Delegates at the United Nations 70th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) overwhelmingly voted against considering a proposal by the U.S. to adopt an anti-trans definition of “gender.”

On March 19, the final day of the nine-day conference, the U.S. introduced a resolution calling on U.N. member states to officially define “gender” as referring only to men and women. The resolution claimed that the landmark Beijing Declaration on women’s rights, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, already defined gender as “referring to men and women.”

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But a letter from the progressive Women’s Rights Caucus circulated among delegates last week noted that the commission did not adopt a specific definition of “gender” in 1995, Devex reported. Cristal Downing of the International Crisis Group said that at the time, member states “agreed to disagree” on interpretations of the word.

“They were more comfortable with leaving the term open to interpretation than they were with any attempt to create a shared definition,” Downing said, according to PassBlue.

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Speaking to Devex, Jennifer Rauch, global advocacy officer at Fòs Feminista, accused the U.S. of being “willing to lie” to “push forward their own gender ideology onto people in the U.N. system.”

During last Thursday’s final CSW session at the U.N. Headquarters in New York City, the representative from Belgium said that the U.S. resolution was “factually incorrect as it misquotes and contradicts Annex IV of the Fourth World Conference on Women, and attempts to rewrite what was carefully agreed and reflected in Beijing over 30 years ago.”

On behalf of 25 other member states, Belgium called for a “no action motion” to block the proposal. Pakistan and Chile were the only two member states to vote with the U.S. against the motion, with 23 countries voting to block the anti-trans proposal and 17 abstaining.

“It was a huge moment of the world telling the U.S. that it stops here,” María Paula Perdomo of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Outright International told Devex. “We follow the rules, and if you want to bring this, do it appropriately, do it with due process, and bring it with truth.”

But as PassBlue notes, some of the 17 countries that abstained said they’d done so only on procedural grounds. Italy’s representative said that while they agreed with Belgium that the U.S. had failed to seek other member states’ input and had not circulated the proposal until the last minute, the country agrees with the interpretation of “gender” as “referring exclusively to male, female, binary based on sex at birth.”

The failed resolution came after the U.S. also failed at the beginning of the conference to introduce amendments to the conference’s agreed conclusions. Those amendments included the redefinition of gender, along with others that align with the current presidential administration’s positions on gender equality, DEI, reproductive rights, climate change, and digital regulation. After CSW delegates voted against the amendments, the U.S. forced a vote on the agreed conclusions, marking the first time in the conference’s 70-year history that the document was not adopted by consensus. The U.S. was the only member state to vote against the agreed conclusions, which represent CSW’s priorities and guidelines on gender equality and justice for the world community.

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