By the mid-2010s the streets of Shinjuku Ni-chome in Tokyo carried rainbow flags from companies declaring support for LGBT people. The 2015 Tokyo Rainbow Pride parade drew a record 50,000, and the press reported the new loanword “LGBT” daily. That April, Shibuya Ward in Tokyo introduced a same-sex partnership-certificate system, and the existence of “sexual minorities” entered the legal, institutional, and economic field of Japanese society. A decade on, the acronym has expanded from LGBT to LGBTQ to LGBTQIA+, settling as a term that makes diverse sexualities visible.

LGBTQ is an acronym for Lesbian (women attracted to women), Gay (men attracted to men), Bisexual (attracted to more than one gender), Transgender (gender identity differing from sex assigned at birth), and Queer or Questioning, an umbrella for sexual and gender minorities. This article covers the acronym’s structure, the related law, the international current, and the points of debate.

The acronym and its variants

The acronym originated in 1980s US activist communities: first L/G, then LGB, with T (transgender) added in the 1990s to fix LGBT, and Q (queer/questioning) added from the 2010s to make LGBTQ or LGBTQ+ the international standard. Further variants extend it: LGBTQIA+ adds I (intersex), A (asexual), and + (other minorities), common in North American and European activism; LGBTQ2S+ adds Two-Spirit, a traditional Indigenous gender role, in Canadian and US Native communities. The “Q” is deliberately two-valued, denoting Queer (an umbrella identity outside normative categories) or Questioning (exploring one’s orientation or identity), respecting self-definition over fixed labels.

Queer was originally a slur (“strange”, “deviant”) that the 1990s movement reclaimed positively, denoting identities and practices that fall outside, or deliberately disrupt, the existing categories of orientation and gender. Pansexual (attracted regardless of gender) and asexual (not sexually attracted to others) name further positions within the umbrella.

Japanese legal developments

The 2003 GID Special Act (in force 2004) allows a person meeting set requirements to change their registered sex on the family register by family-court ruling, the first Japanese mechanism for legal sex reclassification. The sterilisation requirement was held unconstitutional by the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court on 25 October 2023 on personal-dignity (Article 13) grounds; the external-appearance requirement was held unconstitutional by the Hiroshima High Court in 2024, with the Supreme Court position not yet settled.

The 2023 LGBT Understanding Promotion Act (Act No. 68 of 2023, in force 23 June 2023) is a principles law setting the basic philosophy of LGBT policy, without penalties, imposing effort duties of awareness-raising on the state, local governments, businesses, and schools. Its wording (Article 12, that “all citizens can live in security”) drew criticism from advocacy and human-rights groups as a retreat from earlier drafts.

Legal marriage is not open to same-sex couples, but local-government partnership systems have spread. Shibuya Ward (by ordinance) and Setagaya Ward (by administrative rule) introduced Japan’s first systems in April 2015; by mid-2024 well over 400 local governments had adopted them, with population coverage reported above 85 per cent. From 2019, same-sex couples have sued the state (“Marriage for All”), arguing that civil and family-register law barring same-sex marriage violates the equality clause (Article 14) and the marriage clause (Article 24); the Sapporo District Court (March 2021) and Sapporo High Court (March 2024) found it unconstitutional, with constitutional rulings accumulating at the high-court level and the Supreme Court position not yet settled.

The international current

The US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015), and Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) held that Title VII sex-discrimination protection covers sexual orientation and gender identity. Taiwan, through Judicial Yuan Interpretation 748 (2017) and implementing legislation in force from 24 May 2019, became the first Asian jurisdiction to legalise same-sex marriage. The Netherlands legalised it first in the world (2001), followed by Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, and others; over 30 jurisdictions have done so. The Yogyakarta Principles (2007, with a 2017 “plus 10” update), drafted by international jurists and human-rights experts, set a non-binding reference for sexual-orientation and gender-identity human rights. The UN Human Rights Council adopted its first orientation-and-identity resolution in 2011 and created an Independent Expert post in 2016.

Debate

The expansion from LGBT to LGBTQ to LGBTQIA+ reflects the continuing need for new self-representation, while the lengthening acronym is argued to impede outside understanding; the orientation-and-identity concepts SOGI and SOGIE, which do not depend on an acronym, run in parallel. Homosexuality was depathologised in the WHO’s ICD in 1990 and removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM in 1973; current medical and psychological standards treat same-sex and bisexual orientation as a non-pathological variation, though the misconception of it as a “treatment target” persists in parts of Japanese society. Backlash from conservative and religious-conservative groups has accompanied policy advances. Because the umbrella’s components carry distinct issues, legal sex reclassification being specific to transgender people and same-sex marriage to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, effective rights advocacy requires parallel component-specific approaches.

See also

• Lesbian
• Gay
• Bisexual
• Transgender
• Queer
• Sexual minority
• Outing
• SOGI harassment