Reem Alsalem is a courageous woman. For the four years that she has been the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, she has taken unpopular positions which are now gradually being vindicated. While all her reports are well worth perusing, her latest report to the 59th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council on emerging forms of violence against women and girls is a must-read.
While Alsalem surveys a number of emerging forms of violence against women, such as deepfake AI-generated pornography, she spends almost half of her report discussing a new form of violence against women: their conceptual erasure. More specifically, Alsalem decries the elevation of “gender” over “sex” as the means for identifying and demarcating the concept of “women.” She makes several excellent points in this regard.
First, she says, you cannot protect in law what you cannot clearly identify in law. Alsalem asserts “there has been a concerted international push to delink the definition of men and women from their biological sex and erase the legal category of ‘women.’ Such efforts have undermined the practical achievement of equality between men and women. Women are therefore being denied their rightful recognition as a distinct category in law and society. It is a form of ‘coercive inclusion’ that relies on the expectation that women will be kind enough to sacrifice their own recognition and protection for the sake of others.”
Women have seen their very identity distorted beyond belief: they have found themselves being called “uterus havers,” “menstruators,” “birthing persons” and other terms unmentionable in polite society. They’ve been gaslit with the idea that some women might need to have prostate exams, and some have been forced to call their rapists women in courts of law. Alsalem comments, “If the category of biological females is erased or fundamentally decoupled from sex-based oppression, that oppression becomes increasingly difficult to identify and, thus, to combat.” Just so.
Second, much-needed data collection concerning women is corrupted by their conceptual erasure. Alsalem’s investigation notes that at least 21 countries have implemented data collection efforts where gender was substituted for the demographic category of sex. This is especially troubling in clinical trials, for it is well known that there are real sex differences in the body’s response to illness and to pharmaceutical treatments. For example, certain drugs produce almost opposite responses in male and female bodies, and thus including male bodies among the female cohort of a drug trial will obscure vital information needed by women and their doctors.
But it’s not only medical data being corrupted. Alsalem points to crime data as another area of great concern. She points out that “since women commit a very low number of violent crimes, particularly sex offenses, even small variations can have statistically significant effects. Those statistical anomalies have been detected already in Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom. In Norway, for example, after the introduction of self-identification of gender identity, the number of rapes committed by women rose from 12 in 2015 to 44 in 2017.”
Third, the conceptual erasure of women serves as a justification for the elimination of single-sex spaces, sports, quotas and awards.
While the U-turn on sports has been thankfully effected in most cases — there will be no more Imane Khelifs and Lia Thomases —single-sex spaces remain contested. The recent case of nurse Sandie Peggie in Scotland, where female nurses were expected to change clothes in front of a biologically male doctor who asserted he was a woman, is illustrative. The National Health Service accused Peggie of gross misconduct when she complained. After the stunning U.K. High Court decision ruling earlier this year that sex is in fact biological, Peggie was cleared of that charge. Now the tables are turned, and Peggie is seeking employment tribunal action against the hospital that punished her for speaking out.
Prisons, hospital wards and shelters are of particular concern to Alsalem, who notes that these are all facilities where the most vulnerable of women may be housed. She points out that “female prisoners, when housed and required to share facilities with male prisoners, experience harassment and physical, psychological and sexual violence. Data from Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States indicate that males who identify as women retain a male pattern of criminality, including with regard to violent offenses, including against women and children.”
Finally, Alsalem condemns the bullying and harassment of women who believe in the material reality of their sex. Women who have spoken up have been labeled “Nazis” who are engaged in “genocide.” Such women have been subject to death threats, harassment, attacks on their employment and public vilification simply for believing that they have a right to define themselves as females. Such attacks are a gross denial of women’s right to belief and speech.
Alsalem’s conclusion rings out clearly: “acknowledging the reality of biological sex is crucial in addressing the specific forms of oppression faced by women and girls. Policies that seek to erase women as a group that experience discrimination based on their sex, as well as erase women-specific language, therefore do not only constitute unlawful discrimination but also violence against women and girls.”
She is absolutely right. This attempted erasure of sex is merely a new form of violence against women. As such, the nations of the world are obligated under international law to fight this pernicious trend. So how was her message received at the Human Rights Council? Prominent U.N. agencies, such as U.N. Women, UNFPA, WHO and UNICEF, rejected her message, as did 37 countries, including Canada, Colombia, Germany and the Netherlands.
No matter. I’m happily placing my bet that it is Reem Alsalem who is on the right side of history on this question.