Reports

This report examines the controversy over the operations inside the medical community and the pressure on parents to opt for surgery. Once called “hermaphrodites”—a term now considered pejorative and outdated, intersex people are not rare, but their needs are widely misunderstood. Based on a medical theory popularized in the 1960s, doctors perform surgery on intersex children—often in infancy—with the stated aim of making it easier for them to grow up “normal.” The results are often catastrophic, the supposed benefits are largely unproven, and there are rarely urgent health considerations requiring immediate, irreversible intervention.

This report examines the physical and psychological damage caused by medically unnecessary surgery on intersex people, who are born with chromosomes, gonads, sex organs, or genitalia that differ from those seen as socially typical for boys and girls. The report examines the controversy over the operations inside the medical community, and the pressure on parents to opt for surgery.

This report documents the range of abuses against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in secondary school. It details widespread bullying and harassment, discriminatory policies and practices, and an absence of supportive resources that undermine the right to education under international law and put LGBT youth at risk.

This report is based on first-hand interviews with victims of the campaign against gay men that Chechnya’s law enforcement and security officials conducted in spring, 2017.

This report documents abuses suffered by a group of hijras, when they were forced to undergo so-called medical examinations at a hospital in Dhaka, the capital, in 2015, as part of a government employment program. The medical exams were ordered as part of the routine government hiring procedure, but absent a clear procedure to identify and respect hijras, hospital staff responded based on their own personal biases.  Although a 2013 directive from the cabinet recognizes hijras as a third gender, the government has not developed rights-based procedures for changing their gender on official documents, leaving them open to abuse when they seek to assert their rights, Human Rights Watch found. 

This report documents the failure of national and local governments in the Philippines to address the growing HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men.

This report documents a range of problems facing LGBT students. The concerns include bullying and harassment, exclusion of LGBT topics from school curricula and resources, restrictions on LGBT student groups, and discrimination and bigotry from both classmates and school personnel on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

This report shows how the law, which took effect in January 2014, is used by some police officers and members of the public to legitimize abuses against LGBT people, including widespread extortion, mob violence, arbitrary arrest, torture in detention, and physical and sexual violence. The law has created opportunities for people to engage in homophobic violence without fear of legal consequences, contributing significantly to a climate of impunity for crimes against LGBT people.

This report examines how transgender youth are adversely affected by rules that bar them from using bathrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identity. Transgender students described how these rules have given rise to physical and verbal harassment, and adversely affected their physical and mental health, academic achievement, and participation in school.

This report finds that people who don’t conform to gender norms face arbitrary detention, mistreatment, and discrimination accessing employment, housing, and health care. The government should protect the rights of transgender people and others who face similar discrimination, Human Rights Watch said.

This report documents how officials’ biased and untrue statements about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people provided social sanction for harassment and violence against LGBT Indonesians, and even death threats by militant Islamists. State institutions, including the National Broadcasting Commission and the National Child Protection Commission, issued censorship directives banning information and broadcasts that portrayed the lives of LGBT people as “normal” as well as so-called “propaganda” about LGBT lives. That combination of discriminatory rhetoric and policy decisions harmed the physical security and right to free expression of LGBT people across the country.

This report is based on interviews with 32 men and transgender women who underwent forced anal examinations in Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Zambia. The examinations, which have the purported objective of finding “proof” of homosexual conduct, often involve doctors or other medical personnel forcibly inserting their fingers, and sometimes other objects, into the anus of the accused. Victims of forced anal testing told Human Rights Watch that they found the exams painful and degrading; some experienced them as a form of sexual violence.

This report examines the shortcomings in Japanese government policies that expose LGBT students to bullying and inhibit access to information and self-expression. Bullying is widespread and brutal in Japan’s schools, yet government policies addressing bullying do not specifically address LGBT students, who are among the most vulnerable to bullying. Instead, the national bullying prevention policy promotes social norms at the expense of basic rights. LGBT students told Human Rights Watch that teachers have told them that by being openly gay or transgender, they are being selfish and should expect not to succeed in school.
 

This report documents 28 cases of transgender women who were held in US immigration detention between 2011 and 2015. More than half of the transgender women Human Rights Watch interviewed were held in men’s facilities at some point. Half also spent time in solitary confinement, in many cases allegedly for their protection. But solitary confinement is a form of abuse in and of itself, and many who had spent time there experienced trauma and profound psychological distress.

 

This 70-page report is based on research conducted in 2014 and 2015 by Human Rights Watch and PEMA Kenya, a community organization in Mombasa that provides support to gender and sexual minorities on human rights, health, HIV/AIDS, and economic well-being. The groups documented rights abuses against members of sexual minorities in Kenya’s coast region, including mob violence, assault, rape, incitement to violence, and inadequate protection. The groups identified ways the Kenyan authorities could improve their response to these abuses.