Abstract
BackgroundGlobally, LGBT+ people continue to struggle to achieve full realization of their human rights. Amid reported health and mental health disparities, and economic insecurity, we conducted a scoping review to explore the breadth of the literature, map and summarize the evidence, and identify knowledge gaps on LGBT+ inclusion and human rights in Thailand.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review in accordance with the methodology developed by the Joanna Briggs Institute and PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We systematically searched 16 databases for peer-reviewed literature, and government and nongovernmental organization websites for grey literature, published in English or Thai from January 1, 2000–August 21, 2020. Two reviewers independently screened studies according to pre-set criteria. We abstracted and analyzed data on publication characteristics and focal populations, and synthesized findings in six domains of LGBT+ inclusion: political and civic participation, education, family, personal security and violence, economic well-being, and health.ResultsThe review captured 3327 results in total, which was scoped to 76 peer-reviewed articles and 39 grey literature sources, the majority published after 2010. Gay men and transgender women were the primary focal populations in the peer-reviewed literature, LGBT+ people as a whole in the grey literature. Health was the predominant domain across publications. Key findings include the absence of generalized antidiscrimination legislation for LGBT+ individuals and lack of recourse for transgender individuals to change their legal gender; multifaceted stigma and discrimination in the educational system; social isolation and exclusion in families; disproportionate prevalence of sexual violence and reluctance to report to police; discrimination and marginalization in employment; and LGBT+ disparities in health and mental health.ConclusionsFuture research and programmatic initiatives on LGBT+ inclusion in Thailand should aim to address: 1) understudied populations—lesbian and bisexual women, transmasculine persons; 2) underrepresented topics, including constraints to LGBT+ advocacy; 3) strategic policy initiatives around anti-discrimination laws and legal recognition of same-sex marriage and families; and 4) the need for consistent collection of disaggregated data on LGBT+ persons in education, family, economic, personal security/violence, and health domains in order to assess indicators of inclusion and progress in advancing human rights for LGBT+ people in Thailand.
Highlights
LGBT+ people continue to struggle to achieve full realization of their human rights
The main steps were the following: 1) identify the purpose of the review and the associated research question; 2) define a search strategy; 3) create a priori inclusion and exclusion criteria; 4) execute the search strategy; 5) chart and synthesize the data; and 6) report the results. Research question This scoping review was guided by the question, “How does the literature describe the inclusion of LGBT+ individuals in Thai society in the following six areas: political and civic participation, education, family, employment, personal security and violence, and health?”
After the full text review, we identified a total of 76 [16, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93] peer-reviewed articles and 39 [7, 8, 17, 94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129] grey literature sources which were included in the scoping review
Summary
LGBT+ people continue to struggle to achieve full realization of their human rights. The general consensus across much of the literature appears to be that many of these disparities are driven by systemic discrimination, social exclusion, and stigma [7, 8], the limited research on exclusionary and discriminatory forces on LGBT+ populations in Thailand remains fragmented. To this end, we conducted a scoping review to assess the state of the literature as it pertains to LGBT+ inclusion in Thailand
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