UN Women’s Rights Czar Fights Back Against Trans-Feminist Smears

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

NEW YORK, July 25 (C-Fam) Media and advocacy organizations paid to promote gender ideology are viciously attacking a top UN women’s rights expert because she is against gender ideology. She is not cowering. She is fighting back.

“To label advocates for women’s rights like me, and thousands of others, as mouthpieces of extremist, right-wing agendas proves precisely the point that I made in my report,” said Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, in response to the latest attack in an article published in Geneva Solutions, a UN-satellite media group.

“Women’s rights defenders are often threatened, smeared and undermined for asserting their dignity and claiming their equality and safety. Ironically, the article reinforces that very dynamic,” Alsalem emphasized.

Alsalem’s latest report is a dagger at the heart of the UN gender bureaucracy. It called on countries to fight against gender ideology and to defend women based on their biological status as women. A fiery debate about women’s rights and gender ideology is raging within the UN system as a result.

Alsalem has been ostracized by the global women’s rights establishment and is being attacked viciously by government-backed trans-friendly women’s rights organizations and their media allies. The attacks are also coming from within the UN system, including the very UN rights office that should support her mandate.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights initially refused to publish her response on the UN website, according to a post on X by Alsalem on Monday. Alsalem said the UN rights office used the “pretext” that she had not shared her response with one of the groups who attacked her in the article, the Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI). The group is backed by Planned Parenthood’s Canadian branch and promotes sexual rights for children, including access to cross-hormone treatment and transgender surgeries.

“It is important to note that mandate holders are not required to share statements with civil society ahead of publishing it as this procedure. Furthermore, SRI has not afforded me the same treatment, and has not shared any of its articles/statements on my work with me before or after going public,” explained Alsalem.

The UN rights office eventually published Alsalem’s response. In her statement she accused Geneva Solutions of misrepresenting her position and failing in basic professional standards of journalism, publishing unsupported claims by SRI.

Alsalem’s statement also defends her work and details the “substantial global support that my positions receive, including from hundreds of individual women and women’s organizations, including on issues such as gender identity, discrimination against women and girls, and prostitution. In fact, this support was clear in the positive reception of my latest report (A/HRC/59/47) to the Human Rights Council.”

In the end, Alsalem was ultimately grateful for the debate and the increased visibility it is giving her work. “I would have hoped for and expected a fair and balanced coverage, I do once again appreciate the visibility and attention that your article, as biased as it is, has brought to my work—however skewed the framing may be. I continue to have faith in the public’s ability to use their own reason and common sense to discern for themselves, which is exactly what gives me hope for the future.”

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