UN’s New “Gender Crimes” Plan

The United Nations has always had a talent for taking real concerns, rolling a whole heap of confected tripe in with it, and then using it as a battering ram against the everyday freedoms of ordinary people.

This month’s example is a draft UN convention on crimes against humanity, a project that should be about genocide, mass murder, slavery, torture, and the kinds of state-sanctioned barbarism that stain history. Instead, the usual suspects are trying to smuggle in a new ideological payload: “gender” left conveniently undefined, plus a grab bag of fashionable new “gender crimes” like “gender apartheid” and “reproductive violence.”

And because Australia’s Albanese Government has developed an almost devotional attachment to whatever the UN says, we can safely assume Canberra will be at the front of the queue, nodding gravely, applauding politely, and then importing the whole ideological kit and caboodle into domestic policy as if it were a humanitarian necessity.

UN members met in New York from 19 to 30 January 2026 at the first session of the Preparatory Committee to begin shaping the treaty process, which is expected to run through diplomatic conferences in 2028 and 2029.

Once these texts are adopted, they become weapons in the hands of international lawyers, activist NGOs, and domestic courts that love nothing more than “harmonising” national law with global norms. And the activist ecosystem is already campaigning hard to expand the list of crimes and broaden definitions, especially around “gender”.

That’s why the fight over definitions is not some pedantic legal quibble. In criminal law, words are everything. If you want to criminalise conduct, you must define it. Otherwise, you create a floating, shape-shifting offence, a moral accusation looking for a target.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court didn’t leave “gender” to the whims of activists. It included a definition that tied the term to the two sexes, male and female, and explicitly rejected alternative meanings.

But many Western governments and NGOs now want the new crimes-against-humanity convention to drop that definition and leave “gender” open-ended, so it can be treated as a social construct and expanded to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” categories.

This is how the game is played.

First, you remove clarity. Then you declare that “international standards are evolving.” Then you shame anyone who wants definitional certainty as a bigot. Finally, you use the ambiguity to pressure countries into changing laws they never consented to change, on abortion, on education, on parental rights, on women’s sport, on religious liberty, on the meaning of family.

A treaty meant to deter mass atrocities becomes a cudgel for cultural revolution.

Once you create a crime with a politically malleable definition, who decides what qualifies?

Is a country guilty of “gender apartheid” if it rejects gender self-ID laws? If it restricts puberty blockers for children? If it insists on sex-based spaces? If it protects conscience rights for doctors who won’t perform abortions? If it teaches that mothers and fathers matter?

Don’t scoff. The same activist infrastructure that has normalised phrases like “violence” to include speech, disagreement, and policy trade-offs will happily normalise “reproductive violence” to include limits on abortion and possibly even moral persuasion against it.

Once you make “autonomy” the standard, any restriction becomes “violence.” Once you make disagreement a harm, any dissent becomes a crime.

Not all nations are playing along.

A bloc of mainly Asian and African countries has pushed back hard, warning that an undefined “gender” would weaponise international criminal law against conservative and traditional positions. That is not paranoia. It is how these globalists work: load vague language into an international instrument, then let the interpretive class do the rest.

Once a concept enters a treaty, it doesn’t stay neatly in a UN binder. It leaks into trade negotiations, foreign aid conditionality, “human rights dialogues,” professional regulation, corporate policy, and the ever-expanding compliance bureaucracy that governs modern life.

The Albanese Government’s instinct in these forums is rarely to defend Australian democratic self-government. It is to “align”, “harmonise”, and “commit.”

You can already see the tone in Australia’s official statement to the Preparatory Committee. It talks about victim-centred approaches, “Indigenous” perspectives, and the usual diplomatic signalling that Canberra is a model student of the globalist system.

And model students don’t set the curriculum. They accept it.

And if the curriculum now includes turning contested social ideology into international criminal categories, backed by vague definitions and activist enforcement, then Australia won’t be defending pluralism. It will be helping to bury it.

Because the end goal isn’t justice for victims of atrocities. The end goal is power, specifically the power to redefine fundamental concepts, then punish those who refuse to recite the new creed.

If you want to stop crimes against humanity, prosecute crimes against humanity. Don’t turn the treaty into a global HR manual with criminal penalties for cultural nonconformity.

If the UN wants to be taken seriously, it can start by doing the simplest thing any honest legal system does: define its terms, limit its reach, and stay out of domestic moral disputes that belong to voters, not bureaucrats.

Otherwise, the “international rules-based order” becomes what it increasingly resembles: rule by the internationally connected.

“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
– Frederick Douglas