France Rolls Out a 74-Point Plan to Fight Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate — After a Record Year for Attacks

France recorded a record 4,900 anti-LGBT+ offenses in 2025. That number, and the fact that a quarter of identified suspects were between 13 and 17 years old, is the backdrop for a new national plan the French government unveiled in late July: 74 measures spread across education, victim support, healthcare, employment, and trans people’s civil status, running through 2029.

Aurore Bergé, the minister responsible for equality and the fight against discrimination, presented the plan not in Paris but at a rural Pride event in Chenevelles, a small town in the Vienne department — a deliberate signal that the plan is meant to reach beyond the cities where France’s LGBTQ+ protections are already strongest. The plan followed six months of consultation with grassroots associations, government agencies, the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights, and France’s Ombudsman (Défenseur des droits).

What’s actually in it

The plan’s headline goal, according to the government, is to “guarantee that perpetrators are sanctioned” — a direct response to advocates’ longstanding complaint that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime in France is reported far more often than it’s prosecuted. Alongside that, the measures cover:

Education and youth: new training and sensitization kits for apprenticeship centers (CFAs) and vocational programs, aimed at reaching young people outside the traditional school system where earlier LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts have concentrated. That focus tracks with the data — the sharp rise in teenage suspects is one of the plan’s most-cited justifications.

Victim support: expanded training for the people victims actually encounter first, including police, prosecutors, and frontline social workers, plus clearer pathways for reporting.

Trans civil status: measures addressing the bureaucratic side of being trans in France, including how gender marker and name changes are processed on official documents — an area where French law is more progressive than several of its neighbors on paper, but where implementation has lagged.

Employment: training for employment-sector actors, extending anti-discrimination work into hiring and workplace conduct, not just schools and public services.

Why it lands differently in 2026

France already has some of the more comprehensive LGBTQ+ legal protections in Western Europe — marriage equality and joint adoption have been law since 2013, and both sexual orientation and gender identity are protected categories in employment law. But legal protection and lived safety have been drifting apart. A 2023 Eurobarometer survey found 54% of French respondents believed discrimination based on sexual orientation was “very widespread,” a figure that rose to 57% for transgender people specifically — perception data that, combined with the 2025 offense numbers, suggests the gap between France’s laws and France’s streets has been widening rather than closing.

There’s also a regional dimension worth watching. Reporting on the LGBTQ+ situation along the French Riviera this year has described a similar pattern in miniature: real legal progress and growing cultural visibility, sitting alongside persistent gaps in security and healthcare access. The new national plan is, in part, an attempt to close that gap consistently across the country rather than leaving it to wealthier, more visible urban centers to handle informally.

Whether 74 measures translate into fewer unprosecuted attacks and fewer bureaucratic obstacles for trans citizens will depend on funding and follow-through — the same test every national action plan eventually faces. But the plan’s timing, arriving directly on the heels of record hate-crime numbers, makes clear the French government is treating this as an urgent problem rather than a routine policy update.