The Dark Side of Global ‘Gender Equality’
Kimberly Ells /
Dr. Anthony Fauci just announced the Biden administration’s commitment to “advance gender equality at home and around the world.” This is underscored by President Joe Biden’s executive order allowing biological males to compete in girls and women’s sports and removing justification for female spaces in schools.
We are watching the deliberate deconstruction of biological distinctions before our eyes. But there is much more at stake here than women’s privacy or women’s sports, though those concerns remain vital.
The international push for gender equality—rather than women’s equality or women’s and men’s equality—has been intentional, and the United Nations is a major player in the global push to de-sex society in the name of gender equality.
For decades, the term “gender equality” has been inserted into numerous U.N. initiatives, and for decades, most everyone assumed this meant equality between men and women.
If this was ever the case, it is no longer. Due to increasing codification surrounding transgenderism, the word “gender” can now be used to encompass “gender identity,” which promotes and protects the legal ability of individuals to claim a sex that is not manifested by their physical bodies.
The international agenda to decimate the distinctions between men and women by co-opting the word “gender” became clear at the U.N.’s Human Rights COuncil in 2019.
A resolution was put forward that claimed to protect the rights of intersex athletes to participate in women’s sports. Revisions to the document that would have clarified that it applied only to intersex athletes rather than biological males wishing to infiltrate women’s sports were rejected by those pushing the document.
This revealed that the resolution was intended to cast a much wider and more sinister net.
The resolution cited numerous U.N. documents that include the word “gender,” including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals, and nearly every U.N. document that has ever used the word “gender” or addressed “gender discrimination” in any way. And this is where it gets tricky.
In listing all these human rights instruments, this resolution sought to retroactively infuse virtually every previous reference to “gender” with the meaning of “gender identity.”
This means that instead of these instruments protecting the interests of biological women and girls under the banner of gender equality, as they were originally presumed to do, they would now protect the interests of men presenting as women and women presenting as men, not only in sports but in virtually any conceivable circumstance.
Countries that supported this resolution or any future resolution like it would essentially be conceding that every document they previously signed on to that addressed “gender” were really addressing “gender identity.”
These countries could potentially become subject to monitoring by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council to ensure they were fully embracing and enforcing transgender ideology, which renders biological distinctions meaningless.
This is a fantastic bait-and-switch that weaponizes the word “gender” and turns the weapon on women and, in turn, the family.
The Fall of UN Women
But perhaps more stunning than this attempt to turn all previous U.N. references to gender on their heads is the transformation of U.N. Women itself.
U.N. Women is the U.N.’s official body dedicated to advancing women’s rights around the globe. But in July 2019, U.N. Women announced it would no longer focus solely on women’s rights but will focus on “equality of all genders.”
A representative clarified that this included transgender, questioning or queer, intersex, pan sexual, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and “the full range of gender diversities that exist.”
The executive director of U.N. Women further said that gender identity is a core value of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. This means that millions of dollars earmarked to further the rights and well-being of women and girls worldwide will likely be hijacked and redistributed to promote radical gender ideology.
This bold change, of course, by U.N. Women represents the official abandonment of women’s rights at the highest U.N. levels and signals the attempted obliteration of biological sex as a meaningful or defensible designation in society.
As this occurs in concert with the scrubbing of sex-specific words such as mother, father, son, and daughter from public language, the family—which is formed and maintained by the interplay of the two fundamental sexes—will be thrown under the crushing wheels of the gender equality regime. And women will lose the legal protections they have fought so long and hard to gain.
The article has been corrected. The resolution discussed above was heard in the U.N. Human Rights Council, not the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we will consider publishing your remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature.