Women's Organizations

UNIFEM and the The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues were both strange and disorienting experience for me in New York in terms of how they framed gender. Working through the UN to help promote ‘gender issues’ both organizations had an extremely closed minded view of what gender issues actually encompass.

BOTH organizations brought us to women’s issues around the world, in countries that don’t have the same rights that we do, and seemed to do a great number of things fro these countries based on what they could see they needed. MADRE, a similar organization that excludes government funding in order to target areas that the government just condemns such as sex work, offers a less biased perspective to help those in need, though all three organizations focussed on important women’s issues. The problem I have with the two organizations based through the UN is their perspective on ‘gender’.

While both claimed to be open to gendered issues, both organizations defined gender as female. Any reference to transgender, gender dissonance, third sex, the berdache or any other permutation of identity was entirely ignored, even though Indigenous culture often accepts third genders. Not only did they exclude multiple genders from their gender issues, their language seemed archaic, stating that ‘gender’ mean women, framing the female as other to the dominant male. If gender issues pertains only to women, then non gender issues must be male issues, ignoring the fact that most issues are gender non specific. This way of thinking negates equality, even though often the goal is to erase violence and inequality against women.