United States Stakeholder Report for the United Nations Universal Periodic Review: LGBTIQ+ Rights
Country: United States of America
Partners: ILGA–North America and the Caribbean (ILGA-NAC)
Issues: LGBTIQ+ Rights
Mechanism: UN Universal Periodic Review
Report Type: Stakeholder Report
The protection of the rights of LGBTIQ+ individuals in the United States was not stable during the reporting period. While the Biden presidential administration made strides in ensuring the protections of LGBTIQ+ Americans, those efforts have been significantly undercut by the current Trump administration. As a result, the legal rights and protections available to LGBTIQ+ individuals vary across jurisdictions within the U.S. and may change following elections or shifts in political leadership, leaving many individuals without stable or consistent protection from discrimination. More positively, during the Third Cycle, marriage equality for all individuals survived challenges through to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this report, we use the acronym LGBTIQ+ to refer to individuals who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and other sexual and gender minorities. These terms necessarily do not include everyone who may experience violations of their human rights on the basis of their real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and/orsex characteristics (“SOGIESC”), which is why we also include a “+” with the acronym. Any use of a modified acronym is intentional in that we are speaking only about certain members of the LGBTIQ+ population.
