What happened to Amnesty International?

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.

That ordinary people might simply have had enough of trans tyranny – or concluded for themselves that sex-based rights are worth defending – doesn’t seem to have occurred to Amnesty’s overeducated, underthinking professional whingers. Nor, apparently, has the unfortunate optics of compiling lists of ideological enemies and then silently deleting it.

As a spokeswoman from Trans Widows’ Voices, which supports women whose husbands or partners adopt trans identities, tells me, she used to think Amnesty was ‘a good thing when they were about political prisoners’, but now:

‘Adding Trans Widows’ Voices and Children of Transitioners to a list of anti-rights groups is unconscionable. It’s the bullying of grassroots networks for women – who are often survivors of domestic abuse – by a multinational organisation. Amnesty has made no attempt to engage with us, and we are mystified as to what rights they claim we seek to remove and from whom.’

By siding with aggressive crossdressers who demand to be seen as vulnerable, and with young women persuaded that double mastectomies and testosterone can make them male, Amnesty International is abandoning the people who most need its protection.

Amnesty’s doubtless well-paid researchers also profoundly misrepresent the principal objections to gender-identity ideology. Its latest report claims that some groups ‘describe themselves as “anti-gender” because they visibly oppose the rights and equality of women and LGBT+ people’. It goes on to assert that ‘anti-rights actors seek a society in which women and men have fixed and distinct roles, based on what they view as “natural” and “traditional”’.

As something of an embedded reporter within the movement Amnesty condemns, I can attest that the loudest critics of gender-identity ideology have always been feminists and LGB campaigners. What unites them is not a desire to return to traditional sex roles, but a recognition that human beings are either male or female, that sex cannot be changed, and that the physical differences between the sexes matter. Men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime and are, on average, stronger than women. It is for that reason that women have long fought for single-sex spaces and services so that we can take our rightful place in public life.

Recognising reality is not the same as prescribing social roles. Quite the opposite. Feminists sought to change society to liberate people from sex stereotypes. Gender-identity activists seek to change their bodies to accommodate their delusions. Had anyone from Amnesty International actually spoken to the organisations it denounces, they might have discovered this.

This is the organisation that once presented itself as the conscience of the free world: a champion of dissidents and those who stood up to authoritarian power. Today, Amnesty International resembles the very forces it was created to oppose. It spreads the misinformation it claims to be combating, smears grassroots campaigners as extremists, and casts ordinary people who refuse to deny biological reality as enemies of human rights. The organisation that once defended prisoners of conscience now seems determined to identify a new generation of thoughtcriminals.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.