Every woman and girl
About UN Women – what is it? I found myself wondering if it was just one of those fake-official outfits that are nothing but a Twitter account and a person, so I looked it up. It’s a genuine part of the UN – called a UN “entity”…and I don’t really know what that means, but at least it’s not another “Catholic League” which is really just Bill Donohue. It was established by the UN General Assembly in 2010.
It says it’s there for the women and girls.
UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential.
Great, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s pretty much doing the opposite right now.
Today for instance.
They asked no women. None. Zero. The link is to a piece on Medium:
Every June, the world unites to celebrate Pride Month and to promote equality and visibility of the LGBTIQ+ community.
So UN Women could do that by talking to four lesbians, yeah?
But that’s not what they did here.
Geena Rocero (she/her) is a Filipino American supermodel, transgender advocate and founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories of the transgender community worldwide to elevate justice and equality, based in the United States of America.
Rocero is the photo second from left.
Imara Jones (she/her) is a journalist and Founder and Creator of TransLash Media in the United States of America, which tells the stories of trans lives. In 2019 she moderated UN Women’s High-Level meeting on gender diversity beyond binary identities.
Photo first from left.
Amanda Bosco (she/her) is a transgender youth activist from Uganda, advocating for LGBTI rights.
Photo four.
Tarek Zeidan (he/his) is a sexual and bodily rights activist from Beirut, Lebanon, advocating for the rights and protection of LGBTIQ+ individuals and groups in the Middle East and North Africa region, and is the President and Executive Director of Helem, the first LGBT rights organization in the Arab World, founded in Beirut in 2001.
Photo three.
Sorry, wims, it turns out nobody gives a shit about you.
Two or three of them make what looks like a real attempt to look female. The other bloke just doesn’t give a shit, and he doesn’t need to. Move aside lay deez, I’m the woman now.
The other bloke isn’t trying to “look female”; he doesn’t pretend to be a woman. The other three are trying to “look female” because they do claim to be women.
*rereads*
Oh wow, I said that thinking he was another trans or enby claiming to be whatever without changing his appearance, but nope, he’s a man who knows he’s a man and UN Women still spoke to him ahead of an actual woman.
Yep. Stunning, isn’t it.
I think we must be reading that wrong. It’s not U. N. Women. It’s “unwomen.”
Yeah, UN Women has never been the flagship it pretends to be. They have way too many men working in positions that could easily have been filled by a woman, like the Head Statistician. I could name some female statisticians who would have been great.
Anyway, I haven’t had the “pleasure” of working with them myself but I know plenty who do through my work in Africa (which, not coincidentally, is about disorders of pregnancy). They’ve done a lot of work in sanitation, for example, which of course helps women, but also benefits men. But OK, that’s fine.
But recently, things have begun to change. Colleagues of mine trying to get funding for reproductive justice have bumped up against “concerns that the proposal is not inclusive of trans men and women and those who identify as non-binary”. OK, yeah, trans men may need reproductive justice too, and many non-binary folks are biologically female. You could call that an oversight in the language of the proposal that my friend should have included. But what exactly is my friend supposed to do to address reproductive justice for males? What even is that?
Those of us who work in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) are fighting to change attitudes towards women who are menstruating or miscarrying, women who have to make the horrible choice between their lives or their babies. Women are called witches when they miscarry or have to abort to save their lives. They’re excoriated that they killed their babies deliberately.
I don’t want to play in the Oppression Olympics. But forgive me if I care more about actual women being killed by their own biology than validating a trans person’s identity.
Claire, that is so true. And there are a lot of women even in high income countries (especially the United States) who are too poor to get the care they need, and have to make similar hard choices. It’s so easy for the activists to dismiss women as “white” “middle-class” and “imperialist”, because it is the white middle-class women who have the leisure and money to fight for women’s rights.
There was a time when I was in that situation; I could no more afford contraception than I could afford a Porsche; they were both so far out of my reach I put them on a similar status. Fortunately, for me, I was not sexually active at the time, because my extreme depression kept me not only from being sexually active but from being anything-active.
I was also lucky because I lived in a big city where I was eventually able to get to the Health Department and get free contraception once I got past my depression enough to leave the house. Not everyone can get there, not everyone knows that is an option, and a lot of women don’t qualify. I made so little from my disability check that I qualified for food stamps, and I still barely squeaked under the income to get them free. I think it’s become more difficult now.
For a poor woman who is married, or sexually active, this could be a devastating lack. I know, I know, people say “just don’t have sex,, okay?”, but why shouldn’t she if she wants to? And if she’s married and refuses her husband sex, that can sometimes have bad consequences, too.
But, oh, let’s not worry about this. It is way more important that we make sure we get the pronouns correct for a bunch of white, middle-class men who have decided they are women.
Have you noticed the final link in the pretty rainbow-bordered tweet? Whether by accident, design or necessity unwo.men does seem to highlight the ‘men’ part of ‘women’.