Botswana

In the past decade, Botswana has made significant progress toward LGBTIQ equality, largely thanks to the sustained advocacy of LGBTIQ activists and the progressiveness of Botswana’s High Court. Employment discrimination based on sexual orientation was banned in 2010, and in 2014, the High Court ruled that the country’s Civil and National Registration Department had to register the LGBTIQ organization LEGABIBO (Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals of Botswana). In 2017, the Botswana High Court held in ND v. Attorney General that a transgender man had the right to change the gender marker on his national identity document, and later that year ordered recognition of a transgender woman’s female gender in a separate case. Since these landmark rulings, legal gender recognition has remained difficult in practice due to slow and unclear administrative implementation, and only a small number of transgender people are known to have successfully changed the sex marker on their official identification documents.

In 2019, the same court overturned the country’s sodomy laws, a decision that the Court of Appeals upheld in 2021. In response, the government tried to appeal this ruling, but the appeal was rejected by the courts in 2021.

Botswana’s laws regarding marriage do not explicitly define marriage as between one man and one woman or explicitly state that same-sex marriage should not be recognized. The country has not, however, legalized same-sex marriage, nor has it recognized it.

There is no formal recognition of intersex status, and nonconsensual and medically unnecessary procedures on intersex infants are not explicitly prohibited by law. In 2024, a cabinet minister proposed a constitutional amendment that would protect intersex people and people with disabilities from discrimination. The proposal was opposed by a coalition of churches that claimed it threatened a “Christian way of life,” and parliament ultimately rejected it.

Although LGBTIQ issues were not a prominent part of the electoral agenda in 2024, some trans people faced difficulties in exercising their right to participate politically, in part a consequence of the lack of access to legal gender recognition. For the first time, two openly queer candidates ran for office in the country, but they faced numerous challenges, including discrimination and a lack of political infrastructure. 

Public tolerance has risen over the past decade. Polling data in 2021 indicated that approximately 50 percent of Batswana would accept having a “homosexual neighbor,” up from 44 percent in 2016. Another survey found that three out of every five Batswana (about 64 percent) thought that the rights of intersex individuals should be incorporated into the constitution, and about 51 percent supported the inclusion of trans people’s rights in the constitution.