Increase in violence since 2019 is linked to online campaigns seeking to sow disinformation and fuel hatred
A Malta Pride participant carries a giant rainbow flag during the parade in Valletta. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
Europeans who do not fit the typical definition of male or female are grappling with an “alarming” rise in violence, the EU’s leading rights agency has said, as concerted campaigns seek to sow disinformation and fuel hatred towards them.
The findings from the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published on Tuesday, were based on responses from 1,920 people in 30 countries across Europe. All of them identified as intersex, an umbrella term referring to those with innate variations of sex characteristics and which can also include people who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse.
It found that since 2019, the rates of violence and harassment against intersex people have sharply increased – particularly among those who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse – far outpacing the increases reported by others in the LGBTQ+ community.
One in three surveyed, 34%, said they had been physically or sexually assaulted in the five years prior to the survey, up from 22% in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, the rate of reported hate-motivated harassment had almost doubled, from 42% to 74%.
The survey also found that more than half, 57%, of respondents said they had been subjected “without their informed consent” to surgery or other medical treatment to modify their sex characteristics, while 39% said they were put through so-called conversion practices aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender, compared with a rate of 25% among all LGBTQ+ groups.
The Vienna-based agency linked the rise to a wider climate of “increasing or persisting intolerance and bigotry, as well as intense online hatred campaigns” that had “instrumentalised” the LGBT+ community.
“Disinformation campaigns fomenting intolerance and prejudice are often waged by foreign and domestic actors acting to undermine European and western democracies and core values, such as dignity, equality and diversity,” the agency noted.
The result was a “weaponising” of the fact that many people know little about those who identify as intersex, trans, non-binary and gender diverse, allowing these campaigns to spread disinformation and “fuel hatred and violence against them”, it said.
The report echoes organisations across Europe, who have long warned of politicians using parliament, political rallies and media interviews to fuel anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and normalise discrimination across the continent.
In its findings this week, the EU agency warned that the impact of this discrimination was far-reaching for those who identify as intersex. “Their repeated victimisation and the multiple and compounded challenges they face can lead to severe exclusion and critical life situations such as homelessness, suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts.”
More than half of the intersex people surveyed, 53%, said they had contemplated suicide in the prior year. The figure was notably higher than the overall rate of 37% reported across all LGBTIQ groups.
The EU agency called on countries to add sex characteristics to the protected grounds in anti-discrimination legislation and do more to combat hate crimes and hate speech aimed at intersex people.
Their struggle requires an urgent response, said Sirpa Rautio, the director of the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Intersex people in the EU experience alarming levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence,” she said in a statement. “They must be provided with targeted support that addresses their specific needs to ensure they can enjoy their fundamental rights and live in dignity.”
Category: Diversity / Inclusivity
Politicians demonizing LGBTQ+ people for electoral success is a global phenomenon
John Russell (He/Him)September 11, 2025, 2:00 pm EDTShutterstock
Politicians across the globe used anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns last year, according to a new report from LGBTQ+ rights NGO Outright International.
The organization’s just-released report “Queering Democracy: The Global Elections in 2024 and How LGBTIQ People Fared” examines “how LGBTIQ people navigated, participated in, and shaped electoral processes” in 60 countries and the European Union last year. Among its key findings, the report says that anti-LGBTQ+ hate became a widespread campaign strategy around the world even as queer and trans people made gains in some of the same countries.
Related
Outright International describes 2024 as a “super election year” in which more than 1.5 billion people in 73 countries voted. But, they say, “this historic moment also came at a time of democratic backsliding, when LGBTIQ communities and other marginalized groups were among the first to feel the impacts of shrinking freedoms.” The organization describes LGBTQ+ communities as “canaries in the coal mine — among the first targets when democratic norms erode.”
According to Outright International, “In at least 51 of the 61 jurisdictions studied, political candidates weaponized anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric for electoral gain.” Politicians, the organization found, “demonized ‘gender ideology,’ labeled LGBTIQ people as ‘foreign agents,’ and scapegoated sexual and gender minorities to deflect from policy failures. In some countries, elections devolved into what one observer called ‘a competition of who was the most homophobic.’”
Insights for the LGBTQ+ community
Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
* * *Frequency
- Daily Brief
- Week in Review
- Week in Good News
Sign UpThe report cites leaders in Jordan, Czechia, Portugal, and Namibia among those who scapegoated LGBTQ+ people in an attempt to distract voters from their own governance failures. Uruguay, Panama, Australia, Moldova, and the United Kingdom were among 27 countries in which politicians explicitly used the specter of so-called “gender ideology,” “gender madness,” and “indoctrination” to demonize LGBTQ+ people and particularly transgender people.
And leaders across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East stoked both xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment by describing gender and sexual diversity as the result of malign foreign influence. According to the report, anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric led to social media harassment and calls for violence as well as real-world crackdowns on the LGBTQ+ communities in Tunisia and Romania.
“You talk with a politician from Peru… or Hungary or the UK, you start to see common trends and you realize that it’s a global, coordinated and increasingly well-funded effort to diminish LGBTIQ people,” Outright International’s Alberto de Belaúnde told The Guardian.
Even ostensibly pro-LGBTQ+ parties and politicians in some countries appeared to turn on the community. As the report notes, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis claimed his New Democracy party “certainly suffered political damage” for supporting marriage equality. And in the U.S., some Democrats “blamed the party’s crushing defeat on the party’s perceived support for trans people’s rights, despite surveys showing that these issues were not a primary concern for voters.”
The report also includes a four-page case study on Republicans’ anti-trans messaging and misinformation during the 2024 U.S. election cycle, including the GOP candidate’s campaign’s $17 million investment in anti-trans ads. It concludes that the 2024 election cycle “highlights the vulnerability of marginalized communities to targeted misinformation, underscoring an urgent need for ongoing vigilance and robust advocacy to protect human rights amid escalating political adversity.”
The report also found that, while there was no evidence of laws explicitly denying LGBTQ+ people the right to vote, the community nonetheless faces significant barriers to participating in the democratic process around the world — fear of violence, political disillusionment, and lack of legal gender recognition among them.
Despite those barriers, Outright International says that LGBTQ+ communities consistently came out to defend democracy in the face of authoritarian movements in their home countries, most notably in Bangladesh, Türkiye, and Georgia.
Alongside its dire warnings about what de Belaúnde called a “weaponization” of anti-LGBTQ+ hate, the Queering Democracy report also highlighted significant political gains for LGBTQ+ people around the world. LGBTQ+ candidates ran for office in 36 countries last year, including for the first time in Botswana, Namibia, and Romania. It also notes trailblazing transgender candidates in Venezuela, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the U.S., where Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) became the first openly trans member of Congress.
The report includes a long list of recommendations for electoral management bodies, election monitoring organizations, political leaders, and candidates on how to combat anti-LGBTQ+ tactics. These include holding political parties and candidates accountable for hate speech, engaging with LGBTQ+ communities in developing political platforms, and supporting queer candidates.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
Unbelievable, But Believe It!
I read this over breakfast, and by 10 AM workout time, had seen it broadcast on 3 different shows.
America Brought to You by Bad Bunny by Charlotte Clymer
Hell of a choice. Read on Substack
(image credit: Apple Music)
What is the biggest American cultural event?
There’s only one rational answer to this question. It’s the Super Bowl. Nothing else comes close. Not in size or grandeur or symbolism or global resonance.
This past February, for the first time, as many Americans watched Super Bowl LIX as those who watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969, long considered the biggest live audience draw in U.S. broadcast television history.
Neil Armstrong walking on the lunar surface was once indisputably the most-watched live event by Americans. This year, it officially had competition for that title. By 2030, it may not even crack the top five.
What will the top five otherwise be by then? All Super Bowl broadcasts. Right now, if you exclude the moon landing, the top ten live American television broadcasts are all Super Bowls, and the top three are all from the past three years.
Maybe you’re not into sportsball. Maybe you can’t stand the NFL. Maybe you have fond memories of watching the live series finales of M*A*S*H or Cheers or Seinfeld or Johnny Carson’s final Tonight Show appearance, and you’ll recall that it felt as though the entire country were watching those, too, at the same time you and your family were glued to the tube.
But those days are long gone. Network television has been cannibalized by satellite and streaming over the years. If a scripted network series draws ten million viewers for any given episode, it’s more than enough to take the crown over its competitors.
The Oscars draws 20 million. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade does better at 30 million. Trump’s inauguration in January had 25 million viewers, nearly ten million fewer than Pres. Biden’s in 2021.
There is no American cultural event that comes within shouting distance—much less spitting distance—of the Super Bowl. When you walk around today, wherever you are—at work or a café or a park or your kid’s school—keep in mind that, on average, at least a third of the adults around you were all watching the Super Bowl at the same time this year.
Consider the global audience: the Super Bowl is the most-watched live annual television event around the world. The Men’s World Cup Final draws as many as 1.5 billion live viewers, but that’s every four years. The Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony is capable of drawing half that, but it’s also every four years. The Super Bowl draws 200M live viewers globally every year.
No annual live television event in the world is bigger than the Super Bowl, and no other country can lay claim to having a live broadcast of this size that is so inextricably bound with a celebration of its culture.
The Super Bowl is a distillation of all things America: sports and celebrity and military pageantry and unabashed patriotism and unapologetic commercialism all being slammed together, and in terms of annual events, more human beings on this planet watch it live, together, than anything else.
And it’s because of all those elements that most American conservatives perceive it as a showcase of American exceptionalism. It’s not that it’s inherently conservative or that non-conservatives don’t watch it; it’s that the sheer scope of the Super Bowl combined with all the patriotic bits make it a crown jewel in their argument for American cultural hegemony.
That’s why when Apple Music and the NFL announced last night that Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—is headlining Super Bowl LX this upcoming February, my jaw dropped.
For those unfamiliar, Bad Bunny is one of the biggest entertainers in the world. Were you to remove Taylor Swift and Beyoncé from the metrics conversation, he’s easily the biggest. He led global streaming charts from 2020-2022, and he’s still among the top three even now. His Un Verano Sin Ti world tour in 2022 dominated that year, and only Taylor Swift has surpassed his touring numbers since.
Based on both merit and marketing, Bad Bunny is an obvious choice to headline the Super Bowl.
But he’s also an outspoken LGBTQ ally, particularly on trans rights. He has been consistently critical of Trump, especially in regards to immigration. Earlier this month, he announced he would not include any U.S. dates for his 2025-2026 Debí Tirar Más Fotos world tour out of fear for his fans given the fascistic crackdown by ICE. He notably endorsed Vice President Harris last year after Puerto Rico was mocked at Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden campaign rally.
Oh, and he performs solely in Spanish. That’s right: he does not rap or sing in any language other than Spanish. He does speak English, but he’s not a “crossover” Latin artist as an intentional choice. He has made it clear that he wants Spanish-language music to be normalized in the global marketplace, and so, he only produces work in Spanish.
He is an avatar of Latin excellence in a moment when the U.S. government is violently hostile toward Latin people.
The biggest American cultural event—with massive global influence—is about to be headlined by an unapologetically proud Latin trans ally who can’t stand Trump and performs solely in Spanish.
Based on all this, the NFL selecting him to headline the Super Bowl is pretty damn surprising and may indicate no small measure of intended protest by those involved in the process.
What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions that took place between the NFL and Apple and Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation—which advises the league on entertainment—in choosing Bad Bunny for the greatest entertainment gig in the world.
I suppose I’ll have to settle for Bad Bunny’s instantly iconic hint posted on social media just prior to the announcement last night:
“I’ve been thinking about it these days, and after discussing it with my team, I think I’ll do just one date in the United States.”
Goddamn. I love this guy.
Now the questions become: what does Trump do? Is there an online meltdown incoming? Will he attempt to pressure the NFL to cancel Bad Bunny? If he does, how will the NFL respond?
Trump may not want this fight. This may be one of those rare moments he wisely chooses to avoid controversy. His poll numbers are terrible, the Midterms are next year, and his party will need every vote they can get. Alienating young and Latin voters would be a massive, unforced error.
I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, we’re about to be treated to a hell of a show. (snip)
Some clips from recent Majority Report that I enjoyed.
FBI’s War On Trans People | Ken Klippenstein | TMR
An important report on how the tRump bigots and trans people haters are targeting trans people. It shows how clearly they are lying and spreading disinformation so they can erase trans people from society. They flood the media at the first sign of violence yet never correct the misinformation when they are found to be wrong. The goal is to make the US a straight cis only society. They will be coming for the rest of the LGBTQ+ community as soon as they feel they win erasing the trans people. Remember they have made the pride flag political and forbidden to be displayed but the southern confederate battle flag is still allowed. Hugs
Investigative journalist, Ken Klippenstein joins the show to discuss the Trump administration’s manipulation of recent shootings to bolster their war on trans people. Live-streamed on September 25, 2025
What Think You?
Keynote Address: Unscripted — Introducing Intergender Dynamics and Reframing Gender-Type Prejudice by Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA
🇨🇦 Richard Hogan PhD (Mathematics) · MD (Neuroscience) · PhD (Ethics) · DBA (HRD) Architect of IGD & IBT | Rewriting the language of gender justice Essays, theory, and verse from the post-binary frontier
Keynote Address: Unscripted—Introducing Intergender Dynamics and and Reframing Gender-Type Prejudice
Good morning.
It is an honor to stand before you today—not to echo what has already been said, but to challenge what we’ve long accepted. To offer not just a critique, but a new vocabulary. A new lens. A new way forward. I hope you are ‘not toned deaf’.
For decades, we have used the term misogyny to name and confront systemic prejudice against women. It has served us well in many ways. But today, I ask you—academics, legal scholars, educators, and clinicians—to consider this: What if the language we use to fight injustice is now limiting our ability to understand it?
We are living in a post-binary world. Gender is no longer a fixed category—it is a spectrum, a performance, a negotiation. And yet, our frameworks remain tethered to binary logic. Misogyny is one such tether. It is gender-specific. Directionally fixed. It presumes a hierarchy that no longer reflects the lived realities of our students, our patients, our communities.
So today, I introduce a new term: Intergender Dynamics , or IGD .
IGD refers to the patterned, reciprocal, and often asymmetrical interactions between individuals and groups across the gender spectrum. It is not just about identity—it is about relationship . It is about how we perform, police, and punish gender roles in our daily lives. It is about the emotional labor we assign, the authority we grant, the empathy we withhold.
And this is not just a sociological insight—it is a medical one.
Recent research in gender-affirming care has shown that transgender and gender-diverse individuals face significant barriers in accessing health services, often due to systemic bias and relational discomfort within clinical settings. Studies have also revealed that patients with dynamic or evolving gender identities experience distress not only from institutional exclusion, but from interpersonal dynamics—how they are spoken to, validated, or dismissed by providers.
In pediatric and adolescent medicine, clinicians are now trained to recognize how gender-role expectations affect mental health, emotional development, and access to care. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health and The Endocrine Society have emphasized the importance of relational sensitivity—not just diagnostic accuracy—in improving outcomes.
What does this tell us?
It tells us that IGD is not just a theoretical tool—it is a clinical imperative . If we want to reduce disparities, improve mental health, and foster trust in care, we must understand how gender prejudice operates not only in policy, but in conversation. In tone. In silence.
To complement IGD, I also propose Intergender Bias Theory (IBT) —a framework for analyzing the structural architecture of gender-type prejudice. IBT examines how laws, curricula, and institutional norms enforce rigid roles and marginalize deviation. Together, IGD and IBT offer a dual lens: one that captures both the macro-level scaffolding of bias and the micro-level choreography of interaction.
Let me be clear: retiring the term misogyny is not an act of denial. It is an act of evolution. It is a recognition that our language must grow with our understanding. That our frameworks must reflect the complexity of the world we now inhabit.
So I call on you:
- Academics , to revise your syllabi, your research, your theories.
- Legal scholars , to expand your statutes, your protections, your definitions.
- Educators , to teach emotional literacy, role deconstruction, and relational justice.
- Clinicians , to recognize IGD in patient care and to train for relational sensitivity.
Let us move from naming contempt to understanding connection. Let us shift from binary blame to systemic insight. Let us unscript ourselves—and write a new language of liberation.
This is not the end of a conversation. It is the beginning of a movement.
Thank you.
(snip-To read in Latin, French, Spanish, or Arab, click through to the Substack)
“Welcome in Winter “
From Jan Resseger:
A Story From Imani Gandy:
Trump’s Second Term Hits Different Now That I’m Out—Opinion
Sep 24, 2025, 9:00am Imani Gandy
The target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.
Queer people don’t have the luxury of treating Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ actions as a simple policy debate. Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group
I often joke about being a Meredith Baxter gay. You may remember her as Meredith Baxter Birney, the woman who played Elyse Keaton on Family Ties. She came out as a lesbian in 2009, when she was 62. I don’t know why Baxter is stuck in my mind as the quintessential “coming out later in life” queen. Plenty of people have come out late in life, but I’m firmly Gen X, so somehow she became my northstar of late-stage queerness.
When I finally came out at 50 in 2024, it wasn’t particularly dramatic. It was quiet and overdue. Something inside me had been waiting for years, tapping its foot, wondering when I’d finally be ready to stop pretending. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this column—to elicit a reaction that’s more dramatic than “no shit, Imani.”
Coming out later in life means you’ve probably already got bad knees and sciatica. I certainly do. I can’t drop it low anymore unless there’s a paramedic nearby to hoist me up. I missed the whole glamorous L Word era because, even though I knew I was at least a little gay around the edges, I had no idea what to do about it. I was even living in Los Angeles when The L Word was on the air. I knew all the places I could go if I wanted to spread my gay wings.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just kept plodding on and trying to date men. I even considered marrying two different men in my 20s and 30s. And I bless the rains down in Africa that I didn’t, because both marriages would have ended up in disaster.
Sometimes I grieve for the queer Imani who could have been tearing it up in Los Angeles in 2002. But I can’t go back; I can only move forward. And I’m moving forward with an additional identity that colors the way I move through the world.
And on top of that, I’m moving through that world under Trump 2.0.
As a Black woman, I never needed Donald Trump to show me who he was. I clocked him from the jump. Racist, misogynist, wannabe strongman—it was all right there. His first term was terrifying. Not in the politics is messy way, but in the this man will torch democracy if doing so makes him feel powerful way.
But this time hits different. Because now I’m out.
Project 2025’s ‘dark plan’ for LGBTQ+ rights
When Trump was in office the first time, I wasn’t living openly as a queer woman. I fought his administration on reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration, and racial justice in part by highlighting the misinformation and half-truths that are the core features of the conservative effort to impose Christian theocracy on queer people, immigrants, people of color—on basically anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their straight, white, Christian box.
That’s because I’m a person who deeply believes in justice. Hell, I’ve dedicated my life to reproductive justice even though I’ve never been pregnant. Never had an abortion. (My girlfriend says it’s because I’m extremely empathetic and I hate injustice.)
But I didn’t feel the daily, stomach-clenching fear of watching a government try to erase LGBTQ+ rights while knowing my own life was on the line.
Now I do.
(Imani’s new podcast drops on Sept. 25, 2025. Subscribe to Boom! Lawyered to be the first to hear it.)
Trump’s first term was hardly neutral on queer people. He banned trans people from serving in the military. He rescinded guidance telling schools to protect trans students. His Department of Justice claimed in court that businesses should be able to fire workers just for being gay. He proposed gutting nondiscrimination protections in health care so doctors could refuse to treat trans patients. He appointed judges who seem to pride themselves on being hostile to LGBTQ+ rights.
Now, we’ve got Trump 2.0—and the plan is even darker. His allies wrote it all down in Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for turning the country into a Christian nationalist theocracy. Project 2025 is about reframing queer identity and sexual expression as obscenity, criminalizing it, and pushing LGBTQ+ people out of public life.
The Supreme Court is already helping this project along, as I wrote back in July. This past term, the Court handed Christian conservatives two major wins: Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.
In Mahmoud, religious parents in Maryland didn’t want their kids reading age-appropriate LGBTQ+-inclusive books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, Prince & Knight, Pride Puppy! These children’s books don’t contain anything graphic or explicit; they just acknowledge that queer families exist.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the parents. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said parents should get a heads-up and the chance to opt out of any lessons with LGBTQ+ content “until all appellate review in this case is completed”—a process that could take years.
Alito gussied up his argument as “religious liberty,” arguing that requiring parents to submit their children to instruction that contradicts their religious beliefs constitutes a burden on religious exercise. But let’s be real: It’s a green light for parents to purge classrooms of queer content. Schools under pressure won’t build complex opt-out systems for kids whose parents object to these texts. They’ll just pull the books from classrooms.
Then there’s the Free Speech Coalition case. The Supreme Court upheld a law Texas passed in 2023 requiring age verification to access “sexually explicit” content online. Sounds like it’s about porn, right? But Project 2025 calls for a ban on pornography not just in the good, old-fashioned sense of the word. It expands the definition of porn in a way that can easily be interpreted to cover materials commonly found in a high school library, like books on sexual health, puberty, and information on sexual orientation and identity for LGBTQ+ youth.
To the architects of Project 2025, a book on puberty or a novel with queer characters is basically Hustler magazine.
(Read more: SCOTUS Gives Project 2025 Two Big Anti-LGBTQ+ Wins)
Put Mahmoud and Free Speech Coalition together, and you see the playbook: Queer identity equals obscenity. Queer books? Obscene. Queer websites? Obscene. Porn? Criminal. Once you collapse all of that into the same bucket, it’s open season on LGBTQ+ people and culture.
This is the blueprint Trump and his allies are running with. Not just another round of chaos, but a coordinated effort to erase queer life—through schools, libraries, the internet, and the courts.
That’s why this second term feels different
It’s not that I didn’t know Trump was dangerous before—I did. But because I’m out now, I feel these attacks land in a new place.
It’s my life. My love. My newly-formed family. My right to be visible without being treated like contraband or pretending that my girlfriend, Portia, is my sister.
Coming out didn’t make Trump more dangerous. It made the danger he presents impossible to intellectualize away.
Straight people can treat this as just another policy debate. Queer people don’t have that luxury. We know our lives and relationships are bargaining chips in a theocracy that Christian nationalists are trying to build one opt-out, one website ban, one court case at a time.
So yeah, Trump’s second term hits different because the target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.
And that’s the gut punch: Trump doesn’t just threaten democracy in the abstract now—he threatens the most personal parts of my life.
Scottie's Playtime 