Reading Chloé Farand’s piece on Cop30 this morning, it did not feel like breaking news. It felt like a rerun.
A row over the term “gender” is threatening to bog down negotiations in Belém. Conservative states are pushing to define gender as “biological sex,” trying to fence trans and non binary people out of a new gender action plan for climate policy. Argentina and Paraguay want footnotes clarifying that gender only refers to “female and male sexes.” The Vatican is lobbying for “sex” instead of “gender” in official language. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Egypt are once again lining up to resist references to gender that might imply anything beyond the binary.
Gender advocates are calling it what it is: a deliberate attempt to roll back decades of UN language and keep climate action safely inside a narrow, binary frame.
If you have read my recent piece, Beyond the Binary: When the Sector Knows Better and Still Chooses Erasure, none of this will surprise you. The development sector already knows that gender is not synonymous with “women and girls.” It has written that knowledge into policies, submissions and strategies. It simply refuses to act as though that knowledge comes with obligations.
The UN has been playing out a version of this same struggle for decades. Cop30 is not an exception, it is the latest stage.
We Have Been Here Before: Beijing 1995 And The “G Word”
In my 2021 blog, Beyond The Gender Binary, I went back through the evolution from Women in Development to Gender and Development, and how we arrived at a “gender mainstreaming” paradigm that supposedly included everyone but in practice stayed stubbornly binary.
The UN story sits inside that history.
By the time the Fourth World Conference on Women met in Beijing in 1995, debates over the term “gender” were already intense. Some states were worried that “gender” might be used to legitimise trans and gender diverse identities, or to smuggle in what they called “new” or “controversial” meanings. Others, particularly from feminist movements, were pushing for gender as a structural concept: a way of naming the power relations and social norms that shape our lives.
The result was a compromise that should sound familiar.
The Commission on the Status of Women set up an informal contact group to “seek agreement on the commonly understood meaning” of gender for the Beijing Platform for Action. After all that effort, the President’s statement concluded that:
· gender had already been used “in its ordinary, generally accepted usage” in other UN forums,
· there was “no indication” any new meaning was intended, and
· the Platform should be read with that “ordinary usage” in mind.
In other words: we will not define it here.
This deliberate ambiguity allowed progress to move forward, but it also created fertile ground for endless dispute. “Gender” could be expansive enough for feminist and queer movements to use, while still feeling “safe” enough for states that wanted to reassure conservative constituencies that nothing radical had happened.
It is the same ambiguity that Argentina, Paraguay and the Vatican are now trying to close down at Cop30.
How The Binary Survived Gender And Development
In Beyond The Gender Binary, I traced how development thinking moved from Women in Development (WID) to Women and Development (WAD) and then Gender and Development (GAD). The story is usually told as a smooth evolution:
· WID: integrate women into development.
· WAD: recognise women’s central role in development and link it to global economic structures.
· GAD: analyse and transform the social relations between women and men.
On paper, GAD was a shift away from “women as a special issue” and toward understanding gender as a social system. It drew on scholars like Gayle Rubin, who described a “sex/gender system” of social arrangements, and on feminist economists who showed how colonialism and capitalism materialise gendered inequalities.
In practice, something else happened.
Gender became a new label put on old habits. “Gender equality” was shorthand for “women’s equality.” Program documents talked about “women and men, girls and boys,” but the real work, the budgets and the indicators stayed tightly tethered to that binary. Trans, non binary and intersex people were, at best, an “other vulnerable group” in a footnote.
In that 2021 piece I wrote that:
The current development system is stuck with perpetuating an artificial gender binary that simply does not exist.
That sentence could be pasted directly into the Cop30 coverage without editing.
The UN “Gender Wars”: Not New, Not Accidental
What is happening in Belém has been happening across UN spaces for years.
Negotiations at the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission on Population and Development, the World Health Assembly and the Human Rights Council have all seen repeated attempts to dilute or remove references to “gender,” “gender responsive,” “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” and anything that looks like it might acknowledge diverse sexual orientations or gender identities.
These are not technical edits. They are political strategies.
In 2024, for example, conservative states at the World Health Assembly objected to phrases like “gender responsive” and “advancing gender mainstreaming,” along with their long standing resistance to the words “sexual” and “rights” when attached to health.
Scholars who track these fights inside the UN have described them as “gender wars” in which conservative coalitions work to contain or reverse the gains made since Beijing, particularly when it comes to recognising gender identity and sexual orientation as human rights questions.
The pattern is familiar:
· Challenge the term “gender” itself, or demand that it be explicitly tied back to “women and men” or “biological sex.”
· Frame any broader understanding as “ideology,” “western” or “against cultural values.”
· Use procedural tools like brackets, footnotes and definitional debates to stall agreements and weaken commitments.
The fight at Cop30 sits squarely inside this older pattern.
A Different Story Inside The Same Building: The SOGI Mandate
At the same time, another current has been running through the UN system.
In 2016, the Human Rights Council created the mandate of the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). The resolution, HRC 32/2, tasked this mandate with documenting human rights violations against people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, identifying root causes, and making recommendations to states.
The first mandate holder, Vitit Muntarbhorn, and his successor, Victor Madrigal Borloz, have been remarkably clear about what is at stake. Their reports show that:
· violence and discrimination based on SOGI are widespread in every region,
· these harms are intensified by other systems of oppression, including gender, race, class and disability, and
· backlash against “gender” and “gender ideology” is being used to undermine not only LGBTQIA+ rights, but the entire human rights framework.
In his 2021 report to the General Assembly, Madrigal Borloz explicitly analysed the “gender backlash” and warned that attacks on gender frameworks threaten “the universality and indivisibility of human rights,” not just the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.
In later reports, he linked this backlash to colonial legacies and the way colonial laws and norms continue to shape which bodies and identities are seen as legitimate.
In other words, what conservative states are presenting as a defence of women or culture is, in fact, a project of erasing certain people from legal and political recognition. It is about power, not protection.
States that support the SOGI mandate have been clear about this too. In a 2022 joint statement, a group of “friends of the mandate” (including DFAT) welcomed the Expert’s work precisely because it brings a SOGI lens to issues like health and the Sustainable Development Goals, and helps identify the structural obstacles that keep LGBTIQ+ people excluded.
So when we look at the UN, we see two currents running side by side:
· One that tries to narrow “gender” back to biology and keep diversity out.
· Another that insists that protecting people from violence and discrimination based on SOGI is integral to the UN’s human rights project.
Cop30 is happening at the point where those currents collide.
Cop30: Old Battle, New Consequences
Cop30 is not a feminist summit. It is a climate summit. Which is precisely why the fight over gender language there is so revealing.
Climate change is already amplifying inequalities. Women, especially those with caring responsibilities and limited access to resources, are bearing disproportionate burdens. By 2050, climate change is projected to push far more women and girls into food insecurity than men and boys.
We also know, from work across the Pacific and beyond, that people with diverse SOGIESC are excluded and harmed in climate related disasters, in evacuation centres, in early warning systems and in livelihoods support. Those of us who have worked with SOGIESC communities in disaster risk reduction have seen how gendered and sexual norms determine who can enter a shelter, who gets aid and who is left outside in the storm.
So when conservative governments insist that “gender” in a climate gender action plan must mean “biological sex,” they are not clarifying. They are deciding that certain people’s experiences will not count.
As reported in The Guardian today, Claudia Rubio Giraldo of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization described the move to redefine gender as “a way to stall the negotiations, to burden the process and block more ambitious conversations.” Her comments were made in response to conservative states attempting to narrow the definition of gender in the Cop30 gender action plan.
In the same article, Chikondi Chabvuta-Mkawa, the gender coordinator for the group of Least Developed Countries, warned that the debate over terminology is distracting from the real issue: the chronic underfunding of measures that address gender inequality. She noted that only a very small share of global climate finance is directed toward gender equality, and even less reaches the grassroots women’s organisations and gender diverse communities that are doing the frontline work.
The stakes here are simple:
· If the gender action plan at Cop30 defines gender narrowly, it will legitimise the exclusion of trans and non binary people from climate policy and finance.
· If it remains expansive and rooted in lived realities, it can strengthen the hand of those working for intersectional, inclusive climate action in every region.
This is not semantics. It is survival.
The UN Already Knows Better
In 2021 I wrote that there is no longer any excuse for development practitioners, especially those working on GEDSI, to perpetuate exclusionary sex and gender binaries. That was four years, multiple IE SOGI reports, and countless UN resolutions ago.
Since then, the UN system has:
· established and repeatedly renewed a mandate dedicated to SOGI, with a body of work that documents violence, discrimination and backlash in detail
The problem is not the absence of definitions or data. The problem is that states and institutions selectively ignore them when it is politically or financially convenient.
This is the same pattern I wrote about in my recent piece on ACFID and the Australian aid sector. The sector names diverse SOGIESC in policy documents, then quietly drops us when it is time to write strategies, budgets and communications. Gender is used as a neat stand in for “women and girls,” leaving everyone else out of the frame.
The UN is now replaying that same move on the climate stage.
So What Would It Look Like To Take The UN’s Own Expertise Seriously?
If negotiators at Cop30 wanted to take the UN’s existing work on gender and SOGI seriously, they might start by:
· Using the UN’s own concept of gender as a socially constructed system of relations and power, not collapsing it back into “female and male sexes.”
· Explicitly recognising that people of diverse SOGIESC experience particular forms of vulnerability and exclusion in the context of climate change, drawing on the evidence gathered by the IE SOGI and by SOGIESC led organisations globally.
· Embedding intersectionality, as some states have proposed, so that “women and girls in all their diversity” and “gender diverse people” are named as central to climate justice, not optional add ons.
· Linking gender language to actual climate finance decisions, so that gender responsive action plans do not remain unfunded aspirations.
None of this would erase the focus on women and girls. It would make that focus more honest.
In my recent blog I wrote:
Women and girls are not gender, they are women and girls. Gender is the structure of power we all live within.
If climate policy cannot hold that nuance, it is not practising gender equality. It is managing optics.
Back To Accountability
At the end of Beyond the Binary: When the Sector Knows Better and Still Chooses Erasure, I offered an accountability test.
Do not start with what organisations say about gender. Start with how they behave.
The same test applies here.
If states at Cop30 claim to care about women’s rights and gender justice, ask:
· Whose experiences are counted in their data and assessments.
· Whose organisations receive core, multi year funding.
· Whether they support or attack the SOGI mandate.
· How they vote when “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “gender expression” and “sex characteristics” appear in resolutions.
And if climate negotiators, INGOs and managing contractors insist that they are advancing “gender equality,” ask whether they are prepared to name and include people of diverse SOGIESC in their climate work where it is safe to do so, and whether they are funding those communities to lead.
Because this is not about perfectly crafted language. It is about power, risk and resources.
For thirty years, the UN has chosen ambiguity over clarity on gender when it suited political convenience. Now, at Cop30, we are seeing the cost of that choice. The cracks are being widened by those who wish to exclude.
My hope sits where it always has, with communities who keep pushing the UN to live up to its own promises, and with the practitioners and advocates who refuse to accept that “gender” must be narrowed to make some states comfortable.
The climate crisis is already here. The question is not whether the UN can agree on a definition of gender that keeps everyone happy. The question is whether we will build climate action that reflects the reality of who we are, or retreat into a binary that never existed in the first place.
A note for readers
As of today, I will be slowly moving all Including the Excluded writing to Substack. This blog has always centred social inclusion for groups who are underrepresented, erased or pushed to the margins. Much of the writing comes from my humanitarian and development work, but the boundaries are intentionally permeable. The issues we face in practice are the same issues communities navigate every day.
I will continue publishing weekly pieces focused on diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, Gender Expressions and Sex Characteristics, as well as on the experiences and rights of women, people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. If you would like to stay connected and receive new posts, please subscribe.
For those who also follow my Power to Praxis work: that space will remain dedicated to supporting development practitioners to strengthen their practice collectively, through reflective questions, tools and shared learning. If you would like to join the Power to Praxis community, you can sign up here: