We have responded to the call for input to the UN IE SOGI report on violence and discrimination experienced by “lesbian, bisexual, and queer women” for the report at the UN’s Human Rights Council meeting in June 2026.
Our submission documents how European legal and policy frameworks have progressively undermined the rights of lesbians through institutional and policy capture, legal incoherence and lack of accountability. Although European law recognises sex and sexual orientation as protected characteristics, recent institutional practices have elevated “gender identity” without legal definition, scrutiny or impact assessment, destabilising sex-based protections and rendering discrimination against lesbians difficult to identify and address.
This shift has been operationalised through three interlinked approaches: promotion of laws on self-identification of sex that effectively erase it as a legal category; conversion therapy bans framed around gender identity and gender expression that restrict exploratory support for same-sex-attracted youth; and expansion of hate speech and hate crime frameworks that chill feminist and lesbian advocacy. These developments are reinforced by discriminatory funding practices and biased research ecosystems that exclude lesbian organisations while privileging gender-identity-focused actors.
The combined effect is institutional erasure alongside reactionary backlash, leaving lesbians exposed to both weakened legal protection and heightened hostility.
Read our comprehensive input on how institutional and policy frameworks marginalise lesbians by collapsing sex-based categories into gender identity–based regimes, and on the resulting harms to freedom of expression, association, access to services and democratic participation.