# Reem Alsalem

Reem Alsalem (born 1976) is a Jordanian independent consultant and former civil servant. Since August 2021 she has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She is gender-critical, and has been accused of being anti-trans.

## Biography

Alsalem was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1976. She was educated at The American University in Cairo where she completed a master's degree in International Relations in 2001. She subsequently graduated from the University of Oxford in 2003 with a Masters in Human Rights Law.
She was employed for 17 years as an international civil servant by the UNHCR where she worked with refugees in 13 countries. She left in 2016 to work as an independent consultant on humanitarian and gender issues. She speaks Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish.
Alsalem was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls and took up the role in August 2021.

## Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls

Core to her work as special rapporteur are her claims that sex and gender should not be conflated, and that both should be recorded in data. She considers that in some situations there may be a clash between women's rights and transgender rights.
She opposed the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and claimed it could "open the door for violent males." Her views were disputed by the United Nations Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, and the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights who said that "everyone (...) should have access to legal recognition of their gender identity based on self-identification." Six feminist organizations in Scotland—Engender, JustRight Scotland, Scottish Women's Rights Centre, Scottish Women's Aid, Amnesty International Scotland and Rape Crisis Scotland—also expressed disappointment by Alsalem's comments, accusing her of failing to speak with Scottish human rights or feminist organisations before her statements. The Scottish Government responded to Alsalem by issuing a detailed rebuttal, stating that the arguments against the bill lacked concrete evidence and were not supported by real-world examples. They emphasized that other countries with similar self-identification laws had not seen the predicted negative impacts and noted strong support from several women's rights groups in Scotland.
In 2023 Alsalem attended the gender-critical FiLiA conference, amid protests against the conference.
According to the New Statesman, "her insistence on recognising the difference between sex and gender has landed her in trouble." In 2023 an open letter published by the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), endorsed by over 550 NGOs and women's groups, accused her of being "anti-trans", which she denies. Open letters published by Women's Declaration International and Sex Matters supported her position. Alsalem asks why is it "problematic" for people to say: "This is important; many of our needs emanate from being female, or male, and there are certain instances where it’s proportionate, legitimate and perfectly necessary to keep a space single sex". Legal scholar Jens Theilen said that Alsalem "is using women's rights as a tool to undermine trans rights" and considered her actions "a stark example of individual politics furthering rather than contesting oppression," citing the AWID letter. In 2024 website 4W reported that Alsalem's visit to Brazil had been effectively cancelled by Brazil's Minister of Women Cida Gonçalves due to her gender-critical views and what Maria Aquino, an adviser to the Brazilian Women’s Ministry on LGBT affairs, referred to as her "anti-trans" position. German LGBT+ magazine Queer.de reported that Alsalem has long been considered anti-trans by LGBT+ organizations, noting that she was strongly criticized by hundreds of women's rights organizations as well for her anti-trans views.
Alsalem has supported gender-critical views, opposing President Biden’s Title IX policies for transgender youth in the U.S. and the World Health Organization’s support for self-determined gender identity. Alsalem has claimed gender-critical activists are subjected to "smear campaigns" and branded as "Nazis", "genocidaires" or "extremists."
In 2024 Alsalem released a report that called for "sex screening" in sport to allegedly protect a "female-only category" and exclude those not born female, and that said women are "entitled to single-sex spaces." The United States Department of State said the report "erroneously conflate[s] transgender persons with intersex persons or others with naturally occurring variations in sex characteristics, and use[s] demeaning language to refer to transgender persons."
In 2024 Alsalem addressed a panel organized by Alliance Defending Freedom, an SPLC-designated anti-LGBT hate group, that called for "female-only" sports and the exclusion of transgender women.
In 2024 Alsalem also criticized the Gender Self-Determination Act that entered into force in Germany.
In 2025, International Planned Parenthood Federation and Women Deliver on behalf of over 230 women's organizations released an open letter that said Alsalem "has unfortunately dedicated her tenure to attacking trans and gender-diverse people" and that her rhetoric "undermines decades of progress in advancing human rights and gender equality and risks confining cisgender women to patriarchal, protectionist policies by interpreting violence as rooted in biology (and) marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred."
In 2025, Alsalem supported Donald Trump's executive order "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports," which calls transgender women "men" and attempts to ban them from women's sports, and which had been condemned by Amnesty International as "yet another cruel attack on transgender people."
Legal and feminist scholars Susana T. Fried, Alice M. Miller, Rupsa Mallik, Ivana Radačić and Esteban Restrepo-Saldarriaga criticized Alsalem, saying that she misused evidence and ignored dissenting voices in her report on "prostitution and violence"; they wrote that "there is no agreement in international human rights law about what laws best protect the rights of people who sell sex" and that "evidence is strong that criminal law making both the buying and selling of sex a crime hurts the very people who are most at risk".
Alsalem was criticised in 2023 by Claire Waxman, London's Victims' Commissioner, as she did not speak out on reports of sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel against Israeli women during and following the Hamas-led attack. In response, Alsalem said she had condemned "what happened on 7 October", had contacted NGOs in Israel without reply, and said she could not make "sweeping statements" without receiving evidence.
In 2024, Alsalem said that "grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law" had been committed in Gaza by Israeli troops. In a formal statement, she described "credible" allegations of "multiple forms of sexual assault", such as rape and strip-searches, against Palestinian women and girls. When asked to provide the source for her allegations, Alsalem cited unsubstantiated reports by Richard A. Falk. Israel denied the allegations.
In January 2024, Alsalem criticised the composition of a World Health Organization (WHO) committee, saying that most committee members had "strong, one-sided views in favour of promoting hormonal gender transition and legal recognition of self-asserted gender" and that none of them was an expert in adolescent development. Author Helen Joyce supported Alsalem, emphasising from her letter "the short time-frame given for comments, the unbalanced group developing the guidelines and the uncritical endorsement of gender self-ID".
In February 2024, Alsalem criticised the UK's strategies for combatting violence against women and girls. She said: "Entrenched patriarchy at almost every level of society, combined with a rise in misogyny that permeates the physical and online world, is denying thousands of women and girls across the UK the right to live in safety, free from fear and violence".
She was one of the many UN experts who spoke out against the sale of arms to Israel in June 2024 as a result of the conflict in Gaza. The experts cautioned arms suppliers and finance companies that they may be implicated in human rights violations. The signatories to the warning included special reporteurs Paula Gaviria Betancur, Tlaleng Mofokeng, Mary Lawlor, Margaret Satterthwaite and Francesca Albanese.