This year’s annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), the UN’s principal intergovernmental body dedicated to advancing gender equality and women’s rights, showcased a set of procedural maneuvers and informal tactics, cloaked in the language of human rights, that representatives of the United States and its conservative allies used to undermine gender rights and weaken multilateralism itself.
CSW70 coincided with a rising backlash that threatens hard-won gains for women and LGBTIQ+ communities. The authors of this article attended CSW70 as delegates of Sociologists for Women in Society. As observers of formal diplomacy and as participants moving across official sessions, side events, and NGO spaces, we observed competing visions of gender justice being staged in real time.
Appropriating the language of human rights at CSW70
Representatives of the US administration and other conservative parties at CSW70 attempted to redefine justice by appropriating the language of rights. After failing to derail the negotiated document guiding global approaches to women’s rights , the US proposed a resolution titled “Protection of Women and Girls through Appropriate Terminology”: a politically motivated bid to define gender solely in terms of “men and women.” Had it not ultimately failed, the resolution would have rewritten the historical record and created a new procedural pathway for narrowing the meaning of gender across the UN.
In its closing explanation of the vote on the final day of the session, the US warned that “malicious forces” were using multilateral institutions to spread “dangerous gender ideologies.” In response, it declared that it would “always protect women and girls from dangerous radical gender ideology” while reaffirming “biological truth.” This language recast multilateral governance itself as a threat to national sovereignty and repurposed the rhetoric of protection to legitimize narrowing the meaning of gender and rolling back rights tied to gender identity and reproductive freedom.
An expansive anti-rights project
Simultaneously, participants used Q&A sessions during official panels to echo talking points hostile to gender rights. Purportedly motivated by concerns over justice and women’s safety, their questions challenged global norms related to women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and sexual and reproductive rights, aligning with broader anti-rights discourses that seek to cloak genuinely regressive policies in the language of human rights advocacy.
At the same time, the Conference on the State of Women and the Family (CSWF), an offsite event organized by the Heritage Foundation, C-Fam, and other conservative organizations, maneuvered to conflate anti-rights rhetoric with UN values. Several panels at CSWF featured overt attacks on so-called “gender ideology” or more coded appropriations of the language of care, protection, justice, motherhood, parental rights, and concern over surrogacy. Session titles such as “Justice and Equality Begin in the Womb: Every Life Deserves a Chance” and “What is a Woman: Protecting Women and Children from Gender Ideology” made their anti-rights agenda explicit. Other speakers framed similar politics in terms of family protection and women’s well-being. Throughout, participants repurposed the language of gender justice and stripped it of its original commitments to bodily autonomy, gender self-determination, and human rights.
From gender to democracy
What we witnessed at CSW70 suggests that this anti-rights organizing at the UN represents both a backlash to recent feminist gains and an attempt to erode democratic norms and institutions. Research shows contemporary authoritarian regimes often attack gender equality and LGBTIQ+ rights, often using nebulous terms like “gender ideology,” to weaken public commitments to equality and to erode democracy. Though gender is not the only category authoritarians mobilize to pave the way for future power grabs, it is a crucial one, and societal conflicts over gender are a bellwether for rising authoritarianism.
While Trump administration officials drew on US culture war flashpoints in their specific rhetoric, they are actually speaking to (and from within) a growing global anti-rights movement. Participants in anti-rights movements are no strangers to the UN. In recent decades, conservative NGOs have increasingly integrated themselves in the UN, especially the CSW. Indeed, right-wing ideology has crept toward the center of discourse. Its prominence at the CSW meeting this year mirrors a larger phenomenon in anti-rights organizing. While transnational advocacy was long considered the purview of left-leaning groups, their right-wing counterparts have successfully imitated their strategies to organize across borders, now geared toward capturing institutions, such as the UN, with the ultimate aim of weakening them.
The impact is ongoing
While the response to US anti-rights maneuvers at CSW70 was overwhelmingly negative, they still served to corrode democratic and multilateral systems.
Similar actions will certainly continue. Consider, for instance, the US representative to the UN Mike Waltz's recent demand that the UN should get “back to basics” by focusing on international peace and security and embracing budget cuts, institutional streamlining, and a more openly transactional model of US influence.
Read alongside the US interventions at CSW70, this suggests that the Trump administration is not merely contesting gender language. It is attempting to redefine which parts of multilateralism count and whose interests they will serve. At this precarious time for the UN and multilateralism itself, feminist scholars and rights activists must work to identify the misappropriation of rights and push back against these tactics.