Global Headlines Roundup | The U.S. Quits the UN Human Rights Council, and The Atlantic Shares a Story of Transgender Identity
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018 and still in a trial run. It remains committed to helping you understand more of the world.
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018 and still in a trial run. It remains committed to helping you understand more of the world.
What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About
The Atlantic: When a Child Tells You She's Transgender...
On June 18, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally published the latest edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which for the first time takes "gender incongruence" out of the mental illness category and moves it into a chapter on sexual health. The previous edition, ICD-10, had listed transgender people as having a "gender identity disorder."
Besides the ICD, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD) have also treated being transgender as an illness. "Gender identity disorder" was first formally entered as a mental illness in 1980, in DSM-III, the world's first operational standard classification of mental disorders.
After the WHO stopped treating transgender identity as a disease, several American outlets followed the story, among them Newsweek and The New York Times. In its latest issue, The Atlantic tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Claire, and her mother, Heather, exploring questions of transgender identity together. Those are not their real names, but the story is real, and it begins when Claire started to feel that she was not a girl.
In sixth grade Claire already felt different from everyone else, though she could not put a name to the pain and torment inside her: "I just felt like something must be wrong with me." The discomfort pushed her into depression for a time and made it hard to make friends. Around then, Claire came across a video on YouTube by Miles McKenna, another transgender person, and was captivated by what he had to say.
After a while, Claire began to wonder whether she was transgender. The gender she felt herself to be plainly did not match her biological sex. "I wanted the pain to stop, so I wanted to transition." Without telling her parents, she first found medication that could slow the onset of puberty, then started taking testosterone to develop male characteristics.
One day Claire's parents asked why she had not seemed happy lately. Claire answered: "Because I think I'm a boy."
Looking back on that period, Heather stresses how complicated the relationship between parent and child became. She told Claire that they loved her and would keep supporting her as she explored her identity.
Privately, though, Heather also wondered whether Claire's anxiety and unease were simply puberty.
She then found Claire a gender-identity clinic and a counselor to help her through a hard transition. But Heather, who holds a doctorate in pharmacology, stayed rigorous about it. She searched through a great deal of material, and most of it said only that a parent's job is to put the child on hormones. She could not be sure what her own decisions would actually do to her daughter.
While Heather and her husband were still weighing the transition, Claire asked them for sex-reassignment surgery — that is, a mastectomy.
While looking for a hospital, Heather also decided to spend time with Claire and understand what was troubling her. During those weeks they kept Claire away from the internet, leaving her Instagram as her one outlet, and asked her to keep a journal to pin down what she felt.
After a while, Claire saw herself differently. Looking in the mirror, she thought hard and decided she was not a boy after all. "Maybe this isn't the right answer, or maybe it is, but after spending time exploring it — yes, I'm definitely a girl."
What had really troubled her, she said, was working out how men and women are supposed to behave, on top of her peers' stereotypes about gender.
Afterward, Heather thought that if they had skipped the work of understanding where the pain came from and gone straight to a physical transition, it could well have caused Claire more suffering.
The number of transgender people in the United States is indeed rising year by year. A study released by the University of California in June 2016 found 1.4 million transgender adults in the country. As of 2017, about 150,000 teenagers aged 13 to 17 had been identified as transgender. The number of people seeking clinical services is growing too.
Today many children learn about gender identity through the internet, and parents can only find out by staying close to their children whether what they are seeing comes from gender identity or from the troubles of puberty. American transgender organizations also have advice for parents: "Being transgender is not just a phase. When your child needs you beside them, thinking only about how to make that phase pass quickly does harm."
The 24-Hour News Makers
The United States Withdraws From the UN Human Rights Council
According to CNN, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on the 20th that the United States was formally withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, and accused the council of a long-standing bias against Israel, an American ally.
Months earlier, Trump had already warned several times that the U.S. would leave the Human Rights Council, but nothing came of it. Only recently, after the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, attacked Trump's policy of separating immigrant families, did the Trump administration immediately announce its decision to withdraw.
Nikki Haley hit hard: "For too long, the Human Rights Council has protected the people who abuse human rights, and it carries a political bias," and "When the so-called Human Rights Council cannot properly handle the human rights abuses happening in Venezuela and Iran, and even admits the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a member, the council no longer deserves its name."
Founded in 2006 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, the Human Rights Council is an intergovernmental body of 47 member states, charged mainly with strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide.
As soon as the news broke, more than a dozen public-interest groups wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to say they were "extremely disappointed," adding that the move would hurt security and diplomacy and make progress on human rights harder still.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also said in a statement afterward that he very much hoped the United States would stay on the Human Rights Council. Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein wrote on Twitter that the U.S. decision was disappointing but not much of a surprise, and stressed that "given the state of human rights in the world today, the United States should be moving with the times, not backward."
What Else Happened in the World
Kim Jong Un visits China for the third time in six months, meeting Xi Jinping to discuss a peace mechanism for the Korean Peninsula. Right after his flash meeting with Trump, Kim Jong Un traveled to Beijing again to discuss peace on the Korean Peninsula — his third trip to China in six months. The first was to Beijing in late March, the second to Dalian in early May.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron announce a joint eurozone budget, meant to boost investment in the eurozone and economic growth across EU countries. Earlier, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told the broadcaster BFMTV: "Europe is falling apart, right in front of our eyes." He added that Merkel and Macron were trying to settle core questions that had long been "untouchable," which would make the EU's economy steadier.
Trump posts a string of tweets answering the criticism over nearly 2,000 children separated from their parents under immigration policy, first blaming the Democrats: "They don't care about crime or about illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, infesting our country, like MS-13. They can't win with such terrible policies, so they treat immigrants as potential voters." He then added: "No border, no country."
A shortage of carbon dioxide could push up the price of beer and soft drinks during the World Cup. The director-general of the British Soft Drinks Association said, "The CO2 shortage across northern Europe is having a wide impact on the drinks industry."
The Small Arms Survey, published by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, finds more than 1 billion firearms in the world, most of them in civilian hands — 857 million of them, or 85% of the total. Global stocks of small arms have also grown over the past decade, driven mainly by rising civilian ownership, which climbed from 650 million in 2006 to 857 million in 2017.
The U.S. Senate voted on the 18th to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), one clause of which overturns the settlement President Trump reached with the Chinese telecom company ZTE and again bars the sale of American high-tech chips to ZTE.
Japan's Fujifilm Holdings has sued Xerox in a New York state court, arguing that the U.S. company broke their contract by abandoning Fujifilm's planned acquisition. The claim is expected to top $1 billion.
Someone Said
"Call me Mr. President" — French President Emmanuel Macron.
On June 18, Macron attended a ceremony marking the Second World War and shook hands with the crowd. A young man in a red plaid shirt greeted him warmly: "How's it going, Manu?" (Manu is short for Emmanuel, Macron's first name.) Macron answered sternly and at once: "No, no, no, you can't do that." The young man apologized right away: "Sorry, Mr. President."
Macron kept on lecturing him: "This is an official ceremony, so you need to behave. You have the right to mess around, but today is a day of remembrance, so you should call me Mr. President, or Sir, understand?"
Then, a couple of steps on, Macron turned back and went further: "If one day you want to start a revolution, first study hard, get a diploma and support yourself, understand? Then you can lecture other people."
You Might Also Be Interested In
Capgemini published the latest World Wealth Report, based on a survey of 2,600 wealthy individuals plus figures from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It shows that the total wealth of the world's millionaires passed $70 trillion for the first time last year. There are now 18.1 million people worldwide with more than $1 million in investable assets, 9.5% more than in 2016. By country, the United States has the most, followed by Japan, Germany and China.
Worth noting: these fortunes are not growing at the same speed. People with assets between $1 million and $3 million saw their wealth rise 9.5% over the past year; those with $5 million to $30 million saw 10.5%; those with more than $30 million saw 12%.
By the end of 2017, 68.5 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced, among them 40 million internally displaced people, 25.4 million refugees and 3.1 million still waiting on asylum. Syria remains the country with the largest increase; by the end of the year the figure there will reach 12.6 million, including 6.3 million refugees, 146,000 asylum seekers and 6.2 million internally displaced people.
On This Day
June 20, 1789: 577 deputies of the Third Estate at the French Estates-General sign the Tennis Court Oath, and the French Revolution begins.
June 20, 1943: Race riots break out in Detroit, in the United States; 29 people are killed and hundreds are seriously injured.
June 20, 1963: After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union recognize how important it is to talk to each other directly, and the White House and the Kremlin begin setting up what became known as the US-Soviet hotline.
June 20, 2003: The Wikimedia Foundation is founded.
Cover image: the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations holds a press conference announcing the withdrawal from the Human Rights Council. From VCG.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.