Trump Admin Expands Anti-Trans Campaign to U.N.

Donald Trump's administration, not content with trying to erase transgender people in the U.S., is trying to do so internationally through United Nations documents, according to an exclusive report in The Guardian.

During recent meetings of the U.N.'s Third Committee, the U.S. delegation has urged that certain documents be rewritten to remove references to gender, the publication reports. The Third Committee's mission covers "social, cultural, and humanitarian" matters.

One example comes in a document on human trafficking, which is still in the draft stage. U.S. diplomats have proposed that it cite "violence against women" rather than "gender-based violence," the article notes.

The U.S. delegation's opposition to using the word "gender" reflects "what it sees as an 'ideology' of treating gender as an individual choice rather than an unchangeable biological fact," The Guardian reports.

This is similar to the rationale behind a memo circulating among federal government agencies that would define gender as fixed at birth and dependent on the genitalia a person is born with - ignoring the fact that more than genitalia goes into determining gender, and also that some people are born with ambiguous genitalia. If the memo is adopted as policy, it would endanger antidiscrimination protections for transgender and intersex people, and basically define them out of existence.

Several sources who spoke to The Guardian objected to the U.S. moves to expand the campaign to the U.N. "If you only say violence against women, it doesn't really tell the whole story," a senior U.N. diplomat told the publication. "We shouldn't be going along with encouraging their society to be regressive. And if that means a blazing row in the Third Committee, I would have a blazing row in committee because I think some things are worth cherishing and worth hanging on to."