Global Voices Address LGBTQI+ Human Rights

A panel of frontline advocates gathered recently at the Harvard Kennedy School's JFK Jr. Forum to discuss how governments around the world are weaponizing LGBTQI+ identities and how activists are responding. Moderated by Jessica Stern, Carr-Ryan Senior Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy Fellow and former U.S. Special Envoy for LGBTQI+ Rights, this event titled The Fight for LGBTQI+ Equality: Dispatches from the Front Lines, featured Nayyab Ali, Executive Director of Transgender Rights Consultants Pakistan and Carr-Ryan Center LGBTQI+ Fellow; Pau González Sánchez, Co-Founder of PFLAG Panama; Marline Oluchi, Policy and Advocacy Lead at CHEVS (Nigeria); and Dilya Gafurova, Head of the Sphere Foundation (Russia).

Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs as part of their Research Cluster on Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights, the event brought together perspectives from five continents to examine the global dynamics of political scapegoating, legal regression, and collective resilience in the fight for LGBTQI+ equality.

Manufactured Outrage and Political Opportunism

Early in the discussion, Stern noted that LGBTQI+ rights worldwide appear to be a rollercoaster of advances and setbacks, asking what drives such volatility. The panelists’ answers pointed to a shared diagnosis: the deliberate use of queer and trans communities as political scapegoats.

Gafurova described how Russia’s government has spent more than a decade tightening restrictions under the banner of “traditional values,” culminating in the 2024 Supreme Court decision labeling the “international LGBT movement” extremist. “It creates an inner enemy,” she said, “a scapegoat around which the public can be mobilized.”

Ali traced the same pattern in Pakistan. The 2018 Transgender Persons Act, once heralded as groundbreaking, was largely struck down by the Federal Shariat Court in 2023, which invalidated the right to self-identified gender and inheritance. “When the highest court calls being transgender a sin,” she said, “people feel licensed to kill.”

Oluchi pointed to Nigeria’s colonial legal inheritance as the root of ongoing persecution. Before British colonization, she noted, diverse gender and sexual expressions existed openly. The imported legal system, fused with religious conservatism, turned them into political fault lines. In Panama, González Sánchez described a quieter form of exclusion: official indifference. With no gender identity law, anti-discrimination protections, or recognition of same-sex marriage, LGBTQI+ Panamanians remain “invisible by design,” he said.

“They have turned queerness into a tool to manufacture outrage. Understanding that pattern is the first step to undoing its power.”— Jessica Stern

Resilience, Strategy, and the Long View

When Stern asked how activists sustain resistance, the conversation turned toward strategy and adaptation rather than defiance alone.

González Sánchez emphasized cross-movement alliances, arguing that enduring change depends on linking LGBTQI+ advocacy to other justice struggles. “Alone we’re not going to be able to,” he said. Oluchi echoed the point: Nigerian activists increasingly embed queer rights within broader campaigns for gender justice and social inclusion, reframing equality as a shared public good.

Ali outlined pragmatic efforts to embed inclusion in everyday governance–training transgender police officers, creating protection units, and expanding local policy frameworks to survive beyond any single law. “We’ve turned survivors into saviors,” she said. In Russia, where open advocacy risks imprisonment, Gafurova underscored the quiet persistence of visibility campaigns. “Visibility is still key to changing hearts and minds,” she said.

“We’ve turned survivors into saviors.”— Nayyab Ali

Community, Language, and Sustaining Connection

Audience questions steered the conversation toward the personal dimensions of advocacy: safety, belonging, and voice.

Oluchi addressed the difficult calculus of staying or leaving: “You have to be alive to fight.” Gafurova observed that many Russian activists now continue their work from exile, while González Sánchez noted that advocacy “doesn’t end with geography.”

Ali spoke of mentorship as vital to movement continuity—an “ecosystem,” she called it, connecting seasoned advocates with younger organizers. Oluchi emphasized the power of chosen family, informal networks, and peer support: “Community saves us.”

Language, too, remains a frontier of change. In Russian, Gafurova explained, many professions lack feminine or gender-neutral forms, reflecting structural inequality. Feminist and LGBTQI+ groups are pushing to reshape that linguistic landscape as part of a longer cultural shift.

“You have to be alive to fight.”— Marline Oluchi

Concluding Perspectives

In closing, Stern observed that while the political contexts differed, the mechanisms of repression were strikingly similar. Across regions, governments are instrumentalizing identity to consolidate power, often by reviving colonial or religious narratives.

The panelists emphasized the need for documentation, coalition, and shared learning across borders. Data collection, public education, and visibility, they agreed, remain crucial tools to counter misinformation and sustain collective resilience.

What emerged from the conversation was less a sense of resolution than recognition: that the fight for LGBTQI+ equality is inseparable from larger struggles over truth, governance, and belonging in public life.