UN Expert Defends Trans Critics

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | May 25, 2023

NEW YORK, May 26 (C-Fam) A UN women’s rights expert has criticized Western governments for “intimidation and threats” against opponents of trans ideology. She has also clashed with other UN officials on transgender issues.

In a statement issued Monday, UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem said, “Sweeping restrictions on the ability of women and men to raise concerns regarding the scope of rights based on gender identity and sex are in violation of the fundamentals of freedom of thought and freedom of belief and expression.”

The scathing statement, published this week by the UN human rights office, is a full-throated defense of free speech on an issue on which the UN system is usually engaged in efforts to silence critics.

Alsalem said that free speech was “crucial” to democracy and pluralism. But she went much further. She didn’t just criticize government efforts to silence and censor women, she also attacked how “hate speech” laws are interpreted in the West.

“Some such (hate speech) provisions are being taken to mean that any interrogation of the scope of rights based on gender identity amount to hate speech against non-binary persons and perhaps even incitement of hatred and genocide,” she warned.

She also implied that governments had a duty to defend public speakers who oppose transgender orthodoxy when they are being “silenced by loud counter-protests.”

Alsalem is likely to come under fire from her colleagues in the UN human rights office for her bold statement, and not for the first time.

The Special Rapporteur wrote a letter against a new transgender identity law in Scotland last year that would have given potential sex offenders access to female-only spaces, including bathrooms, sports, and prisons. Her intervention sparked a lively debate throughout the United Kingdom.

In testimony before the Scottish Parliament, Alsalem said, “there is no basis in international law to have an unhinged self-identification process.”

She argued that the process of identity change could and should be subject to limitations in order to protect women from violence.

“I would say that our experience as women who are born female is that violent males who can take advantage of any loopholes will do so in order to get into women’s spaces and have access to women. Our experience as women born female tells us that,” she said emphatically.

She also complained that the Scottish Government had not debated the law sufficiently and widely enough.

“There have been victims who have said that they have not had access to the parliamentary committee, and de-transitioners who have been asked to come in very late in the process.”

The intervention drew the ire of the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Victor Madrigal Borloz who accused Alsalem of “misrepresentation” of international human rights law. He said she was perpetuating an “exclusionary narrative” that “trans women are actually predatory men in dresses.”

In his own letter in favor of the law, he insisted that legal gender identity changes based on subjective self-identification is a fundamental human right that cannot be subject to any restrictions.

International women’s rights groups aligned with the homosexual/trans lobby, like Amnesty International, were also angered by Alsalem’s intervention.

The government of the United Kingdom blocked the Scottish Law from taking effect pending further review, citing many of the reasons given in Alsalem’s testimony.

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