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How One Woman Is Using the UN to Attack Trans Rights Worldwide

It’s no coincidence that the Supreme Court’s decision allowing trans sports bans echoes the work of Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes. On its surface, the rulings are narrower than the decision many activists and scholars had feared. They target school sports in Idaho and West Virginia but sidestep broader questions about trans rights under the 14th Amendment, questions probably best left unanswered by a right-wing bench.

But the consequences of the rulings will go beyond those two states and beyond sports. The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate and litigate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls pose “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that ( presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.

The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

The medals statistic cited by Hurst has been repeatedly debunked. In April 2025, a segment from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver broke down the dubious methodology behind it, and reporting from Erin in the Morning further found that the list of trans medal winners on which it is based contains numerous errors and misleading practices—such as the inclusion of women like Imane Khelif, who is not trans, and counting as “sports” poker and competitive video gaming. Erin in the Morning’s investigations also found the anonymous website that developed the stat emerged from an online forum of anti-trans extremists who had been banned from other social-media platforms due to hate speech.

Nevertheless, Alsalem cited the medals statistic again in her September 2025 amicus brief with the Supreme Court.

In that brief, she argues that transgender girls should not be awarded the same protections as cisgender girls. Instead, she proposes that all sports have a strictly defined women’s category and an “open” category, which would require grouping transgender and intersex girls with men—and she wants this separation codified in law.

The document makes clear that Alsalem’s recommendations were “neither sought nor given by the United Nations.” And the reports she writes for the United Nations are technically informational, not authoritative; they do not represent the views of the United Nations. This distinction is often lost on the countless lawmakers, media outlets, and laypersons who see her work on UN letterhead or her posts from a UN X account and understandably assume that they are consuming information from a credible source.

Bearing the apparent imprimatur of the United Nations, Alsalem’s work is providing the veneer of legitimacy to anti-trans disinformation. The elevation of her work before the Supreme Court shows both the effectiveness of her project and how it undermines the rights of the very group she is duty-bound to protect: women and girls.

Alsalem proudly calls herself a “normal non-deranged woman from the UN.” (It was her longtime bio on X.) This is already controversial. For starters, as many of her critics emphasize, this makes it sound like she is employed by or represents the views of the United Nations. She does not. Alsalem was........

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