The US mission to the UN is seeking to eliminate the word “gender” from UN human rights documents, most often replacing it with “woman,” apparently as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to define transgender people out of existence.
At recent meetings of the UN’s Third Committee, which is concerned with “social, humanitarian and cultural” rights, US diplomats have been pushing for the rewriting of UN General Assembly policy statements to remove what the administration argues is vague and politically correct language, reflecting what it sees as an “ideology” of treating gender as an individual choice rather than an unchangeable biological fact.
For example, in a draft paper on trafficking in women and girls introduced by Germany and Philippines earlier this month, the US wants to replace phrases like “gender-based violence” with “violence against women.”
“We are seeing this more and more coming up on the Third Committee, and this is going to be a battle in the coming weeks,” a UN diplomat said.
The diplomat added that US policy on the word is not entirely consistent.
While on a number of recent occasions, US diplomats have called for the removal of the word “gender,” at least once the same word has been added into a text on the US’ insistence.
The diplomat, a European, said the inconsistency might reflect a tussle between different members of the US mission.
To succeed in its campaign, the US would have to forge unusual alliances against its Western European partners with Russia and conservative Islamic states.
“If you only say violence against women, it doesn’t really tell the whole story,” a senior diplomat at the UN said. “We shouldn’t be going along with encouraging their society to be regressive. And if that means a blazing row in the Third Committee, I would have a blazing row in committee, because I think some things are worth cherishing and worth hanging on to.”
The US Mission to the UN referred inquiries to the US Department of State, which did not offer a comment before publication.
Last month, the State Department quietly changed the name of a Web page to address transgender issues on passports, from “gender designation change” to “change of sex marker,” in what appears to be a wider campaign against the word “gender.”
The New York Times on Monday reported that the administration had drawn up a policy paper to define gender narrowly as restricted to male or female only, and immutable from birth, despite the American Medical Association last year ruling that gender and sexual identities are not always binary.
Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights Director Roger Severino was a fervent opponent of US President Barack Obama’s reforms.
In July 2016, he said that then-US secretary of defense Ash Carter had dishonored the sacrifices of “hundreds of thousands of veterans and current troops who were traumatized, wounded, or died fighting against Nazis, communist aggressors and terrorists, yet, believe that biological men should not be allowed into the same barracks and showers as women.”
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
RSS