The World Health Organization (WHO) is poised to promote extreme transgender ideology the same way it once endorsed abortion-on-demand.
Starting on February 19, a college of 21 experts will gather at WHO’s headquarters to develop global guidelines governing how doctors respond to people who identify as transgender. This project aims to create international standards for the issue by relying on a two-pronged strategy of “science” and “human rights.” The process is biased, as numerous national and international media outlets have pointed out. However, this strategy might work, because it already has in the past. This process resulted in a new guideline in 2022, promoting the legalization of abortion up to birth. This is precisely the same strategy WHO is now using to promote transgenderism.
‘Science’ As Defined by ‘Activist-Experts’
WHO’s Guideline Development Group on transgenderism consists of 21 members, 16 of whom are gender ideology activists. This raises questions about the objectivity of the work they will present at the February meeting. Similarly, when it drew up its abortion guidelines, WHO consulted 121 external experts, 81 of whom were abortion activists. Some of them had been directly remunerated by Planned Parenthood or associated organizations.
WHO relies on these activist-experts to impose its ultra-liberal concept of “sexual and reproductive rights” on its member states. Nations are encouraged, allegedly in the name of science, to accept societal changes to which they had not consented at WHO’s founding. This effective strategy emerged as early as 1970, notably through the creation of the Human Reproduction Program (HRP) within WHO. This program was designed to act as a global scientific authority.
This strategy was conceived and funded by a limited number of both state and private partners. Between 1970 and 1972, the HRP began its activities with $4.45 million in financial support from Sweden, Canada, Norway, and the Ford Foundation. These funds give the contributors considerable influence over the program, since the 11 main state contributions obtain a seat on the Human Reproduction Program (HRP). International Planned Parenthood also sits on the HRP by right. Between 1970 and 2022, this program was funded to the tune of $1 billion. In 2019, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation committed more than $100 million to funding the HRP. This pledge represents 10% of HRP funds since its foundation.
Invoking ‘Human Rights’ to impose a Woke Ideology
“The imperatives regarding health and human rights are clear — it is time for the global health community to unite around a bold program to affirm and guarantee sexual health.” This is how WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus concluded his latest bulletin on December 14, 2023, calling for research “on the sexual health of transgender individuals.” This discourse focused on human rights and a catch-all right to health, which began to gain momentum in the 1990s. Initially conceived to expand access to anti-natal methods billed as “family planning,” WHO is now recycling so-called sexual and reproductive rights” in favor of transgenderism.
Thus, the discourse on human rights has a significant impact on the scientific, ethical, and philosophical orientations of societies. Since the 1950s, WHO has yielded to concerns about a population explosion with the World Health Assembly resolution WHA3.7 on the “Resolution on Population Problems.” In 1970, in the name of the right to health, it set up an anti-natalist research program that still impacts the world today.
WHO is now instrumentalizing this same catch-all right to promote transgenderism that it used to liberalize abortion. However, there is a difference: In 1970, when WHO was concerned with demography, it engaged in high-level scientific work to develop fertility reduction methods. Today, fundamental biomedical research has given way to social sciences and rigid ideological conformity. It is as if WHO feels obliged to yield to activists and invent new human rights.
Since their creation in 1994, “sexual rights” or “reproductive rights” have been conceived as Trojan horses of anthropological progressivism. They have allowed for the creation of a discourse allegedly centered on human rights and justified by science. But in reality, these loosely-defined terms have become tools for imposing new moral and ethical norms on states to which they would never have otherwise consented. The February meeting to develop health guidelines on transgender ideology will continue to expand the boundaries of these “rights” unless states decide to reject this trap.
Louis-Marie Bonneau is a research associate at the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) and the author of a book on the history of WHO, “70 Years of Population Policy: History of the Human Reproduction Program of the World Health Organisation 1950-2020,” published by Ethics Press in January 2024.
