A significant proportion of LGBTQIA+ women in India are delaying or entirely avoiding essential medical care — not because they cannot afford it, not because clinics are out of reach, but because they do not feel safe walking through the door. A sweeping new study, conducted by research firm Kantar in partnership with DIVA Charitable Trust and The Curve Foundation, puts a number to that fear: 58 per cent. More than half. The highest figure recorded across any of the five countries surveyed.

Released around Lesbian Visibility Week, the research draws from responses from over 3,200 LGBTQIA+ women and non-binary individuals worldwide. For India, the data does not simply suggest a gap in access — it documents a crisis of trust, one that sits at the intersection of identity, stigma, and a healthcare system that has not been built with this community in mind.

What Bias Looks Like Inside a Clinic

Six in ten respondents in India said they had experienced discrimination within healthcare settings. The word “discrimination” here is not abstract. For many, it means being met with a provider who visibly shifts when they disclose their identity. It means questions that assume heterosexuality. It means being not taken seriously — having symptoms minimised, mental health concerns deflected, and the fundamental sense that the person across the desk has already decided something about you before you have finished speaking.

That experience has a direct consequence: people stop going. Or they go later, when something has already become urgent. Or they go but they don’t disclose — which means they don’t get care that is actually calibrated to who they are. The 58 per cent who delay seeking care are not making an irrational choice. They are making a completely rational one, given what they have experienced or what they have been told by others who have.

Unsafe Beyond the Clinic

The study’s findings do not stop at the healthcare system. Respondents reported experiences of verbal and physical abuse across a range of everyday spaces — social media platforms, public transport, social venues. The picture that emerges is one of a community navigating persistent, ambient insecurity: a calculation about safety that is made not just when deciding whether to see a doctor, but when deciding where to sit on a bus, or what to post online.

This ambient insecurity matters because it shapes everything downstream. When you are already managing the cognitive and emotional weight of navigating public spaces as a marginalised person, adding a healthcare interaction that may carry the same risks is not a small ask. The decision to delay care is not made in isolation — it is made in the context of a life already requiring constant negotiation.

The Corporate Expectation

One of the study’s more striking findings is about what respondents expect from the private sector. In India, 78 per cent of those surveyed said they believe companies should actively contribute to advancing diversity and inclusion. That is not simply a statement about employee benefits or Pride-month branding. It reflects a growing understanding that corporate behaviour — in hiring, in communication, in supply chain choices, in how products are designed — shapes social norms. And that companies have a responsibility to use that power deliberately.

Mridul Shekhar, HR Head at Kantar India, framed the stakes plainly: when people are invisible in data, they become invisible in decision-making. The gap between a community’s lived experience and the systems designed to serve them does not close on its own. It requires those systems to actively seek out what they are missing — and to treat the finding with the urgency it deserves.

What Needs to Change

The study does not offer a policy prescription, but its data points toward a clear set of structural requirements. Healthcare provider training on LGBTQIA+ competency — not as an optional sensitivity module but as a foundational element of medical education. Anonymous or low-disclosure pathways for accessing care. Community health partnerships with organisations that have already earned trust. And the collection of disaggregated data, which India’s health system currently does almost none of, that would allow the scale of this crisis to be tracked, measured, and responded to over time.

India’s LGBTQIA+ community has long known that inclusion cannot be measured in the language of the Pride march alone. It is measured in whether a person who is unwell feels safe enough to seek care — and in what happens to them when they do. On that measure, the numbers in this study are a clear verdict: there is urgent work ahead.