Minendra Rijal, Nepal's minister for information and communication, has said the government is ready to amend discriminatory legal provisions against sexual minorities.
However, Rijal said equality could not be achieved through legal advancement and policies only, but also required changes in society's attitudes and behavior: 'I urge the community to stand up and take a lead.' Read More
Poland’s first openly transgender lawmaker, Anna Grodzka, plans to run for President. There are currently no openly transgender heads of state in the world, meaning that Grodzka – who is already the world’s only elected transgender MP – would make history again if successful. Read More
Members of the Center for Integrated Training and Research, a Dominican advocacy group known by the Spanish acronym COIN that has fought the AIDS epidemic in the country and throughout the Caribbean for more than two decades, will meet with representatives of the Dominican Ministry of Tourism and Tourism Police to promote LGBT tourism and gay rights in the Caribbean country. Read More
The head of a LGBT Colombian advocacy group took part in peace talks between his country’s government and a rebel group. Caribe Afirmativo Director Wilson Castañeda was among the six Colombian human rights advocates who participated in a meeting between representatives of President Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
“We do not want a post-conflict period to generate closets where people are once again stigmatized, made invisible and continue living in fear,” he said, noting LGBT Colombians should be explicitly included. “As Colombians we hope to leave the closet behind, to be able to live without fear of difference.” Read More
An overview of research literature finds that children of gay parents fare no worse than children whose parents identify as straight. Taken together, this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children. Read More
Transgender youngsters identify as much with their genders as do non-transgender children, a new study says. The findings indicate that transgender children are not confused or delayed in their understanding of gender, as some have suggested, write the researchers in Psychological Science.
The children were asked different types of questions that have been shown in other studies to be measures of implicit gender identity. When the researchers looked to see if the transgender children’s responses mirrored those of non-transgender kids - known as cisgender children - they found that transgender boys’ responses mirrored cisgender boys’ answers. Transgender girls responded the same as cisgender girls. Read More
At the end of 2014 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its sexually transmitted disease surveillance data for the previous year, showing the rates for primary and secondary syphilis, increased by an alarming 10 percent.
“This second year of double-digit increases of syphilis rates is completely unacceptable and also significantly intersects with our HIV epidemic,” says William Smith, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “This continues to affect populations already disproportionately impacted by all STDs, including HIV, most notably gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM).” Read More
A new report shows that foundation funding for LGBT health totals less than 0.5 percent of all health funding, and funding for HIV/AIDS is drastically out of proportion. The report was issued by Funders for LGBTQ Issues to coincide with an LGBT Health Funding Summit.
The report shows that of the nearly $3 billion that foundations invested in health issues annually, less than 0.5 percent is given to LGBT communities. The report covers the years 2011 to 2013.
Also, only 21 percent of U.S. funding for HIV/AIDS targeted LGBT communities despite the fact that gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men account for 64 percent of new HIV infections. Read More
The UK government’s leading body for public health has launched a new framework for improving the health of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. Public Health England have identified research showing that men who have sex with men are twice as likely to be depressed or anxious as other men, are twice as likely to be dependent on alcohol as other men, are more likely to smoke, have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, asthma and diabetes and are less likely to seek help from health and social care services. Read More
Engineers have created a compact, handheld device that plugs into an iPhone and turns it into a mobile laboratory that can diagnose HIV and syphilis in just 15 minutes. “This kind of capability can transform how health care services are delivered around the world,” study leader Samuel K. Sia, a biomedical engineer at Columbia, said in a statement. Read More
Jakarta-based program "Scaling Up For Most-At-Risk Populations (SUM)", has launched a social media campaign called #GueBerani (I am brave) in order to encourage gay men to get tested for HIV.
Program leader Erlian Rista Aditya said he believed social media would become an effective tool in their public health campaign because 83 million people in Indonesia were active internet users and almost all of them used social media. Read More
Pope Francis has strongly criticized modern theories that consider people's gender identities to exist along a spectrum, saying such theories do not "recognize the order of creation."
Speaking of gender theory in an interview in a new book released in Italy, the pope even compares such theories to genetic manipulation and nuclear weapons.
Asked in the book about how important it is for Christians to recover a sense of safeguarding of creation and sustainable growth, the pope first speaks of the duty of all people to respect and care for the environment.
But he then says that every historical period has "Herods" that "destroy, that plot designs of death, that disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation."
"Let's think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings," he continues. "Let's think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation."
"With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator," the pope says. Read more