LGBT rights | World news

Editors' picks

LGBT rights around the world

Explore the legal situation for LGBT people around sex, marriage or civil partnerships, adoption, and hate crime by region, country and overall population

India's transgender law is no help to its lesbian, gay and bisexual communities

Ash Kotak: We now have contradictory laws on gender and sexuality in India – with homosexuals now seemingly singled out as a threat
Alaska couples launch challenge to state's same-sex marriage ban

News: Lawsuit filed by five couples seeks to overturn a state constitutional amendment that voters approved in 1998
Drag queen? Transgender? Conchita's an ambassador and that's what matters

Paris Lees: The Eurovision winner is another great stride in the treatment of trans people, showing us what gender diversity really looks like
Rosweglyn: role models for the next generation of gay girls

Bella Qvist: These three young lesbian couples who vlog about everyday life are helping to normalise the portrayal of young gay women

Welcome to our LGBT children's book week

All this week we'll be exploring books which include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters or themes for children, teenagers and YAs, here's what we've got planned
Alyssa Brugman: Why do I have the right to write about an intersex character?

How did non-intersex author Alyssa Brugman find an authentic voice for writing about an intersex teen Alex?
James Dawson: The importance of LGBT visibility in children's books

When James Dawson was growing up he yearned for just one book with a character who was a bit like him – a normal teenage guy who happened to be gay. James explains what it felt like to be invisible in books

Progressive Catholics still have faith in Pope Francis’s vision

Martin Pendergast: The final report of the church’s extraordinary synod on family may have removed gay-friendly language, but great strides were made. Reform will come
If Vatican conservatives are so afraid of gay rights, young Catholics aren't going to wait around

Zach Stafford: How do bishops keep old-school policies with such a progressive congregation? Maybe because the new liberal-ish churchgoers aren’t going to church anymore
Martin Rowson on the Vatican and gay rights – cartoon

Cartoon
Pope Francis appears to have lost out to powerful conservatives in the Roman Catholic church after bishops scrapped language that had been hailed as a historic warming of attitudes towards gay people
Pope Francis’s healing, loving revolution is unstoppable

Austen Ivereigh: A minority of bishops clings to conservative ways but the Catholic church is slowly changing and will be holier for it

Gay navy veteran wins right to be buried with late wife in Idaho

Madelynn Taylor had been denied permission to inter ashes together but new move comes after state’s ban on same-sex marriage struck down
Catholic school bans Ellen Page and Julianne Moore romance shoot

Lesbian love story has permission to film at Catholic boys school in New York State revoked
Transgender teen sues 'schizophrenic' Connecticut detention centre

Sixteen-year-old Jane Doe alleges that boys’ detention centre that has been her giving hormone therapy has also traumatised her
Wyoming, scene of notorious 1998 hate crime, accepts gay marriage

Gay student Matthew Shepard was beaten to death but 16 years later the state has dropped its opposition to same-sex unions
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Mia Freedman's gay-paedophile analogy on The Project - video

Video (27 sec),
Mia Freedman has apologised after comments that compared gay people to paedophiles on The Project
Ray Cole: my time in a Moroccan jail for being gay was 'hell on earth' - video

Video (4min 53sec),
69-year-old Ray Cole was four weeks into a holiday in Morocco when he was charged with breaking the country's strict anti-gay laws
Ray Cole: I was kept in 'appalling conditions' in Morocco - video

Video (3min 09sec),
Ray cole relives the day he was arrested and detained by Moroccan police who found sexual images on his phone
Comedian Josh Thomas slams MP Bob Katter on Q&A for views on gay people – video

Video (41 sec),
Comedian Josh Thomas attacks MP Bob Katter for his stance on homosexuality
Bill Nighy on Pride: 'It's amazing no one knows the story' – video

Video (4min 41sec),
Star Bill Nighy and writer Stephen Beresford tell Steve Rose about their new film, Pride, based on the true story of a group of gay and lesbian activists who arrive in a Welsh mining town in support of the 1984 coal strike
Chilean marine becomes the first to publicly come out as gay - video

Video (1min 52sec),
Marine Mauricio Ruiz announces he is gay at a news conference in Santiago making him the first publicly gay member of the Chilean military