Free to Be Female

            The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns an effort at the United Nations that threatens the rights of biological females. It seems that all those men who have decided that they are women are threatening the rights, privileges, and freedoms of those who are actually female from birth.

            Grace Melton posted an article titled “How Gender Identity Extremism at UN Threatens Rights of Real Women and Girls.” She notes that the United Nation’s 63^rd Commission on the Status of Women was held recently in New York City. While such conferences usually define “women and women’s issues solely in terms of reproduction,” the discussions of this conference will have “the priority theme of access to social protection systems and to public services and sustainable infrastructure for gender equality, and the empowerment of women and girls.”

Although too often these women’s conferences fall into the trap of defining women and women’s solely in terms of reproduction (obviously, an important components of womanhood, though not the only one), a newer danger to addressing women’s genuine needs was on full display at this conference.

Rather than just reducing women’s needs and priorities to issues pertaining to their biological and reproductive capabilities (as though women care solely about sexual and reproductive health), this radical ideology now threatens to erase biological women from the discussion altogether.

The rapidly changing and ever-expanding ideology of so-called gender identity threatens to undermine women’s economic, social, and political progress in unprecedented ways.

Nowadays, the term gender identity is used to describe an individual’s self-perception as male, female, both, neither, or something along a spectrum.

The word “gender” in international legal documents has historically been understood to mean biological sex (male or female), and thus laws and policies that are implemented to achieve gender equality are intended specifically to help women and girls.

However, policies that treat people based upon their gender identity undermine decades of efforts to remedy historical and societal injustices that disproportionally affect women and girls by benefiting any male who “self-identifies” as a woman.

            The Heritage Foundation and the Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition hosted a recent event called “Equal or Erased?: The Rights of Women and Girls in the Age of Gender Identity.” Besides the moderator, there were four diverse speakers on the panel who addressed “how gender-identity ideology harms women and girls.” The women come from diverse backgrounds politically and religiously, but they “were united in their conviction that gender identity ideology, and the policies it demands, pose real threats to women and girls.”       

          

            Activists were enraged at the audacity that someone would hold an event to discuss the needs of biological women and girls and not include transgender women. The bottom line is that biological women and girls are losing their rights as females in many ways and not just on athletic fields and tracks. It is time that all women and girls educate themselves about the problem and reading Melton’s article and listening to the panel discussion is a good place to start that learning process.