The arc was bending. Now it’s breaking.

The current disaster of north-to-south queer rights funding—a personal view by Ise Bosch. Published in Alliance Magazine in June 2025.

For the past three decades, I’ve been one of many who channelled funds and attention to LGBTQIA+ movements across the globe, first as an individual ‘donor activist’, then with our team at Dreilinden, a German not for profit limited liability company. In that time, I’ve seen pain, joy, and slow-but-steady progress. But I’ve never seen anything like this: a sustained, global unravelling of queer rights and protections. 

Our movements now need to discuss strategy and how to pivot. We as funders are listening and discussing. This is the demand of the moment, but the moment also demands mourning. For those of us who have worked for years to help bend the arc toward justice, it is unbearable to watch that arc breaking down. 

Across the world, people of ‘nontraditional’ gender identity, sexual orientation, or sex characteristics have always been under attack. But the situation has changed. The constellation of global actors once cautiously aligned with LGBTQIA+ advancement—international donors, development agencies, diplomatic voices—has begun to flicker and dim. In some cases, they’ve reversed direction altogether, shifting from fragile support to a conspicuous lack of support, or worse, outright antagonism. My heart hurts from so many shattered hopes.

My heart hurts from so many shattered hopes.

My heart hurts from so many shattered hopes. When I came into the work of funding for ‘queer rights’ in the 1990s, the idea was, education will work. By ‘winning hearts and minds’ the world over, we will affect structural change. With enough conversation, societies, even religions, will come to understand and accept some degree of sexual and gender diversity. Accepting diversity might challenge norms and traditions, but norms and traditions have never been static. The hope was, someday, the dark times of being cancelled out of existence will end. So, we got to work. 

International funding is a certain measure of success both in terms of visibility and legitimacy. Some people managed to fight their way into North-to-South funding streams, and in any case, most of the credit belongs to them. The victories are the movements’, not the funders’, and money is usually not the most important thing. 

So, some funding came, though it was never enough (and never as much as there was for those who want to control, or cancel, gender and sexual difference). In my view, we were not even halfway toward anything resembling equal footing. We are still in the phase of discovering just how deep and terrible structural discrimination really is, especially as it concerns such intimate parts of our identity. Also, there’s the endemic link between poverty and racism, the yawning gap between urban and rural experience, and the often vitriolic role of religious institutions who viciously exclude and persecute the souls of those who are sexually diverse. 

Elsewhere, the pandemic hit queer folks worse than the average population, and intersex movements have only just begun to emerge.  The task ahead is sobering. We must respond to this funding crisis with resolve and with clarity.

Queer liberation matters for the sake of human dignity.

But we worked on all these issues. And we reached the point where we could explain to our peers in adjacent movements (including pro-democracy) that queer liberation matters. It matters to us of course but it matters for the sake of human dignity. And it matters strategically, because gender minorities, and women who don’t conform, have been the symbolic centre of attack by the new far right. Far right actors’ express hatred for queerness and sexual rights quickly and readily—and those actors don’t stop there. 

The funders’ scene grew and began to include allied funders, including private funders and public foundations with progressive agendas, as well as private funders with queer family members. And yes, government money came in. Embassies flew rainbow flags. Courts handed down landmark decisions. Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands led the way, and the US, UK, and other European countries followed in their own wobbly way. Even Germany, where I’m from, thawed. (I painfully remember past situations when we approached officials about queer inclusion, and they stopped using their usual voice, lowering it to a whisper or beginning to chuckle, telling anecdotes we really did not want to hear, in a mix of dismissiveness and defensiveness. It amounted to ‘not high on my agenda’, which of course amounts to ‘no go’). We’d placed our hopes in democracy.

We’d placed our hopes in democracy and that majorities would vote for social inclusion. In some places, that worked. The majority of legal successes were won through the courts (because gender discrimination and legal equality just don’t scan), but lately we’ve even had the popular vote in some places. 

I’m giving a narrative of progress—but just once, from the point of a queer donor activist, I need to say how maddening this was. Our victories were fragile and transactional. Queer rights often ended up as bargaining chips—added to legislative agendas only to be dropped when priorities shifted. Marriage equality, parental rights, gender identity protections: all of them were treated as expendable. When we heard ‘Not this time,’ we often heard what wasn’t said: ‘Haven’t you already gotten enough?’ 

We said, ‘if you say so’ but we thought to ourselves, we haven’t. You have no idea how much we haven’t gotten yet. And we went back to the structural work. The world over, queers and their allies trained lawyers, and the police, and the clergy, and it seemed that that fight could be won. It would just take time. 

But time has suddenly run out.

But time has suddenly run out. As official development assistance budgets are slashed and human rights generally under attack, the mood has turned not just indifferent, but openly hostile. Many of our so-called allies are preoccupied with their own domestic crises, their support retreating just as we need it most. 

A friend in Zimbabwe put it bluntly as the USAID disaster unfolded: ‘The others used to point at us. They used to think we were rich because we got queer funding. Now it’s all coming down on them. Now they see they’re just as much affected by the far-right agenda.’ 

The task ahead is sobering. We must respond to this funding crisis with resolve and with clarity. We must have our communities’ backs so they can imagine and build a future less dependent on fragile international aid. I expect that the solutions they develop will include self-reliance, strengthening ecosystems of mutual support, and mobilising capital not just philanthropically, but politically—from North to South, from those who still have resources to those who still have vision. The next chapter begins here.

And for those of us in donor countries, it means defending what gains we’ve made. It means refusing to let backlash write the ending. We may have lost time—but we have not lost our resolve. The next chapter begins here.