Regressive Gender Politics in International Geneva

By Claire Somerville

Language has always been the frontline of multilateral negotiations. Diplomatic dialogue and compromise move texts toward consensus – or sometimes a vote – through processes where every word, comma, or clause reflects months, even years of drafting, interactive dialogues, and closed-door bilateral meetings. These texts - a resolution, a political declaration, a treaty, or a convention - produce hard and soft law, norms, and principles from health and human rights to agreements on trade and peace. Typically, these texts begin by recalling agreed language from previous texts, painstakingly re-crafted through negotiation to produce what diplomats and feminist legal scholar Valarie Oosterveld calls “constructive ambiguity”: vague enough to allow consensus, yet strong enough to signal progress. 

When it comes to diplomatic negotiations on texts related to gender and the rights of women and girls, constructive ambiguity can produce layers of double coding, where words and phrases convey a range of meanings for different country delegations.

When it comes to diplomatic negotiations on texts related to gender and the rights of women and girls, constructive ambiguity can produce layers of double coding, where words and phrases convey a range of meanings for different country delegations. In practice, this leads to whispered corridor debates: “When they say X, do they really mean Y?” Here, “X” might be “family” (singular) versus “families” (plural), with implications for sexuality, kinship, and gender roles. Depending on context, even small variations — “women” versus “all” women or women “in all their diversity”— can spark intense negotiation around meaning, cultural context, and agreed interpretation. 

This is not new. Debated in the early 1990s, these coded contestations on gender language occurred during the negotiations of the Beijing Declaration at the Fourth World Conference on Women, and again in 1998 when the text of the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court and the crime of gender violence, carried “gender” in brackets until the final hours. 

Thirty years after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights,” the international system faces an unprecedented narrowing of definitions. The shift is away from inclusive compromise toward exclusionary certainty — and a politics that seeks to erase gender itself.

What is different, however, is that today, we are not debating nuance; we are confronting attempts at outright erasure of the agreed gender language in existence throughout consensus-based texts for several decades. Thirty years after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights,” the international system faces an unprecedented narrowing of definitions. The shift is away from inclusive compromise toward exclusionary certainty — and a politics that seeks to erase gender itself. 

The Erasure of Gender 

Language matters, but the erasure of language matters most. 

On 20 January 2025, President Trump rescinded the White House Gender Policy. In his inauguration speech, he declared: 

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” 

The Executive Order, later that afternoon, demanded: 

…every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable Federal policies and documents.’ 

This is not a semantic change. It strikes at the heart of decades of negotiated compromise on gender justice. Replacing “gender” with “sex” renders entire populations invisible — transgender, intersex, and non-binary people, as well as women who do not fit Trump’s vision of women, gender roles, and constructions of “femininity”. Silencing categories also means erasing recognition and, by extension, protection. 

The ripple effects were immediate in Geneva. Within days, US-funded organisations scrubbed “gender” from websites, abandoned diversity initiatives, and shifted budgets to refer only to “women and girls”. Anticipatory compliance, motivated by fear of defunding, quickly aligned with regressive gender politics. 

Mimicry as Strategy: The Geneva Consensus Declaration 

The current wave of erasure did not begin in 2025. Back in 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the so-called Geneva Consensus Declaration. Despite its UN-like logo and title, the text was not a UN document but the annex to a letter filed at the seventy–fifth session of the General Assembly in New York by the previous Trump administration. Unrelated to the city of Geneva, or the treaties that carry the city’s name, and far from being the product of a transparent political process of consensus adoption, the annexed document can be easily mistaken as a source for agreed language. 

Trump’s Day One decree was not just a domestic policy. It was a signal that international cooperation is vulnerable to erasure politics. If a single executive order can delete “gender,” what else in multilateral diplomacy might be erased?

The declaration convincingly mimics a UN resolution through a mash-up of quotes cut, pasted, and cubed, from genuine UN texts, repurposed to support a regressive agenda. It tethers gender to sex at conception, frames the family as a fixed traditional unit, and promotes the health of women in connection to their primary role in relation to reproduction and family welfare. The effect: to wed gender to restrictive binary biological categories, erase women’s bodily autonomy, and consign women to a primary societal role as mothers and family caregivers. Described in the United States government's 2022 interagency report on the advancement of Human Rights as “anti LGBTQI+”, the declaration reverses US domestic policy and recruits additional member states to adopt regressive gender politics. 

What Next? 

Trump’s Day One decree was not just a domestic policy. It was a signal that international cooperation is vulnerable to erasure politics. If a single executive order can delete “gender,” what else in multilateral diplomacy might be erased? 

The stakes are higher than gender alone. Multilateralism itself is under threat. Gender is a fragile frontline — if it falls, other negotiated categories and rights may follow. To defend gender language is not a niche issue; it is to defend cooperation, evidence-based policy, and justice for all.

Yet reality cannot be legislated away. Erasing a word does not erase lived experience. Diplomats and negotiators must resist anticipatory compliance and uphold the legitimacy of the UN system that enabled advancement on gender justice through the agreement of texts that shape the contours of how nations cooperate. Instead of quietly deleting words, they must defend them. Gender remains a central analytical category for understanding inequality, as reaffirmed in the 1997 ECOSOC resolution on gender mainstreaming. Advancement on gender justice is an advancement on the rights and freedoms of all. 

The stakes are higher than gender alone. Multilateralism itself is under threat. Gender is a fragile frontline — if it falls, other negotiated categories and rights may follow. To defend gender language is not a niche issue; it is to defend cooperation, evidence-based policy, and justice for all. International Geneva proudly hosts a significant number of negotiations – from pandemics to plastics and peace, to trade, labour, human rights, and fisheries – and more, placing its delegations and negotiators in the headlights of some of the most pressing global issues. That an anti-gender document has co-opted the name of the city of Geneva, in an attempt to garner legitimacy, risks undermining its reputation for peace, neutrality, and justice. 

About the Author 

Claire Somerville is an anthropologist, lecturer, and executive director of the Gender Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute.