The Trump administration is launching yet another attack on transgender people. In addition to the President trying to discharge all transgender service members from the U.S. Military, the DOJ and Dept. of Education rescinding guidelines that help protect the civil rights of transgender students, and most recently, moving to define transgender people out of existence by creating a definition of “sex” that, in the eyes of government erases transgender people, the Trump administration is now taking its war against transgender people worldwide.
The U.S. Mission to the UN is waging a battle to remove the word “gender” from key United Nations human rights documents.
“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,” The Guardian reports.
The Trump administration is pushing the UN to change, for example, the term “gender-based violence” to “violence against women.” To do so would be to choose language that is not inclusive of transgender people.
In September, the U.S. State Department “quietly 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,'” The Guardian adds.
“It’s clear the administration is engaged in a broad strategy of erasing transgender people’s existence across the federal government,” Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told The Guardian. “While it’s infuriating they would behave in such an extreme and volatile manner at the United Nations, we are confident their prejudice will lose out to science, reason, and the ongoing fight for human rights.”
In order for the Trump administration to achieve its goal, it will have to form alliances with similarly-focused nations, namely Russia and conservative Islamic countries.