LBQ Women Free Everyone
No woman can determine the direction of her own life without the ability to determine her sexuality. Sexuality is an integral, deeply ingrained part of every human being’s life and should not be subject to debate or coercion. Anyone who is truly committed to women’s human rights must recognize that every woman has the right to determine her sexuality free of discrimination and oppression.
— Beverley Palesa Ditsie (Beijing, 1995)
Thirty years ago in Beijing, South African activist Bev Ditsie made history as the first openly lesbian woman to address the United Nations. Speaking to those attending the Fourth World Conference on Women, the young veteran of the anti-apartheid movement decried the violence, discrimination, and harassment that lesbians experience on account of their sexual orientation.
In talking about those women who love women being fired from their jobs, beaten and killed, their children taken away by the courts, and facing other such abuses, Ditsie invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its promises of the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family “without distinction of any kind.” Speaking as a citizen of South Africa — the country that just the year before had become the first in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution — Ditsie made an unprecedented appeal to the United Nations to insist on LGBTQI+ equality as a matter of fundamental human rights.
Over the next two weeks, we will commemorate the advances that have grown from that Beijing Women’s Conference, first with International Women’s Day on March 8, followed right after by the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting at the UN’s New York headquarters March 10-21. Outright International — which Bev Ditsie represented in Beijing under its prior name, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission — will be hosting a Lesbian Tent alongside CSW69. This will celebrate the original lesbian tent from Beijing, the historic gathering space set up to promote lesbian visibility and to protest queer exclusion from the 1995 conference program. (For more on lesbians at the Fourth World Conference on Women, we recommend Bev Ditsie’s 2020 retrospective documentary, Lesbians Free Everyone: The Beijing Retrospective.)
In the three decades since Beijing, the global women’s movement has come a long way in incorporating the issues facing queer women in all their diversities — including not only sexual orientation but gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. Likewise, more and more human rights organizations and multilateral institutions have made significant progress in mainstreaming gender and LGBTQI+ issues into their broader work. That said, even were these the best of times, there would still be a long way to go in thoroughly incorporating queer people and communities into the global women’s and human rights movements.
But let’s not be disingenuous: these are very, very far from the best of times. The Trump Administration’s attacks on reproductive freedom and efforts to erase transgender people altogether are front and center on its campaign of state capture.
The cruel and legally dubious moves to shutter USAID and stop all U.S. foreign assistance, including PEPFAR, have put millions of lives at risk and dealt a devastating blow to organizations across the globe working on the frontlines to safeguard the dignity, safety, and rights of LGBTQI+ people.
Additionally, the fevered white supremacist pro-natalism proposals of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Elon Musk further recall Margaret Atwood’s reminder that The Handmaid’s Tale was written as a warning, not an instruction manual.
And just ahead of CSW69 at the United Nations, the State Department announced the withdrawal of the United States from the UN LGBTI Core Group.
Along with the narrative of International Women’s Day’s 2025 theme, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality, and Empowerment,” we are going to hear a lot assessing Beijing+30 and the progress made over the last three decades. And we can and must celebrate the steps forward in LBQ women’s inclusion in the feminist movement since Beijing — in such dark times, coming together in solidarity to celebrate wins is critical to sustaining resistance.
But over these next two weeks, we are also going to hear a lot of disingenuous, transphobic discourse about “protecting women and girls.” Trump’s Day One Executive Order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” is not only the basis of the Administration’s slew of anti-transgender policies but also draws its dishonest language of protection directly from the global anti-gender movement that has grown steadily over the last fifteen years.
That movement, which uses attacks on LGBTQI+ people, especially transgender people, and on sexual and reproductive health and rights to undermine democracy for all, views CSW as a critical platform to push its agenda. Far-right governments — now including the United States alongside Russia and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation — will likely use this year’s CSW to try to roll back the protections of the Beijing Declaration and push a hierarchy of the rights of some women over others.
We know directly that in the negotiations underway now for this year’s CSW declaration, these governments are fighting hard to eliminate language that can be interpreted to be LGBTQI+-inclusive — and to even exclude the word “gender” itself from the final text.
And some of the figures purporting to defend the welfare of women and girls in UN spaces will be claiming a feminist mantle. Perhaps the most visible example of this is Reed Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women And Girls, who has used her office to attack transgender athletes in women’s sports rather than, for example, tackle the global epidemic of violence against women and girls, including transgender women and girls, for failing to conform with traditional signs of femininity.
More broadly, trans-exclusionary so-called feminists are willfully playing a part in an anti-gender movement that is undermining the rights of women and girls in all their diversity. From the right to divorce, to comprehensive sex education, to economic and physical autonomy, this movement is pushing an agenda of gender apartheid that includes but is hardly limited to LGBTQI+ human rights and reproductive autonomy.
So it is incumbent upon civil society, grassroots movements, and pro-LGBTQI+, pro-feminist governments to use CSW69 to insist on the inclusion of LBQ women and non-binary people in all gender-related policies and programs; to end all laws criminalizing LGBTQI+ people; to guarantee the rights of and access to reproductive health services, including abortion; and to increase funding and institutional support for LGBTQI+ and LBQ-inclusive women’s organizations on the frontlines. If we are serious about rights, equality, and empowerment, it must indeed be for all women, inclusive of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics.