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.”
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