President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have voiced growing frustration with European allies who have failed to pull their weight in national security battles around the world. Our friends from across the pond are also undermining the U.S. at global institutions.
During the 70th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in March, the U.S. circulated a draft resolution, “Protection of women and girls through appropriate terminology.” The resolution would have required the entire UN system to use a binary sex-based definition of “gender” instead of the multitude of definitions it currently incorporates in order to appease the Global Trade Union’s Caucus; the Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Caucus; the Women’s Rights Caucus; the Young Feminist Caucus; and so on.
The resolution was co-sponsored by 12 other countries, but in a procedural maneuver, the European Union offered a “no action motion” to block debate. The motion was adopted with 23 votes in favor, 3 against, and 17 abstentions—countries that would have likely voted for the resolution but don’t want to get in the EU’s crosshairs.
The extraordinary move by the Trump administration confronted the redefinition of men and women that has taken place in international bodies, just as the president’s team has corrected a number of domestic policies with the strong support of groups like Independent Women, Concerned Women for America, and many others. European countries are attempting to thwart this effort and are lobbying against the U.S. instead of, as Secretary Rubio encouraged in his speech at the Munich Security Conference, embracing our “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
To bring a resolution of this magnitude to the UN’s annual two-week feminist confab was gutsy. Thousands of women descend on New York from all over the world to voice their opinions on the world’s woes, confront repressive and discriminatory practices around the world, and, more troubling, interject their radical views into official global documents that set the standard for many policies that nation-states implement in their own countries.
In contrast, the Biden administration adopted much of the language used in UN policies, especially when it comes to gender and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
One of the dozens of CSW side events I attended last year made me think I had been transported into a 1970s hippie sitcom with rainbow flags hanging on the walls, women in beads in a circle kvetching about everything that upsets them in the world. Turns out that mostly means men.
What were these feminist radicals most complaining about this year? In the words of one of the speakers at a side event, it is the “pro-family organizations” who have disrupted their grip on these global bodies and the “heteronormative patriarchy” that seeks to “help women and girls by putting forward policies to establish and strengthen nuclear families.”
According to these European-led discussions, Christian ideals of home and family are the biggest threat to women and must be confronted and opposed.
The UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) held an event, co-sponsored by Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, in which they released a report titled “Understanding Backlash Against Gender Equality.”
A policy advisor for UN Women bemoaned the fact that “anti-gender activists have moved from the margins to the center of multilateral spaces.” She suggested that one of the strategies of the “anti-gender” plan is “norm-spoiling,” a term referring to the “strategic, coordinated efforts by actors to undermine, weaken, or reverse established international norms, particularly those relating to women's rights, gender equality, and LGBTQI+ rights,” particularly at the UN.
To these women, biological men playing in women’s sports is fair and should be applauded, and young women cutting off their breasts and taking male hormones for some unhealthy belief that they are in the wrong body is an “established international norm.”
These international women’s groups have run roughshod over other nation-states, including those Asian and African countries that oppose this agenda.
The U.S. resolution sent a shot across the bow, and even though it did not pass, there is a growing sense among like-minded nations that there is hope to stop the gender train from going further down the track.
Yet, traditional cultural groups are outnumbered and outgunned at the UN. While the Trump administration has corrected many of the wrongs in U.S. policy with the support of the American people and his conservative base, allied countries need the same kind of support to believe there is a fighting chance at the UN. Those fighting against radical gender ideology should be lobbying these countries to vote with the U.S. and the Trump administration should be encouraged to offer more resolutions that protect the rights of women.
“As contemporary anti-gender actors reactivate narratives about the naturalness and universality of the gender binary and hierarchy, we must not only seek to understand the regressive aspects of these narratives but also their constitutive effects,” warned another UN Women speaker. “We need to ask the question like what kind of world are these actors trying to build?”
What kind of world are groups opposed to radical gender ideology trying to build? Simply put, one that recognizes the God-given uniqueness and dignity of men and women.
Diana L. Banister is a political and communications strategist, a former Trump administration official, a senior advisor to the Center for Family and Human Rights, and an Independent Women's visiting fellow.