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Delaware U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride speaks on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
The Global Respect Act has 119 cosponsors.
In a rare show of bipartisan unity amid intensifying global hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride, a Democrat, on Thursday reintroduced the Global Respect Act, human rights legislation designed to hold accountable the individuals who carry out torture, imprisonment, and violence against LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
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McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress, unveiled the bill alongside Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican. Together, they secured 119 original cosponsors.
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The bill empowers the U.S. government to identify and sanction foreign individuals responsible for human rights abuses targeting LGBTQ+ people, restrict their access to the United States, and publicly disclose their actions. It also strengthens State Department reporting on global LGBTQ+ conditions and mandates deeper coordination with civil society organizations that monitor persecution.
The legislation’s text outlines a clear structure for biannual reporting, visa bans, and targeted sanctions directed at perpetrators of torture, arbitrary detention, beatings, disappearances, and other attacks.
“Freedom and dignity should never depend on your zip code or who holds power in your country,” McBride said in a press release. “Yet nearly one-third of nations still criminalize LGBTQI+ people, and far too many look away from the violence that follows. The Global Respect Act reaffirms a simple truth: no one should be targeted for who they are or whom they love.”
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According to the bill, roughly a third of the world’s countries still criminalize same-sex relations, including a dozen where such laws can carry the death penalty. Police, military, and government officials in many regions remain directly complicit in anti-LGBTQ+ torture, extortion, and violence.
“No person should ever face imprisonment, violence, or discrimination on the basis of who they are,” Fitzpatrick said in the press release, calling the bill a necessary step to “uphold basic human rights worldwide.”
The announcement was deliberately timed for Transgender Day of Remembrance, when the names of transgender people killed in anti-trans violence are honored around the globe. For advocates, the symbolism is the point: the violence remembered each year is part of a broader, border-spanning pattern the U.S. has the capacity, and responsibility, to confront.
Mark Bromley, co-chair of the Council for Global Equality, said the bill meets the urgency of the moment. “As we mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, we reaffirm that no one, no matter where they live in the world, should be persecuted or subjected to violence simply because of who they are or whom they love,” he said in a press release. He called the Global Respect Act “a tool to hold the world’s worst perpetrators accountable.”
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The legislation also expands State Department human rights documentation, requiring annual reports to include detailed tracking of violence, criminalization, and restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and assembly targeting LGBTQ+ people. Crackdowns on Pride events, arrests under morality laws, and systemic police abuse would receive greater scrutiny.
Major human rights and LGBTQ+ organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International USA, Outright International, the Council for Global Equality, and The Trevor Project, support the measure.
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