U.S. officials are targeting programs for women’s and children’s rights within the United Nations, demanding that they end any supposed emphasis on “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion as they work to combat human rights violations and uplift violently oppressed populations.
Last Friday, U.S. officials offered amendments to routine UNICEF program documents, forcing a vote on their adoption for the first time in history.
The amendments pressured the agency, which focuses on children’s rights and providing protections for disadvantaged children, to erase language in the documents that “promotes gender ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion and also objects to any UNICEF efforts to advance such programming in countries,” Devex reports.
This change is needed to ensure UNICEF’s programs “promote equal opportunities for all,” the U.S.’s language ironically claimed.
The U.S. also specifically directed the agency to embrace anti-LGBTQ hate, saying that it should “not include programming based upon gender ideology so as to promote and underscore biological reality.”
The amendments were not supported by the agency’s board, which has 36 members, with only Oman and Nigeria backing them. The program documents, without the U.S.’s additions, passed 31 to 1, Devex reported, with the U.S. making it the first-ever time the program agenda did not pass unanimously.
In a statement, U.S. acting representative to the UN Economic and Social Council Jonathan Shrier said that the U.S. had “no other option” than to vote against the document, saying that the programs “conflict with U.S. policies.”
The statement was made in reference to Trump’s sweeping executive orders mandating that federal agencies reject the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion, and hatefully declaring that there are only two genders determined by the “immutable biological reality of sex,” a transphobic argument often trotted out by conservatives that has no scientific basis.
“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) programs violate the text and sprit [sic] of our laws by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy,” said Shrier, a career diplomat who formerly acted as the U.S. envoy to Israel and who was embraced by the Biden administration. “In addition, it is U.S. policy to recognize two sexes, male and female, and not to promote gender ideology.”
Trump’s executive orders do not have jurisdiction outside of the U.S.
UNICEF reaches children in countries across the world — including many ravaged by Western colonial powers — with high rates of poverty, and where children may face disease and famine that they cannot escape without foreign aid.
The U.S. right’s culture war issues are far from applicable in many of these places, where “hard work” and “merit” cannot combat systemic poverty and hunger imposed by global powers — even setting aside that embracing tenets of diversity and uplifting oppressed populations is the very purpose of many UN programs.
Meanwhile, this past week, the U.S. also pressured UN Women not to focus on “radical causes such as DEI and gender ideology, neither of which will improve the functioning of UN Women and both of which are demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls,” Reuters reported.
Attacks on DEI by conservatives in the U.S., commentators have noted, are often a thin veil for attacking the rights of women, LGBTQ people and people of color — especially Black people.
UN Women focuses on developing the rights of women and promoting women’s equality, often in majority non-white countries — a mission that the attacks on DEI seem purpose-built to oppose. For instance, ending violence, including sexual violence, against women is a key mission of the agency. But Trump’s orders to end a focus on DEI compelled the Army to temporarily remove its guidelines and trainings on preventing sexual assault last month.
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