Tag: Gender Ideology

movements

Unholy alliances: how divorcing sex from procreation married two movements

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The abortion and transgender movements have been linked for a very long time; parents and lawmakers must first understand where these ideas came from in order to combat them.

by Sheena Rodriguez

(Live Action News) In 2023, Planned Parenthood Action claimed that abortion and ‘transgender care’ go ‘hand-in-hand.’ But few know the history behind transgender ideology and why the nation’s number one abortion provider became so invested in trying to reach young people with pro-transgender sex-ed materials and services.

Activist groups such as Advocates for Youth (AFY), Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, and other organizations aligned with the Future of Sex Ed coalition, continue to shape society by employing digital platforms, educational programs, and a variety of resources to promote abortion, birth control, and transgender ideology. These radical groups seek to counteract parental rights and re-engineer the attitudes of future generations.

Many Planned Parenthood donors are beginning to question why the organization’s mission appears to have shifted — but has it, really? As this series will show, pro-abortion and transgender ideologies have been linked for a very long time.

Parents and lawmakers must first understand where these ideas came from in order to combat them.

(Read Parts Two and Three of this series at the links.)

Key Takeaways:

  • A look at the history of collaboration between abortion advocates and advocates of transgender ideology reveals shared, disturbing philosophies.
  • These advocates all believed in the idea that minors can give “consent” to any number of things related to sex — sexual activity, abortion, and ‘gender transition.’ 
  • Over the past two centuries, efforts were made to distinguish between homosexuality and those who committed child sexual abuse (leading to the classification of ‘pedophiles’). Then, those who held to the idea that children are ‘sexual from birth’ and can ‘consent’ led efforts to sympathetically portray pedophilia as ‘innate’ and acceptable with ‘consent’.
  • Efforts were also made to distinguish ‘sexual expression’ as separate from procreation, drawing in the cooperation of pro-birth control and pro-abortion eugenicists.
  • Disturbing philosophical ideas led to early “sex reassignment” experimentation; one of the doctors performing the earliest surgeries had participated in torturous experiments on human victims within the Nazi regime.

The False Idea of Minor ‘Consent’: 

Neuroscientific and psychological communities have long understood that a minor’s brain development, particularly the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, is not complete until 22-25 years of age. The prefrontal cortex regulates behavior, assesses risk, and enables comprehension and proper planning. Consequently, children, minors, and young adults are particularly prone to engaging in risky or dangerous behavior. They cannot developmentally comprehend potentially life-long detrimental consequences.

Yet, despite this scientific reality, the idea that youth can provide ‘consent’ for sex, life-ending abortions, and life-altering ‘gender-affirming care’ is promoted by purveyors of comprehensive sex education. 

This idea is foundationally based on concepts propagated by early proponents of the transgender movement.

Context

After World War I, severe economic hardship in Germany contributed to widespread prostitution in Berlin, involving minors and children. As awareness of child development and the harms of sexual abuse grew in the late 1800s and early 1900s, documented abuse cases prompted efforts to distinguish homosexuality from child sexual abuse (p. 271). Consequently, at the turn of the 20th century, “sexual scientists” began using the term “paedophile” to describe child sexual abusers (p. 271).

 Read the entire article here at Live Action News

 By Sheena Rodriguez. This article was originally published at Live Action News and is reprinted here in part with permission.

Live Action exists to shift culture and law on abortion. Through compelling educational media, human interest storytelling, investigative reporting, and community activism, Live Action reveals the humanity of preborn children and exposes the abortion industry’s exploitation of women and families for profit.

Marching for LGBTI human rights

US Human Rights Report leaves out LGBTs

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Although it may be hard to argue that Trump’s foreign policy really is “America first”, it is encouraging to see that his administration is sensibly ignoring the woke causes that fracture society along the lines of victimhood status.

By Iulia-Elena Cazan, C-FAM

The just released U.S. Annual Human Rights Report has omitted references to homosexual/trans. Leading homosexual/trans advocacy group calls the pending report “a travesty and subversion of Congressional intent.”

Every year, the U.S. State Department releases a report assessing the human rights situation in every country. While the report is Congressionally mandated, its scope and focus can change from one U.S. administration to another, depending on the administration’s priorities and interpretation of human rights.

The Washington Post wrote that this year’s “draft reports examined by the Post contain no reference to gender-based violence or violence against LGBTQ+ (sic) people.”

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International criticized the document for “downplaying” certain human rights violations faced by “marginalized populations, including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ (sic) people throughout the world.”

Klasing criticized U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for attempting to “limit the scope” of the report. She says Rubio instructed the drafters of the report “to cut everything not legislatively mandated” and that the “Trump administration has turned this report into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices.”

Last year’s U.S. Human Rights report, released under the Biden Administration, lists Amnesty International, OutRight International, the International Lesbian and Gay Association – Europe (ILGA-EUROPE), among other groups, as resources on the topic of “Acts of violence, criminalization, and other abuses based on sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.” The Biden report maintained a special section for human rights violations based on one’s gender identity and criticized several countries for not allowing homosexual/trans couples to adopt children.

Narrowing the scope of the report and deleting controversial references to rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity is consistent with Trump’s foreign policy, which is opposed to gender ideology and states that gender identity “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”

In a statement delivered at an event co-hosted by C-Fam (publisher of Friday Fax) earlier this year, the U.S. representative said that the U.S. mission has engaged in “tough negotiations in a wide variety of U.N. resolutions, fighting against gender ideology, and calling votes if necessary, to advance President Trump’s America First foreign policy.” Since Trump took office, the U.S. Mission to the U.N. has consistently rejected any references to gender ideology in U.N. documents and programs.

References to sexual orientation and gender identity remain highly controversial at the U.N. and are rejected by many UN Member States whose moral, cultural, and religious values stand in opposition to a progressive interpretation of human rights. These countries often adopt an originalist interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and criticize Western countries and some U.N. bodies for extending the UDHR beyond its scope.

According to the Washington Post, a senior State Department official said [this year’s] “Human Rights report focuses on core issues” and that “the Trump administration will bring a new focus to some issues, including freedom of expression.”

By Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

AI censorship

EU turbocharges censorship of conservatives with AI regulation

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Under the latest AI regulation from the EU, tech companies will be forced to censor content from conservative outlets under the guise of stopping ‘hate-speech.’

The EU Commission General-Purpose AI Code of Practice requires AI developers and tech companies to ensure that general-purpose AI models are “safe,” including through censorship of content that is “hateful, radicalizing, or false.”

The new regulation has the potential to turbocharge censorship and social control on all major tech platforms. Along with the notorious EU Digital Services Act, the regulation is expected to lead to new self-imposed automated AI censorship tools across all major technology platforms.

A section of the newly published standards highlights “harmful manipulation” as a specific major risk and appears to define it by reference to populist political narratives against EU transgender policies and mass immigration programs.

“Harmful manipulation” is defined in the regulation as “the strategic distortion of human behavior or beliefs by targeting large populations or high-stakes decision-makers through persuasion, deception, or personalized targeting.” This, the regulation explains, “could undermine democratic processes and fundamental rights, including exploitation based on protected characteristics.” Protected characteristics in the EU context is understood widely to refer to issues such as migration status or sexual orientation and gender identity.

The regulation requires tech companies to first identify a broad set of potential “systemic risks” under the categories of public health, safety, public security, fundamental rights, and society as a whole. Other specific dangers identified in the regulation include “misalignment with human values (e.g. disregard for fundamental rights)” and “discriminatory bias.” Once such risks are identified, AI developers and tech companies must then analyze and mitigate any potential systemic risks by “monitoring and filtering the model’s inputs and/or outputs.”

The standards are a “voluntary tool” designed to show that tech companies comply with the EU’s legislation on artificial intelligence, known as the AI Act. Even though they are only voluntary, companies that adopt the standards will be deemed to comply with the AI Act. “This will reduce their administrative burden and give them more legal certainty than if they proved compliance through other methods,” The EU Commission says.

The standards are predominantly prospective. They are not so much geared toward addressing existing problems in AI models as much as ensuring that future models comply with the standards by design so that the output of AI models conforms to the standards.

The new regulation is in addition to already exhausting censorship measures tech companies are required to adopt under the EU Digital Services Act. The EU Commission already required large tech companies to censor through the Code of Conduct on Disinformation. When it as first adopted in 2018 it was only a voluntary regulation, but it is now binding under the 2025 EU Digital Services Act adopted earlier this year.

The EU Digital Services Act requires large online platforms to censor content in line with the priorities of the EU Commission. The disinformation regulation expressly requires tech companies to censor and promote official EU propaganda through content moderation, demonetization, fact-checking, and counter-information.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance criticized the censorship rules of the EU Digital Services Act at an AI Summit in Paris in February this year.

“We feel strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias,” he said, “and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.” He also warned against the EU AI Act and its possible effect on innovation.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D 

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

UN human rights official

UN human rights official rejects gender ideology

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A top UN human rights official is making waves and helping to protect women by rejecting gender ideology and defending biological sex.

A war of words has broken out at the UN as the top UN human rights official for women told governments to define gender based on biological sex. She also told governments to stop using gender-neutral language when referring to women. “You cannot protect what you cannot define,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls.

“I never imagined the day would come where the mandate would deem it necessary to prepare a report affirming that the words ‘women’ and ‘girls’ refer to distinct biological and legal categories,” said Alsalem as she presented her explosive new report at the 59th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Alsalem said the topic of her report provoked “visceral reactions” and that powerful governments and UN agencies tried to discredit her.

The report on “sex-based” protections for women in international law is the biggest blow to gender ideology since the concept of “gender” was first added to UN policy. The report says gender ideology violates international law and harms women and girls. It also calls out governments for attempting to erase references to “mothers”, “women,” and “girls” in policies and programs.

Alsalem called on governments to preserve sex-based categories in language, policies, and data. She said a failure to do so has “devastating” consequences for women because it leads governments to overlook their unique vulnerabilities and exposes them to increased violence and discrimination.

“Erasing women and women-specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong. It is demeaning. It is regressive and constitutes one of the worst forms of violence against women and girls that they can experience,” Alsalem said. Gender-neutral terms promoted by Western governments and UN agencies in recent years include referring to mothers as “pregnant or birthing persons” and referring to women as “bleeders” and “persons who menstruate.”

Alsalem explained that international law protects women based on their biological sex, not their subjective self-identification and that “gender identity” is not a protected legal category. She said that women are entitled to specific protections from violence, including women-only spaces, and that individuals who subjectively self-identify as transgender do not have a right to these same protections based on their subjective self-identification.

The largest area of UN policy and programming where gender ideology has made an impact is “violence against women and girls”. Discarding decades of sex-based laws and policies to protect women, over the last two decades Western governments have promoted the new category of “gender-based violence,” which is not contained in any UN treaty. These policies conflate gender with LGBT issues, thus diluting the focus on women.

The European Union told Alsalem that the gender approach was required under international law. Switzerland and the Netherlands called Alsalem’s approach regressive. Colombia, speaking on behalf of 37 countries, mostly from Europe and Latin America, told Alsalem that her approach was a “step back” for human rights.

Canada said that “gender is a social construct, not confined to anatomy, and vital for understanding how discrimination and violence operate in diverse contexts.” Germany said that “binary classifications and exclusionary terminology can marginalize groups such as LGBTQI+ persons, sex workers, people with disabilities, and those experiencing homelessness.”

Leading UN agencies, including UN Women, UNFPA, WHO, and UNICEF, also rejected Alsalem’s recommendations. They claimed that polices and gender-neutral “gender-based violence” programs are required by international law.

Alsalem pushed back against her critics. She said that biological sex was not “taboo or an outdated concept, but an “innate, immutable, and fundamental aspect of human existence for women and for men alike.”

The Holy See, Kuwait, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Sudan expressed support for Alsalem.

Alsalem has also received pushback at the UN and beyond for her stance against prostitution, and conversion therapies, and for defending women-only sports.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D and Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

C-Fam is documenting abortion pressure from UN

C-Fam is documenting abortion pressure from UN

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C-Fam has created a database which tracks the pressure from the United Nations directed at countries on abortion as well as sexual identity and gender identity.

Countries around the world are under pressure to liberalise their abortion laws and enshrine special protections and recognition on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in their laws and policies, all in the name of human rights.

None of the nine core UN human rights treaties mentions SOGI, nor establishes a right to abortion.  These topics remain highly controversial in General Assembly and other negotiations, and would not have been agreed to by the diplomats who negotiated the treaty texts.  However, beginning in the 1990s, the expert committees that monitor compliance with the treaties by the states that ratified them began to exceed their mandates.  They started including pressure on abortion and SOGI in their communications with member states.  While these communications are not legally binding, unlike the actual texts of the treaties, they can still be influential, particularly when they are citied by activist courts within countries looking to change their laws.

More recently, a new mechanism was established by the Human Rights Council, called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).  Unlike the treaty bodies and other special procedures associated with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in the UPR, countries are reviewed on their human rights records, not by independent experts, but by their fellow nations.  Countries being reviewed receive brief recommendations from other UN member states, and mark them as either “supported” or “noted.”

Up to now, there has been a dearth of information about this kind of pressure. Two years ago, C-Fam created a database that tracks all of this pressure. This online database tracks the pressure directed at countries on abortion and SOGI in both the UPR and the observations of the treaty bodies.  Using this tool, anyone can look up, for example, what the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is saying to El Salvador on the subject of abortion, with the relevant paragraphs excerpted from each sequential review the committee performed of the country.  Links to the full reports are also included for reference.

In the UPR, every country is reviewed in a four-to-five-year cycle, and the process is currently in its fourth cycle since it began in 2008.  Using the C-Fam database, visitors can look up what recommendations on SOGI and abortion were received by a country during its review, and see how it responded to each recommendation.  Also included is a list of all the relevant recommendations that country made to other countries throughout the same UPR cycle.  For example, one can see that in the third UPR cycle, New Zealand both issued and received recommendations on SOGI.  New Zealand expressed support for ending discrimination on the basis of SOGI in a general way, but stopped short of supporting calls to formally enshrine SOGI explicitly in its nondiscrimination law.

The database is intended to be a tool for research and advocacy, enabling users to quickly access information that can be difficult to locate without knowledge of the UN’s human rights websites. It also provides a one-stop resource for people in any country to see how their government is responding to pressure within the UPR system and hold their elected officials to account.  Similarly, it allows users to see firsthand the extent of treaty body overreach on issues that fall outside their mandates and do not enjoy consensus at any level within the UN system.  Forthcoming articles will showcase some developing trends and observations drawn from this important data.

Using the new database, in the coming weeks, the Friday Fax will report on recent instances of pressure or lack thereof on and from governments.

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

UN Document defeated

Europeans furious the U.S. has blocked new UN document

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The U.S. government has blocked the adoption of a new UN document from the Population Commission over its inclusion of “gender ideology.”

The U.S. government has blocked the adoption of the final agreement of the just-concluded UN population commission over “gender ideology.” This is seen as a loss for the left at the UN, including the European Union. Traditional countries were grateful.

Spencer Chretien, a Trump administration official at the U.S. State Department, expressed frustration that U.S. positions were not incorporated in the final draft. As a result, the Dutch chairman of the commission withdrew the draft agreement from consideration.

In his official statement, Chretien emphasized that the U.S. government rejected “gender ideology extremism” and had rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which states that “abortion is not an international right” and that the family is the “natural and fundamental group unit of society.” He said the U.S. was committed to “population issues that unite us, not divide us,” including improving maternal health and supporting families.

Chretien said that the U.S. “rejected and denounced” the 2030 Agenda for Development, a fifteen-year agreement of the General Assembly that enshrines a vast set of social, environmental, and climate goals as priorities for all governments. While past UN cooperation schemes adopted broad commitments for international cooperation, the 2030 Agenda proposed a universal political agenda with concrete goals and targets to be pursued by all governments. It has been criticized repeatedly as a creeping towards global government.

European Support for UN Document

European countries, who are most invested in the 2030 agenda, complained bitterly that the Trump administration and the government of Argentina under Javier Milei are no longer willing to reaffirm the 2030 Agenda. Some countries that attacked the Trump administration said that they interpreted the 2030 agreement as including abortion rights and gender ideology under the rubric of “sexual and reproductive health.”

A German delegate complained about the U.S. position calling it an “attempt to erode our vision for future.” He said protecting “bodily autonomy”, including through “sexual and reproductive health and rights” was central to this vision and pledged to continue to promote abortion and gender ideology through government funding for non-governmental organizations.

A Danish delegate said Denmark would continue to promote “sexual and reproductive health and rights for adolescents”, clarifying further that “this includes access to abortion” as well as “comprehensive sexuality education.”

A delegate from France expressly said that sexual and reproductive health language “includes a right to abortion” and that it was foundational for development. He also promised to continue a feminist foreign policy.

Delegates from several traditional countries, thanked the chairman of the commission for withdrawing the draft agreement with the controversial language. They expressed opposition to gender ideology and abortion rights.

Nigeria said these were “major red lines.” Burundi lamented that the final draft of the agreement did not mention the family at all. The delegate said this was not acceptable because, “the future of our societies and our ability to develop depends above all on strong families.”

A Holy See official blamed the failure of the commission to reach an agreement on the “inordinate focus” on sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights issues, explaining that they have always been controversial. He encouraged “true respect for sovereign states with regard to sensitive issues.” He also responded directly to the delegations who claimed abortion was an international right, explaining that such statements “explicitly violated” previous UN population agreements.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.