AAWAA welcomes DFAT’s decision to develop a new international gender inequality strategy and trusts that this signals ambition in the direction of policy development to emancipate women and girls. Development of such policies is not only a matter of moral imperative but also a strategic investment that promises substantial returns in the form of enhanced economic growth and regional stability.
Re-prioritising and re-focussing Australia’s international equality strategy
Against this background, AAWAA advocates for a refocused strategy within DFAT, both in its rhetoric and in its practical implementation, with a clear emphasis on addressing the unique needs of women and girls. In particular, we have asked for practical measures to address male violence against women and girls at the same time as promoting sexual and reproductive health and ending reproductive exploitation. It is also imperative that DFAT redouble commitments to programs and policies that prioritise women’s access to comprehensive healthcare, including family planning, maternal care, and sexual health services. This involves removing barriers to reproductive choice, ensuring safe access to abortion while addressing the practice of sex-selective abortions, and upholding women’s right to female carers.
Australia must also continue its leadership of multilateral efforts to address human trafficking with an emphasis on sexual servitude and enslavement. AAWAA would further like to see the Australian Government take a leadership role in establishing extraterritorial laws to address exploitative commercial surrogacy. Finally, AAWAA would like to see Australia – through DFAT – lead a renewed campaign to address the issue of gender-stereotyping in all domains of policy; we would especially like to see DFAT do more to uphold specific obligations regarding gender-stereotyping in education (CEDAW article 10c), where contested ideas of ‘gender’ (as an innate feeling manifest in, for example, clothing preferences and submissive behaviours) risk reinforcing discredited cultural stereotypes that have historically held women and girls back.
The importance of sex-specific language
AAWAA is concerned that efforts to address stereotyping have prompted misguided calls to degender all language and not just where stereotypes are implied as in matters of power or authority (such as in the word ‘chairman’). But calls to degender all language in fact exacerbate discrimination against women, especially where new usages impede clear communication, in matters of health for example.
AAWAA is also concerned about efforts in the United Nations to refashion language to efface women. We look to DFAT’s leadership to push back against these efforts and make the case for linguistic clarity and accuracy. We note in this context that arguments for erasing linguistic distinctions between men and women is the practical application of queer theory that emerged in Western universities, and its imposition on others carries strong undertones of cultural imperialism.
Conflating support for women and girls and persons of ‘diverse gender identities’
AAWAA is concerned that Australia’s and international efforts to address stereotyping have also been confused and constrained by well-intentioned but misguided efforts to promote ‘diverse gender identities’ within the same policy context; the promotion of gender equality and the protection of persons of ‘diverse genders’ are two very different issues, relying on two very different meanings of the word gender, and calling for two very different policy responses.
Self-identification in the developing world
AAWAA has reservations about self-identification laws in Australia because of the scope they provide for abuse – despite the existence of other laws and programs (for example, concerning consent) designed to protect women’s rights to safety, dignity, privacy, and sexual autonomy. But self-identification laws in countries with much weaker legal safeguards and societal norms of male entitlement to women’s bodies would be disastrous – and would, we believe, be rightly rejected by women in these countries.
The ‘Yogyakarta Principles’
AAWAA is concerned about efforts in some quarters to promote the ‘Yogyakarta Principles’ as an international human rights standard. These principles call on states to remove all barriers to self-ID including by ending the practice of registering sex on legal documents, such as birth certificates. Implementing these principles would have severe consequences, making it impossible to carry out ‘special measures’ to address female disadvantage – as required under CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women – along with efforts to collect meaningful statistics to monitor and evaluate progress. The Yogyakarta Principles have no standing in Australian or international law. It should also be noted that they were negotiated by activists, including at least one who has since recognised that the negotiators failed to consider the implications of the principles for the rights of women.
Safeguarding children
AAWAA also calls on DFAT to be mindful of the risk that short-hand messaging to advocate for human rights protections against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity does not serve to legitimate unproven and risky medical treatment for children and young people in the name of their ‘gender identities.’
The risk arises because advocates have extended the very legitimate and important aim of eliminating violence and discrimination against adults who have freely chosen a ‘gender identity’ to apply the concept of ‘gender identity’ to children and with it the notion that states have an obligation to provide these children with unproven and risky medical treatments to ‘affirm’ a gender identity.
This is despite a growing body of expert opinion – and a view accepted by a growing number of countries (e.g., Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, and the UK) – that the evidence base for these medical interventions is poor, that interventions carry significant risk for a young person’s future well-being and that some transgender identities in young people have subsequently proven mistaken especially among children who were simply same-sex attracted. AAWAA raises these concerns in the context of gender equality because girls have come to dominate presentations at gender clinics in the Global North – a trend we fear may be repeated in the Global South.
Read our full submission below.
Affiliation of Australian Women's Action Alliances 