Transgender Policies Pose Such a Horrific Threat to Women, Even the United Nations Is Calling Them Out

(Daily Signal)—I normally avoid reading any United Nations papers lest they trigger my gag reflex. If Florida is where “woke” goes to die, the U.N. is where woke goes to fester and congeal, seeping into bureaucracies and weighing down the rest of the world with the ideological refuse of the West.

Imagine my surprise, then, at hearing a clarion call for sanity blast through the noise of abortion, gender ideology, and climate alarmism that deafens any dissent at the U.N.

I almost had to do a double-take when I heard that Reem Alsalem, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, accurately identified gender ideology as a threat to women’s safety—and not just any threat but the “biggest barrier” to ending violence against women and girls in the United Kingdom.

Alsalem shared the advance unedited version of her report Thursday, announcing that she will present the edited version to the Human Rights Council in June.

Sharing the advanced unedited version of the report of my visit to the #UK conducted in 2024: https://t.co/3Dq5L1npul

I will present the report to #HRC59 in June this year.

— Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls (@UNSRVAW) May 29, 2025

“The lack of legislative clarity on ‘sex’ hampers data collection on violence against women and girls,” the report states.

“The conflation of sex and gender data in particular—prioritizing self-identified gender—erases biological sex records, distorting the male-driven nature of [violence against women and girls] and hindering root-cause analysis,” Alsalem’s report adds.

The U.N. employee highlighted one rather revealing statistic as evidence of this problem. English and Welsh law clearly define “rape” as an action only a male can perform, yet U.K. records claim 49 “females” have been convicted of rape in the decade leading up to June 2023. Alsalem is not afraid to call a spade a spade, faulting the statistics for logging “violent males” as “female offenders.”

Furthermore, the report laments “the erosion of single-sex spaces like prisons and shelters for survivors of violence.” By allowing men who identify as women to enter women’s prisons and shelters, authorities in Britain have allowed “increasing risks in safety” and unwittingly encouraged “self-exclusion,” where women avoid shelters out of concern that men might victimize them there.

Conservatives have raised concerns about these issues for over a decade, and we have often faced ridicule for speaking the straightforward truth: While many men who identify as transgender may pose no harm to women, voyeurs and predators can use the fig leaf of gender identity to smuggle their way into women’s spaces.

It’s refreshing to see even U.N. bureaucrats acknowledging this basic truth.

Yet the report also stands up for women’s freedom to speak out on these issues, noting that defenders of biological sex have been “ostracized, attacked, and punished by state and non-state actors for their beliefs and opinions, including political parties, universities, private employers, the media.”

I immediately think of British tax expert Maya Forstater, who lost her job for posting, “Men cannot change into women” on X, then known as Twitter.

Thankfully, Britain is moving in the right direction. The U.N. report notes a recent U.K. Supreme Court decision defining “sex” in terms of biology, not “gender identity.” It also notes the Cass Report, which exposed the Frankensteinian practices of prescribing cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries, often euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”

The report also praises a February 2023 U.K. government policy stating that biologically intact men who identify as women or those convicted of sexual or violent offenses would no longer be housed in women’s prisons.

Alsalem urges the U.K. government to “ensure that public and private institutions” uphold the U.K. Supreme Court ruling on biological sex, particularly on “female-only spaces.” She also urges that “women and girls must be able to speak on all issues, including sex and gender identity, without fear, intimidation, and reprisals.”

Unfortunately, these excellent recommendations are still exceptions to the general rule—even in this particular report.

The report includes a great deal of “woke” activist framing, such as the language of “intersectionality,” the Marxist framework that interprets Western society as inherently racist, sexist, and in other ways unjust.

The report also recommends that the U.K. repeal its 2023 Illegal Migration Act and to “ensure access to services irrespective of migratory status.” In other words, the U.K. must give up its sovereignty as a country and agree to allow illegal aliens to access social services.

The long-term battle for sanity at the U.N. is far from over, but the opposition to gender ideology here may represent the securing of an important beachhead in the war against woke.

If even the U.N. is warning that men in women’s prisons represent a threat to women, how long can Democrats afford to close their ears?