Why LGBTIQ+ Rights and Human Rights Rise or Fall Together: Reflections on Women Deliver 2026

The current wave of right-wing nationalism is not picking its targets at random. Sexual and reproductive health and rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, Indigenous sovereignty, girls’ education and climate justice are being targeted as the infrastructure that underpins feminist and human development. The withdrawal of the United States from multilateral climate agreements and the gutting of international aid architecture are part of the same political project from the anti-rights backlash playing out in gender equality spaces.

Women Deliver 2026, convened in the Oceanic Pacific at this precise moment of multilateral fragility, was a powerful demonstration of what cross-movement feminist solidarity can look like at its best. It also raised an urgent question, one I don’t think the Australian development sector has fully answered: are our programming and funding architectures organised to respond to a threat that operates across these domains simultaneously, or are we still working in silos that limit our effectiveness?

I don’t claim to answer that question definitively here. What I want to do is use the conference as a lens through which to explore it, drawing on a handful of moments that have stayed with me since.

The Queers Deliver pre-conference, co-convened by ILGA World, ILGA Oceania and Outright International, offered a powerful framing of why LGBTIQ+ inclusion is not a peripheral agenda within gender equality work but a structurally central one. Significantly, the pre-conference’s own agenda acknowledged it was convened partly to respond to the absence of dedicated trans, gender diverse and intersex sessions in the main program. That observation mirrors a familiar pattern in development programming: LGBTIQ+ inclusion is mentioned in strategies, but not deeply embedded in a program’s design or decision-making.

That distinction came through most clearly for me in a keynote from Adjunct Professor Elizabeth Kerekere, delivered with a joy that didn’t soften its challenge. Drawing on her decolonising Te Whare Takatāpui framework for trans Māori and rainbow health and wellbeing, Kerekere offered bodily sovereignty as a principle that refuses institutional correction. It is not asking to be folded into an existing framework. It is asking the framework to change. For development organisations, that is an uncomfortable but necessary distinction – between absorbing diverse identities into structures built without them in mind and actually transforming those structures.

Luz Elena Aranda, Director General within the Mexico City Secretariat of Culture and co-founder of Las Reinas Chulas Cabaret y Derechos Humanos, put a related idea even more plainly, drawing on her own experience building feminist institutions inside government: if you want to build a feminist institution, you have to build the enabling structure first. Who you are, and how you are able to show up and present within an organisation, shapes whether LGBTIQ+ people – and by extension, people from any marginalised group – can actually function and lead within it. Inclusion without that structural enablement rarely produces lasting change.

The third moment was more like an absence. DFAT consulted on a strategy for LGBTIQ+ inclusion in Australia’s development program back in 2025, and that strategy has been on pause for months with no indication when it will be made public. Against that backdrop, Assistant Minister for Northern Australia, Tourism and Pacific Island Affairs Nita Green’s address calling for an intersectional approach to be embedded in Australia’s International Gender Equality strategy and its International Disability Equity and Rights strategy felt like a nudge. This is not only a call for justice, though it is certainly that. It is also a strategic effectiveness argument, and one I think the Australian development sector needs to sit with.

Australian development programming is becoming more attentive to nexus issues, including through emerging climate finance architecture. The question Women Deliver 2026 left me with is whether growing awareness is yet translating into the kind of integrated, cross-movement programming that the current threat environment actually demands. I suspect the honest answer, for now, is: not yet. But that the question is being asked, in rooms like the ones I sat in across that week in Naarm, feels like a necessary beginning.