The WHRC Declaration, Explained (part 1)

I was originally going to make this a multi-part series going through the WHRC declaration in deep detail from start to finish. However since writing it, legal scholar and International Human Rights Law academic Sandra Duffy has written a much more rigorous and scholarly analysis. I really recommend going straight to that instead. I’m an activist who can read technical language competently but I’m not a lawyer.

I am incredibly grateful for the considered effort that went into Duffy’s analysis, which largely concords with my own view of the Women’s Declaration, and is more forthright than I was, because I was trying to stay cautious of the limits of my own knowledge.

The WHRC Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (“the Declaration”) is a sprawling commitment asserting a collection of claims, concerns, and affirmations, based around the international human rights law framework of the United Nations 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (“CEDAW”). The original Declaration format as published in 2019 (A5_Declaration_Booklet.pdf) was 32 pages long, and the amended format now published since 2020 (DECLARATION_-_FINAL_VERSION_AMENDED.pdf) is 20 pages long, although it does not appear that the text has changed substantively between versions.

The Women’s Declaration is unambiguously a document for the abolition of trans people’s civil rights. This has become controversial because it is the leading definition of the so-called “sex-based rights” and has…