The United States Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons was established by presidential mandate and sat in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. The position was established in 2015 when John Kerry served as the U.S. Secretary of State during the second Barack Obama administration. It did not exist during the first Donald Trump administration. Special Envoy Jessica Stern (JS) became the second person to hold this position when she was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021. The post has not existed since January 2025. This is a slightly edited version of an interview that took place with Mona Lena Krook (MLK) via Zoom on January 5, 2026.

MLK: What role did you play in promoting gender equality in the U.S. government?

JS: I held one role in the U.S. government, and it was as U.S. Special Envoy for the Advancement of the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex [LGBQTI] Persons. I positioned my work for the safety of LGBTQI+ people in the context of fighting for gender equality worldwide. The root causes of oppression of women and girls and LGBTQI+ people are the same — gender stereotypes, biological determinism, and a narrow understanding of the importance of gender and sexual diversity for us all. My closest allies in government were always working for gender equality in all its forms.

I led U.S. foreign policy related to LGBTQI+ issues, which incorporated a broad range of activities. I monitored human rights abuses against LGBTQI+ persons around the world. I attempted to use that information to increase resources for LGBTQI+ people in countries in crisis. I partnered with U.S. embassies around the world, so that they could be more effective allies to LGBTQI+ people. I led the policy direction for the Global Equality Fund, which was a State Department-based public-private funding mechanism for LGBTQI+ organizations on the front lines around the world.

I also worked directly with LGBTQI+ activists worldwide, so that they would understand how to navigate advocacy with the U.S. government. My office was often the first port of call when LGBTQI+ people were arbitrarily arrested, or anti- or pro-LGBTQI+ legislation started advancing somewhere around the world. I developed the U.S.’s LGBTQI strategy at the United Nations and represented the U.S. government in UN meetings in relation to LGBTQI+ rights and gender equality. I served as the U.S. government representative in multilateral coalitions and in bilateral relationships with different governments, both friend and foe to LGBTQI+ people around the world.

I also did a lot of training and capacity building. Government officials are not gender experts or human rights experts. I was often called upon to explain why LGBTQI+ issues were relevant to other U.S. national priorities, like economic development or national security or public health. A widespread misconception was that LGBTQI+ issues or gender equality were peripheral to U.S. foreign policy interests, but my view is that LGBTQI+ people are a canary in the coal mine, testing the strength of the rule of law and human rights for all. Once people understand this, they understand why the fight for gender equality must be a U.S. foreign policy priority.

MLK: You mentioned talking to both friend and foe. I can imagine it would be easy to have a conversation with supportive governments. But how do you do that with those who are more antagonistic?

JS: You start with humility. The U.S. is not perfect on LGBTQI+ issues. I couldn’t be taken seriously if I pretended that we didn’t have homophobia or transphobia in the United States. For the entirety of the Biden administration, LGBTQI+ issues were in the news as a hot-button issue, with deeply partisan divides. And so I would try to convey humility and then find common ground. I would approach the topic by talking about fundamental principles, like the principle that no one should be subjected to violence because of who they are. We can disagree about the particularities of a policy agenda, but all but the most extreme would agree that violence targeting LGBTQI people because of who they are is wrong.

I didn’t represent these issues in the abstract. I talked with LGBTQI+ people in the countries in question. I used data to illustrate my points. When it was safe to do so, I would talk about local organizations who had issued reports or held press conferences or carried their concerns to the United Nations or a regional human rights mechanism. That was essential, because their data made it impossible for foreign governments to say: this is just a U.S. priority, or you don’t know the realities in our country.

One of my most interesting meetings was with a government that was fast-tracking an aggressively anti-LGBTQI+ policy. It was severe. I’d been meeting with this government at senior levels over a long period of time. They knew my views, and I knew their views. We were all sort of making the rounds. But I remember saying at the start of one meeting, we’re going to be talking about hard things, but we talk about hard things directly, not behind each other’s backs. This is what a real relationship means.

After I said that, the other government delivered their opening remarks. They said: “There have always been LGBTQI people in our country. There always will be LGBTQI people in our country. And one day, LGBTQI people in our country will have rights much like they do in your country.” Long pregnant pause, and then they say: “But that day is not today.”

Those moments are quite profound, actually. They reveal that international norms and standards are changing. Fifty years ago, the meeting would have begun by saying: those people are disgusting. Or you would have heard, we don’t have people like that in our country. Awareness is growing about gender and sexual diversity. Now, we need awareness to change into action. People cannot wait to be safe.

MLK: What was your background going into the role of Special Envoy?

JS: I started out in the human rights movement. I worked for women’s rights and gender equality. I worked on poverty alleviation. I would show up in all of these progressive spaces, and no one would ever talk about LGBTQI+ rights. And so, I became that cliche where I had my “day job” and my “gay job.” I would do my day job, which was unrelated to LGBTQI+ rights, and then I would go and do activism at night.

I was a member of what was the Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore Collective, which became a very LGBTQI-inclusive space and was a feminist space. Then I started to realize that the bifurcation really didn’t work for me. Some women and girls were members of the LGBTQI+ community. Some people living in poverty were LGBTQI+ themselves. We needed people who were comfortable being out, working through an intersectional lens, and making the connections, both publicly and privately. That inspired me to make a career change.

I felt quite blessed to have gone to Rutgers [University] where I received a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies with minors in Labor Studies and Africana Studies. I had studied what social justice movements need to be successful. I felt like if there weren’t a lot of out people who felt comfortable holding LGBTQI+ jobs, then perhaps I could have a real impact by sharing my voice. I became a fellow in the newly established Amnesty International USA LGBT program, Outfront. The creation of that program marked a historic milestone in the evolution of the human rights movement. LGBTQI+ activists had demanded that mainstream human rights organizations recognize that violence targeting LGBTQI+ people were human rights abuses — a long struggle that followed years of exclusion. I was very lucky to join that program shortly after its establishment. I then took a position as the first researcher on LGBT rights, as we called it then, at Human Rights Watch.

Then I left that because, as much as I loved working in mainstream organizations, I really wanted to work in an LGBTQI+ organization where my fights were not going to be internal. I became the program director, and then the executive director, of Outright International, which is one of the largest global LGBTQI+ rights organizations in the world. One of the first things that I had the opportunity to do was to help Outright achieve ECOSOC status [official observer status on the UN Economic and Social Council] at the United Nations. That was an ugly fight. I mean, talk about jumping into the deep end. ECOSOC status matters for NGOs because it gives you a badge, which makes it easy for you to go in and out of the UN. That’s your ticket to observing proceedings and cornering diplomats in the hall. Really being able to follow what’s happening. Crucially, it also gives you the ability to deliver official statements during formal UN meetings.

When I became an employee of Outright, it was in its third year of trying to become accredited. Now, three years is ridiculous. This should be an apolitical process. But every year, Outright would show up and the Government of Egypt would say, aren’t you proposing new and controversial issues to be included in the human rights framework? And aren’t you advocating for pedophilia and bestiality? All of these were deeply offensive and inaccurate allegations. Yet in the end, Outright was forced to answer, both verbally and in writing, more than 65 different questions to prove that we really were a human rights organization worthy of being able to walk into the UN. Two Republican senators from the United States actively opposed Outright’s application. Their opposition became high profile: they reached out to UN member states to urge them to vote against us, even though we were a US-based organization.

In the end their outrage mobilized our allies. It was so clearly a violation of the human rights to assembly and association. We were being held to a different standard as an LGBTQI+ organization. But Outright was finally awarded ECOSOC status! We leveraged that status to elevate the struggles and injustices that were happening at the national level. The point of UN engagement for Outright was to dispel the notion that nations could do whatever they wanted to LGBTQI+ people and get away with it. We were using international law and global systems to hold them accountable.

Seeing the transformation that multilateralism could create inspired us to co-found what became known as the UN LGBTI Core Group. It is a powerful New York-based mechanism that is coalition of UN member states, today with more than 40 members. During my tenure as Executive Director of Outright, the structure became increasingly formal, and eventually Outright became the Secretariat of the LGBTI Core Group. So, even though I’d always been an activist, I learned how diplomats spoke, thought, talked, walked, ordered their cappuccinos, and so it was familiar landscape to me.

MLK: What do you think were the main achievements during the time you were at the State Department?

JS: There are so many examples, but unfortunately the majority of them were confidential and subject to security protocols. Let me share some of ones that I can talk about publicly.

One of our greatest accomplishments was the inclusion of LGBTQI+ human rights abuses in the annual human rights reports. Every year, the State Department issues reports on the human rights situation of every country in the world except the United States, because of course the U.S. cannot objectively report on itself. The human rights reports were mandated by Congress beginning in the 1970s and are published annually. They varied from administration to administration, but their essence was consistent: reports about issues like torture, extrajudicial killings, and custodial abuse. As a result, they became an invaluable source of data used to adjudicate asylum and refugee claims. That data was used by foundations and grant makers to decide where to allocate funding. The reports were used to shape bilateral relations.

The first references [to LGBTQI+ issues] in the human rights reports were in the 1990s. Eventually, we developed a huge trove of data about LGBTQI+ people around the world. At our peak, the reports became one of the most consistent and comprehensive authoritative data sets about LGBTQI+ abuses in the world because so little data exists from official sources. We even had a standalone section on LGBTQI+ issues addressing issues like sodomy laws, conversion therapy, the persecution of transgender and intersex people, and physical and sexual assault of LGBTQI persons.

It existed until 2025. At that point the Trump administration not only deleted the section but mandated the removal of all references to human rights abuses against LGBTQI+ people from the human rights reports. It was shocking, amounting to the literal erasure of human rights abuses. But their cruelty didn’t undermine what we had achieved. For decades, advocates had ensured that the U.S. Department of State’s understanding of human rights abuses included targeted acts of violence and discrimination against LGBTQI+ people. And during my tenure, we achieved a level of visibility of human rights abuses against LGBTQI+ people that advocates and survivors used to demand real change and accountability.

Another example worth highlighting was Ghana. The day I became the Special Envoy, the country that I was most concerned about in the world was Ghana, because Ghana was moving forward with dangerous anti-LGBTQI+ legislation. The proposed bill was a hodgepodge of ideas for targeting LGBTQI+ people that clearly came from studying dehumanizing legislation around the world. Its language made clear that people who were not from Ghana helped draft the bill. It would have expanded criminal punishments for homosexuality, punished LGBTQI+ allies, banned representations of LGBTQI+ issues in TV or film, and criminalized activism for LGBTQI+ rights. How can you fight for your rights if talking about human rights is criminalized? Through dialogue with our counterparts in the government of Ghana, through investments in the front-line human rights work of Ghanaian LGBTQI+ organizations and their allies, and through coordination with governments and the private sector around the world, that bill did not become a law. The struggle in Ghana is far from complete, but every day that we help prevent a dehumanizing law from going into effect is a huge victory.

In Iraq, members of parliament had introduced a bill that would create new criminal punishments for consensual homosexuality and transgender healthcare. It would also ban LGBTQI+ activism and punish it with prison terms. We partnered with relevant stakeholders, because this bill was frightening. LGBTQI+ Iraqis already lived with unimaginable levels of violence and their movement was just beginning to build. They deserved safety, not state-sanctioned violence. We helped to defeat the bill in two or three different iterations. I started to call it the zombie bill, because it kept coming back. Unfortunately, in the end anti-rights actors won and the bill became law. But what we managed to do was delay it going into effect. This was a win. The less time a criminalizing law is on the books, the better it is for the people who are going to be hurt by it. We [also] worked in lockstep with Iraqi partners to prevent that the final version from including the death penalty. The final form still punishes LGBTQI+ people with up to ten years imprisonment, which is unacceptable, harrowing, and tragic by any measure, but there’s a big difference between execution and a chance to get your life back one day.

MLK: When did you have a sense that things would start to unravel with the Trump administration? What happened to you and your position after January 2025?

JS: On day one, President Trump issued three executive orders that told us what was coming. One was the executive order that claimed to defend women by countering so-called gender ideology, which essentially blamed transgender people for existing while doing nothing for the rights of women and girls. He issued the executive order pausing all foreign assistance which meant that life-saving programs would be stopped overnight. And Trump issued the executive order on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which they define so broadly as to effectively eliminate targeted programming for any marginalized or vulnerable population.

The culture of fear that executive order created was far-reaching. I remember an LGBTQI+ organization in Western Europe told me, we can’t even get the U.S. Embassy to return our calls. Finally, an ally within the embassy told them privately that she feared that simply meeting with an LGBTQI+ organization would violate the DEI and gender ideology executive orders and cause her to lose her job.

To be clear, those executive orders didn’t eliminate my position. My position only existed at the president’s will, so when Obama and then Biden’s terms ended, so, too, did this position. There’s a major problem with that. To have consistent and effective foreign policy you need to have a congressional mandate to ensure that human rights policies don’t change radically depending on who is in the White House. The U.S. doesn’t create a U.S. embassy in Spain, and then take it down, depending upon who is President. But that’s what we do with many of the human rights portfolios like the ones on racism, disability, labor, and LGBTQI+ rights. Other human rights portfolios stay regardless of the administration, for example, the Ambassador for Religious Freedom is a permanent position. Historically, the Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues has been a permanent office though the Trump administration has dismantled that office completely. Having human rights mandates come and go undermines U.S. credibility by creating a hierarchy of rights and inconsistent standards.

The only solution is for Congress to mandate that these offices be permanent, fully funded, staffed by senior officials, and held by experts in their fields. I want to emphasize that last point. My predecessor was a career diplomat, and we got really lucky with him, because he was a quick learner, a wonderful person, and determined to succeed. But prior to the day he became the Special Envoy for LGBTQI+ Rights, he had no significant experience working for LGBTQI+ rights. That position, by virtue of the U.S.’s global influence, immediately became one of the most powerful positions on LGBTQI+ rights in the world. Thus, it has to be re-established and it has to be held by someone who has expertise, who can hit the ground running. I was the first human rights expert to hold the role, and for now, the last in U.S. history. But hopefully not forever.

MLK: What have you been doing in the months since then?

JS: I co-founded the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, with eight of us who were ambassadors, special representatives, or special envoys on different human rights issues, ranging from war crimes to workers’ rights, to racism, children’s rights, gender equality, trafficking in persons, and LGBTQI+ rights. We’re making the argument that we’ve never had adequate political or financial support for human rights in U.S. foreign policy. We believe that’s to the detriment of all Americans and people around the world. In the current administration, we’re trying to stop the harm that the Trump administration is doing to human rights around the world and, long-term, we’re trying to write the blueprint for a better U.S. foreign policy.

In addition to that, I’m a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, in the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. I lead a study group for students and give talks on campus in support of the Harvard community. We’re about to do a curriculum for U.S.-based LGBTQI+ movement leaders to learn from LGBTQI+ movement leaders from around the world.

We won’t always be living through times like these. To rebuild the U.S.’s credibility in the world after this kind of reputational destruction is going to be a generational undertaking. If we want to succeed, we will have to have a radically different approach to foreign policy, premised on respect for the human rights of people around the world. We can’t go back to business as usual. It won’t be enough. The U.S. will have to rebuild the world’s trust. Make no mistake: there is a lot of harm that will be done between now and then, but there will also be an opportunity to rebuild. That’s the hope. That’s the plan.

MLK: What advice would you give to those of us who want to advance gender equality in the current context?

JS: To advance gender equality, we must prioritize values over jargon. We have to welcome people in. Women and LGBTQI people will always need each other, but we have to explicitly reject those who pit us against each other and be arm-in-arm now more than ever. If the President of the United States issued a day-one executive order weaponizing women’s rights in the name of dehumanizing transgender people, it tells you that our shared dehumanization is perceived as a winning political strategy. That’s dangerous, so we have to fight back together.

We also have to take seriously economic equality in a way that we never have done. There are many theories about why we lost so badly in the last election. But for me, one of the most compelling arguments is that we have failed to deliver meaningful economic opportunity for Americans. People are afraid they’ll never be able to retire. They can’t afford their homes, childcare, healthcare, or groceries. Until we take seriously that people are asking for a more equitable distribution of resources, our movement looks lopsided. It looks like we’re talking about theoretical issues — forms of visibility, pronouns — allegedly symbolic concerns at the expense of people’s kitchen table issues. That’s a false divide, but we have to explain why. We can do much better.

We can’t just speak to others who believe in gender equality. The conservatives in the United States own the airways, the radio shows, the most widely watched YouTube channels and shows. We’re really good at going to academic conferences and writing articles in journals. We have to do that, too! But we have to diversify our means so that our brilliant, creative, inclusive, and ambitious ideas are seen and felt by everyone.