The struggle continues

The UN reports:

Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has warned against complacency on women’s rights at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, a landmark agenda for the empowerment of women.

“Women’s rights are threatened and attacked” on many fronts, she warned, adding that there over this period there has been “a backlash and the resurgence of gender inequality narratives based on age-old discrimination”.

And the surgence of male appropriation of everything belonging to women including the word “women.”

However, for the UN human rights chief, women’s rights are not negotiable: “they cannot be an optional policy, subject to the changing winds of politics,” she warned. According to Ms. Bachelet, the women’s rights agenda must not be torn apart by the establishment of a hierarchy between what is acceptable and what is deemed “too sensitive”.

Or what is deemed too “transphobic” or too “cis” or too much about women as opposed to men who claim to be women.

Ms. Bachelet also welcomed the speech delivered to the Human Rights Council by UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday.

As part of his Call to Action for human rights, Mr. Guterres called on every country to “support policies and legislation that promote gender equality, to repeal discriminatory laws, to end violence against women and girls and to strive for equal representation and participation of women in all areas”.

In his speech, Mr. Guterres also worried about “setbacks to women’s rights, alarming levels of feminicide, attacks on women’s rights defenders, and the persistence of laws and policies that perpetuate submission and exclusion”.

“Violence against women and girls”, he said, “is the most widespread human rights violation”.

But we keep being told that trans people – especially trans women – are the most oppressed of all, and that it’s mostly women who oppress them.

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