The business and human rights field and the international LGBTI human rights agenda have evolved almost entirely separately. The United Nations ‘Standards of Conduct for Business on Tackling Discrimination against LGBTI People’ (2017) is the primary effort to bridge this gap. Although drafted in a way that strongly aligns with the second pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on corporate responsibility, the dissemination of the Standards has mainly been untethered from the human rights framework and system. This article identifies the need to reassert the human rights foundations of the Standards and leverage their existing momentum to set out a more robust research and policy agenda for meaningfully accounting for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics in business and human rights frameworks. To that end, the article sets out priority areas for greater attention from researchers, decision-makers and advocates.

The US government was a late adopter of support and advocacy for international sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) human rights. Although US support for SOGI human rights did not begin in the Obama administration, after 2011 such support was expanded, publicized, and institutionalized. Since the 2016 presidential election, many international and grassroots LGBTQI human rights activists have expressed concern about the prospects for US SOGI advocacy in the Trump administration. No definitive policy changes have been made public, but clues to the future of US advocacy for SOGI can be found in a variety of sites. These include the discourse and policy articulations of the secretary and human rights officials in the State Department as well as those of legislators who fund human rights programs and exercise oversight over it.