The UN - and more specifically, UN women - have issued a plea that Afghan women not be forgotten by the rest of the world:
RTÉ coverage.
That would be the UN who are adamant TWAW, yes. The UN women who believe IDAHOBIT is in their wheelhouse. The UN women who pretend the issues they themselves list as impacting women & girls are about “gender [identity]” not their sex. Despite having to quote sex as being the relevant characteristic when they reference Article 1 of the UN Charter.
Absolutely the UN should be addressing this issue. And absolutely the UN should advocate for the human rights of everyone; & TBH I think a specialist commission for LGBTQI+ (the acronym they & many member states use) would make sense.
The UN utterly lacks the moral authority to beg the world not to forget a group who they’ve made a conscious decision to abandon as a matter of policy. When you’ve declared TWAW & are pushing for Member States to adopt self-ID & enact legislation that leads to affirmation-only care, you are failing those women who - for whatever reason - need single sex spaces. The women of Afghanistan are being oppressed because of their sex. They can’t identify out of it (bacha posh have to - for want of a better word - desist at puberty). Absolutely LGBT people are in also danger in Afghanistan - but the experiences & dangers male members of said group face are very different from those of women; & both the women of Afghanistan & their LGBT population deserve to have focused UN interest, rather than the UN persisting with incoherent inconsistent ideologically driven work that is failing women globally.
At least the article used clear language - women, girls, female. We need those words. We need them for all the girls being deprived of an education (not just in Afghanistan, the majority of children who receive no education are girls) & being married as children. We need them to talk about our health, whether you’re exiled to a period hut or in one of the “hard to reach” groups for cervical screening in the UK it matters that language be clear & accessible.
There does seem to be some linguistic drift that permits some parts of the globe to be described using sex-based language. I’ve noticed, for example, that Plan International UK almost entirely use girls [& women] - with “other menstruators” tacked on if it’s a story about/including the UK. Mozambique, for example, apparently does not have “other menstruators”. If, as we are told, trans people are everywhere & have been so throughout history (etc) one does have to question their [seeming] absence in some places. That said, is it better to be an oppressive cultural imperialist & force this Western modelling of gender & associated language onto countries & cultures who have sustained so much damage from colonisation; or to risk looking as if you view certain societies as effectively not developed enough to “share” said language with?
Apologies if this is a bit a jumbled, I was just infuriated by a supranational body asking the world not to forget Afghanistan’s women when it forgot itself what women are long ago.