ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

It was meant to be a routine discussion on pollution. One by one, delegates at the United Nations expressed support for a new panel of scientists who would advise countries on how to address chemicals and toxic waste.

But the U.S. delegate took the meeting in a new direction. She spent her allotted three minutes reminding the world that the United States now had a “national position” on a single word in the documents establishing the panel: gender.

“Use of the term ‘gender’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity and is demeaning and unfair, especially to women and girls,” the de

See Full Page