UN ‘Gender’ Treaty Would Wage International Lawfare Against People Who Believe Men And Women Are Different

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In one of his parting gifts to the United States and the world, President Joe Biden agreed to advance a new United Nations treaty that weaponizes international criminal law against opposition to transgender policy. Under its provisions, politicians who deliberately “misgender” someone or advocate for female-only private spaces would be guilty of “gender-based persecution,” a crime against humanity. In November, the General Assembly agreed to a timeline for finalizing the treaty by 2029.

The Vatican has been warning against this treaty for more than four years because it would enshrine an open definition of gender in international criminal law, effectively replacing the sound definition of gender currently in the Rome Statute.

The Rome Statute defines gender as “the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society.” This was a hard-fought definition to clarify the meaning of “gender persecution,” a new category of crime when the International Criminal Court (ICC) was formed in 1998. It was largely the work of pro-life nongovernmental organizations in collaboration with the Holy See and other delegations during many months of negotiations. 

This surprisingly good definition of gender has been sand in the gears of the international transgender juggernaut for the past two decades; Western countries have been trying to get rid of it. Now they are closer than ever to achieving their goal with a treaty that, unlike the Rome Statute, is expected to be ratified by the U.S. government. The treaty is designed to bypass U.S. objections to the Rome Statute. Rather than using international courts and controversial concepts such as universal jurisdiction as the Rome Statute did, the new treaty would use domestic courts to prosecute citizens who commit crimes against humanity defined in national criminal codes, much like the Genocide Convention, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1986.

Dropping the Definition of ‘Gender’

The UN General Assembly has been discussing the new treaty on crimes against humanity since 2019. The European Union and the powerful UN bureaucracy were able remove the 1998 definition of gender from the new treaty. The U.S. State Department approved of this decision after the fact, even though it is likely that deep-state operatives were shepherding the issue all along behind the back of the first Trump White House. Few have spoken out in opposition since.

The danger of dropping the definition of gender in the treaty is not self-evident to everyone. Western diplomats gaslight anyone who asks for gender to be defined. They alternately argue that the meaning of gender is self-evident and that every country should be able to define gender as they want. But make no mistake, the legal effect of dropping the definition of gender will be to enshrine an open definition of gender as a social construct in international criminal law. And this is very dangerous.

Threat to Free Speech and Religious Freedom

The consequences of adopting a treaty on crimes against humanity with a broad category of gender persecution is a threat to free speech and religious freedom. The crime of gender persecution in the Rome Statute is a broad category of crime. It doesn’t just refer to murder, rape, or enslavement. It includes the catchall “any other inhumane act” that causes injury or harm combined with a pattern of persecution based on gender. And the concept of gender is by its very nature fluid and broad. The category of “gender-based” violence is indeed very capacious. The European Union and UN agencies routinely use it to refer to LGBT issues, misgendering, denial of abortion services, and “misinformation” among other things.

With the new treaty, Western leftists want to label anyone who publicly opposes gender ideology as an international criminal — an enemy of humanity. They want the crime of gender persecution to include things such as denying children cross-sex hormones and surgeries, not recognizing same-sex marriage or adoption, laws against LGBT propaganda in schools, women-only sports, and even denial of abortion. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is already being done by the prosecutors of the ICC.

Want proof? In a 2022 policy paper strongly supported by the global LGBT lobby, the prosecutor of the ICC ordered his staff to adopt a broad new reading of gender persecution that includes any “severe deprivation of fundamental rights” that may result from “regulations that can impact persons in every aspect of life.” This includes “their reproductive and family options, who they can marry, whether they can attend school, where they can work, how they can dress and whether they are simply allowed to exist.” Anyone familiar with the transgender debates will recognize this kind of extremist language immediately. And it gets worse. Even more troubling, the Biden administration has already praised the weaponization of gender persecution in order to promote social engineering on LGBT issues.

Invitation to Totalitarianism

The ICC prosecutor goes as far as claiming that “a myriad of gender-based acts” that are not considered criminal acts may nevertheless be discovered and charged as gender-based crimes. This indeterminacy is the real problem and it is deliberate. According to UN staffer Emily Kenney, the “greatest obstacle” to prosecuting cases of gender-based persecution is that it is “so pervasive that it is nearly invisible.” It is so invisible that “it makes it harder for victims and survivors of gender persecution to identify themselves as victims,” Kenney writes in the New York University foreign policy blog Just Security. In other words, introducing gender ideology in the crimes against humanity framework calls into question every aspect of social, political, and economic life as a potential crime against humanity, to the point that even victims can’t tell they are victims.

This is Orwellian. It is an invitation to the arbitrary exercise of police power and is a license for the kind of political persecution of opponents seen in totalitarian regimes. They don’t want you to know if you are a victim or a criminal. They don’t want you to be able to know. At their discretion and convenience, they will let you know when it is politically convenient for them. This arbitrariness is fundamentally at odds with the motivation behind international criminal law. The basic tenet of the crimes against humanity framework is that there are certain crimes that are so egregious and inhumane as to be always and self-evidently criminally punishable.

The woke ruling regime in the West is building a web to control people’s lives and actions — and even their thoughts. They have done it through censorship and propaganda on social and traditional media around the world. In the United Kingdom, they are arresting people for expressing the wrong kinds of opinions about sexuality, including protesting silently outside abortion clinics and preaching what the Bible says about sexual morality. Now they want to use international criminal law to police the way everyone thinks. If the Trump administration is serious about dismantling the global censorship regime, it will have to take on this treaty to ensure the crime of gender persecution is defined precisely, as in the Rome Statute.

Because of the extended timeline for adopting this treaty, the path for Trump to stop the treaty is not a straightforward one. His bargaining power will be limited by the fact that a Democrat may be in the White House by 2029 and may sign the treaty regardless of the positions that Trump takes. For this reason, President-elect Trump must simultaneously signal that the United States will not be a part of this dangerous new gender treaty as well as engage aggressively in negotiations to sanitize the treaty as if he expects the next U.S. president to sign it. To be effective, he must work multilaterally. And he must ensure that the U.S. State Department, Department of Justice, other federal agencies, and ultimately Congress, cut all funding to organizations and multilateral programs that lobbied for the removal of the definition of gender in the new treaty.