Tensions around the meaning of “gender” in official documents and funding plans have already sparked protests at COP30, the UN Climate Change Conference, which began a few days ago in Belém, Brazil. The debate is being framed as a clash between “progressive gender-rights advocates”, including several Western governments, and a bloc of “hardline conservative” governments accused of trying to turn back the clock. But behind the labels lies a more basic dispute: several states want UN climate texts to retain the categories of male and female, while UN agencies and NGOs push to expand “gender” to include a range of self-proclaimed identities. What is portrayed as an attack on women’s rights is, in reality, a battle over whether climate policy and funding should be based on an analysis of how men and women access resources, information and decision-making processes — the factors on which vulnerability and resource allocation depend — or whether they should be reshaped around ‘’gender identities’’.
This struggle is an insight into the wider pressures now reshaping the international development sector, where ideological conformity on “gender identity” is increasingly treated as a pre-condition for doing work in women’s name.
From international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) that portray the sex binary as a product of colonialism and white supremacy to donors funding initiatives that undermine sex-based rights in law, gender identity frameworks have long captured the international development sector. But how far can this go in replacing the foundational human rights frameworks fought for by previous generations before the sector completely loses its credibility?
Since the Yogyakarta Principles introduced “gender identity”, INGOs, NGOs, multilaterals, donors and many global women’s rights organisations — originally established to protect and advance women’s rights in the Global South — have incorporated this new category into their missions, research, strategies, policies, calls for proposals, programmes, job descriptions and consulting terms of reference. Within fifteen years, international development organisations have moved away from CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, embracing instead the Yogyakarta Principles and the idea that sex is not a material reality.
Activists have embedded within organisational policy a definition of feminism that treats a woman as anyone who identifies as one. International development organisations have increasingly conflated sex, gender and gender identity in their programming, data collection and context analyses — generating confusion and weakening accountability to the communities they claim to serve.
Take, for example, AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development). Founded in the 1980s, its early work centred on women’s participation in development. By the 1990s and 2000s, AWID had broadened its agenda to women’s human rights. Yet by the mid-2010s, it began to adopt gender identity norms, shifting its focus from women’s rights to “gender justice” and redefining its constituency from women and girls to “all people affected by patriarchal and systemic oppression”.
Ultimately, AWID’s transformation from a women-in-development organisation into a gender-identity-organisation reflects a wider shift across global human rights and development advocacy. While women’s rights organisations continue to struggle for funding — increasingly so in recent years — AWID’s own report Where Is the Money? An Evidence-Driven Call to Resource Feminist Organizing, which one might reasonably assume was intended to track funding for women’s rights groups, instead surveyed “feminist, women’s rights, LBTQI+ and allied organisations”, collectively labelled as “feminist and women’s rights organisations”. This lack of clarity in terminology, research and constituencies — often encompassing groups with conflicting agendas — has ultimately contributed to the rolling back of women’s rights as articulated in CEDAW, ratified by 189 countries.
AWID supports self-identification (self-ID) and, in 2023, published a letter titled There Is No Place for Anti-Trans Agendas in the UN in an attempt to discredit Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on ending violence against women and girls, for defending the right of women and girls to single-sex spaces where these are essential for their safety, privacy and dignity. AWID’s statement effectively conveyed the idea that “feminist” advocacy must include men who identify as women and that women and girls do not have the right to boundaries.
We now also have the male “allies” working as partners within the international development sector — such as Equimundo (formerly Promundo), the Centre for Masculinities and Social Justice. Equimundo, whose stated purpose is to challenge the social norms that perpetuate violence against women and girls, lists among its core beliefs that “patriarchy creates and sustains power inequalities collectively among men over women (including cis and trans women), as well as gender-nonconforming individuals”.
While the dismantling of sex in law and policy is largely an elite project — driven by corporate funding and filtered into cultural norms — taxpayers are also footing the bill through institutional funding, including from the EU, the world’s largest institutional donor. Over the past decade, the EU has positioned itself as a leading global advocate of gender identity — a legacy of the Yogyakarta Principles, which the EU embraced despite their non-binding nature and their inconsistencies with EU legislation on equality between men and women.
EU efforts to promote gender identity frameworks are supported by funding of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), the EEAS Diversity & Inclusion Agenda and the Gender Equality Action Plan (GAP III). Ultimately, the adoption of gender identity doctrines by major donors and agencies has occurred without any real debate about the implications for women’s rights, local culture and context, child safeguarding or LGB rights — already highly sensitive subjects in many regions of the Global South.
On the ground, women’s organisations that have long worked to reduce child and maternal mortality and prevent violence against women and children are now suffering the dire consequences of funding cuts — compounded by the excesses of critical social justice and the luxury beliefs of an entitled class who never face the consequences of their own decisions.
International development organisations are now largely staffed by people who either promote gender identity or remain silent for fear of losing their livelihoods. This is particularly true in a time of structural budget cuts and growing uncertainty within the sector. Of course, there are exceptions — people of integrity and political courage who continue to defend sex-based rights and democratic values despite the pressure to conform. However, many organisations now function on two contradictory levels, upholding conflicting policy frameworks (Yogyakarta and CEDAW) that ultimately undermine their mission and credibility.
It is time for people within the sector — and for taxpayers — to hold donors such as the EU to account. Activists promoting gender identity can no longer hide behind rhetorical shields. While it has been convenient for them to deflect criticism by pointing to the “anti gender” movement or the rhetoric of ultra-conservative groups that oppose self-ID, sexual and reproductive health and rights and blame feminism and gay rights for the breakdown of society, people are increasingly realising that defending sex-based rights has nothing to do with this backlash. It is, rather, the effort of ordinary citizens from all walks of life coming together to protect everyone’s rights, freedom of expression and evidence-based policymaking.