Joint Statement Concerning the Call for Input by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls

We, the undersigned feminist, human rights and social justice organizations committed to gender equality and social justice, express deep concern regarding the framing of the call for a thematic report by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls (SRVAW), which adopts a “sex-based” rather than a “gender-based” approach. This framing undermines decades of progress in advancing human rights and gender equality and risks confining cisgender women to patriarchal, protectionist policies by interpreting violence as rooted in biology. It further marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred.

The Strategic Shift of the Focus from Real Perpetrators to an Oppressed Group

The current mandate holder has unfortunately dedicated her tenure to attacking trans and gender-diverse people. Many of her calls and statements have indirectly framed trans people as an obstacle for cis women in achieving safety and equality. This dangerous narrative shifts focus away from patriarchal systems and cis-normative gender roles as the primary sources of violence, discrimination, and inequality. Instead, it positions trans people as scapegoats, enabling the very systems responsible for violence and oppression to avoid accountability. This approach undermines the broader fight for gender equality and harms cis women by reinforcing paternalistic and protectionist policies that uphold patriarchal power structures. Such policies, presented as “women’s protection,” constrain women within patriarchal systems rather than breaking away from patriarchal power dynamics altogether and empowering them, inter alia, through autonomy and equitable redistribution of power and resources. It is telling that anti-gender actors have often welcomed the current mandate holder’s reports and positions and have used her framing and recommendations to push for retrogressive language and to argue against the inclusion of gender-related language in resolutions. This alignment reveals how such framing serves regressive agendas, patriarchal systems, and anti-rights actors rather than advancing human rights for all.

The current mandate holder has a history of efforts that have caused tangible harm, including:

• Undermining National and Regional Reforms: unsolicited interventions on rights-affirming reforms, such as the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill and the Council of Europe resolution on sex workers’ rights.
• Opposing UN Evidence-Based Policies: Ignoring and attacking established UN positions supporting trans and gender-diverse persons and sex workers, attempting to insert her mandate into resolutions at the Human Rights Council in violation of the mandate’s independent nature.
• Manipulating data: Erasing and ignoring contributions from rights holders and affected communities including sex workers, trans persons, and allied organizations in her thematic reports.

Why Framing Violence as “Sex-Based” is a Problematic Lens

The Special Rapporteur’s call framing violence as “sex-based” imposes a limited lens for understanding systemic violence, overlooks the structural root causes of such violence, thereby undermining access to an effective remedy and seeks to erase the well-established understanding of gender-based violence (GBV) within the UN system and international law.

As defined by the World Health Organization:

“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.”

Gender has been the subject of decades of feminist scholarship and organizing, as well as the work of human rights mechanisms. It captures both biological elements and the social interpretations of those elements, as well as the systems of regulation surrounding them. Feminists have long argued that sex is always gender because power imbalances stem not from sexual (biological) elements themselves but from societal interpretations and regulations of those elements. Consequently, discussions about sex are inherently discussions about gender.

The “sex-based” approach reduces the complex social and structural dynamics of violence to a rigid, biological understanding of sex, ignoring lived realities. By promoting a Western colonial patriarchal worldview that insists on the binary nature of sex, it disregards the lived experiences of millions of people. The notion of binary sex stems from Western colonial patriarchy, which historically used strict sex distinctions to assert white supremacy. Under this framework, Black and other racialized women were labeled as inherently gender non-conforming with catastrophic consequences on their health and rights. The category of “woman” has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming. This legacy underpins the harmful positions now advanced by the current mandate holder.

In the real world, neither sex nor gender is binary. Sex comprises many elements, manifesting differently in individuals. The Special Rapporteur’s positions oversimplify these realities and perpetuate an alternative worldview rooted in exclusion and erasure. Even though Special Procedures have a crucial role in upholding the universality and indivisibility of human rights, the current mandate holder’s stance undermines progress on gender equality and reinforces harmful narratives that perpetuate violence and discrimination.

Established Norms

In the call for input, the mandate holder directly contradicts her position by justifying her use of “sex-based” violence with the following statement:

“While the term ‘sex’ has not been defined in international law, Article 31 of the Vienna Declaration on the Law of Treaties (1969) mandates that treaties be interpreted ‘in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose.’ The same article also specifies that States shall take into account—together with the context in which a treaty was concluded—‘any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between parties’ and any subsequent practice. Based on the aforementioned, sex is to be understood as a ‘biological category’ and a distinction between women and men as well as boys and girls. This is the understanding that the Special Rapporteur has for the purposes of the report.”

Human rights mechanisms have clarified as early as 1989 that the prohibition of sex-based discrimination, as enshrined in core international human rights treaties, includes gender-based discrimination. In its General Recommendation 35, CEDAW reaffirmed this interpretation as including gender-based violence, which it defines as “violence which is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately”. This definition has been accepted and recognised by over 30 years of State practice and now forms a principle of customary international law. Furthermore, the term “gender-based violence” is recognised by CEDAW as a more precise and preferred term to “violence against women” as it makes explicit “the gendered causes and impacts of the violence”, and emphasizes the social structures and causes of the violence. This is a position that previous mandate holders have always endorsed.

These standards cover all women, including trans and intersex women and gender-diverse people, who are disproportionately targeted for social control based on their perceived transgressions of established gender roles and sexuality. UN agencies, Treaty Bodies, and past Special Procedures mandate holders have long promoted a gender-based lens to address violence, rooted in the principles of non-discrimination, universality, and interdependence of rights. Gender as a concept was not developed at the time when human rights law was created. Feminist scholarship and human rights mechanisms have redefined the concept of “sex.” Unfortunately, the current mandate holder misinterprets “sex” in bad faith by ignoring decades of feminist scholarship and the work of human rights mechanisms in defining the concept of sex and gender, undermining decades of coherent UN agency, Treaty Body, and Special Procedures’ analysis of gender.

Call to Action

We urge all human rights mechanisms and bodies, including UN Treaty Bodies, Special Procedures Mandate Holders, and UN Agencies to:

1. Adopt an inclusive, evidence-based gender lens, recognizing that violence is rooted in structural inequalities and social norms, expectations and stereotypes, not biology alone.
2. Refrain from divisive and biologically deterministic narratives that undermine the rights of cis women and trans and gender-diverse persons.
3. Center the autonomy, agency, and voices of all rights-holders, especially those directly impacted by patriarchal violence.

Our Position on Participation

We respectfully call on civil society organizations, academics, and other stakeholders not to validate the problematic “sex-based” framing, but instead to engage through advocacy and submissions to this call for inputs which challenge the flawed premise and reaffirms the indivisibility and universality of human rights.

Violence against women and girls cannot be addressed without an intersectional and inclusive gender-based framework. Rights belong to all humans; there are no separate or special categories of rights beyond those grounded in universal principles. Let us collectively uphold this vision.