Schizophrenia treatment Online.Living as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI) person can be life-threatening in a number of countries across the globe. For those who do not live with a daily immediate risk to their life, discrimination on the basis of one’s sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression and sex characteristics, can have a devastating effect on physical, mental and emotional well-being for those forced to endure it.
Discrimination and violence against LGBTI people can come in many forms, from name-calling, bullying, harassment, and gender-based violence, to being denied a job or appropriate healthcare. Protests to uphold the rights of LGBTI people also face suppression across the globe.
What does it mean to be LGBTI?
The term LGBTI refers to a broad category of people, including those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex, although we recognize that there are many terms around the world that are used by people to define their sexual orientation or gender identity. The terminology used can vary widely depending on historical, cultural and societal contexts.Schizophrenia treatment Online
Gender identity vs sexual orientation
Gender identity refers to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual sense of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth. An individual’s gender identity may be that of a man, woman, or outside the binary categories of man and woman; it may also be more than one gender, fluid across genders or no gender at all.
Sexual orientation refers to a person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectionate and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with other people. People experience sexual and romantic attraction differently. You can be attracted to people of a different gender, or the same gender as you. Some people are asexual, meaning they experience little to no sexual attraction.
What does it mean to be transgender?
Transgender (or trans) people have a gender identity that is different from typical expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth.
Some trans people might decide to get legal gender recognition or undergo gender affirmative interventions to help them feel more confident or comfortable living as their true gender.Being transgender has nothing to do with a person’s sexual orientation. You can be a trans man and be gay – or be a trans woman and be lesbian.
What is gender affirmation?
Some trans people decide to affirm their gender identity, which is the process of living your life as the gender you identify with.
There is no single gender-affirming process. Some people may adopt new pronouns, change their name, apply for legal gender recognition, and/or undergo gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy.Schizophrenia treatment Online
What is gender recognition?
Gender recognition, in theory, allows trans people to align their legally recognized gender with that of their own gender identity. In some countries, trans people need medical proof before they can get their gender identity legally recognized. This can be an invasive process and also reinforces the misinformed view that being trans is an illness. Unfortunately, despite the World Health Organization updating their guidelines to no longer recognize being transgender as a ‘disorder’, this attitude, is still prevalent in many societies around the world.
Requiring transgender people to undergo unnecessary medical treatments to obtain legal gender recognition violates their right to the highest attainable standard of health, which is protected under international human rights law, including by the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
For transgender people, official identity documents reflecting their gender identity are vitally important for the enjoyment of their human rights. They are not only crucial when travelling but also for everyday life. States must ensure that transgender people can obtain legal recognition of their gender through a quick, accessible and transparent procedure in accordance with the individual’s own sense of their gender identity while preserving their right to privacy.
What does intersex mean?
There is an assumption that everyone’s physical, hormonal and chromosomal characteristics fit neatly into either male or female. But that is not always the case, an estimated 1.7% of children in the world are born every year with variations of sex characteristics.
These variations are diverse; for instance, some children have genitalia outside the standard norms of male and female bodies, others have female reproductive organs but have XY (male) chromosomes, or male reproductive organs and XX (female) chromosomes.
Many people with intersex variations are forced to undergo invasive, non-emergency and irreversible “normalizing” surgeries, often when they are children, and therefore cannot consent, but sometimes this can happen later in life. Many people Amnesty International has spoken to that have gone through such surgeries reported lasting negative impacts on their physical and mental health, sexual lives, psychological well-being and gender identity.
Discrimination against LGBTI people
We are each protected against discrimination based on our sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression and sex characteristics under international human rights law.Schizophrenia treatment Online
However, in practice, authorities in many countries that have signed international treaties, committing them to protect human rights, continue to implement and introduce legislations that singles out and discriminates against individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression.
There are 64 countries around the world which have laws that criminalize homosexuality, many of which can be traced back to European colonization.
In some countries, such as Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Uganda and in the northern states in Nigeria, people can be sentenced to the death penalty if they engage in consensual same-sex sexual acts.
Discrimination goes beyond being criminally prosecuted for being an LGBTI person and can include limited access to healthcare, difficulty in securing employment, bullying or harassment in the workplace and much more.
What is Amnesty doing to promote LGBTI rights?
We learn from the lived experiences of LGBTI people and make recommendations to governments and other influential leaders on how to improve laws. For example, our research on the rights of intersex people was one of the first of its kind from a human rights perspective and strongly influenced new laws in Denmark, Finland, Greece and Norway.Schizophrenia treatment Online
Amnesty also helps activists around the world by producing resources on various issues that affect LGBTI people. This work takes many forms, from an advocacy toolkit for activists countering discrimination in Sub-Saharan Africa to the Body Politics series aimed at increasing awareness around the criminalization of sexuality and reproduction.
There is still a lot of work to do and we endeavour to continue to push for the fulfilment of all the rights of LGBTI people, in close collaboration with partners, LGBTI groups and activists across the globe.
