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.
[E]arlier 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.
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.
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.
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.