Most people who follow LGBTQI+ rights news experience it the way most news arrives now: one country at a time, one court ruling or one crackdown at a time. A marriage law passes in Thailand, a “propaganda” law tightens in Russia, a Pride march gets attacked in Budapest. What’s harder to get a hold of is the shape of the whole picture — not any single data point, but the actual distribution of how the world’s roughly 200 countries treat their LGBTQI+ citizens, and whether the law on the books matches what people in those countries actually feel day to day.
That’s the gap the F&M Global Barometers were built to close, and the numbers they’ve produced are worth sitting with.
What the project actually is
The F&M Global Barometers is a research initiative housed at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, tracing back to 2010, when government professor Dr. Susan Dicklitch-Nelson first set out to build a systematic way of measuring state and societal treatment of LGBT people. The original Barometer of Gay Rights launched with 29 indicators covering 188 countries; the project has since grown into four separate but linked datasets covering 204 countries and territories from 2011 through the present:
- The F&M Global Barometer of Gay Rights (GBGR), a 27-item index tracking legal and societal treatment of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.
- The F&M Global Barometer of Transgender Rights (GBTR), a 19-item index doing the same for transgender people specifically.
- The F&M Global Barometer of Unified LGBT Rights (GBUR), a combined 41-item index folding the two together into a single national score.
- The F&M Global Barometers LGBTQI+ Perception Index (GBPI), the only one of the four built entirely from firsthand testimony — a short survey asking LGBTQI+ people themselves about their sense of safety, acceptance, fear, and experience with violence and discrimination in the country where they live.
Every country gets graded on the same scale, from F (“Persecuting”) through D (“Intolerant”), C (“Resistant”), B (“Tolerant”), up to A (“Protecting”). The GBGR and GBTR are reviewed by partner researchers, activists, and human rights experts in more than 40 countries, which is part of what distinguishes the project from a purely desk-based index — local knowledge gets built into the scoring rather than assumed from outside.
What the current data actually shows
Pull the most recent (2024) results for the combined Unified LGBT Rights barometer, and the shape of the world is sobering in a fairly specific way: roughly two out of every three countries and territories scored land in the F, “Persecuting” band — everything from Saudi Arabia’s 5 percent to Poland’s 54 percent, a band wide enough to include both places where same-sex activity is criminalized outright and places with partial protections that still don’t add up to functional safety. Only 15 countries — a tight cluster of mostly Western European and Latin American states including Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Uruguay, and Costa Rica — reach the top “A, Protecting” tier at 90 percent or higher.
That much roughly tracks what anyone following the news would expect. What’s more striking is what happens when the Barometers stop measuring law and start measuring lived experience. The Perception Index — the survey arm, built from more than 38,000 direct responses collected across 122 countries in its 2024 round — tells a noticeably less triumphant story even in the countries that score best on paper. Not a single country reached the “A” tier on the Perception Index in 2024. Iceland, the highest scorer, landed at 80 percent — solidly “B, Tolerant,” the same band the legal index reserves for solidly middling performers. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, all graded in the 90s on legal protection, scored in the mid-to-high 70s on lived experience — “C, Resistant.” The United States, a “C” on paper, dropped all the way to the “F, Persecuting” band on how its own LGBTQI+ population actually reported feeling, scoring 58 percent — one point under the cutoff for the next tier up.
That gap is the whole point of running both instruments side by side. A country can pass every law an advocacy checklist would ask for and still leave the people those laws are meant to protect feeling far less safe than the legislation implies. The Barometers’ own framing of this is understated but direct: there is often a gap between legislation and the lived experiences of LGBTQI+ individuals, and the project exists specifically to keep that gap visible rather than letting legal reform stand in as a proxy for actual safety.
The 2026 survey, and why it matters right now
The 2026 edition of the Perception Index opened on June 15 and runs through September 15 — meaning it closes within days of this piece being published, which makes now close to the last practical window to take part in this cycle. The survey itself is short by design: a two-to-five-minute, six-question instrument, available in more than twenty languages this year including Arabic, Bengali, Hausa, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese, reviewed and approved by Franklin & Marshall’s Institutional Review Board and run under EU-standard confidentiality protections. Responses are anonymous.
Scale matters here in a way that’s easy to underestimate. The 2022 and 2024 rounds combined pulled in more than 200,000 responses from people in 130 countries, and that volume is precisely what lets the project say something credible about, for instance, how differently a gay man in Warsaw and a gay man in Copenhagen actually experience the same continent’s supposedly shared legal norms. The 2026 outreach list includes partners like Grindr for Equality, Outright International, the Human Rights Campaign, African Queer Voices, and the Safe Space Alliance, spreading collection well beyond the usual reach of an academic survey team working alone.
Franklin & Marshall’s own framing on why participation matters is worth taking at face value: the responses aren’t just archived, they’re actively used to inform the work of policymakers, scholars, and activists trying to make the case, with actual numbers behind it, for where legal reform is outrunning lived reality and where it still has ground to make up. A single response is one data point; fifty responses from one country is enough for the project to feature that country’s lived experience directly. The barometers’ own social channels have been tracking exactly that threshold this cycle — Serbia, Vietnam, Iraq, and India each crossed 50 responses earlier this year, with Venezuela, the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Morocco following soon after.
Why the whole exercise matters
It would be easy to read a project like this as an academic curiosity — a university dataset that lives mostly in footnotes. What the Barometers actually demonstrate, across fifteen years and four instruments, is something closer to a corrective. Legal indices alone tend to flatten a country’s story into a single grade that implies steady, linear progress: decriminalize, then protect marriage, then ban discrimination, then arrive at “A.” The Perception Index breaks that implication by insisting on a second axis entirely — not what a country has legislated, but what it feels like to actually be LGBTQI+ there, this year, answering six honest questions with nothing at stake but the truth.
Taken together, the four barometers describe a world where meaningful legal protection remains the exception rather than the rule for most of the planet’s population, and where even the small cluster of countries that have built genuinely protective legal frameworks haven’t fully closed the gap between what the law promises and what their own LGBTQI+ residents report actually experiencing. Neither half of that finding cancels the other out. Both are true at once, and a project built to hold both truths in the same dataset, updated every two years, is rarer than it should be.
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