The United Nations has drafted a report claiming that gender dysphoria is “socially contagious” and even goes as far as to say there is a “concerted international push [to] erase” women. The report was initially meant to evaluate sex-based violence against women and girls. However, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) the research led to the theory that there is a global effort to “delink the definition of men and women from their biological sex,” and to “erase the legal category of women.”
As per PinkNews, the report was compiled by OHCHR’s special rapporteur on violence against women, Reem Alsalem. Entitled “Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues,” the report is a critical evaluation of the quality of life, rights, and existing and emerging threats for women globally. However, the report seems to only consider cisgender women in its examinations.
The report, though mostly a critical evaluation of some of the very real issues that women face, such as lack of access to healthcare, inability to make decisions with bodily autonomy, lack of access to education, domestic violence, rape, femicide and genocide, also presents a strange focus on alleged “threats” women might face rooted in transphobic beliefs. A large section focuses on debasing gender fluidity and transness.
The report discusses how some societies have adopted “neutral language” as opposed to “sex specific language” to refer to gender identity instead of sex. Alsalem claims this practice is somehow “dehumanizing,” referring to the fact that in order to adopt more inclusive language, LGBTQ+ people and allies have begun referring to people assigned female at birth as “people with vaginas,” “birthing persons,” or “menstruators.”
In the report’s conclusions, Alsalem proposes that the UN act against these phenomena by seeking to “uphold the rights of children, including girls, to be free from all forms of physical and mental violence and to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, including through the prohibition of legal and social transitioning of children who claim to experience gender dysphoria.”
The report contributes to a large global effort of fear mongering about the threat that transness and gender dysphoria pose to traditional beliefs on gender, most of which are based in patriarchal values.
