Does the UN Care About Women?

“The backlash against gender equality is growing, and faith in multilateralism is faltering. This is the world we are living in—a world we cannot and will not accept. This is not just unacceptable—it is unconscionable. We cannot allow this to continue. We will not wait.”

The above statement is currently plastered on the homepage of “UN Women UK”, one of dozens of barely distinguishable offshoots of the United Nations, in honor of International Women’s Day 2025. It is a piece of characteristically vague and useless handwringing, and its lament for the loss of faith in “multilateralism” is telling. With the death of “end of historyism”, the UN is facing an uncertain future. Now that liberal globalism, open-borders ideology, and wasteful charitable activities are coming under fire from DOGE and a wave of popular nationalist movements across Europe, the UN is doing what it does best: desperate political signaling.

The BBC is not far behind in its recourse to the irrelevant and the trivial: one of its special contributions to this year’s festivities is a celebration of “the women defying skateboarding stereotypes”. Spotlighting a group of mothers who gather outdoors to skate, the article ends: “Looking ahead, they hope to expand, with the ultimate goal of securing their own indoor space”. Perhaps the BBC should check themselves: they sound suspiciously trans-exclusionary here, seemingly endorsing a single-sex community with its own space. They even neglected to use a gender-inclusive term for “mother”, like “birthing parent”.

Of course, the entire premise of “International Women’s Day” is grounded in an obvious fact which the UN, BBC, and most other liberal organizations paradoxically deny. Women are a sex class whose lives are shaped by the reality of their sex. In many nations, their sex faces repression from regimes and religions which deny them education, basic freedoms, and dignity. In the West, too, women face new sex-based challenges: men with perverse incentives take on female identities and enter their spaces, sports, clubs, and changing rooms with new impunity. But rather than extending praise to the women fighting against the allowance of men into female-only intimate spaces (not to mention medical malpractice inflicted on children, primarily girls, in the name of gender ideology), the organizations celebrating IWD either ignore the elephant in the room or outright demonize the pushback. Ignoring the dozens upon dozens of cases of sexually violent trans-identified men being reported in Reduxx, UN Women has this to say about gender ideology and trans-identification:

“Anti-rights groups have mobilized political support by creating and fostering a moral panic that falsely associates LGBTIQ+ people with mental illness and perversion.”

The UN’s working definition of “rights” seems to be “the demands of purportedly marginal groups”. With such shaky and ideological underpinnings, it is a shame for adult human females everywhere that UN Women is apparently the “only organization working towards gender equality at all levels, in all areas of society”. One of its major concerns seems to be that there are currently not as many women in Parliaments and state departments as there are men, a trend which they apparently attribute to top-down unfair discrimination, rather than the set of causes which actually determines career outcomes for women everywhere: sex differences.

It should go without saying that the nature of Islamic misogyny and abuse is rooted in the existence of women as a sex class rather than a mental state. If the UN can find me an Islamist clan which ceases its coercive veiling of women who claim they are actually men – or perhaps nonbinary – I will happily revise that view.

I don’t wish to put a dampener on celebrations. Women should absolutely be championed and protected. But the liberal organizations, both within and outside of Western governments, which use the fanfare of IWD to signal their support for women are beset by major paradoxes at the heart of their advocacy. Perhaps the most critical of these paradoxes is their disproportionate emphasis on perceived injustices inflicted by “white male hegemony” in the West, rather than Islamic male hegemony in both the developing and, increasingly, the developed worlds. I have written previously about the paradoxes of liberal feminism, or “luxury feminism”. It is clear that Islamic “Honor-Based Abuse” and the repression of women are on the rise in Western European nations: in the UK, “Honor Based Abuse”, including clan-based forced marriage, kidnapping and holding hostage, acid attacks, death threats, rape, and even murder, has risen in England by 193% since 2016. Where is the outcry and advocacy on International Women’s Day? Why does self-congratulation about successful initiatives overseas drown out the agony of women in Islamic enclaves on our own shores? Alarmingly still, empirical data on Islamic misogyny in the global South is still woefully under-available. The UN could well use its international links to address these problems, but it prefers to adopt the American dictum that “race trumps sex” in the hierarchy of victimhood.

There are countless stories of brave women who fight violence and perverse systems of male domination to be championed today. Read their testimonies; notice the precise causes of their suffering; don’t give them yet more struggles to overcome by denying or warping the conditions of their plight. The day the UN champions the story of a girl like Muskan, a 16-year-old Pakistani Christian girl who was raped and forcibly converted to Islam before escaping and eventually fighting her rapist in court, will be the day it becomes an organization worth listening to. But on this International Women’s Day, you will hear no such story.