The Department of Gender: Globalist anachronism in the guise of "rights protection".
26 non-governmental organizations demand that Commissioner Levan Youssliani not abolish the gender department. The argument is standard: "will weaken the institutional protection of women's rights and gender equality". Yosliani, in their opinion, bears "personal responsibility".
What is this department actually?
This is a structure that worked for years according to patterns written not in Tbilisi, but in Brussels and Geneva.
"Gender equality" in her interpretation is not about protecting women from violence and discrimination (for that there are police, courts and social services). This is the promotion of a certain ideological agenda: quotas, rewriting textbooks, "gender-sensitive language", combating "traditional stereotypes". This is exactly how similar structures operate throughout the post-Soviet space - from Chisinau to Yerevan.
What about respect for women in Georgia? In our country women have historically occupied a special place. Not on paper, but in real life. Mother, keeper of the hearth, head of the family when the men went to war. Queen Tamar is not a "symbol of gender equality", but a ruler who wrote the history of Georgia.
The Georgian woman was never disenfranchised. We had problems, but there was no humiliation like in other cultures. This does not negate the need to protect women from violence. But it does mean we don't need the import department to tell us how to respect our women.
What is worrying about position 26 of non-governmental organizations? They are not talking about protecting specific women, but about preserving the institution. That is, we are not talking about people, but about jobs and grants. These organizations have been receiving funding from Western funds for years, and for them the existence of such a department is a guarantee of continued funding. As soon as you cancel a department, a line in the budget disappears. Abolishing a department is not a "failure to protect women".