Bluesky

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 appointed in 2021 by the Human Rights Council. All rapporteurs are non-salaried human rights consultants, each with their own thematic or geographic specialty. Alsalem has conducted critical research on topics like femicide and women facing genocide in Gaza.

But 15 months into her first term, Alsalem began to use her association with the United Nations to try to block the expansion of trans rights. In 2022, she sent a formal letter to government officials opposing a Scottish bill facilitating trans people’s ability to obtain accurate legal identification. Since then, Alsalem has repeatedly bolstered attacks on gender equality across the globe, including through her UN-commissioned reports—one of which was a 2024 treatise on women in sports, which appears to be what pushed the warped statistic about medals into the mainstream.

In June 2025, Alsalem took the stage at the UN headquarters in Geneva, a sprawling art deco structure, to present her report on “Sex-Based Violence Against Women and Girls: New Frontiers and Emerging Issues.” By the time Alsalem stepped up to the dais, hundreds of human rights and medical groups had already denounced what they characterized as an abuse of her position. One statement, whose signatories include Planned Parenthood Global and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association, accused Alsalem of “manipulating data” and “undermining” long-held policy reforms. Another statement cosigned by Amnesty International says her report “misuses legal, scientific, and testimonial evidence, ignoring established methodologies for interpreting human rights.”

“Sex is as binary as it gets,” Alsalem told the assembly. This, according to the World Health Organization, UN Women, most if not all other rapporteurs, and essentially every other part of the United Nations, is false. Her report derides the concept of “gender identity,” which she falsely describes as “the feeling that some individuals have of not identifying with the sex observed at birth.” (Broadly speaking, that is called being transgender; “gender identity” is something all people have, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender.)

Alsalem argues against the idea of “gender equality” altogether. She wants to replace it with the term “equality between men and women.” Enshrining this binary into international law would strip transgender and intersex people from gender-based protections, which Alsalem says should be replaced by the term “sex-based protections.” The Trump administration has followed suit. This is a talking point from the global “anti-gender” movement, which opposes the idea of gender itself. Human Rights Watch has called it a “global conspiracy myth,” and its roots go back to the 1980s when the Catholic Church feared that a gay and feminist movement was undermining the traditional family. This fantasy of a global gender cabal underlies the Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling in BPJ and Hecox, as well as in Skrmetti, the 2025 decision that limited trans youth’s access to healthcare.

“Attacks on gender—including on women existing outside certain roles or LGBTQI+ people existing at all—are a bellwether for rising authoritarian practices,” Tarah Demant, the senior director at Amnesty International researching authoritarianism, told me. “When authoritarians or those in power attack ‘woke gender’ or LGBTQI+ people and their rights or women’s rights or sexual and reproductive rights, it’s the government and people in power exerting control over your body and life—defining who is valuable, who is fully human, and who gets rights.”

One would assume the reports of a UN special rapporteur would rely on rigorous academic research and reputable newsrooms. After all, the special rapporteur’s code of conduct instructs its purveyors to use “reliable sources” and to “be guided by the principles of discretion, transparency, impartiality, and evenhandedness.” But in an article published in Sexual Health Matters in 2024, scholars criticize Alsalem for her “odd” and “opaque citations” such as her repeated and vague references to “expert consults,” taking quotes out of their context, and using testimonies “in direct opposition to what these submissions call for.”

Her sourcing sometimes traces back to far-right and anti-trans outlets and tabloids like Reduxx, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail or known anti-trans groups like Women’s Declaration International and the LGB Alliance. In one such case, she asserted that presumed-cis women were leaving women’s sports en masse over trans athletes. The citation linked back to an article from an anti-trans group about a recreational swimming pond with trans-inclusive policies.

The interplay of her reports and the anti-trans media circuit creates a feedback loop, where far-right newsrooms and groups publish anti-trans propaganda, receive validation from Alsalem, and then spit it back out as if the source were the United Nations itself.

Well-known extremist groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, have been in lockstep with Alsalem. She hosted the ADF, an evangelical legal advocacy group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate organization, on the official UN streaming platform for a discussion on the “issue” of trans athletes. And on X, she’s posted that gender-affirming care has “mutilated” and “dechilded” a generation, comparing it to the mass murder of children in Gaza.

“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality. “For a lot of people who are very rules-bound and technical experts, you see a lot of anxiety and a lot of uncertainty about how to respond, because I don’t know that we’ve seen a special procedure mandate holder use their mandate to harm so proactively.”

Alsalem denounces anyone who calls her an “extremist,” but she advocates for laws that are even more restrictive than the ones in the most right-wing US states. In a 2025 report on “sex-based” violence, she calls for “all actors” to ban youth even from “social transitioning”—apparently meaning that she wants the government to prohibit children from being addressed by their preferred pronouns and name. She also seems to imply that those assigned female at birth cannot “meaningfully consent” to transitioning. On the other hand, she often describes trans women as sexual predators attempting to insinuate themselves into lesbian spaces and women’s facilities.

In e-mail correspondence for this piece, Alsalem denied that her work is hateful or factually unsound. In spring 2025, during initial reporting for Erin in the Morning on the medals statistic, she wrote to me that she didn’t want to ban trans women from sports; she just wants to ban them from women’s sports and to deploy sex tests as a tool of enforcement. Her report acknowledges the violent history of sex tests but says that some athletes may have their sex “contested,” requiring a “non-invasive” investigation into their DNA.

“It’s such an immediate and direct attack on women to have this position that she takes,” explained Anima Adjepong, head of the gender studies program at the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in the politics of sport. They also run the nonprofit Silent Majority Ghana and have a forthcoming book on women’s sports in the region. They warned that sex testing disproportionately harms women of color.

“The history of sex testing within sports—they kept having to change it over and over again, because there’s not a clear, scientific, ‘answer’ for what constitutes a man,” Adjepong said. “And of course, actually, that’s not what they’re looking at, right? There’s not a clear answer for: What constitutes a woman?”

Meanwhile, the criticisms of Alsalem’s conclusions are matched by questions over the sources she uses to reach them. Via e-mail, I asked Alsalem why she cited Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate and extremist groups in her work. She replied, “You may be interested to know that the Human Rights Council Presidency has indicated that defaming, attacking organizations or individuals that engage with the Human Rights Council…will not be tolerated for whatever reason.”

Much of her response to me was recycled later in a near-identical reply to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the full version of which you can read here.

But even by her own description of her duties, she violated UN instructions. She told me that as per guidelines for special rapporteurs, she used generic citations to protect transgender individuals from being identified. But her reports link to Fox News and anti-trans outlets and sources that reveal detailed information about people, including their deadnames. In other citations, she failed to redact identifying information about transgender student-athletes—the redactions can be removed simply by highlighting the text. This functionally outs these individuals on a global stage.

Still, Alsalem rejects the idea she wasn’t living up to her duties. “Only the UN Human Rights Council can determine whether or not she violated her duties,” she wrote to me. “You can make a complaint to the council. Otherwise, it is fair to say you are engaging in misinformation and disinfomeation.[sic]”

The process for pursuing such complaints, however, is obscure if not nonexistent, and many human rights experts emphasized that a push to reprimand Alsalem is potentially dangerous. Special rapporteurs are central to the work of the Human Rights Council, and if one goes down, it could put targets on others. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories, already faces death threats and harassment campaigns.

“This is a really sensitive topic,” said a staffer from Transgender Europe and Central Asia who asked not to be named because of hostility toward the LGBTQ community in their region. “Not only because of the subject matter,” they said, but because the institutions upholding the special rapporteurs’ work are “constantly at risk.”

In the majority opinion for Hecox, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reasoning is similar to that of Alsalem and her anti-gender movement: “Allowing a biological male athlete to compete on a girls’ team necessarily displaces or disadvantages a female athlete, replacing her on the roster, knocking her out of the starting lineup, reducing her playing time, depriving her of a medal, and the like.”

On July 9, Alsalem welcomed the court’s decision, saying, “The experiences of women and girls who have lost places on teams, podium positions, scholarships and opportunities deserve to be heard and taken seriously.” She urged states, educational institutions, and sporting bodies to ensure that the ruling is applied across the United States. She also reposted anti-trans rhetoric from Justice Clarence Thomas that quoted from an account named “TERFs ‘r’ us.” (TERF is shorthand for “trans exclusionary radical feminist).”

The full impact of the decision is yet to be seen, but experts warned me that the harms will go beyond the trans community. “Pitting groups against each other creates division, and perhaps the biggest influence that we see here is that many people believe this is an issue about trans people,” said Erika Castellanos, executive director of Global Action for Trans Equality. She pointed out that many of the same groups attacking trans rights are also targeting reproductive rights, queer rights, women’s rights, and free speech.

“The rhetoric that the advancement of the rights of one group removes rights of another group is a misunderstanding of how the human rights ecosystem works,” she said. “Everyone is affected by this.”