To what extent do countries protect the rights of transgender people? How does this differ from legal protections countries offer sexual orientation minorities? What conditions are beneficial for advancing trans rights? Limitations in data availability and accessibility make answering these types of trans-specific questions difficult. To address this shortcoming, this article introduces a new dataset. The Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) provides insight into the legal situations transgender people faced in 173 countries from 2000 to 2021. The dataset currently includes 14 indicators that capture the presence or absence of laws related to criminalization, legal gender recognition, and anti-discrimination protections. The article then uses this data to discuss the global status of transgender rights throughout the period and compares these trends to sexual orientation rights. Finally, the article concludes with a preliminary analysis of three institutional and cultural factors that may help explain variation in transgender rights throughout the world.

At Global Affairs Canada, we celebrate diversity in all its forms. In this story, we highlight resilience, celebrate talent and address the issue of workplace transition for transgender people.

At Global Affairs Canada, we celebrate diversity in all its forms. In this story, we highlight resilience, celebrate talent and address the issue of workplace transition for transgender people.

The island of New Guinea harbours one of the world’s largest tracts of intact tropical forest, with 41% of its land area in Indonesian Papua (Papua and Papua Barat Provinces). Within Papua, the advent of a 4000-km ‘development corridor’ reflects a national agenda promoting primary-resource extraction and economic integration Papua, a resource frontier containing vast forest and mineral resources, increasingly exhibits new conservation and development dynamics suggestive of the earlier frontier development phases of other Indonesian regions. Local environmental and social considerations have been discounted in the headlong rush to establish the corridor and secure access to natural resources. Peatland and forest conversion are increasingly extensive within the epicentres of economic development. Deforestation frontiers are emerging along parts of the expanding development corridor, including within the Lorentz World Heritage Site. Customary land rights for Papua’s indigenous people remain an afterthought to resource development, fomenting conditions contrary to conservation and sustainable development. A centralised development agenda within Indonesia underlies virtually all of these changes. We recommend specific actions to address the environmental, economic, and socio-political challenges of frontier development along the Papuan corridor.

Geographic coverage of estimation in countries with known estimation methods for female sex workers (FSW), men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drug (PWID) and transgender women in low- and middle-income countries, 2010–2014.