Photo by Syd London.

Good evening, everyone. This is an exciting time in the LGBT movement globally and for IGLHRC especially. It is with great pleasure that in this context of rapid change and momentum forward that I welcome you here tonight.

In lofty terms, we at IGLHRC would say that our mission is to end human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but in daily terms, we promote something much simpler: story-telling. After 22 years of experience advancing LGBT rights worldwide, my breaking news for you tonight is that the oldest tool in the books is the best one. The most powerful tool for social change is our own voice, telling our own story.

We at IGLHRC will never speak for someone else. Communities know their own conditions better than anyone else. Everyone has his or her own voice, and it is our task at IGLHRC to help empower that voice. The question is not whether you have a voice, but whether you are empowered to speak, whether you know how to convey your message so that people believe you, and whether you have a platform from which to be heard.

As a global LGBT community, we all have heard the stories of injustice, but as global human rights defenders, we need to be able to explain the depth, the shape and the color of human violations -- in detail -- in order to successfully advocate for change. Without credible documentation, it's simply too easy for them to dismiss us.

And so, we at IGLHRC partner with activists around the world, like our colleagues featured in the video you just saw, to document and amplify the reality of LGBT lives -- including arbitrary arrest, sexual violence, media bias, employment discrimination and ruthless attacks on our families. We work in coalition, listen and collaborate to come up with solutions. And finally, we help activists leverage community knowledge and increase their impact by shaming their governments on the world stage -- from the African Commission for Human and People’s Rights in Banjul to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in Washington D.C. to the United Nations itself in Geneva.

But there is a twist! IGLHRC departs radically from the traditional human rights model by not only teaching LGBT communities how to document their tragedy but how to celebrate their resilience. From North to South, from East to West, we LGBT people are not just victims; we are survivors!

For the foreseeable future, police departments in most countries of the Global South will continue to arbitrarily arrest gay men and transgender women. Sodomy laws will remain in tact. Lesbians and transmen will be subjected to forced marriage and sexual violence. But here’s the good news: our communities will survive, in spite of it all. We at IGLHRC know that we have resources in ourselves, with our friends, with our exes (our many, many exes!), as well as inside our very own families. And so, while we fight for seismic change, we at IGLHRC are partnering with communities around the world to ensure that we also access the courage of our LGBT family to ensure our collective survival.

As a strategy, we know this works. I'll give you 3 examples.

• First, in Malawi, one of IGLHRC’s 16 priority countries worldwide, President Joyce Banda made a verbal commitment 2 months ago to voluntarily decriminalize sodomy. IGLHRC’s partner in Malawi, an organization dedicated to Men-who-have-Sex-with Men, is leading the response.
• Second, activists from 2 organizations in Guyana jointly produced with IGLHRC the country’s first-ever report on human rights violations against lesbians, bisexual women and transgender people, prompting the government to fearfully claim just last week that it is trying to pass a non-discrimination law.
• And third, in Guatemala, where significant numbers of transgender women are killed each year, the Presidential Commission on Femicide agreed after joint advocacy between a local trans organization and IGLHRC to solve the unresolved deaths of upwards of 30 transwomen over 3 years.

Finally, with these goals in mind, as we talk about hardship and we talk about resilience, as we honor the indefatigable visionaries Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and Judge Karen Atala, I invite you to let your intellect be stoked, your heart be inspired, and to feel like you’re with your community here tonight, imagining a world where human rights are for everyone, everywhere.