The truth behind the claim that trans women supposedly stole 890 medals "from every cis woman on the planet".

Reem Alsalem, UN special rapporteur for violence against women and girls An anti transgender extremist who abuses her role while enjoying protection from the highest levels at the UNHRC.

A little bit of context about this paper that was submitted on 27August, for the agenda of the latest UN HRC panel discussion. It is a date which falls within the period of the 4th United Nations Periodic Review cycle. These cycles last about 4 to 5 years and the 4th one started in 2022 and will continue until 2027. During such a cycle, several sessions are planned to allow human rights campaigners, or in this case a Special Rapporteur to come together at the UN and discuss the observations they have from the evidence they’ve gathered from their investigations. I should probably point out that the UN has a range of different mandates for which candidates can apply and which are decided on by the council. Reem Alsalem is the current mandate holder with the title UN Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Children, its causes and consequences. It’s a mandate which she has held since 2022 and which has been extended during the summer of last year and will officially end in August 2027. Also important to note is that mandate holders such as UNSRVAW are not paid for their work. They can rely on support from the UN and their travel does get reimbursed, but essentially these are non-paid positions. As I’ve learnt more about the reports outside of her attacks on trans people, all I can say now is that where on the surface she seemed to have a well constructed argument, at present the majority of issues she investigates and reports on are drawing an awful lot of valid criticism. This goes as well for her reporting on parental alienation and also prostitution, where she has taken up a stance that is detrimental for the rights of sex workers, people who she doesn’t even acknowledge exist (sound familiar?) because in her warped mind every sex worker is an exploited person. I am aiming to go deeper into that report in another article but for this one, the topic of transgender rights, where Reem has taken a position of advocacy from the point of view of gender critical people, which by default assume that granting transgender people, trans women in particular, the same human rights as a cis women, is a de facto reduction of women’s rights and thus must be avoided. She has gone down the rabbit hole or right wing extremism so far that she frankly doesn’t even realise that she is now supportive of the most obscene abusers out there. That obviously is important to know, because that hard stance is being propped up by input she receives from an increasingly more hostile set of advocacy groups. She regularly receives submissions as part of her “call for input” on certain topics, coming from groups like Sex Matters, Alliance Defending Freedom, LGB Alliance, Heritage Foundation, For Women Scotland, ICONs (Independent Council on Women’s Sports, where Martina Navratilova is Chairwoman) and Independent Women’s Forum for whom Riley Gaines is their ambassador.
Now you know the who and what and that brings me to the topic of this article: For the 79th session of the UN Human Rights General Assembly meeting , which is part of the 4th cycle mentioned at the start of this article. For that session she published 2 articles: The full agenda and all the reports that were submitted can be found in UN doc A/79/150.Reem submitted 3 documents to be included: The first was her report on Prostitution and Violence against Women and Girls with reference A/56//48. The second publication was her report on her country visit to Poland, under A/HRC56/48. And then the piece the resistance, her report on Violence against Women and Girls in Sports which is filed under A/79/325.
The crucial part, which got a lot of attention from the gender critical mob, was a paragraph on page 5 of the report:

Obviously, when you hear a mention that 890 medals had been given to people who she describes as “men,” it immediately has gravitas. So where did this number come from? And is it accurate?
She took the number from a submission made by “Wolf” a reporter for the Women’s Liberation Front. That submission can be found on the WLF website ob this page.

Let’s dig in. Start with the fact that the information that has been provided to UNSRVAW did not come from an official research paper or report. The data upon which Reem has based her statement is taken from a user-submitted database where they allow entries to be made in ANY sport at ANY level. The key consideration for WLF to add an entry is that it refers to a trans woman participating in women’s activities. I use the term “activities” because among the entries, there are entries such as ballet, Irish dance, croquet and disc golf. As well, submissions can come from a whole range of unverified sources such as Twitter. Also, the sources as mentioned in the original list could not all be verified. For some, the link to the source information was broken, meaning that it was impossible to verify the contents of the entry, casting further doubt on the reference that Reem made. And on Reem’s choice of language it is important to point out that she amended the original statement from the submission. The statement from Wolf’s submission refers to “over 900 instances of…”.. The text which Reem submitted to the general assembly of the UN Human Rights Council speaks of medals, suggesting that each of those cases referred to an organised competition with the aim to win a prize. Taking into account Reem’s background and education I consider the change in language a deliberate choice to add weight to her remark.

When I look into the categorisation of the sports and the total number of “medals” lost, we note that two thirds of the total amount of “medals” relate to three sports: Track and Field (athletics) with 324 mentions, Cycling with 206 and - surprise - Disc golf with 204. So let’s focus on the super sport known as Disc Golf. The first interesting observation is that there are only 5 entries registered:

So, using the statistics published on the PDGA website, I count 181 wins. That’s 22 less than the 204 reported on the “shewon.org” list that Wolf used in her submission to the UN. The win count for the individual players was as follows: Kirsty (30,) Laura (29), Natalie (30), Nove (84) and Chloe (8).

So, clearly the data is flawed and unreliable. But let’s also focus on the mentions that 600 cis women were impacted. There is no mention provided how they concluded on the amount of women impacted. Equally, it is important to highlight that even looking at just the Disc Golf statistics, that we’re talking about events going back a full decade. Adding that there are no restriction for entries on a global scale nor on the sport, the submission is actually an indication of how little impact trans women have on sports. After all, we’re talking an overestimated 890 “medals” gained over an entire decade versus a cis gender women population size of conservatively estimated 3 billion. Or how to make an absolute non-issue look much more important tan it actually is.

Addendum: After writing this article, all the way back in October 2024 information came to light which showed that not only had she used falsified information in her report on violence against women and girls in sports, but she also wilfully misquoted the research paper she referred to in her report on prostitution. The misinterpretation of the data she used in that report was so blatant that it forced the researchers to issue a public statement denouncing her false conclusions. As well, women have come out to also complain how she handled the reporting on parental alienation, causing women more harm than good.

At the same time, UNHRC have seen fit to ignore any complaint made about her. Worse yet, the complaints office even deleted complaints about her without so much as opening the submitted complaint. This comes after the UN previously ignored complaints by over 300 human rights organisations about the extremist views of miss Alsalem and her relentless campaigning for the anti transgender movement.