Women's Declaration International

Women’s Declaration International (WDI), formerly called the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC), is a British-led anti-trans hate group with extensive ties to the far right, and that is active in multiple countries. The Trans Safety Network has described WHRC as “an extreme anti-trans group” and “a key point of convergence” between transphobic feminism and the far right.

Activities and analysis
The group was founded in 2019 by Sheila Jeffreys and Heather Brunskell-Evans, after Brunskell-Evans had been ousted from the Women’s Equality Party for transphobic comments in 2018; Jeffreys has stated that trans women are “parasites.” The group calls for the “elimination” of “transgenderism.”

The group is known for promoting conspiracy theories and false information, and for its use of virulent anti-trans rhetoric, especially in social media. The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) has described WHRC as a trojan horse in human rights spaces and argued that WHRC “engages in sensationalism and fear-mongering” to “undermine and water down the progressions of human rights standards that protect the rights of trans and gender non-conforming persons.” The Scottish Women’s Aid described WHRC as a group “seeking to stigmatise and discriminate against trans women.” The Canadian Anti-Hate Network described WHRC as a "TERF project."

WHRC openly collaborates with far-right and pro-Trump organizations in the United States. Commenting on WHRC and similar groups, philosopher Christa Peterson has noted that anti-trans ideology has “solidified over time” into embracing explicit conspiracy theories, and that “today, this rhetoric provides an entry point into far-right politics.”

Transphobic manifesto
The group is best known for publishing a transphobic manifesto titled the “declaration on women’s sex-based rights.” Emma Ritch, executive director of the feminist policy organization Engender, noted that “when [the declaration] talks about violence against women, freedom of expression, and children’s rights it does so entirely through the warped lens of antipathy towards trans people.” Human rights expert Sandra Duffy has described the declaration’s concept of “sex-based rights” as “a fiction with the pretense of legality.”

Name change
WHRC changed its name to Women’s Declaration International (WDI) in December 2021 in an apparent attempt to avoid the taint associated with the WHRC name, after the group had become infamous for extreme transphobia and widely denounced as an extremist hate group by mainstream organizations, including numerous feminist organizations in the U.K.