February 18, 2025 - 10:00am
The United Nations has been dragged into the global conflict between the defenders of biological reality and the demands of transgender activists. UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, has dared to acknowledge the existence of two sexes in her reports — at once a fact so mundane and an act so rare — that over 200 NGOs have signed a letter denouncing her.
According to this outraged coalition, co-led by Planned Parenthood International (PPI) and Women Deliver (WD), Alsalem’s “sex-based” approach is nothing less than a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress.” Apparently, recognising that men commit violence against women “further marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred.” Because nothing threatens safety quite like correctly identifying the sex of rapists, wife beaters or extremist religious leaders who stone rape victims. The furious missive is the latest attack on Alsalem, an expert who has faced calls for her dismissal from her UN role for over two years, alongside constant accusations that she is transphobic.
Bizarrely, to the NGO set who enjoy expense-account lunches in Geneva while churning out unreadable reports, Alsalem’s insistence on biological sex is supposedly rooted in white supremacy. As the letter states: “The category of ‘woman’ has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming.” Presumably, they believe that before the arrival of Western colonialists, the Global South was blissfully free of the concept of male and female, with multi-gender people just banging bumpy bits together at random and producing theybies. This inherently racist and sexist drivel is what now passes for “feminism” among most of the over-credentialed, under-experienced elite at international development agencies.
These are not feminist aims that would be recognisable to any of the grassroots activists who fight for women’s right to reach their full potential and it’s tempting to suspect the NGOs that attract funding are those that tick the correct boxes. A stack of the letter’s signatories, from the grants-makers Mama Cash to the Sex Workers Alliance Ireland, campaign for full decriminalisation of the sex trade, pushing policies that benefit pimps and brothel owners. Others, such as the EuroCentralAsian Lesbian Community, believe that all “persons who feel connected to the lesbian identity” should be welcomed as lesbians. In their postmodern worldview, a trafficked and prostituted girl is not a victim but an empowered “youth sex worker” exercising her agency.
Alsalem’s work, which exposes the brutal reality of male violence — child marriage, sex trafficking, femicide — triggers the #BeKind conformists because it refuses to kowtow to their luxury beliefs. Anyone with a functioning moral compass should be horrified by these crimes, not by the language used to describe them. Yet WD and PPI seem more exercised by words like “biological sex” than by the actual atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide.
It’s darkly funny that PPI in particular — an organisation that deals with the unavoidable biological reality of pregnancy and abortion — now finds itself arguing that sex isn’t real. More widely, the idea that women in rural Pakistan should stop worrying about child marriage and death in childbirth and start interrogating their “gender identity” would be laughable if it weren’t so grotesque.
But the tide is turning. Thanks to pressure from both those who mistrust the UN, like President Trump, and those who still have faith in it as a force for good, like Alsalem, the ideological stranglehold on international development is starting to crack. Furious open letters and overwrought accusations won’t save the battalions of NGO right-thinkers who have spent years dictating policy across the globe. The grip of these neo-colonialists is loosening — and reality is finally beginning to reassert itself.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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Subscribe“The category of ‘woman’ has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming.”
This is the kind of lie that has been pumped into the heads of so many young people across the west. I’ve often wondered where these “feminist” organisations were when we read about the mass rape/grooming of vulnerable whit girls in many British towns, of the institutionalised suppression of women in many countries and communities that are under the shadow of perhaps the most monolithically patriarchal religious ideology ever conceived etc . Now I know, they could not make any kind of collective stand without exposing their own absurdity and their ideological betrayal of women.
Who is funding them? Make it stop.
You as a British tax payer are funding them.
Yes. How revolting is this.
I know it’s abuse of tax payer funds – like so much else – but who is sanctioning those payments? Not the general tax payer that’s for sure. Hope full exposure of where our tax money goes gets mainstream attention.
Also let’s not forget that many of these NGOs are funding by independent entities both within and outside of the U.K… such as Open Society etc
This goes right back to the Department of Education. By law, through their guidelines to which schools have to comply, children are taught LBGT from Primary School onwards. Can your everyday teacher do that? No. What do they know about the latest theory? So the government will fund various ‘charities’ to create and write LBGT materials and come into the schools to teach them.
‘Gender’ is taught in schools by the gender and trans activists and the government funds them using your taxes.
Imagine you are a civil servant who doesn’t want Trans to be taught in schools. How can you even say that when the law dictates that Trans is taught in schools? You will stay quiet.
Correct, it’s truly hideous what is going on and what many parents and professionals are standing for.
I edited my reply above to say that many of these NGOs are also funded from outside sources such as Open Society… and most likely various foundations within the U.K.
That they have been allowed to indoctrinate children is truly shameful.
“…over-credentialed, under-experienced elite at international development agencies.”
This line says it all.
There are so many NGOs out there, all enjoying tax free status and injection of funds from billionaires who also use the tax deduction. If not for these “organizations” what would these trust fund pansies do?
Yep. I was recently watching a TV debate about county councils going into debt. The one side said that this was just democracy – you vote for somebody, they get to power, raise taxes and spend those taxes in a way which they feel is right.
The other side stammered, “But they’re spending my money on that stupid idea.”
We have a FPTP democracy and this is what it means. It also means, as you know, that they can bring a tremendous pressure on the courts to convict people outside of their beliefs. The famous judge (and historian) Lord Jonathan Sumption spends his spare time giving lectures about this. He says basically, “If you want a democracy, this is what you get.” Any ideas?
We also have JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference, in which he put it to the commissars of Europe that ignoring those voices with which you disagree – or worse, looking to suppress them – is the greater failing since it provides ‘nothing to defend’ when contrasted with other forms of government.
The majority of those leaders were elected not though FPTP, but some form of deal-making with other political parties.
It truly is like trying to square the circle, except we now have progressives claiming that geometry (part of maths in general) is a form of white oppression.
True. An efficient democracy depends upon a largely well or treasonably well educated population that respects the laws of the land and genuinely cares for the localities they live in. Unfortunately our education and national discourse, art, media etc have been relentlessly dumbed down, civic and any notion of national pride sneered at. That’s not to say there aren’t many excellent people doing their best but unfortunately I think they’re now outnumbered. They don’t call this The Age of Stupid for nothing.
Take a look at Charlotte Gill’s work on Substack.
And no doubt USAid, till last week.
I think Musk is going to have a stab at stopping the US taxpayers from funding these obscene organisations.
” Yet WD and PPI seem more exercised by words like “biological sex” than by the actual atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide.”
You are right to say Feminism has gone off the rails being more worried by language than reality. If so stop whittering about language and get to grips with reality.
Reality is dark and often evil. And that is where language gains its meaning, not in Feminist-world.
And of course the biggest atrocity against girls and women of recent times has taken place in England. The Pakistani rape gangs.
When are the Unherd Feminists going to campaign for justice there?
I take it you’ve not bothered reading any of the articles by Joan Smith, for instance. She’s also a real life activist on behalf of women’s rights, including her work in women’s refuges.
By ignoring these articles, and claiming Unherd doesn’t publish them, it’s you that’s denying reality.
Edit: i meant Julie Bindel not Joan Smith.
This was Joan Smith’s take on the rape gangs
UK’s grooming gangs inquiry won’t bring justice
And this was my comment.
No mention of Pakistani rape gangs, no mention of Starmer’s role, no mention of Muslim votes, no mention of Musk’s specific accusations against Starmer. No mention of Tommy Robinson. No mention of a cover up. No mention of local authorities being afraid to tackle the rape gangs for fear of being labelled Racist. No mention of Jess Phillip’s role in refusing a national inquiry.
How can you write an article about this scandal and mention none of that?
Memo to contributors to Unherd – Do not criticise Starmer and Labour.
What a ridiculous article. Avoiding every aspect of the scandal. A progressive liberal looking the other way. Just as has happened over the last thirty years.
See the edit to my comment.
However, you’re also wilfully ignoring these:
Grooming gang victims need a new statutory inquiry – UnHerd
The grooming gangs condemnation is too little, too late – UnHerd
Why the police ignored the rape gangs – UnHerd
Why is Labour rejecting a national grooming gangs inquiry? – UnHerd
Once again, i’ve demonstrated that your insistence that Unherd doesn’t publish articles on the subject is totally wrong.
Now, you can carry on denying that reality, or lose any credibility.
There are many articles published by Unherd on these topics, by several writers, which you’re wilfully ignoring.
Your claim is false, and demonstrably so.
The grooming gangs condemnation is too little, too late
By Julie Bindel
An article just like Joan Smith’s
And my comment.
Surprise surprise. No mention even of Starmer. No call for Phillips to resign. No mention of her job title Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding of Women and Girls.
Why does Unherd defend Labour in every article? Is Unherd just Starmer’s political puppet?
This is a multifaceted scandal.
The Pakistani rape-gangs to start with. Anyone from abroad will read that phrase, open-mouthed, not in England, surely?
The failure to intervene out of fear of being labelled Racist. The soul- destroying apathy of all those who saw and did nothing.
The fact this took place in Labour controlled cities. Starmer, now Labour PM, then in charge of the CPS.
The sickening realisation this is England today. The shame of the mainstream media who hid the facts from the public. The shame that it takes foreign pressure, from Musk, to bring it to all to light.
The shame of Labour supporting columnists, who proliferate in Unherd, continuing to try to divert attention away from Starmer and the Labour councils.
For them it is just a political problem. A story to spin.
What a country….
A couple of years ago I resigned from UnHerd because everyone was happily upticking but saying nothing – like a sort of mutual back-patting society, featuring a lot of good comments (as in well-written) but with nothing new. I came back and after six months I see the same thing developing. So, I will break for six months again.
Don’t go. I read your comments!
.
There’s plenty of other articles. Your comments are simply a continuation of the attempt to smear Unherd. You claim Unherd ignores these issues, which it very clearly doesn’t.
Laddie get some help. You shouldn’t be following me around like a lost dog.
Richard does perhaps go on a bit, but he is quite right that we need a more critical take on feminism instead of just rants by aging feminists.
It’s just the same old stuff: men bad, trans bad, porn bad, sex work bad, some women bad (but it’s men’s fault), feminists who disagree, also bad, feminist trans rights activists are really men’s rights activists (in spite of all appearances) also bad.
Edit: i meant Julie Bindel not Joan Smith.
Understandable, it’s hard to tell their repetitive rants apart. The only person on Unherd with a worthwhile feminist angle is KS – and she seems to have gone off the subject. Her book is worth a read btw.
Well outside the UK there is the greatest oppression of women, whose voices must never be heard, nor their faces seen in public. This is happening in Afghanistan.
That these NGOs are given funding and thus continue to exists is intolerable. In Trump’s style they should be defunded immediately.
Oh don’t worry, the gender-loons are well ahead of you on this one. They’ve already gleefully appropriated the term “two-spirited” into their rainbow coalition.
Its only a matter of time before they go the whole nine-yards and add biological sex to the list of things which were unknown in these indigenous arcadia before white colonialism. A list which already includes war, slavery, and racism.
I identified as a woman and married a trans man. I was shocked when she became pregnant! That’s white privilege I guess.
How dare you misgender your husband! You should say “He became pregnant”.
Oops!
Sorry, yards are an imperial measurement and therefore a tool of white supremacy. You need to say ‘the length of 4.5 trans women laid end to end’.
If the Unherd Feminists truly wanted to protect girls and women in England they would start by investigating the rape gangs cover up.
Listen to the Raja Miah interview on Heretics. He explains in detail how Andy Burnham used an Inquiry itself to cover up the scandal of the rape gangs and how Labour funds mosques in Labour areas in return for votes.
There is no doubt at all that Labour wants the Muslim votes – hence their publicised enquiry into Islamaphobia.
These NGOs are utterly grotesque! Every single one of them ought to be rounded up and put on the frontline in Ukraine as cannon fodder. Then they’d soon understand the difference between reality and fantacy. No amount of shouting ‘no debate – you Russians are harming the LGBT+++ community. You must be cancelled’ would save them. They’d go to the grave along with their appalling ideology. Indeed, it has to be acknowledged that part of the reason Putin is waging this war, and looking to expand it, is because he believes Western ‘woke’ ideology is an existential threat to Russian tradition and culture. Unfortunately, he is not wrong.
Whilst we are living in a nightmare with all of this.. take heart, this lot rendering themselves infertile and therefore inferior humans unable to reproduce .. eliminating the dodgy ‘gene’ and at super speed . Is this evolution in action right before our very eyes? An argument to fully promote and encourage this rubbish? We could consider speeding this up and get them gone..
It’s way beyond the time when NGOs should stop receiving public money.
Technology has made large swathes of the graduate class effectively useless. What else is there for them to do but invent new and more damaging ways to leach off taxpayers?
We must reform higher education as a matter of urgency to produce fewer of them.
I don’t think it’s much to do with technology. It was loony philosophers (initially mainly French) who started the slide into general madness and have infected academia, politics, law, the arts, schooling, baby care, and the list continues.
What I meant was that technology has destroyed many of the jobs that the education system prepares middle class kids to fill.
Ah! I see! That makes more sense now!
” Alsalem’s “sex-based” approach is nothing less than a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress.”
This is the same argument her fellow philosophers used to justify removing Kathleen Stock from Sussex University. They won of course. There is near uniformity in British academia supporting the argument of the 200 NGOs.
This is the argument which raged in the 1990s and Judith Butler eventually came out on top. Biological sex is a social construction created by men to dominate women.
It is all very interesting and is now part of our recent intellectual history. But Feminists, who don’t follow Butler, including all the Feminist writers in Unherd, will go to any lengths to cover up recent Feminist history, out of shame, I believe. They refuse to acknowledge ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’ were creations of Feminists who won the argument in the 1990s and who now dominate academic and all UK institutions, as well as the 200 NGOs mentioned in the article. For them it is a taboo subject. The result is widespread ignorance of what ‘gender’ is today in the UK.
I now believe that all non faith charities and NGOs have been irretrievably captured by an anti-imperialist, progressive elite. Defund the lot. Defund the WHO (after Covid, what justification is there for believing anything they say, and I suspect they’re now paid hands of the Chinese Government). Defund UNWRA. Defund the UN while we’re at it. It won’t be long until the World Bank, OECD and IMF are captured, as well.
Why am I so sceptical about these charities and NGOs? Because nowadays they depend on Government grants (eg Rape Crisis Scotland), they attract people who want to do good and in their social circle (mainly in the US and UK) progressive anti-imperialism, and adopting the latest fad, is the thing.
They don’t believe in anything, so cut off their money. They’ll find something else to do.
Defind them all. Keep them in their little circles on irrelevant campuses.
“It’s darkly funny that PPI in particular — an organisation that deals with the unavoidable biological reality of pregnancy and abortion — now finds itself arguing that sex isn’t real.”
The link is not really that hard to discover. Abortion and transgenderism are both about ‘liberating’ people from biological reality.
Satire just isn’t possible anymore!
Pregnancy is the creation of the Patriarchy (white, of course) to oppress women, and keep the best jobs for themselves. There, do I get a government grant now?
Time to wind up the NGOcracy in all senses. Just think fellow taxpayers this depraved drivel is all on our dime.
My most fervent hope is that President Trump will withdraw all US funding for the UN and evict them from New York. That should start the ball rolling on the obliteration of all the meaningless international nonsense that has emerged in the last eighty years.
Likely to be a rough ride, but we still have a moat and (hopefully) the means of defending our homeland. We can then elect a sensible Government, and start rebuilding along the lines of our buccaneering ancestors. Because we will have no choice..!
Not at all sure about YooKay defences but the demolition of the UN, World Bank, IMF, EU and general NGO/non-profit gravy train corruption system, is a necessary step in unravelling the horrendous mess we are in.
I see commenters calling to know who’s funding these disgusting, depraved organizations. Well, many of you, especially women, will have been screaming for no limits on Planned Parenthood to abort hundreds of millions of babies globally. Thats PPI, duh.
“ the Global South was blissfully free of the concept of male and female, with multi-gender people just banging bumpy bits together at random and producing theybies“. That’ a very nice sentence!
It might be a start to acknowledge that victims of violence are not exclusively female, whether that is violence on the street or domestic violence at home. And if it’s really too much to acknowledge that grown men are victims, could we at least start the ball rolling by acknowledging that boys are.
Am I the only one to find it odd that a critique of the women only victimology has as its starting point trans and gender diverse persons?
That aside, this is just another rant from this author.
Can someone explain what the bit about white women enforcing gender norms actually refers to? I thought the feminist story was that (white) men did this. Or is it the patriarchy?
If I blame a white woman for this, would I still be mansplaining?
When you lie down with dogs you might get fleas. In my “lived experience” (lol) Reem Alsaleem is no defender of maltreated women. Her reports protect establishment players – operators of one-side of the system. Oddly (or not) her domestic violence report cites only establishment players – those dependent on govt grants. Joan Meier is cited repeatedly even though she did NOT write the paper cited (it was written by retired grant administrator Dr. Leora Rosen). When did a University Professor of Law get to put their name on others papers? When narrative centers solely on money and power interests propaganda ensues. Is it any wonder we find ourselves here? Thanks Reem for not stepping up when given opportunity. (she already has friends in U.K. prepared to place her into another position of authority – so no worries). This article and emails were submitted and ignored. Here’s whats really being done to real women (breeders). https://medium.com/@doreenludwig/will-united-nations-tell-the-truth-about-u-s-custody-a6bc6f4f5690
Who are all these oppressed societies who created a paradise for their queer people? It’s the incuriosity of these people that really gets me.
This is why NGOs need to be brought to heel.
“Western colonial patriarchal worldview …”
These are words from the enemy deep within western civilisation. What awful people. Decent folks have zero in common with these bigoted, warped minds.
A relative of mine resides in a former British colony in Africa. He utterly detests NGOs, which he says are unaccountable, live like lords, drive new 4x4s and are paid huge salaries. Moreover, they generally live in the best suburbs and experience very little hardship, dishing out largesse to the ‘povo’ (people) but making little difference to their quality of life. They suck up to the tyrants, torturers and murderers who govern this hellhole continent and escape back to the UK or wherever to live on large pensions when they have had enough of parading their virtue to the poor people.
The whole system stinks. I hope Trump is in the process of initiating a worldwide cull of these egregious organisations.