These women’s rights issues are critical for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, but don’t usually rank high among LGBT rights movements’ priorities. At the same time, LBQ+ women are also underrepresented in women’s rights research and advocacy. But there were, in fact, a number of stereotype-fulfilling boomer TERFs on board the cruise — and plenty of lesbians whose policing of gender norms took more banal forms. The woman who bought me a drink after I sang Kelly Clarkson at karaoke — a petite therapist from California with a prim gray bob — ended up being one of them. According to interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with 66 lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) activists, researchers, lawyers, and movement leaders in 26 countries between March and September 2022, forced marriage is one of ten key areas of human rights abuses most affecting LBQ+ women’s lives. Human Rights Watch identified the following areas of LBQ+ rights as those in need of immediate investigation, advocacy, and policy reform. This report explores how the denial of LBQ+ people’s rights in these ten areas impacts their lives and harms their ability to exercise and enjoy the advancement of more traditionally recognized LGBT rights and women’s rights:

But even in cases when lesbians were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the records can be hard to find. One of the greatest challenges is that lesbians were rarely identified as such in official records from the Nazi era.

Adoption and Second-Parent Adoption

The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection. Normative conceptualizations of LGBT rights have not effectively incorporated fundamental areas of women’s rights investigation and policy work, such as forced marriage of women and girls, women’s property rights, and their freedom of movement. In other words, basic restrictions on women’s freedom, autonomy, and economic empowerment, which are often key barriers to LBQ+ rights, are not considered relevant to the progression of LGBT rights. There is an immense opportunity for future investigations into the nine rights areas covered in this report, with the aim of improving LBQ+ rights and lives.

At the Gen O meetup, the hairdresser mentioned that most of the paying customers on board are older women who’ve had an extraordinarily difficult time navigating life as lesbians; they deserve a space, she said, to fully be themselves. Maybe Olivia could do a specific queer-plus trip for trans people and gay men? Being in a space with “someone who looks like a man,” she said — horrifying me, Jamie, Matie, Dana, and a bunch of others — “can cause these women so much trauma.” Bonding is built into an Olivia trip, which, I realized soon enough, is basically like grown-up lesbian camp. “It’s funny, because on a normal cruise, you’re trying to spend as much time as you can away from other people,” Jamie would later put it. “But we’re all here precisely because we want to be around everybody else.”At first, the sex was good," says Sarah. "But she always wanted more than what I could give. One day she came home with a strap-on; if I loved her, she said, I would allow her to use it." Sarah wasn't interested. "It was just something that I didn't like and didn't want," she says. She declined for months, her partner repeatedly pressuring her, until one night, Sarah's partner assaulted her with the strap-on. "Even though I was crying the whole time, she never stopped," Sarah recalls. In addition, there was no specific law under which lesbians were prosecuted. Thus, there is not always an obvious place to look for criminal records pertaining to their arrests and detentions. For example, lesbians appear in court cases and police files relating to political opposition or asocial behavior. However, these are scattered across many files and in various archives. Scholars hoping to learn about lesbians’ stories are painstakingly combing through these files.

When I kissed Lynette goodbye at our appropriately miserable reentry to the real world — Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan — I still wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was supposed to do next. Millennials watch most of their porn between the twitching hour of 11 p.m. and midnight, whereas old people, obviously, need that sleep to live. A girl allegedly caught in bed at 13 with her female tennis coach sobbed yesterday as she told how she was forced into having a lesbian affair.Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox. Lyte, of Shirley, West Midlands, denies five charges of unlawful sexual activity with a child. The case at Liverpool crown court continues. Most Read