Nepal

Nepal has long been viewed as a beacon for LGBTIQ people’s rights in South Asia due to early Supreme Court decisions and constitutional protections. A 2007 ruling decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual activity and directed legal recognition of a third gender category, enabling “O/Other” gender markers on passports and IDs. The 2015 constitution prohibits discrimination against “gender and sexual minorities,” and Nepal has included sexual and gender minorities in national census and planning frameworks. In June 2023, the Supreme Court issued an interim order requiring the registration of same-sex and nontraditional marriages in a separate register, making Nepal one of the first countries in Asia to offer provisional marriage recognition to same-sex couples. A few marriages have been registered under this framework, but these temporary certificates do not yet grant full spousal rights like inheritance, adoption, joint taxation, or medical decision authority, and enforcement remains uneven.

Although LGBTIQ individuals still face harassment, stigmatization, and discrimination due to societal taboos, authorities actively seek to improve the recognition of their rights. In June 2021, Nepal included LGBTIQ people for the first time in the national census, helping them gain better access to social security, health, and education schemes. LGBTIQ organizations and civil society actors are able to register as such and operate freely across the country. 

Transgender people can use a third gender marker on official documents based on self-identification, and in 2024, the Supreme Court required recognition of a trans woman as a woman without medical intervention, signaling progress toward less medicalized gender recognition. However, binary gender marker changes still lack clear administrative procedures, and barriers persist in practice. Intersex persons in Nepal face human rights violations related to bodily autonomy and physical integrity, are invisibilized in school curricula, and encounter legal uncertainty as a result of laws that are based on cisheteronormative female/male binaries. Some intersex people have noted the harm caused by religious beliefs that attribute innate physical intersex traits to “misdeeds or sins committed in a previous life”; these beliefs contribute to discrimination, ostracization, and violence, including infanticide and medically unnecessary interventions on intersex infants and children.