6,078 articles
Lebanese people (الشعب اللبناني)
Lebanese people (الشعب اللبناني) are the people of Lebanon and its roughly 14-million-strong diaspora, divided among 18 recognized religious sects, with no census since 1932 and remittances near a third of GDP.
Leelah Alcorn
Leelah Alcorn, born Joshua Ryan Alcorn, was an American transgender teenager from Kings Mills, Ohio, whose December 2014 suicide and Tumblr note sparked international outcry, the Leelah's Law petition, and US movement against conversion therapy.
Legal recognition of non-binary gender
Legal recognition of non-binary gender: state acknowledgment of genders beyond male/female via markers like X, diverse, or third gender. Nepal (2007), India NALSA (2014), Germany (2018), Argentina recognize it; the UK and, since 2025, US passports do not.
Legality of polygamy
Legality of polygamy: marriage with more than two spouses is legal to some degree in over 40 countries, mostly Middle East, Africa, and Asia, almost always as polygyny capped at four wives, while criminalized in Western states.
Legitimation
Legitimation is the social process by which authorities, institutions, or practices come to be seen as appropriate and just, producing voluntary deference; studied by Weber, Berger and Luckmann, Tyler, and organizational and global-governance scholarship.
Leigh Anne Tuohy
Leigh Anne Tuohy, Memphis interior designer and philanthropist whose family took in Michael Oher, inspiring The Blind Side; subject of the 2023 conservatorship dispute and head of the Making It Happen Foundation.
Lemba people
Lemba (Remba), a southern African people of claimed Semitic and Black African origin living in Limpopo, southern Zimbabwe, and Mozambique; no distinct language; oral tradition of origin from Sena; contested Y-chromosome evidence of Middle Eastern ancestry.
Lenape
The Lenape, also called Lenni Lenape or the Delaware tribe, are an Indigenous people of the northeastern United States whose homeland became eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
Léo Taxil
Léo Taxil, pen name of Gabriel-Antoine Jogand-Pagès (1854-1907), was a French journalist whose 1885-1897 Palladium hoax fabricated a Luciferian inner circle of Freemasonry and the convert Diana Vaughan, confessed in 1897.
Lesbian
Lesbian: a woman with enduring sexual or romantic attraction to women; defined across identity, attraction, and behavior; prevalence, health, and legal context worldwide.
Lesbian bed death
Lesbian bed death is a 1980s-popularized term for a supposed decline of sex in long-term lesbian relationships, rooted in Blumstein and Schwartz's American Couples study and since qualified by matched-comparison and desire-discrepancy research.
Lesbian erasure
Lesbian erasure is the denial or omission of lesbian identity, culture, and same-sex attraction in academia, media, healthcare, and data, related to bi-erasure and heterosexism erasure, documented since 1994 scholarship.
Lesbian feminism
Lesbian feminism: 1970s second-wave feminist movement, also called lesbian-feminist or radical lesbianism, founded around Radicalesbians and the Furies; challenged homophobia in feminism and sexism in gay politics, advocated separatism, and built a print culture.
Lesbian sexual practices
Lesbian sexual practices: sexual behaviors between women, including oral sex, digital penetration, mutual masturbation, and intercrural sex. Covers prevalence, STI transmission risk, safer sex methods, orgasm research, and screening disparities versus heterosexual women.
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a London lesbian and gay activist group founded July 1984 during the 1984–85 UK miners' strike, raised about £20,000 for the Dulais valley mining community in South Wales and helped win NUM backing for lesbian and gay rights.
Leslie Feinberg
Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014), who used zie/hir pronouns, was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, author, and communist, author of Stone Butch Blues (1993) and Transgender Warriors (1996).
LessWrong
LessWrong is a community blog founded in 2009 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, successor to Overcoming Bias, dedicated to human rationality and known for The Sequences, karma-weighted voting, the AI Alignment Forum, and its central role in the rationalist and AI safety communities.
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Letter from Birmingham Jail is Martin Luther King Jr.'s open letter of April 16, 1963, written in Birmingham City Jail responding to eight clergymen's "A Call for Unity," defending nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience of unjust laws.
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Лев Семёнович Выготский), 1896–1934, Soviet founder of cultural-historical psychology; known for the zone of proximal development, mediation, and internalization, distinct from Piaget's individualist developmental theory.
Levi Marhabi
Levi Salem Musa Marhabi (ليفي سالم موسى مرحبي), born about 1987, is a Yemeni Orthodox Jew, reportedly Yemen's last, held by the Houthis since March 2016 over an ancient Torah scroll, despite 2019 court release orders and US wrongful-detention findings.
Levirate marriage
Levirate marriage, also called widow inheritance, is the custom whereby a widow marries her deceased husband's brother, keeping her and her children within his family's lineage.
Lewis Vaughan Jones
Lewis Vaughan Jones, Welsh BBC News presenter (born 1981, Penarth) of Breakfast, News at One and the News Channel; former ITV/ITN political correspondent; lost left-ear hearing suddenly in 2018 and anchors with a visible hearing implant; married to CNN anchor Hannah Vaughan Jones.
Lexical decision task
The lexical decision task is a widely used behavioral paradigm in cognitive psychology, introduced in 1971, in which participants judge whether letter strings are words or nonwords.
Lezgins (лезгияр)
Lezgins (лезгияр, Lezgi) are a Northeast Caucasian people of southern Dagestan, Russia, and northern Azerbaijan, split by the Samur River border; Lezgian-speaking Sunni Muslims, largest minority in Azerbaijan.
LGBT parenting
LGBT parenting: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people raising children as parents or foster parents. Meta-analyses find child outcomes comparable to heterosexual-parent families; family relationship quality, not orientation, predicts adjustment, with ongoing methodological and legal debates.
LGBT rights opposition
LGBT rights opposition: organized resistance by Christian Right movements, anti-gender networks, and states to LGBTI rights, via criminalization, religious freedom laws, propaganda censorship, and ballot campaigns; 60 UN states criminalize same-sex acts.
LGBT-free zone
LGBT-free zones (Strefa wolna od LGBT) were Polish municipalities, counties, and provinces that declared themselves free of "LGBT ideology" from 2019; non-binding resolutions covering about a third of Poland, repealed by 2025 after court challenges and EU funding pressure.
LGBT-free zones
LGBT-free zones were declarations by Polish municipalities, counties, and regions, adopted mainly between 2019 and 2021, rejecting "LGBT ideology"; at their peak they covered a third of Poland.
LGBTQ advocacy in the Gaza war
LGBTQ advocacy in the Gaza war: positions since October 2023 by ILGA World, Outright International, alQaws, Queers for Liberation, and Queers in Palestine, covering ceasefire demands, pinkwashing critiques, HRC protests, Tel Aviv Pride 2024, and Safebow evacuations.
LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union
LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union: decriminalization of male homosexuality after 1917 and in the 1922 RSFSR code, Stalin's 1934 recriminalization of muzhelozhstvo after the 1933 OGPU arrests, the 1965–75 decriminalization debate, and repeal in Russia in 1993.