UNESCO, in an attempt to stay relevant in the fast-changing, fluid world of gender politics within the UN family, has announced a new educational initiative: trans-ESD, which is to sit alongside the more usual ESD which is to be termed cis-ESD.
From now on the ESD team, which will henceforth be termed, TEAM ESD, will have two divisions cis-ESD and trans-ESD, each with the same rights, privileges and responsibilities (but separate toilets). They will work quasi-independently, coming together in carefully chaperoned sessions under the guidance of specially trained and vetted counsellors.
A UNESCO spokesperson, Mx Fatima Cholmondeley-BloodAxe, said:
"UNESCO is striving to become an institution where people can live open gender-neutral lives. As such, it signs up to what the LGBTQIAGNC community stands for; that is to a world which is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and gender-non-conforming. Our approach to ESD from now on exemplifies these values."
When asked whether LGBTQIAGNC wasn't a rather difficult acronym for public use, Mx Cholmondeley-BloodAxe said that UNESCO had considered using the rather briefer term 'GLOW’ (gay, lesbian or whatever), but had decided that this did not do full justice to the nuanced complexity of the ideas embodied (in every sense) within LGBTQIAGNC. They added that UNESCO had also considered using LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA as an alternative, but that it agreed with others when they described this as "silly", and rather devaluing of the serious issues around sexuality and gender. Cholmondeley-BloodAxe said that UNESCO was not fearful of being caught between sex and gender, and claimed that this development would rapidly result in minorities being drawn into the trans-cis-ESD fold.
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Note
This cis-trans distinction is not just a feature of modern gender fluidity (and organic chemistry), but has a much older use in English dating from the Reformation when, as Dot Wordsworth has noted, Henry Stafford was described by Thomas Fuller as a cis-reformation-man, rather than a trans-reformation one.
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