Republican congressmen and women in the US have proposed a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which appears to be little more than an attack on non-binary and trans rights, while failing to do anything at all for cis or trans women.
According to analysis by LGBTQ Nation, three of the six clauses in the resolution are about definitions, two talk about government action and one is about excluding trans women from certain spaces.
Representative Debbie Lesko of Arizona, who is backing the resolution and who is supported by anti-abortion group Arizona Right to Life, said, “The Democrats are erasing women and the spaces that are uniquely ours,” with Mary Miller, a Republican representative for Illinois, adding, “The radical Left has launched an attack on biology because they want to put themselves above God and they want to brainwash our daughters with their wokeism.”
Responding to the resolution, which has been introduced into the Senate by the outspoken anti-trans Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Olivia Hunt from the National Center for Transgender Equality said, “The Republican resolution is another in a long line of cynical attempts by anti-LGBTQ extremists around the country to erase transgender and nonbinary people from our communities.”
Hunt continued, “More than a century of science has shown us that biology is far more complicated than what the authors of this resolution describe, and that trans and non-binary people’s genders are just as real and just as valid as everyone else’s. Science simply doesn’t support this attempt at making our existence a ‘culture war’.”
An international framework for the rights of women has existed since 1980, when the UN introduced the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The Convention covers a range of issues, including forced marriage, FGM and human trafficking (among many others) and has been adopted by almost every country in the world, with the exception of Iran, the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau (pop. 18,000) and – incredibly – the USA.
