcement, including home raids and questioning related to their online writing.
ShanghaiPRIDE, a Chinese LGBTQ advocacy group that organized annual Pride events in the city, has remained indefinitely suspended since 2021. In the same period, dozens of LGBTQ-focused accounts have been removed from WeChat, China’s largest social media platform, as authorities intensified oversight of online content related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Authorities in 2021 detained the founder of LGBT Rights Advocacy China. They later released them on the condition that he shut down the organization, which ceased operations shortly afterward.
China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997 when it removed consensual same-sex sexual relations from the country’s criminal code. The Chinese Society of Psychiatry in 2001 formally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Despite those changes, same-sex relationships remain unrecognized under Chinese law, and there are no legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Public advocacy for LGBTQ rights remains tightly restricted, with authorities continuing to limit community organizing, public events and online expression related to sexual minority issues.
Within China’s LGBTQ community, transgender and gender non-conforming people remain among the most vulnerable. Under current regulations, access to gender-affirming surgery is subject to strict requirements, including being at least 18 years old, unmarried, obtaining parental consent and having no criminal record — procedures that are required in order to legally change one’s gender on official documents.
China’s system of online governance places responsibility on both users and platforms to prevent the spread of prohibited content. Social media companies are required to conduct real-name verification, monitor user activity and remove posts that violate regulations, while individuals can be punished for content authorities determine to have caused public misunderstanding or social disruption.
“Actually, at least three similar incidents have occurred in Chengdu recently, all involving netizens posting on social media linking Chengdu with homosexuality, resulting in legal repercussions. This isn’t just about giant pandas. I think the local police’s reaction was somewhat excessive,” said Renn Hao, a Chinese queer activist. “The content was actually praising Chengdu’s inclusivity, and there was no need to punish them with regulations like ‘maliciously spreading false information.’”
“This situation reflects the strict censorship of LGBT related content in the area,” they added. “This censorship makes LGBT-related content increasingly invisible, and people are even more afraid to post or mention it. This not only impacts the LGBTQ+ community in China but also hinders public understanding and awareness of this group.”
Advocacy groups are demanding the Trump-Vance administration not to deport two gay men to Iran.
MS Now on Jan. 23 reported the two men are among the 40 Iranian nationals who the White House plans to deport.
Iran is among the countries in which consensual same-sex sexual relations remain punishable by death.
The Washington Blade earlier this month reported LGBTQ Iranians have joined anti-government protests that broke out across the country on Dec. 28. Human rights groups say the Iranian government has killed thousands of people since the demonstrations began.
Rebekah Wolf of the American Immigration Council, which represents the two men, told MS Now her clients were scheduled to be on a deportation flight on Jan. 25. A Human Rights Campaign spokesperson on Tuesday told the Blade that one of the men “was able to obtain a temporary stay of removal from the” 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the other “is facing delayed deportation as the result of a measles outbreak at the facility where they’re being held.”
“My (organization, the American Immigration Council) represents those two gay men,” said American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a Jan. 23 post on his Bluesky account. “They had been arrested on charges of sodomy by Iranian moral police, and fled the country seeking asylum. They face the death penalty if returned, yet the Trump (administration) denied their asylum claims in a kangaroo court process.”
“They are terrified,” added Reichlin-Melnick.
My org @immcouncil.org represents those two gay men. They had been arrested on charges of sodomy by Iranian moral police, and fled the country seeking asylum. They face the death penalty if returned, yet the Trump admin denied their asylum claims in a kangaroo court process.
They are terrified.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) January 23, 2026 at 8:26 AM
Reichlin-Melnick in a second Bluesky post said “deporting people to Iran right now, as body bags line the street, is an immoral, inhumane, and unjust act.”
“That ICE is still considering carrying out the flight this weekend is a sign of an agency and an administration totally divorced from basic human rights,” he added.
Deporting people to Iran right now, as body bags line the street, is an immoral, inhumane, and unjust act. That ICE is still considering carrying out the flight this weekend is a sign of an agency and an administration totally divorced from basic human rights. www.ms.now/news/trump-d…
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) January 23, 2026 at 8:27 AM
HRC Vice President of Government Affairs David Stacy in a statement to the Blade noted Iran “is one of 12 nations that still execute queer people, and we continue to fear for their safety.” Stacy also referenced Renee Good, a 37-year-old lesbian woman who a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, and Andry Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker who the Trump-Vance administration “forcibly disappeared” to El Salvador last year.
“This out-of-control administration continues to target immigrants and terrorize our communities,” said Stacy. “That same cruelty murdered Renee Nicole Good and imprisoned Andry Hernández Romero. We stand with the American Immigration Council and demand that these men receive the due process they deserve. Congress must refuse to fund this outrage and stand against the administration’s shameless dismissal of our constitutional rights.”
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