No Conflict? UN Report on Violence Against Women and Girls
- Aaron Kimberly
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
On June 25, 2025, Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, presented her report, Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues. During her address to the UN, Ms Alsalem made the following piercing and sobering statement:
“Let me be frank, I never imagined the day would come where my mandate would deem it necessary to prepare a report ...affirming that the words women and girls refer to distinct biological and legal categories, and that their female sex is central not only to the definition as categories of humans, but also central to the understanding of the discrimination and violence that they experience as subordinated classes. The consequences of this blatant disregard of the material reality of sex have been devastating. The erosion of women and sex-specific language, the conflation of sex, gender, and gender identity have produced flawed data, overall weakened protections for motherhood women and girls, including lesbians, as well as women who do not identify as women, and girls who may be experiencing gender dysphoria. It has also obscured the correct understanding of current and emerging forms of violence against women and girls, and exposed women and girls to more violence, and undermined our ability to provide targeted and relevant services and assistance to all victims. Simply put, you cannot protect what you cannot define.”
Transmen belong under the biological category of women, and are under the protections and interests of women, globally. Why is this important? Ms Alsalem’s well-informed concern is that the conflation of gender identity and sex, by which there is an erasure of language specific to the female sex, has impacted the protections of women and girls in the following ways:
Elimination of sex-specific data
Cementing sexist stereotypes
Inaccurate understanding of violence against women and girls
Failure to design effective policies promoting equality
Denial of sex-specific needs, including single-sex spaces
Erosion of protections for lesbians
Denial of freedom of belief and speech
She goes on to outline several emerging forms of sex-based violence:
Consequential suicide as femicide
Femi-genocide
Sex-selective practices
Reproductive violence as a genocidal tool
Violence through digital technologies
We are global citizens. Given the severity and nature of sex-based oppression and violence against women and girls internationally, it is imperative that sex-based language be retained. It is our responsibility to all women and girls that we, as self-identified transmen, concede to the realities of our sex as a protective measure for all natal females, including ourselves. We are not exempt from sex-based oppression and violence just because we experience gender dysphoria or adopt a male-presenting appearance. “Gender identity” recognition in law is a legal fiction granted to us as an accommodation, which must never be leveraged in opposition to sex-based rights and protections, putting all women and girls at risk. Those risks are tangible, not hypothetical. The legal fiction granted to us involves responsibilities, not just rights. It’s our civic responsibility to ensure that our protections are never at the expense of others.
I urge you to read Ms Alsalem’s reasoned and carefully articulated report, and I implore you to make whatever changes are required in your self-conception, to accept your sex as an inescapable and important truth that matters to all women and girls, in need of clear definitions.