Insights
The Reach of the Law. Rights in Retrograde, vol. 10
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Type
Commentary
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Publish Date
November 5, 2026
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About the Series: Queer people’s human rights are under attack — but progress continues despite ongoing exclusion and inequality. “Rights in Retrograde,” an Outright series published every Mercury retrograde, explores legal developments affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people. The title has dual significance: firstly, it aims to spotlight the multifaceted efforts to deploy the law against queer people’s rights. Secondly, it highlights positive legal developments, shining a beacon of hope during a period that might pose challenges for some of our star-aligned queer siblings. This is the 10th commentary in our “Rights in Retrograde” series, covering June 29 to October 24, 2026.
Much of what happened in this period involved the enforcement of laws and rulings already in place. Police in Senegal, where the law criminalizing same-sex relations was tightened in March, started to arrest women; a court in Russia handed down the first criminal convictions under the Supreme Court’s decision declaring the “international LGBT movement” extremist; and prosecutors opened cases against queer activists across Türkiye. Also during this reporting period, rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) came into effect in three EU member states. Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation reopened legal gender recognition, the Government of Poland brought into force a procedure for registering same-sex couples’ foreign marriages, and Hungary’s parliament voted to repeal provisions the CJEU found to be in breach of EU law. Ministries and other registries in countries like Colombia, Spain, and Bolivia have put in place procedures to implement LGBTIQ couples’ and people’s legal recognition, once ordered by legislatures or courts.
From Silencing Speech to Prosecuting Presence
In September, Outright published a policy brief on “LGBT propaganda” and “promotion” laws, which explains how they treat the public visibility of LGBTIQ people as harmful in itself. In this period, that logic extended from censoring films and online content to prosecuting the people who make LGBTIQ life visible, and criminal enforcement extended to women and to gender expression.
On June 29, a court in Orenburg, Russia, sentenced the owner, administrator, and art director of the Pose nightclub to prison terms of up to seven years for organizing and participating in an “extremist organization.” It is the first known criminal case under the Russian Supreme Court’s 2023 decision designating the “international LGBT movement” as extremist. Investigators cited filmed drag performances and Telegram posts as evidence. Russian lawyers warn that the verdict exposes any venue where queer people gather to prosecution.
On August 13, Türkiye’s Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) fined Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and Prime Video at the maximum rate, citing “LGBT propaganda” and obscenity, and called for titles to be removed from their catalogs. In September, the Ministry of Justice launched an operation named “My Family Is Safe,” tied to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of Family and Population,” with prosecutors bringing legal action against 162 people, nine associations, and 13 businesses in 15 provinces. Courts jailed at least 62 people pending trial, including seven board members of Kaos GL, the first LGBTIQ association to obtain legal status in Türkiye, and a journalist whose only connection to the group was one article she wrote for its website. Consensual same-sex conduct is not criminalized in Türkiye. The prosecutions rely instead on laws on obscenity, “prostitution,” and associations.
In Senegal, under the law criminalizing same-sex relations, police investigators in Keur Massar, in the Dakar region, arrested eight women on charges that include “acts against nature.” Until then, the crackdown documented in an earlier edition had targeted men, with more than 100 arrests. In a separate case in Rufisque, investigators ordered anal examinations and HIV tests on suspects arrested on suspicion of homosexuality, including two women. On August 13, the National Police acknowledged these examinations for the first time, describing them as consensual without explaining how consent was obtained. As the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and the World Medical Association have found, forced anal examinations have no forensic value and are a form of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
In Malaysia, 13 people, described in local media as men, were charged before the Temerloh Lower Syariah Court in Pahang on July 14 with posing as women and dressing indecently in a public place, offenses that carry up to two years in prison. The charges stem from a raid by religious enforcement officers in January 2025, and all pleaded not guilty. As with Malaysia’s first prosecution for “gender transition” in February, shariah morality offenses are being used to police how people present their gender.
EU Law at Home: Compliance and Defiance
Court of Justice of the European Union judgments covered in recent editions have started to take effect in European Union (EU) member states. How far they reached depended on the national institution responsible for applying them.
Hungary’s new government, formed by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party after it defeated Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in April, submitted a bill on September 14 to remove restrictions on the “portrayal” or “promotion” of homosexuality and gender diversity from laws on child protection, media, advertising, and education. The bill responds to the CJEU’s April judgment finding that the 2021 law introducing those restrictions breached EU law and the EU’s founding values. Parliament adopted the bill on October 13 by 139 votes to 51, with Fidesz and the far-right Mi Hazánk voting against. Magyar also announced that child-protection professionals rather than politicians will decide who may adopt children, replacing 2020 rules that shut same-sex couples out almost entirely. As Human Rights Watch notes, the reform leaves intact the constitutional provisions behind the anti-LGBTIQ framework and the assembly law used to ban Pride.
In Bulgaria, following the CJEU’s March ruling in Shipova that EU free movement law requires member states to make legal gender recognition possible, the Supreme Court of Cassation ruled on July 22 that trans people may change their official name and sex marker, abandoning the interpretation it adopted in 2023, which had closed legal gender recognition to everyone. The court held that surgery cannot be required, but upheld requirements of a psychiatric diagnosis and hormone treatment. LGBTIQ organizations have called on the government to legislate a procedure without medical requirements.
In Poland, the government and the Constitutional Tribunal clashed over same-sex marriages concluded abroad. In November 2025, the CJEU ruled that Poland must recognize same-sex marriages that EU citizens conclude in another member state, including by recording them in the civil registry, though it need not allow same-sex couples to marry at home. To comply, the digital affairs and interior ministers issued a regulation in May 2026 allowing registry offices to record these marriages. As a ministerial regulation, it did not need the approval of parliament or of President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with the opposition Law and Justice party (PiS). At the request of PiS lawmakers, the Constitutional Tribunal declared the regulation unconstitutional on July 28. However, the government does not consider the tribunal lawfully constituted and has not published its rulings since 2024. It ignored this decision, and the regulation entered into force on August 23. By mid-September, according to the digital affairs minister, registry offices had recorded 328 such marriages, and the Social Insurance Institution had begun paying these spouses the allowance that married people receive for caring for a sick spouse.
Same-sex couples who did not marry abroad still receive no recognition in Poland, although the European Court of Human Rights held in 2023 that this gap violates their right to respect for private and family life. On July 17, Nawrocki vetoed a bill to create a “closest person” status for any two adults, and on September 17 the parliament fell 27 votes short of the three-fifths majority needed to override his veto.
Slovakia chose open defiance toward the CJEU. On July 31, Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok declared that same-sex marriages performed abroad cannot be registered because the Constitution, reinforced by a 2025 amendment, defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. In August, the ministry rejected the application of Ivan Novotný and Metod Špaček, who married in Austria in 2020. The European Commission reminded Slovakia that EU law and CJEU rulings take precedence over national law, and the couple will challenge the refusal in court.
Deciding Who Counts as Family
In family law, gains came through individual judgments, while losses were written into legislation or upheld by courts unwilling to move.
In France, where surrogacy is prohibited, the Court of Cassation ruled on July 3 that the child’s best interests do not allow French courts to refuse recognition of a foreign parentage judgment solely because the child was born through surrogacy. The case concerned two French men living in Canada, whom Canadian courts had declared the fathers of their children.
In Bolivia, two women became the first same-sex couple to marry on August 7 in Santa Cruz, after nearly four years of proceedings in which they were represented by IGUAL Bolivia, a legal advocacy group. A constitutional chamber had ordered the civil registry in March to record their union as a marriage, drawing on the Inter-American Court’s 2017 Advisory Opinion OC-24/17, which held that states must give same-sex couples access to existing family registration systems, including marriage. The ruling covers only this couple, and the Constitution still defines marriage as a union “between a woman and a man.” Under Bolivian law, decisions of this kind are sent automatically to the Plurinational Constitutional Court for review and enforced in the meantime. A ruling by that court could set a precedent for other couples.
In Ecuador, lawmakers moved in the opposite direction. An adoption reform that entered into force on August 14 requires single people who seek to adopt children to be heterosexual, extending a constitutional ban that already excludes same-sex couples. It also makes a parent’s support for medical procedures to “modify the biological sex” of a child grounds for losing parental authority, while expressly exempting parents who consent to harmful “normalizing” interventions on intersex children. The National Assembly passed the law 118 to 0, with 25 abstentions, four months after the Constitutional Court affirmed trans adolescents’ right to legal gender recognition in a case in which Outright submitted an amicus brief.
In South Korea, in July and August, three family courts in Ulsan, Busan, and Daegu dismissed petitions from same-sex couples challenging their district offices’ refusal to accept their marriage registrations. All three courts refused to ask the Constitutional Court to review whether restricting marriage to a man and a woman is constitutional. These were the first public marriage equality suits filed outside the Seoul area. The couples plan to appeal.
Gender-Affirming Healthcare: Who Has the Final Say
Restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare continued, but they bind unevenly. Access increasingly depends on which authority has the final word
In the United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency that provides healthcare for more than 20% of the U.S. population, finalized a rule in August that bars federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds from paying for “sex-rejecting procedures,” namely puberty blockers, hormones, or surgeries for people under 18 (under 19 in CHIP). The rule exempts procedures to treat what it calls “medically verifiable disorders of sexual development,” so federal funds can still pay for harmful interventions on intersex children. States may still cover gender-affirming care with their own funds, and New Mexico has said that it will.
In Canada, Alberta bars doctors from prescribing puberty blockers or hormones to trans young people under 16, and has invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield the law from challenges under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On September 9, Saddle Lake Cree Nation announced that it will establish a safe haven for this care on its lands and adopt its own health law to protect clinicians, invoking its inherent jurisdiction and Treaty 6, the 1876 treaty whose “medicine chest” clause covers health commitments. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith responded that she respects the nation’s sovereignty.
In Argentina, on July 30, a federal administrative appeals court suspended nationwide President Javier Milei’s Decree 62/2025, which barred people under 18 from hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery. The decision, requested by the Argentine LGBT+ Federation, restores access under the 2012 Gender Identity Law until a final ruling. Earlier rulings against the decree applied only to individual cases.
In the United Kingdom, opponents of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents sought to block PATHWAYS, a clinical trial of puberty blockers for young people with gender incongruence led by King’s College London. On July 31, the High Court ruled against them, allowing the clinical trial, commissioned by NHS England in response to the Cass Review, to proceed. Recruitment of 226 participants under 16 was scheduled to begin the next day. Because puberty blockers have been unavailable to new patients under 18 outside research since 2024, the trial is now the main route to that treatment.
Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice reaffirmed in July that private health plans must cover facial feminization surgery for trans women when prescribed by a physician as part of the “processo transexualizador”–the clinical pathway for gender-affirming care–rejecting an insurance company’s argument that the procedure is cosmetic.
Legal Gender Recognition: Self-Determination and Its Alternatives
Three developments in very different legal systems moved legal gender recognition forward, on different terms.
Colombia’s Decree 0732 of 2026, issued on July 8, implements a 2022 Constitutional Court order by adding nonbinary (NB) and transgender (T) options to the sex field of birth registrations and identity documents. The notarial procedure rests on the applicant’s self-determination, requiring no medical or psychological certificate, and the first revision is free. The decree names the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion OC-24/17 as its standard.
Spain closed a gap in its 2023 trans law. The Interior Ministry approved a protocol on July 13 that allows foreign residents, asylum seekers, and stateless people to update the name and sex marker on their documents, either on the basis of a change made in their country of origin or where the Foreign Ministry confirms that such a change is impossible there. The law required this procedure by March 2024. The protocol came only after the Ombudsperson, acting on a complaint by the Plataforma Trans federation, urged the Interior Ministry in January to comply, and after a Madrid court ordered the police in June to correct the documents of a Peruvian trans woman.
In Lebanon, a judge allowed a trans woman to change the sex recorded in the civil registry six years after she applied, relying on a 2016 Beirut Court of Appeal precedent. The decision, issued in April and published in a Lebanese judicial magazine in July, may still be appealed. It follows a medicalized model: the applicant had undergone gender-affirming surgery, and the judge described recognition as remaining “within restrictions.”
Holding Harm to Account
Several protections secured in this period came through criminal and civil liability. These cases treat LGBTIQ people as people the state is obliged to protect, including from violence and rejection at home.
On September 4 in Mexico City, a judge reclassified the 2016 killing of Paola Buenrostro, a trans woman and sex worker, from aggravated homicide to aggravated femicide. At the first hearing, prosecutors treated the case as a homicide and identified Buenrostro as a man, which prompted protests. In 2019, Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission had recognized the killing as the first documented transfemicide in Mexico. The decision follows a conviction for attempted femicide in the case of trans activist Natalia Lane, reported in our previous edition.
In Spain, a court in Novelda opened criminal proceedings for an alleged hate crime in September against the parents of Daniela, a trans woman who died in 2022. Her parents allegedly buried her under her former name, with a photograph from before her transition, although she had legally changed her name. Prosecutors argued that the inscription and the parents’ later public statements denying her identity went beyond the private sphere. The case follows a January ruling by the Valencia High Court ordering the regional government to investigate the burial as discrimination.
In Brazil, a court in Santa Catarina ordered the parents of a teenager to pay R100,000 (USD19,400) in damages. When he disclosed his sexual orientation as a minor, they threatened him and expelled him from home, and his father exposed his private life online.
In Australia, the High Court refused special leave to appeal on September 10 in Tickle v. Giggle, leaving in place the Full Federal Court’s finding that excluding Roxanne Tickle, a trans woman, from a women-only app was indirect discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act.
In mid-July, Gibraltar’s parliament passed two bills that add transgender identity to the hate crime and incitement provisions of the Crimes Act and make it an offense to carry out or offer conversion practices.
Conclusion
During this period, the reach of the law was determined by the authorities who applied it. Police, prosecutors, and regulators in Senegal, Russia, Malaysia, and Türkiye deployed existing rules against women, trans people, nightclub staff, and streaming platforms. CJEU judgments took effect in Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary once a national institution acted on them, while Slovakia’s government refused to register same-sex marriages performed abroad. Gains that rest on a single ruling or decree can be reversed, and several, from Bolivia to Lebanon, cover only the people who litigated. Yet the same fragmentation of authority leaves room to protect rights when one level of government withdraws them: New Mexico will pay for care that federal funds no longer cover, and Saddle Lake Cree Nation is invoking Treaty 6 to offer care that Alberta bars.
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