(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / New York, 11.10.2024).- The day before election day in the United States, the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity presented a report to the General Assembly arguing that elections around the world are not gay and trans-friendly enough.
Graeme Reed said that in order to fight against “hate speech” and “gender persecution” countries must censor opponents of the homosexual/transgender agenda. He even argued for “international election observers on LGBT rights issues.”
In apparent electioneering, the report was “welcomed” by the Biden administration. “Your report is very timely, as it comes during the so-called global ‘year of elections’ including in my own country tomorrow,” said Dylan Lang, a U.S. delegate to the General Assembly. This may have been a veiled attack against the Trump campaign’s strong positions in favor of banning transgender treatment and surgeries for minors and transgender participation in women sports.
The Trump campaign and its supporters spent over $215 million jointly on political advertisements against transgender policies, highlighting specifically Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for transgender issues, including in the context of minors and sports. The ads have been credited with boosting support for Trump and contributing to low Democratic turnout.
According to the report, such ads may be considered a form of “gender persecution”, which is an international crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The report lists “online animosity” against the homosexual/transgender political agenda as a “threat” alongside such things as “killings, physical attacks, threats, sexual violence.”
The report specifically defines the threat of hate speech as a broad threat, not requiring any specific level of imminent danger or specific threat. It states that “LGBT persons may be targeted specifically in campaign rhetoric, or hostility may be expressed in more general xenophobic terms.” In all such cases, the rhetoric must be rebuked and punished.
It laments the impact of political rhetoric from “unscrupulous politicians” who appeal to “prejudice and provoking further animosity” to cause a “moral panic” against homosexual/transgender issues.
As a result, Reed’s report argues that countries must adopt a slew of homosexual/transgender-specific legislation, including political quotas and “differentiated treatment” to encourage individuals who identify as gay or trans to participate in elections as voters and politicians “with recognition of the non-binarity of gender.”
It replies negatively to objections from women that “gender” policies should be about women and not about transgender issues. “Legal frameworks increasingly address the issue of gender-based political violence, but often do so with a specific focus on women,” he lamented, “without attending to or differentiating between their experience and that of trans women or lesbians.”
Reed’s report also calls for censorship and regulation of civil society organizations, traditional and social media in highly intrusive ways. It calls for aggressive content moderation and “responsibility for third party content” for social media companies and objects to exemptions from hate speech laws for media outlets when “reproducing or broadcasting direct speech of individual politicians, especially if transmitted live on air”
Reed presented his report to the General Assembly on Monday and drew warm congratulations from the U.S. government as well as the European Union and European countries more broadly.
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