Keeping an eye on anti-rights actor at the Human Rights Council

Anti-rights mobilization at the United Nations constitutes a response to the significant feminist and progressive organizing. It involves a constant threat for women's rights, especially when it comes to sexual and reproductive rights and an open door to racism, xenophobia and all kinds of discrimination.

Get to know all their tactics and discourses worldwide.

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Main resolutions and organizations to follow on the 38th session

We’re looking at an attack on the human rights system, and all of these fundamentalisms are coming together to try to weaken the fabric of multilateralism, and that’s happening in large part at the expense of marginalized groups of people. It’s happening at the expense of women, and it’s happening through tactics that are often about gender and sexuality.

Cynthia Rothschild

Independent human rights expert, OURs member

We’ve experienced a lot of pushback from different states, from different civil society actors, from private corporations and large donors who are funding the activities of these anti-rights actors.

Meghan Doherty

Director of Global Policy and Advocacy with Action Canada

Read more on what we do at the Human Rights Council

More interviews at HRC38

Zhan Chiam

ILGA's Gender Identity and Gender Expression Senior Programme Officer

Paola Salwan Daher

Global Advocacy Adviser at the Center for Reproductive Rights

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Maryum Saifee (@msaifee), New York, USA    

When you do a search for “Female Genital Mutilation” or “FGM” online, an image of four line-drawings of the female anatomy pop up next to its Wikipedia entry. It illustrates four types of violence. The first being a partial cut to the clitoris. The second, a more invasive cut with the entire clitoris removed. The third is progressively worse with the removal of the clitoris, labia majora and minora. And the fourth box illustrates a series of hash marks to symbolize stitches over the vaginal opening to allow only for urination and menstruation.

As a survivor of FGM, most questions about my story fixate on the physical. The first question I usually get asked is what type of FGM I underwent. When I told a journalist once that I went through Type 1, she said “oh, that’s not so bad. It’s not like type three which is far worse.” She was technically right. I had the least invasive form. And for many years, I gaslighted myself into feeling a sense of relief that I was one of the lucky ones. I comforted myself noting that I could have been less fortunate with all of my genitalia gouged out, not just the clitoral tip. Or worse I could have been one of the ones who didn’t survive at all. Like Nada Hassan Abdel-Maqsoud, a twelve year old, who bled to death on a doctor’s operating table earlier this year in Upper Egypt. Nada is a  reminder to me that for every data point -- 200 million women and girls who live with the consequences of FGM globally -- there is a story. Nada will never be able to tell hers.

As much as I find the label “survivor” suffocating at times -- I also realize there is privilege embedded in the word. By surviving, you are alive. You have the ability to tell your story, process the trauma, activate others in your community and gain insights and a new language and lens to see yourself through.

The act of storytelling can be cathartic and liberating, but it can also shatter the storyteller in the process.

Without integrating the psychosocial support of trained clinicians into storytelling and healing retreats, well-intentioned interventions can result in more trauma. This is all the more important as FGM survivors navigate the double pandemic of their own PTSD from childhood trauma, and the indefinite COVID-19 global shutdown.

In many anti-FGM advocacy spaces, I have seen this insatiable hunger to unearth stories -- whatever the cost to the storyteller. The stories help activate funding and serve as a data point
for measuring impact. 

Survivor stories then become commodities fueling a storytelling industrial complex. Storytellers, if not provided proper mental health support in the process, can become collateral damage.

My motivation in writing this piece is to flip the script on how we view FGM survivors, prioritizing the storyteller over the story itself.

FGM survivors are more than the four boxes describing how the pieces of our anatomy were cut, pricked, carved, or gouged out. In this essay, I’ll break down the anatomy of an FGM survivor’s story into four parts: stories that break, stories that remake, stories that heal, and stories that reveal.

Type 1: Stories that break

I was sitting in the heart of Appalachia with a group of FGM survivors, meeting many for the first time. As they shared their traumas, I realized we all belonged in some way or another to the same unenviable club. A white Christian survivor from Kentucky - who I don’t think I would have ever met if we didn’t have FGM survivorship connecting us - told the contours of her story. 

There were so many parallels. We were both cut at seven. She was bribed with cake after her cut. I was bribed with a jumbo-sized Toblerone chocolate bar when mine was over. Absorbing her trauma overwhelmed me. And I imagine when I shared my story, others in the circle may also have been silently unraveling. We didn’t have a clinician or mental health professional in a facilitation role and that absence was felt. The first night, I was sharing a room with six other survivors and tried hard to keep the sounds of my own tears muffled. By the last day, I reached breaking point. Before leaving for the airport, my stomach contracted and I convulsively vomited. I felt like I was purging not only my pain, but the pain of the others I’d absorbed that week. We all dutifully produced our stories into 90 second social media friendly soundbites with narration and photos. But at what cost?

Type 2: Stories that remake

On February 6, 2016, the Guardian published my story as a survivor. The second it was released, I was remade. My identity transformed from nondescript, relatively invisible mid-level Foreign Service Officer to FGM survivor under a public microscope. That same day, then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power tweeted my story with the introduction: “I was seven years old” before linking to the article. The tweet symbolized a moment for me where my personal and professional worlds collided. Since then, they have been forever intertwined. 

Even though I spent ten years of my career as a diplomat focused on other issues -- I lived in Cairo during the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011 and served in Baghdad and Erbil when the Syrian revolution turned from an uprising to civil war -- all of those past experiences that began to make mefeel erased. When I spoke on panels, my identity would be reduced to “survivor.” Like other survivors, I have worked hard to rewrite the script on how others see me.

I reinsert pieces of my other identities when speaking to underscore to the broader public that while yes, I am a survivor of childhood trauma and while my FGM story may have remade a part of my identity, it doesn’t define me.

Type 3: Stories that heal

With the guidance of a mental health expert, I have spent the last few months doing a deep dive into my FGM survivor story. I have told and retold my story over dozens of times in public venues. My goal is to break the culture of silence and inspire action. At this point, the telling of my story has almost become mechanized, as though I am reciting a verse from the Quran I memorized as a kid. I would always start with: “I was sitting an anthropology class when a fellow student described her research project on Female Genital Mutilation. And that’s when I had the memory jolt. A memory I had suppressed since childhood came flooding to the foreground.” I go into the details of what happened in granular detail -- the color of the floor, the feelings of confusion and betrayal in the hazy aftermath. And then I go on to talk about the afternoon I confronted my mother about the summer she and my father shipped my brother and off to India to stay with my aunt. The summer it happened. I later found out my aunt cut me without my parents’ consent. In my years of telling and retelling this story, I would have moments I felt nothing, moments I would break down, and moments of relief. It was a mixed bag, often contradictory emotions happening all at once. 

When I began to take apart the story, I discovered the core moment where I felt most gutted. It wasn’t the cut itself. It was the aftermath. I remember sitting in a corner alone, feeling confused and ashamed. When I looked at my aunt on the other side of the room, she was whispering to my cousin and they both pointed and laughed at me. Unearthing the moment of shame - the laughter - has haunted me since childhood. The piece that was carved out of me is called “haram ki boti” which translates into sinful flesh. Over time, the physical scar healed. But for many FGM survivors, the psychological wounds remain 

Type 4: Stories that reveal

Last year, I decided to take a sabbatical from the Foreign Service. I was burning out on both ends -- I had just completed a really tough assignment in Pakistan and was also doing anti-FGM
advocacy in my personal capacity. When I came home, an acquaintance from graduate school approached me to capture my story on film. As part of the process, she would send a camera
crew to shadow me. Sometimes while giving speeches, other times filming mundane interactions with friends and family. On a visit to my home in Texas, I’ll never forget the moment where my mom told me her story of survival. As part of the film, we went on a roadtrip to Austin to visit the university where I first had the memory jolt. My mom is patiently waiting for the cameraman to set up his tripod.  My father is standing next to her. 

In the end, we eventually had the conversation I never had the courage to have with either of my parents face to face. Looking them both in the eye, retelling my story with a camera as witness, we discussed how FGM ripped our family apart (specifically my dad’s relationship with his sister). For the first time, I heard my mom talking about her own experience and the feeling of betrayal when she discovered my aunt cut me without her consent. When I later told her that FGM was actually indigenous to the U.S. and Europe and that it was a cure for hysteria (prescribed by doctors) up until the 19th century, my mother exclaimed “that’s crazy to me, this was a cure for hysteria. I’m going to educate other doctors to speak out.” And in that moment, my mother, a survivor who had never shared her story before, became an activist. 

My story, intertwined with her story, revealed a tightly woven fabric of resistance. With our voices, we were able to break the cycle of intergenerational structural violence. We were able to rewrite the stories of future generations of girls in our own family and hopefully one day, the world.

 “Dreams”

by Neesa Sunar (@neesasunar), Queens, USA

This is a woman breaking free from her mundane reality, devoid of color. She dreams in a colorful, "nonsensical" way that people in her life would not understand. She could be considered insane, yet her dreams are more vivid and imaginative than actual life. This is frequently how schizophrenia occurs to me, more engaging and exciting than real life.

< United against the violence, by Karina Ocampo 

Freeing the Church, Decolonizing the Bible for West Papuan Women, by Rode Wanimbo >

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About Upasana Agarwal

Akosua Hanson is an artistic activist, based in Accra, Ghana. Her work spans radio, television, print media, theatre, film, comic art exhibitions, art installations, and graphic novels. Akosua’s activism has been centred around pan-Africanism and feminism, with an interest in the intersection of art, pop culture, and activism. She has a Masters in Philosophy in African Studies with a focus on Gender and African Philosophical Thought. Akosua Hanson is the creator of Moongirls, a graphic novel series that follows the adventures of four superheroes fighting for an Africa free from corruption, neocolonialism, religious fundamentalism, rape culture, homophobia and more. She works as a radio host at Y 107.9 FM, Ghana.

Ever experienced moments of deep clarity during or after sex?

In these panels, the Moongirl Wadjet is engaged in BDSM lovemaking with a two-gender daemon. Of the four Moongirls, Wadjet is the healer and philosopher, the conduit of the Oracle. She does this to launch a scientific and spiritual process – an experiment she calls “Illumination by the Light of the Full Moon” – through which she traces a vibrational time arc between her memories, sensations, emotions, visions, and imagination. It is a form of vibrational time travel in order to discover what she terms as “truth-revelations.” 

During the experience, some of Wadjet’s hazy visions include: an approaching apocalypse brought about by humans’ environmental destruction in service to a voracious capitalism; a childhood memory of being hospitalized after a mental health diagnosis; and a vision of a Moongirls’ origin story of the Biblical figure of Noah as an ancient black Moongirl warning of the dangers of environmental pollution.

More than a fun kink to explore for the sensations, BDSM can be a way of addressing emotional pain and trauma. It has been a medium of sexual healing for me, providing a radical form of liberation. There is a purge that happens when physical pain is inflicted on the body. Inflicted with consent, it draws out emotional pain – almost like a “calling forth.” The whip on my body allows me to release suppressed emotions: anxiety, depression, my sense of defenselessness to the stresses that overwhelm me sometimes.

When engaging in BDSM as an avenue for healing, lovers must learn to be very aware of and responsible for each other. Because even though consent may have been initially given, we must be attentive to any changes that might occur in the process, especially as feelings intensify. I approach BDSM with the understanding that in order to surrender pain, love and empathy have to be the basis of the process and by that, I create space or open up for love. 

The engagement with aftercare after the infliction of pain is a completion of the process. This can be done in very simple ways such as cuddling, checking if they need water, watching a movie together, sharing a hug or just sharing a joint. It can be whatever your chosen love language is. This holding space, with the understanding that wounds have been opened, is necessary to complete the process of healing. It is the biggest lesson in practising empathy and learning to really hold your partner, due to the delicacy in blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. In this way, BDSM is a form of care work for me.

After BDSM sex, I feel a clarity and calm that puts me in a great creative space and spiritually empowers me. It is an almost magical experience watching the pain transform into something else in real time. Similarly, this personally liberating experience of BDSM allows Wadjet to access the foreknowledge, wisdom, and clarity to aid in her moongirl duties in fighting African patriarchy.

Moongirls was birthed during my tenure as the director for Drama Queens, a young artistic activist organization based in Ghana. Since our inception in 2016, we’ve employed different artistic media as part of their feminist, pan-Africanist, and environmentalist activism. We used poetry, short stories, theatre, film, and music to address issues such as corruption, patriarchy, environmental degradation, and homophobia.

Our inaugural theatre production, “The Seamstress of St. Francis Street” and “Until Someone Wakes Up” addressed the problem of rape culture in our communities. Another one, “Just Like Us,” was arguably one of the first Ghanaian theatre productions to directly address the country’s deep-seated issue of homophobia. Queer Universities Ghana, our queer film workshop for African filmmakers, has trained filmmakers from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. Films birthed during the workshop, like “Baby Girl: An Intersex Story” by Selassie Djamey, have gone on to be screened at film festivals. Therefore, moving to the medium of graphic novels was a natural progression.

About seven years ago, I’d started a novel that I never completed about the lives of four women. In 2018, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) opened up a grant opportunity that launched the production of the project and my uncompleted novel was turned into Moongirls. 

There have been two seasons of Moongirls made up of six chapters each. Contributing writers and editors for the first season were Suhaida Dramani, Tsiddi Can-Tamakloe, George Hanson, and Wanlov the Kubolor. Writers for the second season were Yaba Armah, Nadia Ahidjo, and myself. Character illustrations and conceptualizations were by Ghanaian artist Kissiwa. And AnimaxFYB Studio, a premium animation, design, and visual effects studio, does the illustrations.

Writing Moongirls between 2018 and 2022 has been a labour of love for me, even, a labour for liberation. I aim to be very explorative in form and style: I’ve dabbled in converting other forms of writing, such as short stories and poetry, to graphic novel format. By merging illustration and text, as graphic novels do, Moongirls aims to tackle the big issues and to honor real life activists. My decision to centre queer women superheroes – which is rare to see in this canon – came to mean so much more when a dangerous backdrop started developing in Ghana in 2021. 

Last year saw a marked hike in violence for the Ghanaian LGBT+ community that was sparked by the shutdown of an LGBT+ community centre. This was followed by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of people suspected to be on the queer spectrum, as well as of those accused of pushing an “LGBT agenda.” Crowning this was the introduction in Ghanaian Parliament of an anti-LGBT bill named “Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values.” This bill is arguably the most draconian anti-LGBT bill ever drafted in the region, following previous attempts in countries like Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. 

I remember quite vividly the first time I read the draft of this bill. 

It was a Friday night, typically a night I take off to rest or party after a long work week. By sheer luck, the draft was leaked and shared with me on a WhatsApp group. As I read it, a deep sense of fear and alarm made burnt toast of my Friday night chill. This bill proposed to slap any LGBT+ advocacy with five to ten years of imprisonment, and to fine and imprison people who identify as LGBT+ unless they “recanted” and accepted conversion therapy. In the draft bill, even asexual people were criminalized. The bill went for all fundamental freedoms: freedoms of thought, of being, and the freedom to hold one’s personal truth and choose to live your life by that truth. The bill even went for social media and art. If it passed, Moongirls would be banned literature. What the bill proposed to do was so evil and far-reaching, I was stunned into a depression at the depth of hate from which it had been crafted. 

Scrolling through my Twitter timeline that night, the terror I felt inside me was mirrored. The timeline was a livestream of emotions as people reacted in real time to what they were reading: disbelief to terror to a deep disappointment and sorrow when we realized how far the bill wanted to go. Some tweeted their readiness to fold up and leave the country. Then, in the way Ghanaians do, sorrow and fear is alchemized to humour. From humour came the zest to upscale the fight.

So, the work still continues. I created Moongirls to provide an alternative form of education, to provide knowledge where it has been suppressed by violent patriarchy, and to create visibility where the LGBT+ community has been erased. It is also important that African BDSM is given this platform of representation when so much of BDSM representation is white. Sexual pleasure, through BDSM or otherwise, as well as non-heterosexual love, transcend race and continent because sexual pleasure and its diversity of experience are as old as time.

Dear feminist movements, 

Speaking on behalf of the Board, I  write to express our deepest gratitude, appreciation, and respect for Hakima Abbas and Cindy Clark, our extraordinary Co-Executive Directors during the past five years who will be stepping aside to refresh the AWID leadership as we move into a new strategic plan and phase of our organizational life. They have consistently practiced the best principles of feminist organizational leadership and ethics of care as they navigated us through one of the most unpredictable, turbulent times in recent history of the world, the COVID-19 syndemic, and the subsequent downward global political spiral. They held AWID, our Staff, and Board firmly, gently, and lovingly as all of us experienced various impacts. They also held steadfastly to AWID vision and mission as they responded respectfully and strategically to various changes, not least the cancellation of the AWID Forum.

The Board decided to prioritize an internal recruitment process first, fully recognizing the great potential that exists within the current team. We expect to complete the transition by the end of 2022. Hakima and Cindy will stagger their departure, and will facilitate a smooth transition to the new leadership.  

Seeing Cindy and Hakima leave AWID is difficult for the Board as well as others who have worked closely with them and love them.  Nonetheless, rest assured the AWID Board is leading the transition process in a way that fully recognizes the beautiful and inspiring indelible marks Hakima and Cindy will be leaving as part of our 40-year history, that embraces the next step of on-boarding and supporting new leadership, and that inspires us to do better at this moment in AWID's life. 

Major organizational transitions are neither simple nor easy. Sometimes they are forced, beyond anyone’s control, fraught, or even destructive. I, and many of you, have seen examples of those kinds of transitions. At other times, the staff’s needs and aspirations are aligned with those of the organization. Although we did not choose or wish Cindy and Hakima to leave AWID, their decision and AWID moving into the next strategic plan and new decade of existence are aligned. Best of all, we are in the wonderful, super competent, creative, and feminist hands of the Staff and Board.

We thank you, dear Feminist Movements, for your confidence in AWID. We also ask you to support our leadership transition in the coming months. Let’s continue to build, deepen, and strengthen our connections, as we have done for the past 40 years. 

Please stay tuned for more concrete developments and updates. You will be hearing from us in the coming weeks.

In feminist solidarity and love,
Margo Okazawa-Rey
President, AWID Board

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Dearest Beloved Feminist Movements,

Hello again, and again, and again. I have known and loved you my entire adult life, since I first met you meaningfully, after graduating from university. I’d seen you one time before then. That was you appearing as Betty Friedan on a local TV talk show in the US Midwest, in the late-1960s. At the time, Mrs. Wells, my other mother, and I commented on what wild, far-fetched ideas this woman was trying to convince us about. Decade after decade since then I have fallen more deeply in love with you, Beloved, and understand and witness your political and theoretical brilliance, ethical and moral authority, creativity, joy, and love, above all. Nearly 60 years later, I know we are partners forever.

The early years of our acquaintanceship was ok. I was quite self-involved--figuring racial, gender, and sexual identity; getting clear on my core politics, values, and ethics; completing my formal education--and you provided numerous settings, intellectual drop-in centers, and comforting holding environments where and through which I was able to craft the young-adult building blocks of the feminist and human being whom I would become.

The predominantly white women’s movement of Cambridge and Boston, including Daughters of Bilitis, was my starting place. That suited me at the time but soon realized I desired something more. Poof! Like magic (serendipity), I connected with a small group of radical, anti-imperialist, Black, socialist lesbian women and we soon became the Combahee River Collective. 

That early Combahee experience, combined with critical life lessons and particular African-American/Korean immigrant racial politics of early-1990s in the US, prepared me for the journey that has led me to identify and work as a transnational feminist to address militarism and to dedicate myself to imagining other worlds where all living beings will thrive.

The next two critical women’s-movement moments were decades after Combahee years but deeply linked. First was meeting and being invited into the Korean feminist movement organizing against US military bases and supporting the “kijichon women” the Korean women whose lives, including for some, their mixed-race children, revolved around servicing US military personnel in numerous ways in villages and towns adjacent to the bases. Korean Beloved Feminists, especially Kim Yon-Ja and Ahn Il-Soon, the first sisters I met and traveled with, made me see and understand the critical importance of nation as an analytical and organizing principle. The “capstone” was living, working in occupied Palestine. The late Maha Abu-Dayyeh introduced me to the Palestinian women’s movement, with a profound comment, “you can leave Palestine but Palestine will never leave you.” So true. And, all my work and experiences across many borders brought me to AWID--my second home.

As you know, Beloved, being with you has not been easy or simple. Indeed, you are demanding, consistently riddled with contradictions, and sometimes even hurtful. Nonetheless, you continue to grow and develop, as you are supporting my political, emotional, and spiritual growth and development.  I guess we are growing each other--a very profound process to which I will dedicate the rest of my time in my current form.

The through-line of being with you all these decades is this: 

So much love, Feminist Movements!

Your Margo
AKA DJ MOR Love and Joy
Wellfleet Massachusetts USA

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Last updated: May 2019