All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
[T]he current holder of that role is UNHRC appointee Graeme Reid, a South African who previously worked for Human Rights Watch. Although it is claimed that the Independent Expert’s mandate is separate from the CRPD negotiations, his position creates huge institutional pressure within the UN to swap sexual orientation for “gender identity” and treat the latter as a “human-rights cause” across the board.
Why is there a persistent push within the United Nations to replace sexual orientation with “gender identity”, and who benefits when same-sex attraction is erased for a belief-based identity?
When New Zealand supports international language that redefines sex or gets rid of fundamental categories, or – as in this case – relocates sexual orientation into inappropriate legal frameworks, the public has a right to ask who authorised that position, on what basis, and with what mandate.
We’ll have to ask our Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters about it.
So the proposal to insert sexual orientation into this UN disability framework did not succeed, but the fact that it was initiated and supported at all should concern every lesbian (and gay man, I’d add).
Disability frameworks exist to address real impairment, not to serve as yet another convenient vehicle for ideological expansion of the “human rights” industry.
For us, this abolition of sex in law through the back door raises a larger, unavoidable question:
What role does the UN now play, and who gave it this authority? The UN is not a democratic body. The key committees and branches are unelected. Its language is drafted by a small ideological cohort, but its conventions and resolutions touch every aspect of society and shape domestic law, education, healthcare, child policy across the whole world. Under UN guidance “human rights” have become a Trojan Horse (if we wanted to be polite, we could call it a delivery mechanism) for social engineering.
Source: SOGIESC and the quiet erasure of same-sex attraction
Could the author of this article please have the commonsense and duty to universal comprehension to spell out the acronym SOCIESC before including the acronym in brackets – or, include the acronym then spell out the acronym in brackets. The bureaucratic notion that ‘everyone’ understands acronyms is either dense, or deliberately determined to eliminate a readership or potential readership from understanding. Yes we all know that traditionally bureaucrats aim at just this – keeping information to themselves, hugging knowledge to their chests so that they can feel superior (even when they so clearly are not even equal – for ‘equal’ implies the understanding that not everyone does know what acronyms mean (for example). Honestly, what’s the point of writing if it is not to convey knowledge and to broaden understanding? People who write for some other purpose – as appears here (namely to limit the audience to ‘those in the know’) – need to realise that their writing is pointless.