It is always a pleasure to publish works by authors from outside North America in the Journal, and this issue contains a number of original research papers, reviews and short contributions with an international scope.
Seventy-two countries in the world continue to criminalize some aspect of LGBTQ people’s lives according to the website HumanDignityTrust.org. More than half of these countries are former colonies of the British Empire and thus the impact of colonialism and Victorian-era legal frameworks is still being felt today. However, the hope for increasing global progress on this issue over time is sometimes dashed. While Botswana, Mozambique and Angola have all decriminalized homosexuality in recent years, other countries have gone in the other direction with criminalization policies, like Indonesia and Chad.
That being said, on a per capita basis, these global advocacy movements received a giant shot in the arm when India, the world’s second most populous country, decriminalized same-sex sexual activity in a 2018 court ruling. Additionally, transgender people in India had certain constitutional rights recognized in legislation passed in 2019, including the right to register their gender as a “third gender”, an acknowledgement of the tradition of gender-variant hijra people in Southern India. However, legal rights are often just the beginning: as Apurva Kumar Pandya & Alex Redcay demonstrate in their review this issue, barriers to appropriate health care continue to exist. The lingering effects of historical discrimination also have their impact as internalized homophobia, a topic explored in an original research contribution in this issue from Minaish Dhabhar & Anagha Deshmukh.
Other most interesting contributions to this issue include research on the mental health of trans people in Serbia and Argentina, an exploration of the representation of LGBTQ people on television in Lebanon, and research into the experience of emotional abuse by Italian lesbian women. Please enjoy this scholarly trip around the world at a time when the global Covid-19 pandemic is keeping us from meeting in person.
Editor-in-chief, The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health
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