Published by UN Women

A debt crisis of epic proportions in the Global South is unfolding. The debt crisis—on top of the continued economic and social fallout of the Covid-19 crisis, the climate crisis, democratic deficits in several national contexts, and the breakdown of cooperation and traditional alliances in the global community—dim the prospects of mobilizing vast quantities of the medium- and long-term financial resources necessary to reverse backsliding and make progress on the full range of the UN SDGs by the looming 2030 target. SDG 5 provides the impetus for this paper.

As with previous debt crises and the pandemic, the burdens of today’s debt crises are borne disproportionately by women and other vulnerable groups and nations. It’s therefore crucial that we explore opportunities for expanding and creating the fiscal space that national policymakers can use to support SDG 5.  I consider strategies that focus on a subset of external financial flows (namely, external debt, concessional finance, and special drawing rights). Some of the strategies I discuss are “gender-indifferent,” meaning that they are neither informed by concerns about gender nor do they directly target gendered inequalities. That said, gender-indifferent external finance strategies directly increase fiscal space and can indirectly support gender equality, if national policymakers have the political commitment and tools to use the space created toward this end. I also discuss gender-informed external finance strategies that can, to various degrees, directly support gender equality. And because austerity policies disproportionately affect women and girls, any strategies that ease external financing burdens and constraints necessarily support gender equality. It’s my intention that those advocating for women the world over will find a set of attractive and viable strategies for creating, expanding, and engendering fiscal space through strategies aimed at external finance at a time of overlapping crises. It’s my hope that this paper will be of use to those advocating for green transitions and for a just, inclusive global economy.

To me, the lynchpin that enables the other problems listed here is that "LGBTIQ+ rights are [being] wedged into existing ‘culture-war’ narratives":

Media and political campaigns have positioned the rights of LGBTIQ+ people as negotiable and debatable. Some try to frame the human rights of transgender people as being at odds with women’s rights, even asserting that trans women do not face gender-based discrimination or that they pose a threat to the rights, spaces, and safety of cisgender women.

While they vary by cultural context, these campaigns often portray the push for LGBTIQ+ people’s rights as merely a generational dispute, part of a so-called “culture war”, or in some cases an imperialist agenda. 

Many such narratives position trans and non-binary gender identities as new or Western concepts, ignoring the rich history of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics across cultures and within the global South in particular.  

Falsely portraying the rights of LGBTIQ+ people, and particularly of trans people, as competing with women’s rights only widens divisions in the broader gender equality movement. This has given anti-rights actors space to advance rollbacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights, comprehensive sexuality education, and other critical issues.