by Jo Bartosch, spiked
It’s gone from championing the rights of political prisoners to championing the right of men to use women’s bathrooms.
Are you now, or have you ever been, part of the ‘anti-gender’ movement? If you’ve ever side-eyed a drag queen reading to children or told a bloke to get his hairy arse out of the ladies’ loo, Amnesty International would like a word.
Its new report, ‘A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK’, was recently published and then, like a disfavoured comrade, quietly disappeared from the organisation’s website less than 24 hours later. Before its abrupt vanishing act, Amnesty warned that an ‘anti-rights ecosystem’ was threatening ‘the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK’. It identified 117 organisations allegedly working to roll back human rights, lumping together American Christian groups with a patchwork of British feminist, lesbian and gay organisations. Among these supposed extremists is Beira’s Place, the Edinburgh rape-crisis centre established with the support of JK Rowling after Scotland’s publicly funded rape-crisis network abandoned its guarantee of female-only services.
This is not the first time Amnesty has waded in and found itself on the losing side. In 2024, it intervened in the Supreme Court case brought by For Women Scotland. Rather than defending the rights of women, Amnesty supported the Scottish government’s argument that men with Gender Recognition Certificates should count as women under the Equality Act. The court unanimously rejected that position, ruling instead that ‘sex’ in the law means biological sex.
Read also: Transgender Trend letter to Amnesty