Dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women
UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.
That doesn’t work if women no longer means women but instead means women and men who call themselves women. Men who call themselves women are not subject to the kinds of contempt and neglect and dismissal that women are.
Gender equality is not only a basic human right, but its achievement has enormous socio-economic ramifications. Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth. Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Women lack access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage gaps. They are too often denied access to basic education and health care. Women in all parts of the world suffer violence and discrimination. They are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes.
All of that applies to real women and girls, “natal” women and girls, literal women and girls, not men and boys who decide they too are female despite having male bodies.
This shit isn’t a game. This isn’t dress-up. This isn’t a pantomime or a drag act or cosplay or let’s pretend. This is reality, hard messy painful physical reality. This is girls who miss school several days a month because they don’t have access to menstrual pads or tampons. This is girls who are married off at age 16 or 14 or 12, with all the future life prospects that implies. This is girls who are impregnated at 16 or 14 or 12 and who are left with fistulas after the birth, and are exiled to a shed for the rest of their lives. This is rape jokes. This is not letting women talk. This is always hiring the man. This is always promoting the man. This is not a game.
For many years, the United Nations faced serious challenges in its efforts to promote gender equality globally, including inadequate funding and no single recognized driver to direct UN activities on gender equality issues. In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly created UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to address such challenges. In doing so, UN Member States took an historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and the empowerment of women.
But now its Twitter account is promoting the words of a misogynist young man rebuking a woman for saying that women are women.
This relates so much to that report of trans people reporting being discriminated against. When women are discriminated against, we are not hired, we are paid less, we are sexually harassed or assaulted, we are not taken seriously, we are treated like pariahs because of our periods, we are ignored, we are beaten and killed.
What percentage of the 73% of trans reporting discrimination are mainly reporting their peevishness at someone using the wrong pronoun? Even when they retain all their masculine characteristics and dress, but insist they are really a woman?
But what about sexual inequality?
Mostly, I think, because it’s not clear what that means. It could mean equality in sexual activity, and using “gender” instead gets rid of that ambiguity.