UN Women has abandoned their mission to advocate for girls’ and women’s rights and equality. Join our United Women for Women’s Rights campaign: sign on to our open letter and let UN Women know that vilifying women who know that men are not women is incompatible with protecting girls’ and women’s rights.
We the undersigned, women organized in associations, groups, collectives and movements from various countries, comprised of women of all ages, classes, races, educational levels, sexual orientations, religious denominations and political positions, as well as independent women and men, hereby repudiate the statement published by UN Women, in which the Institution refers to groups and organizations that are critical of the ideological conception of “gender identity” as “anti-rights” groups, labeling all dissent as dangerous, “far-right” and propagating “hate speech” against the “LGBTQI+ community”.
In a classic DARVO move (“deny, attack and reverse victim and offender”), the recently published statement by UN Women, “LGBTIQ+ Communities and the Anti-Rights Resistance”, accuses those who do not believe in gender identity ideology of hate speech. But the accusations made by UN Women throughout the text are false and detrimental to children and teenagers, women, lesbians and gays, by labeling as hateful the healthy and entirely reasonable questioning of a new ideology that subverts women’s rights. It is UN Women that is actively opposing women’s rights organizations that seek true equality between the sexes:
- The ideological notion of “gender identity” is antithetical to diversity. It cements harmful and misogynistic stereotypes for women and men, girls and boys, that women’s rights organizations have been fighting for decades. Gender identity ideology celebrates men for ‘performing’ womanhood, an insult to women globally. Gender identity ideology pushes lesbian and gay teenagers to attempt “sex-change” surgeries, rather than celebrating their sexual orientation. This is the opposite of a human rights stance;
- LGBTQI force-teams lesbians and gays with a group who are not gay. Gender identity ideology erases lesbians by pushing them to accept men as sexual partners. There is no ‘community’ in forcing people to accept heterosexuals who want to pretend to be someone they aren’t;
- The false appeal to health care, with references to the reproductive health of women and people with differences in sexual development (“intersex”), actually covers up the violation of the ethics of care, the promotion of hatred towards one’s own body, the submission to physical alterations carried out by a pharmaceutical and medical industry guided by profit and a lack of commitment to well-being and self-acceptance.
What UN Women calls “anti-LGBTQIA+ movements” are, in fact, women’s movements aware of the profound human rights violations perpetrated under the guise of the “LGBTQIA+” rights movement. Women have the right to speak up for their rights, and those of lesbians and children. Calling us ‘hateful’ for doing so is just patriarchal oppression in a new costume.
What UN Women calls “LGBTQIA+ rights”, far from representing the rights of LGB people, are essentially demands by groups of men for the destruction and violation of the rights of other groups:
- they demand to invade spaces exclusive to women;
- they demand to compete against women in women’s sports;
- they demand to be housed in women’s prisons, putting women directly at risk of violence, with nowhere to go;
- they demand certificates and documents that lie about who people are;
- they use the false identity allowed by gender identity ideology to escape accusations of sex-based violence;
- they demand the erasure of the meaning of mother, woman and lesbian to accommodate men;
- they demand harmful, unethical and experimental interventions in children and adolescents;
- they demand the legalization of sexual exploitation and the reproductive capacity of women.
The main strategy used by UN Women in this text is widely known, as it follows the playbook1 long used by trans activism: vault a newly declared group to the highest status of marginalized victim. This creates direct conflict with the rights of long-marginalized groups, such as women, lesbians and children. Trans activists created a false new supremacy, placing themselves at the top.
UN Women deploys the tactic of false-teaming, in forcing those working for the human rights of children, adolescents, women, lesbians and gays to now put LGBTQI at the top of the human rights hierarchy: “working for the human rights of LGBTIQ+ people is inseparable from working for women’s rights and gender equality.”
We do not agree. UN Women should support the work of women for women’s rights, not tell women that they need to place their concerns secondary to a newly declared group whose main aim is to claim women’s rights for men.
Contrary to what UN Women claims, children, adolescents, women and lesbians do not have to submit to masculinist groups, they do not need to work for male demands in order for their rights to be guaranteed, and they must have full autonomy. Children, adolescents, women and lesbian women, including the feminist organizations that UN Women tries to instrumentalize in its text, do not share the same goals as trans activist groups. Those of us who’ve experienced trans activism can attest that this is what is a new version of “patriarchy, white supremacy, racism, colonialism, ableism, classism and other systems of oppression”. The most heinous affront is that UN Women uses these slurs against feminist organizations working for women’s rights.
UN Women’s relentless propaganda demands that women’s rights organizations submit to men’s demands of recognition of their ‘womanhood’, further proving that UN Women is no longer a body interested in protecting and advancing women’s rights. UN Women is now a tool of the patriarchy and actively oppresses women.
That is why true movements for the rights of children and adolescents, women, lesbians and gays will always necessarily be “gender critical” and against masculinist demands disguised as “transgender rights”, which are in explicit conflict with the lives of children and adolescents, women, lesbians and gays.
Another strategy used by UN Women is to label the complaints of all these groups as producing “moral panic”, a strategy with which we are all very familiar, because whenever women fight to not lose their meager rights to existence, or fight for their children, they are demeaned as crazy, hysterical, and overly demanding.
UN Women should cease and desist immediately from denying the very real concerns of parents about their children’s health and wellbeing. Cutting off healthy body parts of children, sterilizing them, and putting opposite sex hormones into their bodies is NOT ‘healthcare’. It’s harm, and when a leading world body pushes harm, parents have every right to question it.
Likewise, there is no “moral panic” in pointing out that existing data demonstrates that “trans women” pose the same threat to women as men do2, since “trans women” are, by definition, men.
As for “defunding” and “exclusion from civic spaces,” UN Women’s complaint about a lack of funding is laughable, when in all Western countries there is heavy and growing investments from foundations interfering in the autonomy of women’s and LGB movements3. Government powers, such as the judiciary, legislative and state governments, are also increasingly endorsing public policies based exclusively on the imposition of transgender ideology in education, health, public safety and others. The most recent example was the opening of the Olympics in France, filled with exaltation of the idea of “transgender”, which shows that far from being defunded, this movement is, on the contrary, highly funded and hegemonic.
The serious accusations made by UN Women affect all the undersigned organizations and all men and women who criticize gender ideology and affirm, in particular, that women and girls have specific rights based on sex.
It is noteworthy that UN Women puts the expression “gender ideology” in quotation marks, trying to characterize it as something prejudiced, when the transactivist movement is undeniably ideological at its root, since it is based on abstract ideas and beliefs4: the movement believes that people can change sex, it believes in sexist stereotypes as defining what people are, it believes in an entity called “gender identity” that would be perceived subjectively, has no material basis, but should be imposed as a concrete truth on the whole of society.
Committed to embracing and reaffirming its commitment to an entire agenda focused on the queer project, the UN system has become equally ideological, as it has distanced itself from science and reality and today works, in its various instances, in favor of an ideology that, instead of defending the rights of women, girls and homosexuals, the largest portion of the world’s population lacking human rights, actively and exhaustively works to erase the concepts necessary to protect these groups.
The UN, committed as it is now to an agenda opposed to the interests of women, lesbians, children and teenagers, is anti-diversity, anti-human rights, and anti-democratic. This treatise by UN Women attempts to silence legitimate criticism of a movement that subverts women’s rights using slurs, demeaning language, and denigration – all tools of historical patriarchal oppression of women.
Given all of the above, in this open letter we denounce UN Women for betraying the cause of women everywhere by placing the concerns of a newly invented group of men seeking women’s rights over the concerns of actual women. UN Women was formed in 2010, as the The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. UN Women was supposed to champion the cause of women, not disempower us and erase our equality in favor of men pretending to be women. Quite frankly, you’ve lost your way.
We also highlight the antidemocratic nature of UN Women, in its unwillingness to engage in dialogue.
We will not give up on the understanding that women are adult human females, that lesbians are women who are attracted to women, and that children and adolescents cannot consent to delusional and harmful interventions to their development.
These are non-negotiable aspects for all organizations that are represented in this manifesto, as they should be for any institution that claims to defend human rights.
In view of this, we affirm that:
- The attempts to criminalize women who reject gender ideology reveal that UN Women propagates and promotes misogyny in its most basic form.
- Slurs and accusations of ‘far right’ are intended to silence anyone critical of the wholly unproven concept of ‘gender identity’. A UN Entity should never use this tactic, especially against women advocating for women’s rights, children, and the rights of lesbians and gays.
- The accusation that women who criticize gender ideology are part of “anti-rights” groups constitutes hate speech on the part of UN Women, which thus encourages the silencing and persecution of women, negating our rights.