The Language of Women’s Rights
Reports from the front line of an evolving debate
As the 63rd Commission on the Status of Women rolled on at New York’s United Nations Headquarters, talks and panels about women’s issues that received less attention — with all the controversial bits included — sprang up around the city. Panels with radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys, hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), were controversial enough that they didn’t release the location of events until two hours before they were set to start.
Sheila Jeffreys, author, professor, and feminist activist, has been hounded and deplatformed from speaking out against the issues surrounding gender-based, as opposed to sex-based, rights for women and girls. The first panel was Gender Hurts: The Feminist Fight Against Gender. The mostly women (and four men, I counted) who came to hear Jeffreys and a panel of detransitioned young women from the Pique Resilience Project did so at risk of discovery. The views these women hold — that sex is innate and gender is constructed — have gotten women fired, ostracized, deplatformed, physically attacked, online mobbed, kicked off Twitter, and interrogated by police.
Speaking out for women — defined as based on physical traits, rather than a broader coalition of women that includes trans women — has become controversial in this era where even discussing changes in the definition of the word “woman” results in harassment. Some Western activists declare the liberation of women from the confines of biology, and these ideas are being disseminated to the developing world through NGOs and international aid organizations. The U.N. is helping, broadening the scope of the conversation to be more gender inclusive, and less about sex-based rights.
Distributing Western feminism to developing countries has led to broader awareness in the West of just how far women have to go to achieve equality and to have their rights valued globally. But as that feminism turns from being primarily about rights based in a woman’s sex to being about rights based in gender, it is important to consider the impact of that shift.
Joining Jeffreys on WoLF’s second panel, “the Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights,” were Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans and Maureen O’Hara. The Declaration asserts that women’s rights are not based in gender (i.e., societal roles and stereotypes that can apply to any individual who identifies as such). Instead, radical feminist activists believe that notions of gender identity are not liberating, but oppressive, and that replacing sex-based rights in documentation from humanitarian organizations does more harm than good for women and girls.
Gender, as opposed to sex designation, gives rise to the idea that body is not an essential component of one’s worth. That has the ring of liberation and truth. Certainly, a person’s worth is not based in their bodily limitations, but in the innate, natural rights that every human being can claim, whether or not those rights are acknowledged by government entities.
NGOs and aid organizations that embrace gender-based feminism believe they are lifting up populations, bringing open-minded acceptance to those within developing nations who do not subscribe to traditional values and sex-based designations. When applied to gays and lesbians, or any women and men who opt for different paths in life than those selected by their gender designation at birth, this appears to make sense. If developed nations advocate for broader rights for more people — i.e., the right to pursue individual drive and self-determination free from the shackles of imposed gender roles — should we not bring them to the people served by aid and outreach? Given that most of the global funding for aid programs comes from the developed West, shouldn’t our values be delivered along with money, tents, and bags of rice?
In one sense, the answer is of course. The values that uphold and facilitate democracy and human rights should be exported along with clothing, food, and education. But in another sense, doesn’t this practice offer a version of colonialism? Is there any difference between 16th-century Christian missionaries bringing Jesus and medicine to impoverished populations and the 21st-century U.N. bringing gender-nonconformity and aid packages?
Jeffreys spoke about the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which identified women based on sex. She argued that, as the language of gender has replaced the language of sex, it has become increasingly difficult to secure women’s rights. The main reason is it treats the biological needs of women, defined based on sex, the same as the needs of trans women, who do not have the same biological reality.
The concept of gender, as laid out by feminists in the mid-20th century, was about taking back the definition of woman from cultural, sex-based stereotypes, and giving women the agency to live according to their own wishes instead of those prescribed for them. This was a liberating concept, and allowed women to step out of the kitchen, the nursery, and the corset. But the 21st-century version that separates women from their female bodies and declares the feminization of women to be nothing more than a social construct — not partially a social construct, but entirely — takes the idea further than most 20th-century feminists intended.
Because gender is about socially visible traits of femininity and masculinity, it serves to keep women and men in their roles. If women, as a societal group, are innately subservient, then why shouldn’t they be excluded from educational opportunities? Why shouldn’t they be kept home from the workforce?
They shouldn’t, of course. But gender-based understandings define women, in part, on femininity, which inherently places them in a subservient role in most traditional cultures. Is this the message we want to bring to developing nations, where women are already vulnerable because of the complications and consequences of their biological sex?
Does the U.N. want to perpetrate the idea that a woman is the set of traits that have been used to oppress them? Or does the U.N. want to liberate women from the oppression they suffer as a consequence of their reproductive systems?
These are the questions that gender critical radical feminists are asking. And while they are often criticized for not being trans inclusive, the question still remains. If women are something other than their biological reality, something other than adult human females, then how can they be protected from discrimination that results from that biology? And how can trans women be protected from the unique types of discrimination they experience?
On the Gender Hurts panel, Jeffreys stated:
Women are trained to be nice to men, women cannot bear to see a man unhappy, women want to serve these men. We need proper radical feminism where women want to stop serving men, and refuse to do so.
That’s what feminism used to be about — the liberation of women from sex-based stereotypes. To include gender as a protected category alters the breadth and scope of women’s liberation. And exporting those values to women in the developing world risks exporting and deepening women’s oppression.
