Can human rights as a concept survive? NGOCSW66 – 20 March 2022

I am going to argue today that the inclusion of imagined identities such as ‘gender identity’ into human rights understandings and activism threatens the significance and integrity of the very idea of human rights. The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights that we are here to talk about today concerns the protection of women’s rights from ‘gender identity’. The word ‘gender’ in the term ‘gender identity’ means an imagined essence of womanhood composed of insulting sex stereotypes about how women behave and think. But the inclusion of imagined identities into human rights documents and understandings threatens so much more, it threatens the ability to support equality and anti-discrimination on the grounds of race and disability too, as I will show…

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Download full transcript: Can women – Sheila Jeffreys