Biden vows to use US clout, foreign aid

In Guatemala, two transgender women and a gay man were murdered this month in separate attacks days apart. 

In Ghana, police arrested 21 activists in May for unlawful assembly and promoting LGBTQ activities during a conference at a hotel. 

In Russia, two young gay men were abducted from a safe house in February and sent back to Chechnya, where LGBTQ people regularly face arbitrary arrest, torture and other violence because of their sexual orientation.

Experts said these incidents highlight a perilous landscape for LGBTQ people around the world. From Central America to Africa, LGBTQ communities have been disproportionately affected by a global backsliding on democracy and human rights and by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, advocates said. 

"COVID has exacerbated a lot of underlying inequalities and tensions," said Mark Bromley, chairman of the Council for Global Equality, which promotes robust U.S. policy on international LGBT and intersex human rights issues. "We have seen a number of governments use COVID to justify attacks on LGBTQ individuals and communities."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States will work to counter "discriminatory legal frameworks" in a host of countries and step up U.S. support for grass-roots LGBTQ organizations around the world. 

"It is a new day with the U.S. coming back to the international stage on this issue and wanting to engage multilaterally," said Urooj Arshad, senior program manager for LGBTQ issues at Freedom House, a pro-democracy group based in Washington. "It will make a huge difference." 

The Biden administration has offered a glimmer of hope by advocating for LGBTQ rights on the world stage, said Bromley, a sharp pivot from the Trump administration's embrace of domestic and international policies hostile to their community. 

Friday, the White House announced the appointment of Jessica Stern to be the U.S. special envoy for global LGBTQ issues, filling a post left vacant by the Trump administration.

In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order vowing to use American diplomacy and U.S. foreign assistance to promote and protect LGBTQ rights internationally.

The State Department lifted a Trump-era edict prohibiting U.S. embassies from flying the Pride flag, and Friday the State Department raised the Progress flag at the agency's Harry S. Truman building in downtown Washington to mark the anniversaries of the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015 and the start of the Stonewall riots in 1969.

"Today is the first time a flag recognizing the LGBTQI+ community will fly over State Department headquarters," said Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, who also paid tribute to gay diplomats who were fired, harassed and outed in previous decades. 

"Sadly, the State Department was especially aggressive in persecuting our own," Sherman said, noting the agency began investigating and firing LGBTQ employees in the 1940s and continued into the 1990s. 

President Donald Trump implemented a raft of anti-LGBTQ policies domestically, barring some transgender people from serving in the military, removing gay content from federal websites and proposing to let homeless shelters deny transgender people access to their facilities.

Mike Pompeo, Trump's secretary of state, derided what he called a "proliferation of rights" and pushed the State Department to promote religious freedom above other human rights. Critics said it was a thinly veiled effort to sideline the rights of LGBTQ people and women's reproductive rights. 

Bromley said the Trump administration's moves to undermine U.N. human rights mechanisms emboldened authoritarian governments to ramp up their repression and targeting of LGBTQ communities.

Those moves came even as Trump named Richard Grenell, who is openly gay, to be his ambassador to Germany and later his acting director of national intelligence, a Cabinet-level post. Trump also tasked Grenell with leading a global push to decriminalize homosexuality, but advocates said it yielded little to no results.

"(Grenell) did speak out in forceful ways in support of decriminalization," Bromley said. "But unfortunately, those goals and aspirations were not shared by other political leaders in the Trump administration. ... So there was never a comprehensive strategy, a diplomatic strategy or a funding strategy to support decriminalization efforts."

More: How Joe Biden became the most LGBTQ-friendly president in US history

At least 68 countries have laws on the books that criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults, according to Human Rights Watch, and nine have laws targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

In Hungary, the government approved a law that essentially bans the discussion of sexual and gender diversity in schools, media and other venues, a development that critics fear will increase discrimination and violence against LGBTQ citizens. 

The pandemic increased vulnerability and stress for LGBTQ communities. Some people lost their livelihoods and were forced to move back in with homophobic or transphobic families, said Arshad.

"Then, if they needed to relocate, they couldn't because of all the restrictions," Arshad said.

Access to health care and social services, already difficult for many, became even more scarce as funding evaporated and advocacy groups shuttered. 

In May, Ugandan police arrested 23 people living at an LGBTQ shelter near Kampala, alleging they were guilty of “a negligent act likely to spread infection of disease,” according to Human Rights Watch.

Advocates said it was one of many examples around the world in which government officials used COVID-19 as a pretext to target LGBTQ people.

Neela Ghoshal, associate director of Human Rights Watch's LGBT rights program, said three of those arrested were released, and the other 20 were put in prison where the risk of COVID-19 infection is severe. 

"Human lawyers can’t visit them in prison – Uganda’s latest COVID-19 guidelines only allow movement for 'essential services,' which do not include legal services," Ghoshal wrote on the Human Rights Watch website. 

In an interview, Ghoshal said that although there have been horrific abuses in recent months, the longer trend is positive.

Over the past decade, she said, more than 10 countries have decriminalized homosexuality, most recently in Bhutan and Gabon, and she anticipates similar developments in the Caribbean and elsewhere.  

The LGBTQ community in the European Union counted two wins Tuesday alone: the Spanish Cabinet passed a draft bill on allowing transgender people to freely change their gender without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or requiring that a person’s physical appearance conform with traditional male or female expressions; meanwhile, France expanded access to its free fertility treatments, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, to women in same-sex relationships and single women. 

"I think we can expect to see a lot more progress in the next decade," Ghoshal said, though she conceded that every step forward is met with pushback. 

One arena where that backlash has been fierce, she and others said, is transgender rights. 

"Homophobia and transphobia particularly right now are deeply embedded within the culture wars of the United States and directly connected, in terms of advocacy and funding, to what's happening around the world," Bromley said. "So we need to own part of this problem."

Last year there were 44 transgender killings in the USA and its territories. This year, a number of states moved forward with laws specifically targeting the transgender population, especially youths. Tennessee passed a law requiring transgender students to compete in school sports according to their sex assigned at birth, while Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming treatments for transgender minors.

"The Trump administration’s clear anti-trans position did great harm, and that is something the Biden administration has really turned around on in an incredibly impressive way," Ghoshal said.

Biden has praised transgender youth in multiple speeches, including his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress.

"Transgender kids are some of the bravest people in the world," Biden said at a Pride event Friday. "It takes courage to be true to your authentic self and to face ... these kinds of discrimination you know exist."

Blinken said this month he is "particularly sensitive to the plight of transgender people, especially people of color, and especially when we’re seeing within this overall regression particular instances of violence and discrimination against that community." 

He touted the Biden administration's decision to sponsor its "first-ever" side event June 23 at the United Nations on the rights of transgender and gender-diverse people.

While activists cheered that move and others, Bromley said it's critical to seize the moment and keep the Biden administration's feet to the fire.

"The political commitments are there, but now we have to use those commitments on the ground to really change the lives of LGBTQI persons,” he said.

Contributing: Michael Collins, USA TODAY; The Associated Press