Among the many uncertainties the United Nations is facing, a surprisingly basic question appears to be absorbing a lot of its time: what is a woman?
Almost everyone at the UN seems confused about what a woman is – from the Human Rights Council, and its many special rapporteurs, right down to UNICEF, its agency focussed on children’s rights. Even UN Women, the organisation supposedly dedicated to women’s rights, struggles to tell the difference between actual women and men claiming to be women.
There’s human-rights commissioner Volker Türk. Last November, Türk spoke at a ‘LGBTIQ+ global gathering’ to praise the fact that so many countries were adopting ‘laws recognising gender identity based on self-identification’. Then, earlier this year, the UN’s special rapporteur on cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki, proposed that the very convention designed to protect women from sex-based discrimination ought to be updated to include men who identify as women.
Even by today’s gender-deranged standards, Xanthaki’s speech made for uncomfortable listening. In it, she urged the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to reject what she called ‘the stereotype of women only being determined by biology’ – something that might once have been referred to as a fact. She went on to state that ‘being a woman is self-identifying’. If the ‘international community’ is truly committed to dismantling the hard-won legal rights of women, she concluded, it should allow men to compete in women’s sports. This was said all in complete seriousness.
The UN has more to answer for here than just a few officials’ nonsensical speeches. It was due to the invisible hand of the UN Development Programme – a vocal advocate of gender-identity ideology – that a conflict-torn Bolivia ended up inscribing gender identity into its 2009 constitution. And it was a UN Human Rights Council resolution that established the office of the Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in 2016. The office has used its mandate to lobby states to dismantle sex-based protections for women and girls.
Lesbians, in particular, have much to fear from the UN’s gender madness. In many UN documents today, a lesbian is defined as any person who identifies as a woman and is attracted to women. But most men are attracted to women, and a growing number of men now also identify as women. According to this logic, these heterosexual men qualify as lesbians, if they identify as such. Some have even accused actual lesbians of ‘genital fascism’ when their advances are rejected, a phrase now common in activist spaces. The fact that such behaviour would amount to sexual harassment in any other context appears to pose no moral dilemma for UN officials.
Why is the UN so determined to blur the meaning of ‘woman’? Why has it promoted this confusion on the global stage? And how will it respond to member states that are no longer willing to tolerate the redefinition of women’s rights?
A rare voice of clarity within the UN on this issue has been Reem Alsalem, the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Unlike many of her colleagues, Alsalem has resisted the pressure of activist lobbies, donor demands and social-media campaigns. She has relied on international law and her formal mandate to protect women and girls from violence. Vilified by a small but well-funded network of NGOs, she has nonetheless gained the support of grassroots women’s movements worldwide.
Is one principled official enough to shift the course of an institution as sprawling as the UN? The answer is likely no. So long as UN leadership continues to placate donor governments, activist consultants and corporate funders with vested interests in abolishing sex-based rights, it will continue to lose both legitimacy and relevance. Its growing failure to represent the real needs of half the world’s population risks alienating the very member states on which it depends for survival.
If the UN continues to abandon its obligations to protect the rights of women and girls – and instead aligns itself with an unelected class of activist ideologues – it will not gain the trust of the global majority, especially women. Unlike many UN officials, they know all too well that calling yourself a woman does not make you one.
Faika El-Nagashi is a former MP for the Austrian Green Party, a political scientist and a longstanding advocate for human rights.
Anna Zobnina is a feminist advocate specialising in the rights and protection of migrant and refugee women.
