LGBT+ Rights

Bastian Herre; Pablo Arriagada; Max Roser

LGBT+ rights are human rights that all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other people outside traditional sexuality and gender categories have. But in practice, these rights are often not protected to the same extent as the rights of straight and cisgender people.

Among others, LGBT+ rights include: physical integrity rights, such as not being executed for their sexuality or gender and not being subjected to conversion therapies; social rights, such as changing their legal gender, being sexually intimate, marrying, and adopting children with people of the same sex; economic rights such as not being discriminated at work; and political rights, such as being able to advocate for themselves and their communities publicly.

The protection of these rights allows LGBT+ people to live the lives they want and to thrive in them.

On this page, you can find data and visualizations on how the protection of LGBT+ rights has changed over time, and how it differs across countries.

Research & Writing

Featured image for the article on LGBT+ rights. Stylized line charts with lines in red, yellow, green, and blue, going up from left to right.

LGBT+ rights have become more protected in dozens of countries, but are not recognized across most of the world

Despite progress, same-sex marriage, adoption, gender marker changes, and third genders remain unrecognized in many countries. Some have even imposed more regressive policies.

Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada

Interactive Charts on LGBT+ Rights

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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “LGBT+ Rights” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/lgbt-rights' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-lgbt-rights,
    author = {Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada},
    title = {LGBT+ Rights},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2023},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/lgbt-rights}
}

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