US diplomats at the United Nations are seeking to eliminate the word “gender” from UN Human rights documents , in most cases replacing it with ‘ woman ‘ in an apparent move by the Trump administration to strip transgender people of official recognition..
US diplomats at the United Nations are seeking to eliminate the word “gender” from UN Human rights documents , in most cases replacing it with ‘ woman ‘ in an apparent move by the Trump administration to strip transgender people of official recognition.
Background
The American medical community recognizes a distinction between sex – a classification based on bodily characteristics, internal and external — and gender, the socially constructed roles and behaviors typically ascribed to men and women. It also recognizes that no single aspect of sex or gender defines a person’s gender identity — their internal sense of gender, which may not match the sex assigned to them at birth.
The American medical community has called for legal protections for those whose gender identity does not fit squarely into the categories of man or woman, such as transgender and gender-nonconforming people. And several courts have granted them those protections through prohibitions against sex stereotyping.
Around 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. Many states have already passed their own laws protecting the transgender community. It was estimated that in 2008–2009 there were approximately 15,500 transgender individuals either serving on active duty or in the National Guard or Army Reserve forces within the U.S. Military
Analysis
The US mission to the United Nations is seeking to eliminate the word “gender” from UN human rights documents, most often replacing it with “woman” apparently as a part of Trump administration’s campaign to define transgender people out of existence.
At UN’s Third Committee meeting which is concerned with “social, humanitarian and cultural” rights, US officials have been pushing for the rewriting of general assembly policy statements to remove what the administration argues is vague and politically correct language. US diplomats are said to be lobbying to replace the word “gender” with “woman” – thus discounting the experiences of transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
In a draft paper on trafficking introduced by Germany and Philippines, the US wants to remove phrases like “gender based violence” and replace such expressions with references to “violence against women”. A senior UN diplomate retaliated saying that violence against women does not tell the whole story.
It was reported that the Trump administration had drawn up a policy to define gender narrowly as restricted as male or female only and immutable from birth, despite the American Medical Association (AMA) ruling last year that gender and sexual identities are not always binary.
The move signifies a radical reversal from policies brought in by Obama’s administration which essentially allowed gender to be the choice of individuals. Those reforms made official gender designations an individual decision rather than basing them on the sex assigned at birth. Under Mr Obama, congress and federal agencies came down on the side of increased protections for trans people.
Trump’s administration on the other hand have been criticised by the Civil rights groups for their position on transgender rights. Days after being sworn in, Attorney General Jeff Sessions indefinitely suspended the Obama era provision to allow transgender students to us the bathroom of their choosing. Trump’s administration had also attempted to ban transgender individuals from serving in the US military. Last month, the Department of state tacitly changed the name of a webpage 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”
A spokesperson for the US state department said: “In no way is the United States attempting to exclude the protection of transgendered persons, or protection of any person, in any UN resolution. When certain parts of resolutions explicitly refer to issues affecting ‘women and girls’, our negotiators have suggested in several instances to change ‘gender’ to ‘women’ and/or ‘women and girls’ to make the resolutions clearer, more specific, more accurate, and in our view, stronger in the Administration’s efforts to empower women and girls.”
Assessment
Our assessment is that the Trump administration’s decisions on transgenders are reflecting what it sees as an “ideology” of treating gender as an individual choice rather than an unchangeable biological fact.
While it remains relevant to adopt a policy against the use of federal funds to be used for sex reassignment surgery, adopting a legal definition could have far reaching implications for the transgender community resulting in people being excluded from existing civil rights protections.
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