How are anti-LGBTQ+ laws being organised globally?

It is more coordinated than most people realise. Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller got inside a summit at the UN Headquarters in New York where over 200 politicians and religious leaders from more than 40 countries gathered specifically to push back against LGBTQ+ rights. These summits help shape legislation like Uganda's law, which can carry the death penalty. What part of this are you most concerned about?

Why is this happening at the United Nations?

That is exactly the question that makes this so troubling. The UN was built to defend human rights, and yet this network has found ways to use its spaces and its credibility to organise against them. It speaks to how well-funded and politically connected this movement is. What does it feel like to you, reading that this is happening inside the very institution meant to protect people?

Inside the UN summit working against LGBTQ+ rights

Instagram 15 June 2026

A global network of conservative politicians and religious leaders is coordinating to push anti-LGBTQ+ laws, meeting at venues including the United Nations Headquarters. Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller filmed one such summit for her series Trafficked on National Geographic and Hulu, connecting these gatherings directly to legislation like Uganda's law carrying the death penalty for homosexuality.

Photo by Matthew TenBruggencate on Unsplash

Mariana van Zeller went somewhere most journalists never get to go: inside a gathering of more than 200 conservative politicians and religious leaders from over 40 countries, held not in some fringe venue but inside the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The same building created to defend human rights. And what she found there should make all of us pay attention.

This is the investigation at the heart of Black Market Love, van Zeller's episode of Trafficked on National Geographic and Hulu, and the footage and testimony she gathered there is extraordinary. One speaker told the room that new LGBTQ+ rights are not human rights at all, but "human wrongs". Another claimed the rainbow flag belongs to the church, not to the community that has carried it through decades of persecution, loss, and hard-won progress.

That tells you everything about the moral logic at work here. These are not people engaging in good-faith disagreement about policy. They are gathered to reframe the existence of LGBTQ+ people as a threat, to present religious and political opposition in the language of rights, and to do it in the very institution built after the Holocaust to say: never again will we allow states to persecute their own people.

The stakes are not abstract. Van Zeller's investigation connects these summits directly to legislation like Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, often called the "Kill the Gays" bill, which carries the death penalty for what it terms "aggravated homosexuality". That law did not emerge from nowhere. It was shaped, funded, and encouraged by a global network, and summits like the one she filmed are part of how that network operates: providing cover, credibility, and coordination to governments that want to criminalise who people are and who they love.

What makes this investigation so valuable, and so uncomfortable, is that it names the mechanism. This is not a collection of isolated bad actors in countries far away. It is an organised, internationally connected, well-funded movement, and it is using the architecture of multilateral diplomacy to advance an agenda that would see LGBTQ+ people imprisoned, executed, or erased from public life entirely.

People tell me, again and again, that they feel exhausted by the relentlessness of it. Trans people who thought things were slowly getting better, gay men and lesbians who grew up believing the direction of travel was settled, young people who have never known a world where they could not be openly who they are. The news keeps arriving, and it keeps being bad, and it is hard not to feel the ground shifting under your feet.

But here is what I also know. The reason these networks have to gather inside the UN, the reason they need summits and coordination and international funding, is precisely because they are not winning naturally. Acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has grown in country after country, generation after generation. The instinct of most people, when they actually know a gay person, a trans person, a bisexual person, someone who does not fit the binary, is compassion, not condemnation. These networks exist because the tide of human feeling is not with them, and they know it.

That does not make them less dangerous. It makes them more desperate, and desperate movements backed by serious money and political power are capable of terrible things. Uganda's law is real. The people it will kill are real. The families torn apart by criminalisation are real.

What van Zeller has done is pull back the curtain on the machinery, and that matters. You cannot fight what you cannot see. Naming the network, showing how it works, connecting the summits to the legislation to the deaths, is exactly the kind of journalism that makes a difference. Watch the episode. Share it. Talk about it.

Human rights are not a culture-war issue. They are non-negotiable, and they belong to every human being on earth, including every LGBTQ+ person, including every trans person, including everyone in Uganda, and everywhere else these laws are being written or planned or celebrated behind closed doors in buildings built to protect them.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate for trans and LGBTQ+ rights.

In response to: The Hidden Third with Mariana van Zeller on Instagram: "In Black Market Love, my investigation for Trafficked into the global network pushing anti‑LGBTQ+ laws, I gained access to a summit held inside (Instagram)