LGB Without the T? Testing the Transferability of International Gay Norm Diffusion Predictors on Transgender Rights

While many consider human rights, including LGBT+ rights, to be ‘European norms’, the rights of LGBT+ people, particularly transgender (trans) people, remain at the centre of continuous political debates. Trans individuals, who often receive less public support than cisgender LGB individuals and whose interests are sometimes marginalised even within queer communities, are increasingly targeted by right-wing populist movements. Amid the current rise in right-wing populism, understanding the mechanisms through which human rights norms protecting marginalised groups diffuse across borders is even more important. Despite this, the literature on norm diffusion in Europe, which demonstrates the positive effect of international channels like advocacy networks on LGB rights, has largely excluded trans rights from systematic analyses. I address this gap, by providing the first study of how trans rights diffuse internationally. Building on arguments about Europeanisation and LGBT+ norm diffusion, I argue that trans rights norms face distinct obstacles relative to LGB rights, due to their challenge to entrenched binary gender norms. Touching a polarising issue like gender thus renders the diffusion of trans norms more complex. To test my argument, I analyse changes in trans rights legislation in 49 European and Central Asian countries between 2001 and 2022, combining data from the Transgender Rights Indicator Project with an original dataset on international factors affecting norm diffusion. Using zero-inflated count models and simulations, I find that while factors such as social globalization and embeddedness in LGBT+ advocacy networks promote the adoption of trans rights, political globalization, a key driver of LGB rights diffusion, has no significant effect. These findings reinforce the importance of transnational exchange and solidarity, while demonstrating the complexities of gender norms at the international political level and the impact of queer alliances. They also highlight the need for more precision in LGBT+ research. Including trans people when speaking about queer communities often makes sense and can be normatively desirable. However, when studying the rights of LGBT+ communities, conflating trans rights with LGBT+ rights may obscure critical dynamics in norm diffusion processes. Future research should carefully differentiate the mechanisms and barriers unique to specific subgroups within queer communities to advance both theoretical and practical understandings of human rights advocacy.