Candidates in 85% of world elections ran on anti-LGBTQ+ talking points in 2024: study

Candidates around the world have been demonizing LGBTQ+ people to win political favor — but the community hasn't taken it lying down.

More than 1.5 billion votes were cast in at least 89 countries during 2024, which has been dubbed the "super election year." In at least 51 of 61 jurisdictions studied (85 percent), candidates used anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric on the campaign trail, a new report from Outright International has found. This included attacking so-called "gender ideology" and "wokism," claiming LGBTQ+ people are "foreign agents," and scapegoating the queer community to deflect from failed policies.

"The findings are a chilling indictment of the state of global democracy," Neela Ghoshal, Senior Director of Law, Policy, and Research at Outright International said in a statement. "Anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric is no longer a fringe issue; it is a central tool in the modern authoritarian playbook. When politicians attack their own citizens to win power, democracy itself is at risk."

In a year where far-right authoritarianism gained traction, "LGBTIQ communities and other marginalized groups were among the first casualties of these anti-democratic attacks," according to the report. The five largest democracies in the world — India, the European Union, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil — all saw LGBTQ+ candidates or the community at large targeted.

In the United states, Donald Trump's campaign spent over $212 million on attacks ads against trans people. The television advertisements were mostly repeated in battleground states — airing heavily during college sports games — pushing false claims about gender-affirming care and transgender athletes.

However, it wasn't just Republicans who were complicit in demonizing the LGBTQ+ community, as the report notes "post-elections, several members of the Democratic Party in the United States blamed the party’s crushing defeat on the party’s perceived support for trans people’s rights, despite surveys showing that these issues were not a primary concern for voters."

In the United Kingdom, far-right party Reform U.K. promised to ban “transgender ideology” in primary and secondary schools. In Canada, the leader of the Sask party declared 11 days before the election that his “first order of business” would be to ban trans students from using single-sex facilities that do not match their sex at birth, and conservatives in New Brunswick campaigned against the Liberals’ promise to end a policy requiring parental consent for teachers to use students’ chosen names and pronouns.

Despite the attacks against the community, the report noted another trend that arose in 2024 that saw "LGBTIQ people in several countries show up to assert their place in the body politic, counter anti-rights movements, and stand in solidarity with other marginalized groups even when it came at a price."

In Bangladesh, LGBTQ+ people played a pivotal role in the July Revolution, a student-led mass uprising over civil-service quota reforms and crackdowns against protestors, that ousted the long- serving prime minister. In Türkiye, activists continued to hold Pride marches in spite of bans and police violence.

"Queer communities mobilized not just for their own rights, but in solidarity with all marginalized groups — understanding that their fates were intertwined with the health of democracy itself," the report states.