Violence against Lesbians

The United Nations on violence against lesbians and other women

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on violence against women, including its causes and consequences, on 4 March 1994 (resolution 1994/45). Since March 2006, the Special Rapporteur reports to the Human Rights Council, as per Human Rights Council’s decision 1/102. Fortuately, the mandate was renewed in July 2025 through resolution 59/20. 

The current Rapporteur is Ms. Reem Alsalem (Jordan) and she has been fighting hard for Australian women and lesbians (eg seeking to be heard on the definition of ‘woman’ in both the LAG and Giggle v Tickle cases). In July 2023 she published a report on violence against women. 

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At the 59th session of the UN Human Rights Council,  Commission on the Status of Women, held on 16 June–11 July 2025, the following reports were presented:

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The UN Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity has issued a call for input to inform the report of the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity on violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women at the 62nd session of the Human Rights Council (June 2026).

CoAL is preparing a submission setting out our objections.

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Below is a response by the Athena Forum based in Europe.

‘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.’

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And below is another response, this time from ArciLesbica, an Italian-based lesbian group.

‘ArciLesbica – January 2026
Call for input to thematic report to HRC62
ArciLesbica is an organisation founded in 1996. For thirty years it has defended the rights of lesbians and given voice to their cultural reflections. Our work is, and has always been, entirely voluntary and unpaid.
Over the years, we have met and supported thousands of lesbians—Italian and migrant, very young and elderly, from a wide range of geographical and cultural backgrounds.
ArciLesbica is a member of Lesbian Bill of Rights International (LBORI), an international network of radical feminist lesbian organisations that have adopted the Lesbian Bill of Rights (LBOR). We support the definition of lesbian  given there.
Based on an unparalleled experience in Italy, we can state that violence against lesbians takes many forms depending on the context in which it occurs, ranging from physical violence to psychological abuse. In Italy, acceptance of lesbians remains uneven. Urban youth tend to be fairly open, whereas other segments of the population often hold more conservative attitudes.
Although instances of physical violence against lesbians still occur, the most common form of violence experienced by lesbians in Italy is psychological and cultural. This is particularly exacerbated by the erasure of lesbians, which occurs mainly for two reasons.
ArciLesbica – January 2026
A. Lack of spaces and funding
First, lesbians face significant difficulties in developing cultural discourse and community services due to the lack of spaces and funding. Grassroots groups cannot afford the cost of rent or professional services (for example, maintaining an online presence). Institutions do nothing to address this problem, which means that the creative energy of lesbians is dissipated in fundraising efforts. When lesbians are not visible, younger lesbians—but also older ones—become isolated and are more easily bullied or fall prey to internalised lesbophobia. Anyone belonging to a minority needs meeting places in order to develop their identity and exist freely.
The resources, support systems, or interventions that are most helpful for lesbians are those created and managed by lesbians themselves. Therefore, institutions should enable and support the work of lesbian groups through dedicated spaces and funding, without placing excessive emphasis on formally registered organizational structures. These groups may also be informal, provided they are stable.
B. Gender identity ideology
The second major difficulty is gender identity ideology, which allows men who define themselves as women to enter lesbian spaces and discredits those who are sex-realist. Lesbians are attacked both online and offline as “transphobic” simply for defending their existence as women who love other women.
This attack is so pervasive that even the definition of woman as an adult human female is under assault. Removing the words and categories necessary for a minority group to constitute itself as a subject is the most powerful form of violence, because it erases not only its existence but even its conceptual intelligibility.
All of this is done to protect the feelings of some men who say they feel uncomfortable in their bodies and claim to have a female soul. But what is a female soul? Decades of feminist scholarship have shown that gender is a set of norms that preserves the oppression of women by men. Gender is oppression, as is the concept of race: neither gender nor race has any genetic basis, yet both have a powerful discriminatory effect in reality. Claiming that a gender identity exists and that it can override biological reality is a theoretical and political contradiction and a position harmful to lesbians. One needs only look at what is happening to very young lesbians in Western countries.
ArciLesbica – January 2026
In Italy, an increasing number of young lesbians, misguided by the concept of “gender identity”, are being medicalized. They are administered puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The fictional concept of “gender identity” enables conversion therapy targeting lesbians and homosexuals.
For these reasons, we find this call we are responding to biased against lesbians: how can any data be meaningful if they do not refer exclusively to lesbians, but also include men who believe they are lesbians?
Women, including lesbians, cannot be protected as classes of people if those classes cannot be properly defined. The forced teaming of lesbians with queer and trans-identified men erases the very concept of lesbian.
Recommendations
Based on community expertise, ArciLesbica recommends:
A. Institutions should provide stable premises for grassroots groups. This support is more important than funding for individual projects, as projects cannot be carried out without a permanent and reliable space.
B. The United Nations and all governmental bodies should retain the word “sex” in their legislation and avoid conflating it with, or replacing it by, “gender.” This is essential for the survival of lesbian communities and for the legal protection of women as a sex class. Lesbians’ rights, like all women’s rights, are grounded in sex.
Erasing the category of sex is a new form of violence against women and lesbians and the United Nations should not promote it.’

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And below is a copy of a statement by LBORI (Lesbian Bill of Rights International)criticising the UN on the UN’s ‘ campaign to erase all women (including lesbians in particular) and to erase men and boys as the main perpetrators of violence universally’.

How UN Women Want to Reframe Male Violence Against Women and Certain Men

The United Nations group called United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) held a webinar September 3, 2025 titled “Measuring gender-based violence: Data collection and evidence on violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC).” I was able to attend live and remotely as coordinator of Lesbian Bill Of Rights International (LBORI). 

The webinar organizers – Raphaëlle Rafin, Sophie West-Browne, and Giorgia Airoldi – used the occasion to introduce their report having the same title as the webinar. I can assure any readers who do not support gender identity ideology that the chat was by far the most interesting aspect of the webinar; or perhaps I am influenced in saying that because I persistently asked what I considered pertinent questions in the chat, sparking discussion. 

The gist of my persistent questioning during the live chat was “This webinar purports to be about ways to perform accurate, meaningful, and useful data collection. But how can those aims be accomplished where there is no coherent definition of ‘lesbian’ or of sexual orientation, and no discussion of how both conflict with ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’?” 

I received a couple of rude or dismissive responses to my question at first; so I reframed and rephrased it several times in the chat. Eventually, several attendees said something like “I wondered that too.” And eventually I received as much of an answer as I could reasonably have expected from supporters of UN Women, to the effect that ‘lesbian’ doesn’t need definition because

  1. such terms as those included in the ‘LGB’ acronym, for instance, are too “culturally specific” to be universally applicable to the work of the United Nations; and
  2. violence can be based on self ID or on perceived identity (for example, someone thinks you look like a lesbian).

So, it was explained to me, it is for these reasons that the report focuses on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics – and not on whether victims of violence actually *are* lesbian, for instance. Because actually *being* lesbian is somehow beside the point. Conveniently, if this is accepted, then whether any person can actually *be* “trans” is also logically beside the point!

It was further explained to me that understanding the scope of the issue (which issue?) and the common roots of the violence are what matters most. But which demographic perpetrates the overwhelming percentage of the violence universally? Of course it is men and boys, and acknowledging that bit of data is forbidden in this patriarchal ideology; the erasure of sex in favor of “sex characteristics” aims at ignoring the obvious, universal link between maleness and violence against women, lesbians, and those people perceived to be like either group.

I’m puzzled by the notion that ‘lesbian’ is culturally specific. LBORI’s Lesbian Bill Of Rights defines a lesbian as “a human female homosexual; or, a woman or girl who is exclusively same-sex attracted.” The purported cultural specificity of that definition eludes me. But I suspect the criticism is in alignment with a transgenderist/postmodernist agenda:

  • It’s useful to avoid defining any terms at all where the intent is to conflate terms (such as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’) in some usages, but distinguish them in others.
  • It’s useful when the intent is to erase sex to avoid either defining or using any term that tends to focus the reader’s attention on sex.

Going forward, it seems predictable that the proponents of gender identity ideology, including UN Women, will increase their usage of the SOCIESC acronym instead of LGBTQIA+ as a next step in their campaign to erase all women (including lesbians in particular) and to erase men and boys as the main perpetrators of violence universally.