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Governments Are Meeting to Discuss Women's Rights at the UN. Trans Women Must Be Included.
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March 9, 2026
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The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is the foremost United Nations body promoting women’s and girls' rights, documenting their lived experiences throughout the world, and framing global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. For seventy years, CSW has been an important multilateral space where governments come together to debate, collaborate, and establish global norms on women’s human rights, producing outcome documents that set forth shared commitments. Civil society activists are present, too, educating and advocating with states and seeking to shape the language of the outcomes.
CSW 2026: A Stress Test for Trans Inclusion
Each year’s CSW has a priority theme; in 2026 it is ”Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls, including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, and addressing structural barriers.”
All women and girls, inclusive systems, elimination of discrimination – as an activist advocating for the rights of trans people around the world, the thematic language sounds promising. But trans people's rights are at a crossroads, at CSW and around the globe. Some voices in civil society, government, and even the UN itself loudly oppose trans people’s rights and have been particularly insistent on narrowly defining “women” in ways that exclude and erase our diversity. This was most pronounced in 2025, which saw a rapid avalanche of the erosion of trans rights globally. While trans rights have been recognized in some diplomatic spaces, they are increasingly vulnerable to being traded away in negotiations and political backlash.
This year’s CSW, with its focus on access to justice and the removal of discriminatory laws, provides both an opportunity and a significant stress test for whether trans people, especially trans women, are seen as an integral part of women’s rights or as expendable. The thematic focus goes directly to the core of trans people’s lived realities: criminalization, lack of legal gender recognition, and systemic exclusion from services and decision-making. When states commit to eliminating discrimination in law and practice, those commitments should apply to all women and girls, including trans women and girls, whether or not they are explicitly named.
Yet, despite the UN having adopted its first UN LGBTI Strategy in 2024 and established the mandate of the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 2016, much more needs to be done to mainstream this inclusion. UN human rights mechanisms have repeatedly documented how trans and gender-diverse people face pervasive violence, legal invisibility, and barriers to health, employment, and justice even where states proclaim broad commitments to equality. CSW, therefore, becomes a critical arena where states can commit to operationalizing existing human rights standards for trans communities or sidestep them altogether.
One of the most visible recent developments is the European Parliament’s resolution calling on EU members of the Commission on the Status of Women to emphasize the importance of “the full recognition of trans women as women,” noting that their inclusion is essential for effective gender-equality and anti-violence policies. While non-binding, it sets a negotiating baseline for the European Union at CSW and sends a clear signal that excluding trans women undermines women’s rights as a whole.
This step builds on a growing body of UN guidance affirming states’ obligations to protect trans people from discrimination and violence, and to guarantee access to legal gender recognition, health, and justice. These standards already exist in human rights law; the question at CSW is whether states are prepared to stand for trans people’s rights, and push back against those that wish to eradicate them, or whether they treat trans inclusion as negotiable in the face of political pressure.
How Anti-Gender Movements Are Weaponizing CSW
In recent years, CSW has increasingly become a venue targeted by coordinated anti‑gender and anti-rights movements seeking to restrict references to sexual and reproductive health and rights, trans people, and gender equality more broadly. These actors use disinformation about “gender ideology” and trans people to fracture women’s movements and to justify watering down language in the negotiated agreed language. The result is that affirming language related to “all” women and girls, or women and girls in all their diversity often becomes a bargaining chip that is sacrificed to preserve a minimal consensus text or to avoid a failed outcome document.
This dynamic does more than erase the understanding of non-violence and discrimination as international law normative absolute principles, and imply that it is permissible to have exemptions for some women, including trans women. It also normalizes the idea that some women’s safety and dignity can be traded for political expediency, reinforcing the very hierarchies of “deserving” and “undeserving” women, something that women’s rights advocates have fought against for decades. As anti‑gender movements gain influence within and beyond the UN, the risk grows that CSW outcomes will lag further behind existing human rights standards, including those on gender identity and expression, rather than advancing them.
Feminist and LGBTIQ Movements Are Organizing Together
Despite this backlash, feminist and LGBTIQ organizations have increasingly organized together around CSW to defend inclusive language and practice. Coalitions of women’s rights, queer, and trans groups have identified how attacks on “gender ideology” and on trans rights are part of a broader project to roll back democracy, bodily autonomy, and even civil society space itself. Activists emphasize that protecting trans women from violence and ensuring self-determined legal gender recognition and access to health and justice are not “special” rights, but obligations enshrined in binding international human rights law – including under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, as interpreted and affirmed by their respective treaty bodies – and they are necessary conditions for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals on health, equality, and inclusive institutions.
CSW increasingly includes parallel events, expert panels, and side meetings that foreground lived experiences of trans and gender-diverse people in relation to justice systems, political participation, and gender-based violence – though these spaces are contested, as anti-trans actors also organize side events and parallel events to advance opposing agendas. Even when these realities do not appear fully in the final written agreed conclusions, they continue to shape the narrative, inform UN agencies’ programming, and build relationships that persist beyond the two-week session.
Excluding Trans Women Weakens the Entire Women's Movement
This marginalization of trans women and gender-diverse people, excluding them from agenda-setting and decision-making, is not merely an attack on a vulnerable minority but a broader assault on democratic principles themselves. When any group is systematically silenced in spaces meant to represent all women, the legitimacy of those spaces is compromised. The anti-trans agenda at CSW mirrors the tactics of wider authoritarian and anti-democratic movements: the narrowing of who counts, the policing of who belongs, and the shrinking of the civic tent. A women's movement that excludes trans women is not only diminished in its diversity, but weakened in its democratic foundations, and ultimately, in its power to advance justice for anyone.
The Stakes: Justice Cannot Be Selective
Whether CSW becomes a driver of trans‑inclusive gender equality or a forum where trans rights are repeatedly bargained away will be determined not only in negotiation rooms, but by the power that women’s and LGBTIQ movements build together. States have affirmed that lesbian, bisexual, trans, and intersex women and girls endure disproportionately high rates of sexual and gender‑based violence, rooted in the same gender norms and patriarchal structures that harm straight, cisgender, and non-intersex women.The stakes are clear: there can be no meaningful access to justice, no end to discrimination or gender‑based violence, and no genuine equality or full access to public participation if trans people’s rights remain optional in the UN’s premier space on the status of women, because this treats the women and gender-diverse people who face some of the highest levels of violence and exclusion as expendable; it reinforces the theme of erasure of trans women and sets an exclusionary precedent for whom which international standards set at CSW are applicable to; it tells states that women’s rights standards may be applied selectively; and it entrenches a two‑tier system in which cis women benefit from strong language on “women and girls,” while language on gender‑based violence, which addresses harm on the basis of gender rather than sex, is sidelined. This marginalizes trans women and gender‑diverse people, excluding them from agenda‑setting and decision‑making, and in so doing weakening both democracy and the women’s movement as a whole.
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