In Hungary in 2025, parliament banned Pride events and authorised facial recognition to identify attendees. In Uganda in 2024, the courts upheld the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, imposing penalties of life imprisonment or death. In Argentina in 2025, President Javier Milei banned gender affirming care for people under the age of 18, and his administration explicitly rejected “the diversity of sexual identities that do not align with biology.” As ILGA’s 2026 report puts it: “These developments form part of a broader dismantling of democratic norms, checks and balances, in which LGBTI persons are used as scapegoats to further divide society, and normalise the removal of human and fundamental rights.” We are in the era of anti-rights.

This is the moment when DFF is launching its LGBTI Rights Hub. Following more than eight years of supporting human rights organisations, we at the DFF are launching a new Community Hub dedicated to LGBTI rights. This comes at a time where the ground is shifting more quickly than most funders or organisations can track. As the anti-rights movement has grown with increasing momentum offline, it has followed LGBTI people online where it continues to amplify. Meeting the needs to counteract this shift will mean building a shared space: bringing movements, funders, human rights groups, litigators, and digital rights partners into the same room to define, together, clearer narratives that will identify new, important legal opportunities to protect and advance LGBTI rights.

DFF has worked closely with its community to generate legal strategies and build power for LGBTI rights online. We have supported Trans Europe and Central Asia (TGEU) in their work to establish legal gender recognition for trans people in the EU, a general precursor to accessing digital rights. Háttér Society has completed research mapping the extent of discriminatory content filtering of LGBTI voices in Hungary. Following complaints filed against Grindr and five adtech companies written by our partners at the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC), the Norwegian Data Protection Authority fined dating app Grindr for disclosing personal information about users to third parties for behaviour-based marketing without a legal basis.

We believe that by developing our ecosystem of partners and building their power individually and as community, we can advance our vision of digital justice. But the reality for our community is that resources to drive forward this work are declining, as documented by the latest Global Resources Report (2023-2024) 

There is a clear opportunity to bridge organisational missions and build wider, deeper relationships at a critical moment. We are launching the DFF’s LGBTI Rights Hub to put this work of cross-pollination in practice. Like our other Hubs, this Hub will build power to defend LGBTI rights while embracing the complexity of its legal landscape. We will bring together organisations and different kinds of actors from all over Europe, Africa, and Latin America, to build shared vocabulary, evidence base, and case precedent, while recognising that each organisation’s case exists within a constellation of local and global restrictions. By doing so, we can ready organisations to identify and claim strategic legal action in digital spaces. Together, we will co-create powerful, new strategies that challenge and build strong LGBTI rights in digital spaces.

If you are interested in what we are building, look for us in the program at the 10th TGEU European and Central Asian Trans Council – come say “Hi” and feel free to setup a meeting with us while we are there. If you are interested in joining or supporting our LGBTI Rights Hub, please contact Alexandra – and sign up for DFF’s newsletter for updates on the Hub’s activities.