People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) face rising discrimination, violence, and threats to their lives in many countries around the world, both in the physical and digital spaces of our lives. Anti-LGBTI laws are criminalising queer folk in some parts of the world, while in others, trans people are facing bureaucratic and technological obstacles that make legal gender recognition and updating their digital identities across different platforms difficult and, at times, exclusionary. The rise of the anti-rights and anti-gender movement and funding has resulted in the pulling back of important policies and protections for LGBTI people. 

Queer activists and human rights defenders working to defend LGBTI rights are also targeted by online harassment, hate speech, disinformation, and public intimidation in efforts to silence and delegitimise their work. There is an urgent need to amplify the organisations that defend and protect the rights of queer communities, ensuring LGBTI people can live lives of dignity and safety – in both online and offline spaces.

Since 2018, DFF has provided 13 grants to ten LGBTI groups and has included ten organisations working on LGBTI related topics in the AI and Digital Democracy Hubs. By working with partners and affected communities, we have been able to support – among many topics – litigation related to data protection and data transfer issues experienced in the process of changing their legal gender; advocacy highlighting instances of content filtering that block LGBTI websites; and ensuring data protection authorities hold Grindr and PornHub accountable for processing, sharing, and using user data without their consent.

You can check out other cases we are supporting on LGBTI rights here.

In 2026, we consulted with our existing partners and with a larger LGBTI network of organisations who all pointed to a real and urgent need for a collaborative space to form stronger partnerships and share knowledge enabling the development of legal strategies for queer justice. Our consultation also showed that this space can also become a vital space to launch coordinated strategies to counter the rising anti-rights movement to ensure LGBTI people can live lives of dignity and safety – in both online and offline spaces. You can check out our progress report for more information on our community-consultatory progress here.

The LGBTI Rights Hub (Hub) shall meet this need in a collaborative space. In the Hub, participants shall share expertise and networks to jointly develop legal strategies that defend LGBTI communities against technology-driven harm in online spaces.  We aim to then fund the most promising strategies developed within the Hub.