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At recent U.N. Third Committee meetings, officials from the U.S. have been pushing to change the word “gender” in U.N. human rights documents to the word “women”.
U.S. officials argued that using the word “gender” instead of “women” was just to be politically correct. One of the documents the U.S. officials are seeking to change is a paper introduced by Germany and the Philippines and has to do with the trafficking of women and girls. The papers used the terminology, “gender-based violence” and the U.S. officials are seeking to change it to “violence against women.”
While U.S. officials are currently fighting for these changes, a U.N. Official states that the U.S. is not unified on this policy, stating that at least once, the U.S. has fought for the use of the word “gender” in documents. The U.S. officials currently arguing for the recent changes are not full-time U.S. diplomats, but officials sent from Washington.
Opponents of these changes, like the Executive Director of the National Center For Transgender Equality Mara Keisling, argues that the U.S. officials are trying to write transgendered people out of existence. Keisling, however, is confident that the “prejudice will lose out to science, reason, and the ongoing fight for human rights.”
A senior U.N. diplomat called the changes “regressive”.
In order to succeed with these changes, the U.S. may have to align themselves with Russia and the Middle East against the European nations.
The U.S. officials from Washington are setting the stage to reverse Obama-era protections and federal programs for transgender people. The Trump administration wants to create binary sexes based on how individuals are at birth, whereas the Obama administration made gender-designation an individual decision.
For more information about transgender protections, send us a message.
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