NEW YORK — Early Thursday morning, The Guardian reported that the U.S. mission to the United Nations is wanting to remove “gender” from human rights documents, replacing it with “woman.”
From The Guardian:
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 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 remove phrases like “gender-based violence” would be replaced by “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,” said a UN diplomat. The diplomat noted 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 US insistence.
The diplomat, a European, speculated that the inconsistency might reflect a tussle between different members of the US mission.
The is just the latest move by the administration, and third this week, that would hurt the transgender community. Yesterday, the Department of Justice confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court that discriminating against transgender workers would not violate any laws. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Health and Human Services is seeking to define gender only by genitalia, effectively erasing transgender people from consideration by the federal government. In the past, the administration has also moved to ban transgender people from the military and raised barriers to transgender people updating the gender marker on their passports.