In Its Struggle to Survive, Will the United Nations Finally Remember What a Woman Is?

A shorter version of this article was published on Spiked Online.

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It has been a rough few weeks for the United Nations. The US withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement while cutting funds for international development and practically shutting down USAID has been a major blow to the UN machinery, which employs over 130,000 personnel globally, not counting its Special Procedures or external experts. The US is not the only country that has reversed its stance towards the UN. Others have followed suit and have been reducing their support—the Netherlands and United Kingdom among them.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the top boss of the UN, António Guterres, knows this. On 12 March 2025, the UN Secretary-General announced a radical reform of the organisation—aptly named the UN80 initiative, marking the UN’s 80th year. Under this new plan, taxpayers’ money flowing into the UN through state budgets will be redirected to areas where results can be demonstrably effective and efficient.

According to Guterres, such changes are necessary because “these are times of intense uncertainty.” Among the many uncertainties the United Nations has been facing is a surprisingly basic one: how to define a woman. And unlike other uncertainties, this one risks making the entire UN system obsolete.

Being a woman is self-identifying in the same way as being a member of a minority is self-identifying or a member of an indigenous group is self-identifying.“

Alexandra Xanthaki, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights

From the major agency established to promote women’s empowerment—UN Women—to the agency focused on children’s rights, UNICEF; from the UN Human Rights Council to its many special rapporteurs, almost everyone in the UN seems confused about what a woman is. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk of Austria, a woman is anyone born such, plus any man who wishes to be treated like a lady. At a recent session of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights, Alexandra Xanthaki, proposed that the convention — the primary international treaty designed to protect women from sex-based discrimination — ought to be updated to include men who identify as women. The idea, apparently, is that a treaty based on the category of sex should now centre identity instead — a small administrative tweak, no doubt. Speaking at the Committee’s 90th session, Xanthaki urged CEDAW to reject what she called “the stereotype of women only being determined by biology” — a phrase that, in less enlightened times, might have been referred to as a biological fact. She went on to suggest that the General Recommendation — a formal interpretive guide to the treaty — should state that “being a woman is self-identifying”, in the same way, she said, as identifying as a minority or as indigenous. She concluded that, if the international community is truly committed to dismantling the hard-won legal rights of women, it should get on with it — beginning, naturally, with allowing men to compete in women’s sports. This was said in all seriousness. No one laughed.

“And who is to define what a woman is?” UN Special Rapporteur Alexandra Xanthaki asked during the CEDAW Committee’s 90th session in February 2025.

Such views are shared by many UN officials, despite standing in stark contrast with international law, which has historically understood “woman” according to its ordinary meaning: adult human female. A woman may not be explicitly defined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but just as the overwhelming majority of people around the world can identify one in a crowd of men, so too can the vast majority of nearly 200 UN member states that negotiate and adopt international law.

So why has the UN been so determined to blur the meaning of “woman”? And why has it promoted this confusion on the global stage? Even more pressing for the organisation’s future: how will it respond to member states that are no longer willing to tolerate the unchecked redefinition of women’s rights? The loss of funding and political support may be only the beginning.

It was with the generous support of the United Nations that the Yogyakarta Principles—an activist manifesto demanding that states erase sex from legal definitions—gained traction globally over the past two decades. Though non-binding and never ratified by any state, the Principles have been repeatedly presented as “international best practice” by UN agencies and officials.

It was also with the invisible hand of the UN Development Programme (UNDP)—a vocal advocate on gender identity policy and author of a 2022 handbook for parliamentarians on advancing related legislative reforms—that conflict-torn Bolivia ended up inscribing gender identity into its 2009 constitution. And it was a UN Human Rights Council resolution that established the office of the Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI), which has used its mandate largely to lobby states to dismantle sex-based protections for women and girls—including lesbians.

Recommendations from UN treaty bodies and special procedures advise parliamentarians on how to advocate for and implement self-ID.

Successive SOGI Experts have declared that same-sex attraction—the basis for the persecution of countless lesbians and gay men worldwide—is no different from a belief in being “born in the wrong body.” Some have gone further, insisting that biological sex itself is “socially constructed,” thereby undermining decades of advocacy on behalf of same-sex attracted people.

Among the clearest casualties of this institutional shift are lesbians. In many UN documents today, a lesbian is defined as any person who identifies as a woman and is attracted to women. But most men are attracted to women—and a growing number of these men now also identify as women. According to this logic, these heterosexual men qualify as lesbians. Some have even accused actual lesbians of “genital fascism” when their advances are rejected—language now common in activist spaces. The fact that this behaviour amounts to harassment in any other context appears to pose no moral dilemma for UN officials. On the contrary, in his 8 March message for International Women’s Day, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk declared that males with feminine identities are among the most discriminated-against women in the world.

The only voice of clarity within the UN structure has been Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Unlike many of her colleagues, Alsalem has resisted the pressure of activist lobbies, donor demands, and social media campaigns. She has relied on international law and her formal mandate: to protect women and girls from violence. Vilified by a small but well-funded network of NGOs, she has nonetheless gained the support of grassroots women’s movements worldwide.

But is one principled official enough to shift the course of an institution as sprawling as the UN?

The answer is likely no. So long as UN leadership continues to placate donor governments, activist consultants, and corporate funders with vested interests in abolishing sex-based rights, the organisation will continue to lose both legitimacy and relevance. Its growing failure to represent the real needs of half the world’s population risks alienating the very member states on which it depends for survival.

As the UN faces one of the most serious crises in its history, it must ask itself a foundational question: what price is it willing to pay for forgetting what a woman is?

Guterres may hope that the UN80 Initiative will stave off financial collapse. But if the UN continues to abandon its legal obligations to protect the rights of women and girls—and instead aligns itself with an unelected class of activist ideologues—it will not escape its “liquidity crisis.” Nor will it regain the trust of the global majority, who, unlike many UN officials, do not believe that being a woman is simply a matter of self-identification.