The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights begins with these words:
This Declaration reaffirms the sex-based rights of women which are set out in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 18 December 1979 (CEDAW), further developed in the CEDAW Committee General Recommendations, and adopted, inter alia, in the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women 1993 (UNDEVW).
The CEDAW committee recently solicited submissions from women and women’s organizations on the subject of gender stereotypes and how to combat them. The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus and Lesbian Bill Of Rights International (LBORI) each submitted a statement; you can read both of them below.
WDI USA Lesbian Caucus Statement to CEDAW on Gender Stereotypes
To CEDAW:
Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is a global, nonpartisan group of volunteer women dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights. Women’s Declaration International USA, Inc. (WDI USA) is its U.S. chapter. WDI promotes the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (the Declaration), which has more than 39,000 signatures globally. The undersigned are the members of WDI USA’s Lesbian Caucus.
As radical feminists who are lesbians, we aim to abolish all gender, meaning sex stereotypes. Not just “trans” gender, but the entire spectrum of masculine-feminine, whether performed by a male or a female. Abolition of all gender is our aim because we understand that it is a system that functions to maintain the sex class of males as dominant and the sex class of females as subordinate. We aim to abolish that sex-class system of dom-sub.
In this article published by WDI USA, authors Levey, Lopez, and Nowlin wrote:
When gender is a pervasive system that each woman has internalized from the culture (as it surely must be to some degree), free choice in matters regarding our own presentations and behaviors is an illusion, because what feels like a choice is so heavily influenced by our internalized system of gender. For this reason, radical feminists don’t primarily examine personal presentations and behaviors as to whether or not they were freely chosen; they ask whether particular presentations and behaviors support the liberation of the sex class composed of women and girls.
We encourage you to read that article in its entirety, as it delves into the harms of gender stereotypes relating to Black women and to detransitioned and desisted women, in addition to lesbians. In this statement by the WDI USA Lesbian Caucus we will focus on the harms of gender stereotypes relating to women as a class and lesbians in particular.
Sheila Jeffreys, one of the directors of WDI, has written and spoken extensively about harmful beauty practices, including in her book “Beauty and Misogyny” (2005). Jeffreys describes how specific beauty practices – which exaggerate and enforce biological differences between the sexes – are typically framed either as natural or as freely chosen; and in any case as being without generalizable, culture-wide significance. She describes how these practices harm women individually and collectively, and for the purpose of enforcing the subordination of the female sex class. They harm women’s health, diminish women’s strength and mobility, and undermine women’s dignity and ability to thrive as full humans entitled to full civil rights. A partial list of such beauty practices includes “transgender medicine,” labiaplasty, anal bleaching, lip fillers, breast augmentation and mastectomy, body piercings; and clothing fashions such as shoes with high narrow heels and pointy toes, tight short skirts, long decorated fingernails, and plunging necklines.
Jeffreys explains that such practices are not freely chosen, which can be seen in the denial of privileges in public life to women who fail to adopt them. They are a condition of employment for most women in most high-paying jobs. These conditions support the domination-subordination core of gender with visible badges of subordination for women. While men in business attire have both feet planted, with bodies covered in a dignified manner, his female counterparts teeter precariously on high heels, showing cleavage and other bare skin, unable to fully use their long-nailed fingers, and continuously having to move the required long hair out of their eyes either by touching it or tossing their heads. To gain precarious and conditional male acceptance of a woman’s participation in public life, a woman is required to divert part of her attention away from her work and instead toward her self-conscious awareness of her impractical appearance and posture. The contrast in professional attire required for each sex, like the veil in other cultures, makes the female’s subordinate status visible at a glance, so that she can be treated accordingly.
Explicitly abolishing gender in law and policy would be a statement that femininity has nothing to do with being female; and that women have a right to live consistently as free, dignified, full human beings having full agency.
As to lesbians in particular, authors Levey, Lopez, and Nowlin wrote the following:
What would the abolition of gender look like for lesbians?
- The stigma of “lesbian” would end. The Lesbian Bill Of Rights defines a lesbian as “a female homosexual; or, a woman or girl who is exclusively same-sex attracted.” By definition, lesbians are taboo in patriarchy because (a) they deny sexual access to all men, and (b) they demonstrate that women have sexual agency – that sexual desire and satisfaction occur for them without male involvement. Both taboos exist as a consequence of gender, i.e., the patriarchal requirement of universal male supremacy. There must be no viable exceptions, or else the rationale for patriarchy disappears. Without the dom-sub component of gender, the stigma of being a lesbian disappears along with patriarchy itself.
- The institution of state-sanctioned marriage would disappear. Its purpose has always been for the state to regulate and be a party to long-term sexual relationships in order to support patriarchy: to manage the ownership and inheritance of property accordingly, and to encourage heterosexual married couples to have lots of “legitimate” children, especially sons/heirs. Its marketing strategies involve romance, religion, soul-mate ideology, and tax breaks and immigration privileges. Some of these “perks” have no value to the collective interests of women and girls as a sex class or lesbians in particular; others should not be tied to marital status. There are ways of organizing communities other than isolating each woman, away from her birth family, in a household headed by a man.
- Lesbian motherhood would no longer be valorized. Once women, including lesbians, are understood to be fully human, with equal access to productive public life, lesbians (like other women) would not be pressured to bear even one child. And the choice to become a mother would not be made or seen in the context of femininity (or “women’s nature”). Furthermore, lesbian motherhood would not be lamented as “how sad the poor baby has no daddy.” Being raised by a community of lesbians could arguably be quite a rich upbringing for any child, especially in a culture where gender has been eliminated.
- The lesbian gender identities of butch and femme, discussed by Sheila Jeffreys and Lauren Levey in February of 2024, would disappear. “Butch” means masculine, and “femme” means feminine. Some lesbians make an attempt to reframe butch as simply “not feminine” or as “nonconforming to gender expectations for women,” but in common usage “butch” maps the swagger of male entitlement and domination. Although some lesbians feel strongly that lesbian genders are innate and immutable, and that butch or femme, for instance, is who they are, there is no scientific evidence to support biological innateness. Without the power and romance and mystique of masculinity and femininity, butch and femme would no longer have a cultural foundation. So we predict that lesbians would not only be functioning workers in the public sphere, as most are now; but would also appear as fully functioning workers.
5. Absent social stigma,there would be a lot more women living openly and visibly as lesbians, for two reasons: (a) Lesbians would no longer be excluded from public life generally, and (b) lesbian communities would be welcoming to new lesbians, to women who are wondering if they might be lesbians, and to women who wished to become lesbians. And many of those open and visible lesbians would undoubtedly be taking the lead in creating new and more just structures of social organization post-patriarchy.
The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus
Lauren Levey, coordinator
Katherine Kinney
Mary Ellen Kelleher
KC Bianco
LBORI Statement to CEDAW on Gender Stereotypes
To the CEDAW Secretariat:
Lesbian Bill Of Rights International (LBORI) is an international network of lesbian radical feminist organizations. Our principles are enumerated in the Lesbian Bill Of Rights (the LBOR).
“Gender stereotypes” is a redundant expression because gender is the sum of stereotypes whereby society subjugates women: Gender is the cultural expression of the material oppression of women by men.
For this reason, LBORI asks CEDAW and all governmental bodies to maintain the word “sex” in their recommendations and legislation and to avoid conflating it or replacing it with “gender.” This clarity is crucial to the very survival of any lesbian community and to legal protection for women and girls as a sex class: Lesbians’ rights, as it is for all women, are based on sex. UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem recently warned against erasing sex-based language, calling it a “new form of violence against women.”
The language of gender is dangerous for women in general and for lesbians in particular because it paves the way to legitimizing the concept of “gender identity” and, subsequently, of the right of men to self-identify as women. “Gender identity” is a lie that some men could be born in the wrong sexed bodies and possess female souls; this lie is then used by men to appropriate women’s rights, spaces, and opportunities.
Being a human female is not a feeling, but a biological fact. Men as a sex class use this biological fact to subordinate women as a sex class. There is no such thing as a female soul in a male body, nor vice versa. In fact, there is not even a female soul in a female body, nor vice versa. Humans are fully embodied; no part of us exists apart from our bodies. We are our body and the body is never the “wrong” one. The concept of a female or male soul is a reactionary one because it accepts gender stereotypes that are historically determined by the cultures, politics, and economics of the patriarchal oppression of all women and girls as a sex class.
Lesbian spaces, community, and culture would be destroyed if men claiming they are women were considered lesbians and allowed by law to participate. Lesbians’ sexual orientation is based on attraction to the female sex, not to feminine gender presentation. Lesbians can be masculine looking or feminine looking, but their romantic love and sexual attraction are for women, never for men who claim to be women.
Moreover, an increasing number of young lesbians accepting the concept of “gender identity” are being medicalised all over the world. They are administered puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones; basically, the lie of “gender identity” allows the return of conversion therapy for the most vulnerable lesbians and other young women, forcing them to consider men as sexual partners. “Transing” of homosexuals is done explicitly as a conversion practice in very homophobic countries such as Iran.
Finally, it should be noted that the “gender identity” agenda is unfortunately pushed by NGOs on women’s associations around the globe, through the power of funding to be given or denied, notwithstanding the fact that in most countries of the world being born female is automatically a heavy burden and has nothing to do with the subjective claim of gender identity. There is no country in which any woman or girl can “identify” her way out of the pre-existing sex-based subjugation.
Lesbian Bill Of Rights International
Women’s Declaration International USA Lesbian Caucus (USA)
Lesbian Resistance (New Zealand)
Lezbicon (Norway)
ArciLesbica (Italy)
