Nepal

Nepal has been seen as a beacon for the rights of sexual and gender minorities in South Asia, thanks to positive societal attitudes and the Supreme Court’s progressive decisions on LGBTIQ people’s human rights. While the country’s 1963 National Code criminalizes “unnatural sexual intercourse,” a 2007 Supreme Court decision in Sunil Babu Pant and Others v. Nepal Government and Others found that same-sex sexual intercourse should not be construed as unnatural sexual intercourse, thereby legalizing consensual same-sex sexual acts between adults. The same ruling held that the government should recognize a third legal category for individuals who identify as neither male nor female. In 2017, the Nepali Supreme Court ruled that trans individuals should be able to legally change their name and gender marker, which coincided with the issuance of the first passport in Nepal with the marker “O” for Other. However, the government has maintained burdensome requirements, including medical interventions, for individuals who wish to change their gender marker from female to male or male to female, although a 2024 court ruling required the government to recognize a trans woman as a woman without proof of medical intervention.

Article 18(3) of the Constitution includes a provision prohibiting discrimination against sexual minorities, thereby offering broad protections to LGBTQ individuals. In June 2023, a court issued a historic order directing the government to make the necessary arrangements to register the marriages of “non-traditional couples and sexual minorities,” resulting in the first same-sex marriage in November 2023. Although the order does not give same-sex couples equal marriage rights, activists are working tirelessly with decision-makers to pass legislation that will enshrine marriage equality for all couples. 

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. 

Outright’s research in 2023, based on surveys with 100 LGBTIQ people in Nepal, ages 50 to 75, indicates that the intersection of discrimination based on age and sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics leads to specific challenges for older LGBTIQ persons, including discrimination in health care settings, exclusion from social security, and the lack of physical and emotional safety.

Intersex persons in Nepal face human rights violations related to bodily autonomy and physical integrity, are invisibilized in school curricula, and encounter legal lacunas 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.

*Outright research indicates that the bodily autonomy of intersex people is not respected and protected in this country.