Can nativist attitudes condition support for LGBT+ rights? The sustained advance in pro-LGBT+ attitudes in the West often contrasts with the greening of anti-immigrant sentiment propagated by nativist supply-side actors. We argue that these parallel trends are causally connected, theorizing that exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups can provoke an instrumental increase in LGBT+ inclusion, particularly among those hostile toward immigration. Leveraging experiments in Britain and Spain, we provide causal evidence that citizens strategically liberalize their levels of support for LGBT+ rights when opponents of these measures are from the ethnic out-group. In a context where sexuality-based liberalism is nationalized, increasing tolerance toward LGBT+ citizens is driven by a desire among nativist citizens to socially disidentify from those out-groups perceived as inimical to these nationalized norms. Our analyses provide a critical interpretation of positive trends in LGBT+ tolerance with instrumental liberalism masking lower rates of genuine shifts in LGBT+ inclusion.

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) require a global rights category around which they can make claims. But, social category systems vary across context. How do INGOs articulate a global transgender rights category amid rapidly shifting political landscapes? Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and expert reports published between 1990 and 2019, I show how the gender experts who staff INGOs used a variety of recognition strategies to navigate competing demands from gender-diverse communities, opponents of LGBT rights, and broader political and cultural shifts. Initially, gender experts subsumed divergent gender category systems. As a widening array of gender-diverse people and opponents of LGBT rights contested the universality of the category system, INGOs shifted their approach. Rather than flattening divergences or decoupling them from institutional categories, gender experts substantively responded to misalignments, qualifying and transforming the original category in the process. In showing how INGOs address contradictions inherent to human rights frameworks and reflexively respond to critiques of coloniality, this article advances science, knowledge, and technology studies, global and transnational studies, and gender and sexuality studies.