On 15 March 2026, the Seimas sent back for revision a set of amendments to the Law on Equal Opportunities prepared by the Ministry of Social Security and Labour (SADM) – amendments that, among other things, would for the first time have explicitly added gender identity, gender expression, other sex characteristics and skin colour to the list of protected grounds against discrimination.
After the initial presentation, only 16 MPs voted in favour, ten voted against, and 17 abstained, meaning the bill failed to gain the momentum needed to advance, though it can still be resubmitted. The amendments were presented by Vice-Minister Rita Grigalienė as a systemic review of Lithuania’s equality framework, aligned with new EU directives on standards for equality bodies and designed to introduce long-missing concepts such as multiple, intersectional and associative discrimination – categories that would allow the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson’s Office to more accurately assess and respond to the layered realities that LGBTIQ people, racialised communities, disabled people and women actually face in Lithuania.
The political resistance that stalled the bill was telling. MP Vytautas Sinica – the same lawmaker behind the March 2026 anti-gender referendum initiative on the constitutional definition of the family – called the amendments “the Istanbul Convention climbing in through the window,” recycling the familiar Central European “anti-gender” playbook in which any reference to gender identity or expression is rebranded as ideological contraband. His central objection was that the law does not define “gender expression” as a self-contained term; Vice-Minister Grigalienė responded that, as with most non-discrimination grounds, interpretation would fall to the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson’s Office and the courts – which is precisely how anti-discrimination law works across the EU. That this was framed as a scandal rather than standard legal practice illustrates how far the rhetorical goalposts have shifted: simply naming trans and gender-diverse people as people who can be discriminated against is now treated by part of the Seimas as a provocation, even though international bodies – including the UN CEDAW Committee, which reviewed Lithuania in February 2026 – have repeatedly urged the country to strengthen protections for women and minorities facing intersecting forms of discrimination.
Tthe stalling of these amendments is not a neutral legislative delay – it is an active harm. Trans and non-binary people in Lithuania already live in one of the EU’s most hostile legal environments: there is still no clear gender recognition law, no partnership law despite the Constitutional Court’s April 2025 ruling that the legislature’s inaction is unconstitutional, and no explicit statutory protection against discrimination based on gender identity or expression. Every month that the Equal Opportunities Law remains in its current form, trans employees can be fired, trans tenants can be refused housing, and trans patients can be humiliated in healthcare settings with no clearly named legal ground on which to file a complaint. The Seimas majority’s willingness to let a handful of MPs reframe a technical EU-compliance bill as a culture-war battlefield – and to abstain rather than vote – is exactly the kind of quiet institutional cowardice that allows discrimination to keep functioning as the default. When lawmakers refuse even to name a group in the statute book, they are not “staying neutral” – they are choosing to leave that group outside the protection of the law.
