Weekend Hot Takes - The Erasure of Women and Girls

We want to give credit where it’s due: More To Her Story, a youth-led feminist platform, was one of the first to sound the alarm on a deeply disturbing change in the 2023 U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports - the complete erasure of any dedicated section on women’s rights. Not a single mention of gender-based violence, maternal mortality, or structural inequality facing half the global population.

Audio Version Available Here!

While mainstream media outlets like The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post eventually picked up the story, much of their coverage couched it in cautious, bureaucratic language. Let’s be clear: this isn’t a formatting update. It’s a strategic deletion. And if you think this won’t affect sex workers, survivors, incarcerated women, or criminalized communities - you haven’t been paying attention.

This isn’t just bad optics. It’s state-sanctioned gaslighting. Countries like Papua New Guinea - where gender-based violence is epidemic - are suddenly absent from reports. Survivors who risked their safety to contribute data are now invisible. And it’s not just women being erased. Sections on LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, child abuse, and disability protections have been slashed, diluted, or eliminated. What used to be comprehensive human rights assessments now read like sanitized diplomatic memos. What's at stake is massive.

When the U.S. government stops documenting violence against women, it doesn't just fail survivors - it actively harms them. These reports are often the only official acknowledgment many survivors will ever get. Without that validation, their stories are more easily dismissed or ignored. The credibility they need to access justice, services, and reparations is undermined. Silence at this level reinforces a dangerous message: your suffering doesn’t matter.

This erasure also kneecaps advocacy. Activists, NGOs, and diplomatic partners rely on this data to push for reforms, trigger investigations, and justify aid or sanctions. These reports are used in boardrooms, courtrooms, and backchannel diplomacy. When the data vanishes, so does the leverage. Governments with terrible track records on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights can now wave a clean report card, courtesy of the U.S. State Department.

And let’s not forget who benefits. Abusers - especially state actors and regimes targeting women, queer folks, and racialized communities - now have even more cover. When violence isn’t named, it’s normalized. Governments restricting abortion, criminalizing queerness, permitting femicide, or jailing survivors for “morality” now get to operate without scrutiny. If the U.S. - once considered a global human rights watchdog - won’t call it out, who will?

Sex worker-led and survivor-centered movements have long understood this dynamic. Visibility makes us vulnerable, and invisibility protects the powerful. The removal of these sections doesn’t just betray global truth - it sabotages future protections. For decades, we’ve demanded better than just symbolic “mentions” in official documents. But now, we’re not even getting that. This isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity.

Here’s the takeaway: We don’t need another sanitized memo. We need public documentation that tells the truth and demands justice. If the State Department is erasing women, LGBTQ+ people, and criminalized communities from its reports, what will be erased next?

To everyone reading this - especially survivors, and sex workers and our allies - this is your call to action:

• Hold elected officials and diplomats accountable for these omissions.

• Demand the reinstatement of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in all future reports.

• Partner with survivor- and women-led organizations to build alternative records when the government refuses to.Amplify the stories of those made invisible.

Because if the official narrative forgets us, we must become the record.

Justice doesn’t live in redactions. It lives in truth - loud, public, and impossible to ignore.