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Forced Marriage and Queerness: Where Multiple Forms of Gender-Based Violence Collide
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Commentary
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December 2, 2025
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Every year, the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign challenges us to confront the systems that deny women and people of queer experience safety, dignity, and autonomy. For this year’s 16 Days of Activism, it’s time to talk about the different dimensions of gender-based violence in forced marriage and highlight why forced marriage is a queer issue.
Earlier this year, while working on Outright International’s joint submission to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), developed with partners in India and Nigeria, I found myself realizing again how closely forced marriage is tied to the realities queer people face. Not only because lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, as well as trans and nonbinary people assigned female at birth (LBTQ people)*, are coerced into heterosexual unions, but because the very system that enables forced marriage is the same one that endangers queer lives everywhere.
Forced marriage is gender-based violence. It is a mechanism of enforcing compulsory heterosexuality — often violently.
Across many contexts, parents, extended families, and community or religious leaders compel women into marriage to regulate sexuality and police gender norms. For LBTQ people, this coercion is frequently framed as “correction,” a way to conceal queerness or force conformity. The belief that heterosexual marriage will “fix” someone is not only erroneous; it is a form of conversion practice, and in some circumstances, recognized as torture.
Within these marriages, LBTQ individuals face psychological distress, coercive sex, emotional abuse, and the ongoing erasure of their identities. Many who attempt to leave experience retaliation from spouses or their own families. Forced marriage becomes:
- a conversion practice,
- a form of sexual violence, and
- a lifelong denial of identity.
Despite growing recognition of these harms by some international bodies, LBTQ people remain largely invisible in data, policy, and programming on forced marriage. The 16 Days of Activism provides us with an opportunity to highlight these often-overlooked realities.
Even when the survivors are not queer, forced marriage is a queer issue
One truth is often overlooked: forced marriage of heterosexual women and forced marriage of LBTQ people stem from the same violent system.
The root causes that push queer people into unwanted marriages — restrictive gender norms, patriarchal expectations, legal discrimination, and economic dependence—also underpin forced marriage more broadly. Cultural expectations that women must marry men and have children erase queer identities, but they also confine heterosexual women to narrow, prescriptive life paths.
In many communities, marriage is treated as women’s inevitable destiny. For heterosexual women, cultural norms pressure them into early or unwanted marriages for reasons of reputation, economics, or social control. For LBTQ people, this often results in forced heterosexual unions meant to suppress signs of queerness or maintain family honor.
Discriminatory regimes such as male guardianship and unequal divorce, property, and custody laws limit women’s ability to resist coerced marriage. Where same-sex relations are criminalized or heavily stigmatized, families — sometimes believing they are acting in their loved one’s best interest—may use the threat of exposure to pressure LBTQ people into conformity.
Widespread economic discrimination can push heterosexual women and LBTQ people into marriage for survival. Across gender and sexuality, economic precarity becomes a coercive tool.
To dismantle forced marriage, we must challenge the expectations that uphold it: compulsory heterosexuality, rigid gender roles, and the belief that marriage by a certain age defines a woman’s respectability or security.
Today, for the 16 Days of Activism, Outright reiterates its call on governments, service providers, educators, and civil society to recognize and address the vulnerabilities and needs of LBTQ people within anti–forced marriage efforts, with emphasis on the following priorities:
1. Collect Queer-Inclusive Data
We cannot protect people who remain statistically invisible. Surveys, monitoring tools, and academic research on forced marriage must include sexual orientation and gender identity while safeguarding confidentiality.
2. Train Service Providers in Shelters, Hotlines, and Legal Services
LBTQ survivors should be able to seek support without fearing discrimination or being outed. Protection services must be competent, confidential, and explicitly inclusive.
3. Repeal Discriminatory Laws
Anti-LGBTQ criminalization fuels forced marriage and prevents survivors from seeking help. Family and property laws must be reformed to allow diverse family forms and remove coercive structures.
4. Challenge Compulsory Heterosexuality in Public Discourse
Forced marriage thrives in silence. Campaigns must address the cultural narratives that normalize marriage as the only legitimate future for women and invalidate queer relationships.
If measures against forced marriage are strong, they will protect even the most marginalized — including LBTQ people.
As a queer woman in a straight relationship raising four children, this issue is not theoretical for me. I want my children to grow up in a world where marrying a man is just one possible life choice — not a condition for safety, status, or autonomy.
My commitment to this work is rooted in a simple belief: every person deserves the freedom to grow, to explore who they are, and to build their future without coercion or fear that their identity or relationships will be policed or punished.
Forced marriage attempts to make those choices for us. Our activism is how we take them back.
*This commentary addresses the experiences of lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans people who may be forced into marriage as a means of policing their sexual orientation or gender identity. In other written works, Outright examines how compulsory heterosexuality and rigid gender norms contribute to human rights violations against intersex people. Because we have not yet identified a clear nexus between intersex traits and forced marriage, this commentary does not include intersex or the “I” in its analysis, nor in the acronym used.
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