This past June, UN Women put out a messaging campaign that angered women around the world.

Here’s some of what they shared:

Framing women’s rights advocates as ‘anti-rights movements’ was a heinous move and is completely off-the-rails from UN Women’s mission:

Our Executive Director, Sharon Byrne, has served as a delegate to the Conference on the Status of Women at the United Nations and has reported that it’s attended by over 10,000 women every year desperately seeking to advance women’s issues throughout the world. Topics range from female genital mutilation, child marriage, land for women to farm in impoverished nations, peace-building,  conflict violence, and violence against women. That is the work that UN Women, as an internal department in the United Nations, should be focused on. 

UN Women’s attacks on ‘gender critical’ women, who don’t believe men can be women, are neither upholding women’s rights nor ensuring that women and girls live up to their full potential. It’s antithetical to it.

The USA is the primary funder of the UN, providing 22% of its annual budget, and is seen as the major player in the UN. Our Executive Director gave a talk at WDI UK’s conference in London last month on the topic of how the USA is pushing the UN on gender ideology.

While UN Women were thoroughly excoriated on social media for damning women standing up for women’s rights, WoLF felt a unified global voice was needed to push back on them. Our friends at MATRIA in Brazil wanted to collaborate with us, and we decided the best response was an open letter to UN Women that other organizations could sign on to. We drafted it and created a website where they could sign on and upload their logos.

We decided to call this joint effort between WoLF and MATRIA “United Women for Women’s Rights.”

Our groups sent it around to friendly women’s organizations we’d worked with…

And then something amazing happened.

Our friend, Jo Brew at WDI UK, got the letter to several international women’s rights groups to sign on. We reached out to Radfem Italia, for example, and they’d introduce us to more Italian women’s rights organizations. WDI Espana sent it to other Spanish women’s rights organizations.

Organizations from Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and more all signed on. Lesbian rights organizations from other countries reached out to each other and signed on.

A global coalition of women’s organizations has now signed on to the letter, some of whom we’d never met before. Every day, more and more women are signing the letter.

Here’s the best part:

Every time someone signs on, it triggers emails to UN Women and staff in UN Human Rights and UN Headquarters in New York. So they’re getting a lot of emails, as over 2,800 have signed on at this point.

YOU CAN SIGN IT TOO!

There’s an even better step you can take: Contact Linda Greenfield-Thomas, the US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Our Executive Director has regard for Greenfield-Thomas, as she’s been very strong in representing US interests on both Ukraine and the situation between Israel and Gaza at the UN Security Council. She has solid foreign affairs experience. So why is she pushing gender ideology at the United Nations? Sharon feels this is the US government’s stance, and our Ambassador to the UN is required to carry it, like it or not.

The opportunity:

We could make the US Mission To The UN realize that Americans do not support pushing gender ideology at the UN. If our ambassador receives a lot of contact from her countrymen and women on the topic, she could raise an alert to our government that the public is not on board with gender ideology and doesn’t want the US pushing it at the UN.

After all, there’s way more important work to do in the world, right?

Would you be willing to contact Ambassador Greenfield-Thomas? We advise using the US Mission to the UN’s official website and forward your letter to Contact@WomensLiberationFront.org.

Comments submitted through the website are tracked by staff and will generate emails to the US Mission Staff. They tend to notice and react when something is perceived as ‘hot’ or very unpopular.

Why this could work:

You were terrific in contacting the US Senate Judiciary Committee about Judge Netburn’s appointment. Senate leaders talked publicly about all the emails they received from feminists pushing back on that appointment. We’d like to deploy a similar strategy now, but it will require a chorus of US citizens singing the same tune from diverse political backgrounds. This could be very helpful in turning this situation around at the United Nations.

In contacting the US Mission to the UN, you may want to express that you are appalled by UN Women accusing women who stand up for women’s rights of being ‘anti-rights.’ You might oppose the forced teaming of lesbian and gay rights with transgender ideology, which subverts LGB rights. You might oppose the forced teaming of feminism and trans rights that UN Women asserts is required. You could point out that removing the word ‘woman’ (which UN Women has also done, using terms like ‘pregnant people’) and erasing women’s sex-based rights and spaces, as required by gender ideology, is very much in conflict with women’s rights.

We welcome you to make your points as you see fit but encourage you to respectfully let Ambassador Greenfield-Thomas know that citizens across the United States do not support this ideology and do not want to see the United States Mission to the UN push it.

We know we have supporters from other countries, and we encourage you to contact your country’s ambassador as well.

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