A new report that Outright International released on Thursday notes 90 percent of LGBTQ and intersex rights groups around the world have lost funding since January 2025.
The New York-based global advocacy group surveyed 229 LGBTQ and intersex rights groups in 94 countries.
Forty-nine percent of the organizations that responded said they have lost more than half of their total budget since January 2025 — 75 percent of the groups said they lost more than a quarter of their total funding.
tl;dr: all the percentages in the article are bullshit.
The US government was providing 31-69%1 of all global funding to LGBTQ organizations? That’s a lot more than I expected.
So much more that I doubt whether this New York-based advocacy group running a survey about recipients of US funding has properly accounted for selection bias.
Did they search for advocacy groups with an English-language website or something? Or take a survey from groups they work with?
edit: I looked at the methodology section of the report. As I feared they spread the survey “through their network”, though they did distribute it in several different languages.
They pay lip service to the existence of response bias, but they completely ignore selection bias, and they ignore both when loudly presenting the percentages from among respondents as if they are in any way representative.
So as usual the headline is utter trash, but for once it’s the fault of the survey organization doing bad statistics rather than the media misrepresenting them.
It is of course awful that queer organizations are losing funding with which they can help people, but this is a qualitative observation. Most of the numbers in the article and the report are bullshit.
1: (lower bound: ½•½+¼•¼+0 = 5/16, upper bound: 1•½+½•¼+¼•¼ = 11/16)
