I’m obviously not part of that crew. But I am a “content creator”, in the lingo, as well as a “platform user”. And I’m interested in the regulators who get in between the spergs making cool apps and users like me, because regulators set the limits about what platforms can and cannot do (or more specifically, how they can operate in the market). That extends to what can and cannot be said online, because those apps/technologies are the medium with which we say things that have reach.

A couple of weeks ago, Sarah O’Reilly, who leads Free Speech Ireland and just founded the Digital Justice Institute (of which she invited me to join the board), led me by the hand through the details of the various legislative efforts to gatekeep online discourse.

The “compliance” rules she describes are not just a nightmare for those of us who want to say untoward things online, it’s also a nightmare for the tech companies who own any kind of public-facing platform and don’t want to drown in rules, because that interferes in their ability to make money. It also influences how developers design their new products (and their incentive to do so, obviously).

The big kahuna of EU platform regulation is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was the main topic of my conversation with Sarah. There are plenty of good things about the DSA, but alongside the good there are a few provisions that risk making it an illiberal censorship nightmare (Sarah calls it “repugnant”).

The EU Commission and their allies are quick to remind everyone that the DSA doesn’t directly criminalise (or call for the criminalisation) of speech. It doesn’t even define hate speech. It does something far more insidious. You can hear all about it in the interview. If you find details of EU legislation boring, you might want to skip this one. But even if it’s heavy on the acronyms and bureaucracy, it’s important, and it matters outside the EU too. And having just attended an incredibly tense session on the DSA this morning, I’m quite shocked at the appetite for it. Do these dorks know what they’re cheering for???

As I was writing this post, the Alliance Defending Freedom (right-wing/tradcaths) reported that the Commission has dropped its plan for a treaty change that would make hate an EU-level (crime) (yawn, I know) but will instead move ahead with a directive (double-yawn, yes, but it matters).

Sarah explains some basics of free speech, civil versus common law, and all kinds of interesting tidbits. A fine woman.

I’ll be writing a debrief about this session for Free Speech Ireland/the Digital Justice Institute (who comped me the ticket). Stay tuned.

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Show notes (AI generated)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with Sarah O’Reilly, a free-speech advocate and the founding CEO of the Digital Justice Institute, about the European Union’s expanding regulatory framework for online platforms and its implications for freedom of expression, privacy, anonymity and public debate.

Sarah discusses her involvement with Free Speech Ireland and its campaign against Ireland’s proposed Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill. The conversation examines the relationship between EU legislation and national law, including the EU’s framework for combating racism and xenophobia and the eventual passage of Ireland’s Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024.

The discussion then turns to the Digital Services Act (DSA), trusted flaggers, codes of conduct on disinformation and illegal hate speech, and the role of national Digital Services Coordinators. Sarah raises concerns about how definitions of misinformation, disinformation and harmful information could affect online expression. Róisín also discusses EU-supported fact-checking initiatives, funding transparency and a dispute over how an EU parliamentary resolution was characterised.

The conversation examines specific cases and incidents, including a viral video falsely described as showing a child kidnapping in Dublin, the prosecution of Sandra Barry over threatening messages sent to Simon Harris, the UK case involving rap lyrics posted by Chelsea Russell, and Finnish proceedings involving politician Päivi Räsänen. These examples lead into a broader discussion about the boundaries between offensive expression, harmful communications and criminal conduct.

Later, they examine Coco’s Law, proposed EU-wide rules for children’s access to social media, age-verification systems and the implications of identity verification for anonymous accounts, whistleblowers, journalists and people expressing unpopular opinions. The speakers also discuss France’s restrictions on minors’ access to social media and the constitutional challenge to its under-15 prohibition.

The episode concludes with a discussion of the EU’s legislative powers, proposals to extend the list of EU crimes to include hate speech and hate crime, and the possibility of using existing computer-crime powers to address certain forms of online expression. Sarah explains the purpose of the Digital Justice Institute and its plans to research digital regulation and engage with businesses, individuals and policymakers.

────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Sarah O’Reilly

Sarah O’Reilly is a free-speech advocate with a background in law and financial services. She is the founding CEO of the Digital Justice Institute and has been involved with Free Speech Ireland’s campaign against Ireland’s proposed hate-speech legislation.

In the episode, Sarah draws on her legal background and campaigning experience to discuss the development of digital regulation in Europe, the relationship between national and EU law, and the challenges of protecting freedom of expression while addressing genuine online harms.

Digital Justice Institute — Sarah O’Reilly’s Profile

https://digitaljusticeinstitute.com/about-us/

Free Speech Ireland

https://freespeechireland.ie/

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Free Speech Ireland & the Irish Hate Speech Bill

Free Speech Ireland — “Bin the Bill” Campaign

https://freespeechireland.ie/press-release-bin-the-bill-campaign-launched/

Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA — Racism and Xenophobia

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32008F0913

Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1989/act/19/enacted/en/html

Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2024/act/41/enacted/en/html

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The Digital Services Act, Trusted Flaggers & Platform Regulation

Digital Services Act — Official EU Regulation

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj

European Commission — Trusted Flaggers Under the DSA

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/trusted-flaggers-under-dsa

Ireland’s Digital Services Coordinator — Coimisiún na Meán

https://www.cnam.ie/

European Commission — Codes of Conduct Under the DSA

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-codes-conduct

European Commission — Temu Fined €200 Million Under the DSA

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-fines-temu-eu200-million-breaching-digital-services-act

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Misinformation, Disinformation & Fact-Checking

PolitiFact — Charlie Kirk’s Assassination, One Year Later: How Conspiracy Theories Have Evolved

https://www.politifact.com/article/2026/sep/08/charlie-kirk-assassination-misinformation-tpusa/

EU-Funded Fact-Checking & The Journal

The Journal FactCheck — Funding & Methodology

https://www.thejournal.ie/the-journal-factcheck/

EDMO Ireland — European Digital Media Observatory

https://edmohub.ie/index.php/about/

Germany’s Gender-Marker Disclosure Law

Germany — Act on Self-Determination With Regard to Gender Markers, Section 13

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_sbgg/englisch_sbgg.html

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Chelsea Russell & the Snap Dogg Lyrics Case

Police Professional — Instagram Rap Tribute to Dead Boy Lands UK Teenager in Court

https://policeprofessional.com/news/instagram-rap-tribute-to-dead-boy-lands-uk-teenager-in-court-for-hate-crime/

Lucy Connolly & Online Speech Following the Southport Attacks

Crown Prosecution Service — Lucy Connolly Case

https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/updated-sentence-childminder-admits-inciting-racial-hatred-over-social-media-post

Päivi Räsänen & the Finnish Supreme Court

Supreme Court of Finland — Päivi Räsänen and Her Internet Publisher

https://www.korkeinoikeus.fi/en/news/news-archive/supreme-court-paivi-rasanen-and-her-internet-publisher-convicted-of-agitation-against-a-population-group/

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Coco’s Law & the Simon Harris Case

Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020 — Full Legislation

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2020/act/32/enacted/en/html

Section 4 — Threatening or Grossly Offensive Communications

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2020/act/32/section/4

RTÉ — Woman Jailed for Six Months Over Online Threats to Tánaiste Simon Harris

https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2025/1218/1549696-courts-threats/

A Viral Dublin Video & False Kidnapping Claims

TheJournal.ie FactCheck — No Evidence a Viral Video Shows a Kidnapping in East Wall, Dublin

https://www.thejournal.ie/viral-video-seen-millions-of-times-does-not-show-a-kidnapping-in-east-wall-dublin-6811588-Sep2025/

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Child Protection, Age Verification & Online Anonymity

The EU KIDS Act

European Commission — Proposal for the EU KIDS Act

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/proposal-eu-kids-act-eu-keeping-internet-digital-spaces-accountable-and-trustworthy

EU KIDS Act — Official Legislative Proposal

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52026PC0681

France’s Under-15 Social-Media Restrictions

French Constitutional Council — Decision No. 2026-911 DC, 14 August 2026

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/cons/id/CONSTEXT000054952977

French Senate — Legislative Record on Protecting Minors from Social-Media Risks

https://www.senat.fr/dossier-legislatif/ppl25-304.html

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

EU Treaty Powers & the Proposed Extension of EU Crimes

European Commission — COM(2021) 777: Extending the List of EU Crimes to Hate Speech and Hate Crime

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52021DC0777

Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union — Article 83

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12016E083

Treaty on European Union — Article 48: Treaty Revision Procedure

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12016M048

Directive 2013/40/EU — Attacks Against Information Systems

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32013L0040

The EU Parenthood Regulation

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52022PC0695

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Guest Links

Sarah O’Reilly — X

https://x.com/FreeSpeechSarah

Digital Justice Institute

https://digitaljusticeinstitute.com/

Free Speech Ireland

https://freespeechireland.ie/

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Host

Róisín Michaux — X

https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Substack

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

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🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

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https://peaked.news

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She’s the advocacy director of Sex Matters, a British organisation whose objective is right there in the name. Sex Matters’ tagline is also pretty explanatory: “it shouldn’t take courage to say so.”

Unfortunately it does take courage, or at least a lot of fuck-you money, because you might get fired, sued, or forced to resign for saying it. You might also get physically attacked, mobbed, or even dunked in tomato soup by an angry man. Most likely, you’ll get quiet-cancelled and/or not-hired, or removed from the WhatsApp group, and you’ll have to resort to Substack samizdat to make everyone aware of the ongoing scandal.

In this week’s Peaked newsletter, I compare the the Athena Forum event to the official “genders” events taking place in parallel all week in Brussels, none of which will touch on this issue because the political fallout of doing so is too much to bear for elected and unelected EU officials.

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Helen will be speaking at the Athena Forum event in Brussels from 6:3PM on Tuesday 3 November. You can follow it by live-tweet on my X account here. The event will be hosted on Athena Forum’s YouTube channel. Here are the other panellists:

1. Athena Forum are in Brussels to talk about discrimination against women for protecting sex-based laws. At the same time, a Big Gender Conference for Genders will take place in the European Parliament

2. Dutch intensive care doc blows the whistle on gender interventions after rise in complications

3. The Council of Europe just just made it harder to opt out of queered sex education

4. France nearly messed up the gay gameplan in Geneva

5. The WHO confirms: trans guidelines are delayed again

6. A provision about stereotypes in the CEDAW convention offered an opportunity to undo trans damage to women’s rights, but it just got trooned up to hooha

7. Ukraine introduces queer concepts to national human rights plan to satiate the gender beast in Brussels

8. Programmed motherlessness is being openly advertised by the Dutch Prime Minister

9. Trouble in Paradyke: French app for lesbians is off to a very TERFy start

10. Who can we thank? Navi Pillay

Athena Forum conference featuring women punished for reality-based definition of women is running in parallel to official EU ‘gender’ week kickoff

Athena Forum, a Vienna-based organisation founded by former member of the Austrian Parliament, Faika El-Nagashi, is hosting its first EU event tomorrow (3 November) in a hotel right beside the EU Commission headquarters. The panel will feature a lineup of women who have been monstered in various ways for refusing to stop talking about women and girls being real phenomena (as opposed to sets of aesthetic and temperamental stereotypes who require “theory” in order to be decoded).

This cause that the panellists will defend — the retention of biological sex in law and public policy — does not get any airtime in Brussels, and the reasons for that are varied but it mostly comes down to: keeping your job. It is professional poison among the elite class to acknowledge the trashy reality of human sex. Email jobs in the “knowledge economy” make the fiction of chosen-sex identity claims easier to maintain. Men in party shop wigs sit stubbornly at the bottom of the privilege heap (or at least, beneath “cis women”) and any claim that they do not deserve to upend our fundamental understanding of nature for more satisfying wanks is seen as cruel and unsophisticated, and even (shudder) conservative.

The official line among the camp du bien in Brussels is that a woman is an open category, even in places like Cameroon where for some reason, eight-year-old girls aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity presented by sexswapism to avoid getting impregnated by their uncles and dying in childbirth because their pelvises are too narrow for a newborn head. Those girls are so dumb! What do they not understand? Their mothers would not need to delay their daughters’ sexual appeal by flattening their budding breasts with hot rocks if those kids just declared themselves to be little boys. Honestly, they deserve their funding cuts. Has nobody explained Genders to these people? Sometimes all it takes is a well put-together Genders pamphlet. Has nobody tried that?

Hélas, luckily for all the world’s female children, also taking place on Tuesday is an EU event dedicated to Genders. It is being hosted in the European Parliament, and it can be viewed via livestream via the link above (and via my X account) from 4:00PM CET. Perhaps the QR code for the livestream could be airdropped into the world’s most misogynistic shitheaps? Those alluring little children can finally understand that being a girl is just a performance. They can throw off their chadors and finally get a go on the swings. We live in hope!

The Athena event starts at 6:30PM (I’ll be there to live-tweet it), at the exact same moment that the European Parliament Genders event is finishing up. The two events are around the corner from each other, but their objectives couldn’t be further apart.

The European Parliament Genders conference has a stellar line-up of very-approved women who will talk about leadership and empowerment and other lean-in, nutrition-free gruel. It’s kicks off a week of similarly-themed Genders events. And you can tell already exactly what the content will be because it’s always the same.

In all my years as a culture-war distractor/anti-gender actor (as women like me are officially known in the academic literature) I have never attended a gender event that had anything new or interesting to say. The only fun you’ll ever squeeze out of a gender event is when someone accidentally skirts too close to the awkward fact that they have removed women from the law — oops! — and you can hear everyone’s sphincter bolting shut like a room full of mouse traps before someone steers the discussion somewhere safer.

I live for this tension. Squirm harder, you pricks.

Meanwhile, the Athena panellists will talk about a subject that officialdom in Brussels has done everything to ignore. They will talk about their experiences of being subjected to every kind of harassment you can think of for holding the line on a basic fact: female biology is central to female oppression — even if culture has a big influence on whether or not a woman is oppressed. You can be raped and impregnated in Kandahar and you can be raped and impregnated in Copenhagen. The social conventions that make this more or less likely to happen in a particular place have no effect on the basic hardware of men and women. Nor do your stupid theories. Rape and sexual assault statistics are directly connected to male biology in ways that even the most “cultured” culture can never negate. It is for this reason that it matters that what is recorded on everyone’s official documents as their sex is factual and not fantastical. This matters for women and children. You can all go on pretending that women and children are not uniquely vulnerable to male predation if it makes you feel better, but hands off our laws.

That’s it. That’s the entire argument that everyone has been studiously ignoring.

The reason this very basic claim is so contentious is because some men would prefer to be women, mostly for sexual reasons, and it makes them very angry that despite their elaborate costumes, reality keeps breaking through. They are forced to monitor the reactions of everyone around them as part of a permanent system of coercive control to see if their cosplay is “working”. It’s exhausting and infuriating, as you can imagine.

And guess who they blame for their predicament?

But of course, honourable mention: most institutional trans “allies” seem to be women, and I would guess it is in no small part due to something else that evolution bestowed on the female sex: whatever you do, don’t make the men violently angry, especially the ones currently trapped in a deep psychosexual delusion.

You might not give a shit about women — many do not, especially the ones who shout loudest about us — but you should care that a basic truth can so easily infect our truth-based institutions. And not least, you should care because the coercion required by institutionalised transvestism is totalitarian in nature.

It’s important to note that Tuesday’s Athena Forum event will not be the first time the issue of sex erasure has been discussed in Brussels; that honour belongs to Kellie-Jay Keen, who was invited by the right-wing Patriots party to talk about it in the European Parliament last year. She gave a brilliant speech. But because that party is MAGA/Orban-coded, it was easy for everyone to fob off the event. Indeed, Politico reporter Mari Eccles later called it a “toxic culture war”, and I’m still waiting for her to explain to me what that phrase means.

How much longer can the establishment pretend not to notice that *somebody* has legislated and litigated women and girls out of official existence? Even to defend it as a good thing? To be fair, Politico chief policy correspondent Sarah Wheaton once had a crack at pseudo-bothsidesing it via a despicable feature article about JK Rowling, in which she quoted an absolutely gross sexual deviant as an example of the poor-sad-transwoman trope (this was before the media had twigged that sad-trans tropes only works when you use the girly gays, not the autogynephiles or the testosterone-bloated tiny lesbians.)

Anyway, I’ll livestream the genderfaff conference and I’ll live-tweet my way through Athena Forum’s panel, to try to reach as many people as possible but especially the Official Cowards who follow me on X and on here all while pretending not to. Yes, I’m talking about you.

Dutch intensive care doctor blows the whistle on gender interventions after rise in complications

A doctor working in the Amsterdam UMC, home of the original Dutch Protocol, is speaking out about ideology-driven treatments taking priority over evidence-based science at the Netherlands’ university hospitals.

Armand Girbes is a professor of intensive care and a clinical pharmacologist. He wrote in a widely-discussed LinkedIn post that he routinely sees the “severe” physical complications of gender-related surgical procedures, but he had assumed that the specialists prescribing the procedures had done their due diligence.

He said:

As an intensivist you see the complications and the patients pass by regularly, but I had not delved into the literature and relied on what I heard from the practitioners. But now I know, and it’s seriously wrong.

Girbes was invited to take part in debates with gender doctors but he claims the latter pulled out.

Compare all this to another LinkedIn post from earlier this year, in which a private gender clinic (masterfully named “Gender Clinic”) boasted of its partnership with Girbes’ Amsterdam hospital. The partnership is intended to increase the number of “low-complexity, high-volume” surgeries performed off-site, while more complex cases can be carried out on the hospital site itself. One assumes these are the cases Girbes’ has been dealing with, though he may also be confronted with the outcomes of the “low-complexity” surgeries, too, which refers to phalloplasties without urethral reconstruction and vaginoplasties, according to a statement from the hospital published in January.

The Gender Clinic post was reposted by Thomas D Steensma (see post below), who is linked to the original Dutch Protocol team.

Girbes’ post reflects a phenomenon that Genspect’s Mia Hughes has written about, called the "broken chain of trust”. When one link in this chain fails, everyone downstream is misled. That’s happening all over the Western world right now. Professionals don’t want to believe they are on the receiving end of a flawed system. But history is full of this stuff (see this X post by Sama Hoole for examples).

Council of Europe just made it harder to opt out of queered sex education

A couple of weeks ago the ministers who make up the main decision-making body of the Council of Europe (a Strasbourg-based human rights body, not related to the EU) adopted a new soft-law, non-binding “recommendation” on the contentious topic of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). A provision in the text — for which no vote rollcall has been made publicly available — will make it harder for national governments to create opt-outs for CSE, which, when designed according to the official guidelines, contains queer theory precepts that are utterly bizarre.

The text states:

Member States should adopt the necessary legal or policy basis for the inclusive and accessible provision of this education to all children. De jure or de facto exemptions to comprehensive sexuality education undermine the protection of children from various forms of violence.

The explanatory memorandum also encourages making CSE available for all children, “including by making it compulsory.”

As per usual, the recommendation has been itself infused with queer theory by including in it a call for special attention to be paid to “children with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, or sex characteristics”. Of course all children, no matter who they are or what they believe, should be protected from violence. On the other hand, there’s no such thing as a transsexual child. It’s not real, folks.

This damaging nonsense is not new for the Council of Europe. What’s new is that the particular body that voted for it is the most influential one in the system. They are representatives of member states’ sitting governments. It is hard to understand how the ministers (or their deputies) think that teaching boys and girls that they can reject their sex, override the objection of their parents, and put their trust in these matters into the hands of unrelated adult “CSE providers” would lead to less grooming by creeps and freaks, an objective that is also part of the same recommendation.

The first question everyone always wants to know about these kinds of ‘instruments’ is: does it matter? If it’s not binding, who cares? The answer is that its utility is in the eye of the beholder. Governments can (and do) ignore non-binding gendershite declarations from Strasbourg (and Brussels and New York and Geneva). But ultimately, it depends on whose good side you’re trying to get on. These international bodies, at least on this topic, seem to do little more than churn out activist advocacy materials.

If, say, the Irish government introduced a law declaring that no parent can opt their child out of lessons about child transvestitism, there would be uproar. But this mysterious and somehow all-powerful and regal-sounding Council of Europe told the Irish government to do it — well Irish officials can shrug and pretend they’re just following orders. Even though it was their own reps who flew to Strasbourg to negotiate and vote on the thing, and it’s their own funding that they have given to the NGOs that will subsequently use it for lobbying them to make sure the ‘instrument’ gets implemented.

At any point, member state governments could just refuse to implement the recommendations. But then what would be the point of membership of the Council in the first place? And what message would it send to other members about ignoring rules they don’t like?

Most notable for me is that the entire transification of law in Europe ran on the steam of exactly the same type of “recommendation” from the same body: a 2010 recommendation on sexual orientation and genderfaff. Activists dined out on that for years (even more so than the Yogyakarta Principles — it had more legitimacy in the sense that the CoE ministers have a mandate to invent all this stuff) and yet it was essentially worth no more than the paper upon which it was written. Except in the eyes of national governments who wanted to be seen to be obeying the “democratic” institutions they had signed up to be a part of.

Anyway, I hope your kids enjoy having their brains scrambled by the Genderbread Person.

France nearly messed up the gay gameplan (gaymplan?) in Geneva

France arrived at the human rights council in Geneva early last month planning to table a resolution that would call for the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships in the countries where it’s still illegal. The draft resolution claimed that criminalising consensual same-sex conduct between adults is “contrary to international human rights principles”. It would have encouraged states to “review and repeal such laws”.

But the plan got dropped.

It was obviously not popular with the usual suspects (conservative Islamic states) but it also faced opposition from those who you would assume would be allies: a group of 140+ progressive NGOs. France ended up withdrawing the resolution and issued a statement instead, which was signed by 52 countries. It was all very weird.

To understand why it happened, why France’s “allies” would disapprove of a plan to decriminalise homosexuality, you need to upgrade your understanding of gay rights activism. Things have changed.

Gay does not exist in the places where homophobia is worst. I’m not saying homosexuality doesn’t exist, or that same-sex relationships don’t exist, I mean the identity of “the gay man” as a cultural trope is not happening and probably never will. A gay guy just going around being gay? With a boyfriend? Never going to happen. It is seen as a foreign idea/import, and the people working on the ground do not benefit from globogay swooping in in a rainbow cape telling their governments to decriminalise sodomy. France was a colonial country, and a lot of the places where homosexuality is illegal were colonies (though it must be pointed out: the French have long been cool with gay stuff, to their credit, and most ex-French countries where it’s illegal made it so after independence. It was mostly the British who got the severe ick about local homo arrangements. Check out what the puritanical Brits thought about Hijras, those “habitual sodomites and unnatural prostitutes”).

As such, the NGOs have chosen to frame decrim as a decolonisation project. And for that to work, Macron needs to stay the hell away from it. Read the letter they wrote to him about it.

Sure, they want decrim, but this is not your uncle’s gay rights movement. This is a new beast. If you read through the letter, you’ll notice that there is no mention of what, exactly, the activists want decriminalised. As far as I can deduce, and this is just my very educated guess, strategists are trying their luck to re-normalise precolonial third gender identities. Because while “gay” will never (ever) fly, the more culturally familiar third-gender workarounds for too-gay men are homegrown, and they might be an easier sell in their culturally-specific milieus.

These identities were right there before evil Christian colonialists outlawed male-on-male sex (nobody cares about the lesbians innit). So the strategy of the NGOs is to try to rewild the old homophobia of pretending gay men are a type of half-woman (under the neo-colonial labels of “trans” and, importantly, “intersex”). This might indeed improve the lives of gay men, but it certainly won’t do anything to increase support for regular old homosexuality without the elaborate ornamentation and narrative-weaving. What’s worse, the idea is going back up the tube in reverse, and flooding back into the countries where being gay is (relatively) okay. We in the West are importing this backward notion, because globohomo is, well, globo.

Look at the names of all the NGOs that supported the NGO letter to Macron, and where they’re based. Those vague human-rightsy names are not specifically about homosexuality. Their demands have to stay vague, and if you look into them, you will notice they are often inordinately invested in the T and the I, not the G.

The letter to Macron was blunt: the NGOs support the goal of decriminalisation but oppose the strategy, and they thought a high-profile Geneva resolution would strengthen the “foreign agenda” narrative. They were also miffed that France didn’t consult them.

France has an election coming up and I suspect Macron’s people are scrambling for scraps to offer to the gay gods. But they desisted on this long-standing gay rights priority, and the gender gods breathed a sigh of relief.

The WHO confirms: no release date for (delayed) trans guidelines

The WHO is supposed to be working on a set of guidelines for the clinical treatment of “trans people”, and the document was expected to be released sometime this year (early announcements said the meetings would begin in early 2024, with the process taking about 2 years). Much controversy surrounded the composition of the drafting group, which subsequently went through some light changes.

Last week I wrote to the WHO units responsible for the guidelines (HIV/AIDS and the gendershite department) and they confirmed: no guidelines are forthcoming, no date is known. This may be because the drafting committee can’t agree on what the guidelines should say.

To understand why this is happening (again, this is just my informed speculation), you can listen to this very long conversation with Stephanie Winn where I explain the problem that lies at the heart of the alliance of people who want to pretend trans is real. The unlikely collab can be broken down into two broad categories: one is public health officials who think that mainstreaming third-gender gay men is the only way to get them on HIV drugs (see France/UN story above) and the other is what I’ll just call the Judith Butler Perverts.

The public health people know in their heart of hearts that acceptance of “gay” is never going to happen in the places where HIV is worst. But what might happen is pre-colonial workarounds for gay men could get resurrected and gain more acceptance than the Village-People Western notion of the gay man identity. The JBPs, on the other hand, just want to change sex but can’t. Most of them are women from upper-class Western academic backgrounds, and some of them are STEM-type autogynephiles.

Why can’t they agree? As I found out in an undercover interview with one of the drafters, they ultimately have different “clinical endpoints”. The HIV guys want to know that transing away the gay actually works to achieve a public health goal. The JBPs just want their identities affirmed. Hormones-in-hand is the clinical endpoint for the JBPs. They do not want to wait to gather “evidence” that transing is beneficial to anyone for any reason (the evidence does not point in the direction they would like, especially for young people).

So we wait, with popcorn at the ready.

The stereotypes provision of CEDAW was once seen as a way out of trans madness. Not anymore

One of the most infuriatingly dumb things about transgenderism is that it’s based on bundles of stereotypes of the sexes. Women are like this/feel like this, so you can be one too. It’s incredibly retarded.

The UN’s dedicated women’s treaty — known as CEDAW — contains a provision specifically about stereotypes that had been touted as a potential vehicle for challenging stupid and regressive gender identity where it has replaced sex-based protections in laws all over the world. Indeed, For Women Scotland wrote to the CEDAW committee to make this point, and Sall Grover publicly linked the stereotypes provisions of CEDAW in the context of her Tickle v Giggle case.

Article 5(a) of CEDAW requires signatory states to take appropriate measures to

modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.

Their argument is essentially that gender identity treats stereotypes as evidence that you are one sex or another, so it entrenches them rather than help eliminate them. But hopes that the CEDAW committee might come to understand this point have been dashed, because a new interpretive General Recommendation on “Dismantling Gender Stereotypes” has now been sewn on to the CEDAW treaty that treats resistance to gender identity claims as a manifestation of stereotypes. “LBTI women who are perceived to defy social and gender expectations face violence and discrimination rooted in stereotypes.” This treats any “No” directed at a man in a dress as a manifestation of the stereotype that men shouldn’t wear dresses. He can of course wear the dress, but he can’t join the women’s football team. This interpretation sees the dress as the reason, not the man. Human rights lawyer Claire Methven O’Brien’s argument is simpler: she says the CEDAW treaty is only for actual women, not for boys or men who say they are girls or women.

Allies like this ex-UN gender looper are celebrating it as a win for transvestites.

Ukraine human rights strategy gets queered to feed the Brussels gender beast

On 12 October, war-weary Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky signed off on an overhaul of the country’s national human rights strategy which, for the first time, mentions LGBTIQ+ people as a group at higher risk of human rights violations.

It says that sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics need to be more clearly reflected in Ukrainian law, and it covers all the bases: bias/discrimination, hate speech, social services, health, education, legal aid, public awareness, and police and judicial training. It tells the government to prepare “develop an operational plan” within 6 months.

Decree No. 1038/2026 approving a new National Human Rights Strategy replaces a 2021 version, and it is now in effect. It is not binding, but it’s a start. It’s part of Ukraine’s EU-pleasing strategy to speed up its membership bid. Ukraine does have the old-school psycho-medical transsexual model of legal gender recognition, and there is pressure (though no plan) to ease up on the requirements. A civil law bill that passed first reading this year firmly declares that man-woman is the only legally recognised marriage type, which I think tells you which way the cultural wind blows, despite what the bureaucrats in Brussels would like to push through. Box half-ticked, I bet they’re hoping the beast will be satiated for now.

Programmed motherlessness is being openly advertised by the Dutch Prime Minister

Mothers matter to children. It’s right there in the word: the word matter comes from the same latin root as mother. Materia means the substance from which something is made.

This material mattering is one of the reasons why surrogacy — where the womb of a woman is used to incubate a child on behalf of someone else — is not legal in most EU countries. The other reason is that commercialising the practice of breeding someone else’s children falls only to desperate and poor and/or unwilling women, and it is open to a myriad of abuses.

There are a few countries in Europe currently where there is an effort underway to develop this commercial industry, and the way it’s being done is by focussing on the dilemmas that currently face people who go ahead and purchase children in other countries and then bring them back and then face administrative mess.

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands is currently going through that process, and his government really wants to reopen the official debate about it, so a draft bill that eases the rules on surrogacy will be discussed in the legislature in December. I interviewed my beautiful and ferocious TERF friend Lydia Daniel about it.

Ultimately, there’s going to have to be a choice made about which state makes people sadder: childlessness, or motherlessness? Yes we have to pick one.

Trouble in Paradyke: French app for lesbians is off to a very TERFy start

A French company launched an app called Gouindr (a play on the word Gouine, which is French slang for dyke), and it ran into some trans-shaped problems immediately upon launch. The app features a report button that allows users to signal that the profile they are perusing is not, in fact, that of a woman, but of a man. The trouble is — get this folks — some men pretend to be women and there’s actually no difference between those men and other men who pretend to pretend to be women. Did you catch that?

Here’s the message that pops up when you click on the report button:

This profile doesn’t belong here?

Gouindr is reserved for women, cis and trans, and non-binary people. If you think that the profile of (INSERT AGP NAME HERE) is that of a cis man, alert the moderators: they will check carefully.

(INSERT AGP NAME HERE) will not know it was you. Trans women are welcome: this reporting feature concerns cis men only.

Soon after launch, a “clarification” post came from Gouindr HQ that trans women are women. How will you test?, asked allies. What about trans women who don’t pass? they pleaded. LOL, said the TERFs.

So I created an account (photo of “me” in a burka) and I reported the first loonytroon I came across, a bloke calling himself “Maïwenn” whose bio says he’s “ready for the revolution”.

The site was offline while it got sorted out, but it’s back up. Makes you realise just how bad English language skills are in France. How did they not know this would be an undoable nightmare?

Who can we thank? Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay, a South African judge, just won the Nobel Peace Prize and a lot of people are upset for various reasons (Gaza, but maybe also the Uighurs and Kashmir?).

But you don’t hear much about her role in the great entrooning.

Pillay ran the UN human rights office from 2008 to 2014, meaning she was in charge when globohomo really got off the ground. In fact, you could say that 2008 was when the “international community” got really serious about what came to be known as SOGI rights, and by the time Pillay finished her term, Bruce Jenner was hiding his man-arms on the cover of Vanity Fair.

As high commissioner, she was there for the very first SOGI UN Human Rights Council resolution (2011) which formally put gender identity alongside sexual orientation on the UN human rights agenda. She commissioned the first UN report calling for member states to “facilitate legal recognition of the preferred gender of transgender persons and establish arrangements to permit relevant identity documents to be reissued reflecting preferred gender and name”, and she launched the “Free & Equal” campaign to educate people out of their transphobia.

In a video message to the European Transgender Council in Budapest in May 2014, she made a statement in front of the UN logo saying that “the T in LGBT should never be silent.” She flagged “forced sterilisation” in Europe (the newly-introduced activist term for what is, in other contexts, called bottom surgery, sex-reassignment surgery, or gender-affirming care). She also praised Argentina’s gender identity law and the Indian Supreme Court’s recent recognition of third genders.

The 2011 report criticised the requirement in many countries for legal gender recognition to be open only to those who are unmarried. This ultimately trapped people in (legally) same-sex marriages that they never consented to. But we never talk about those people.

Here she is. Say thanks to Navi.

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In other news…

• Germany: Berlin hormone house for “dolls” gets raided. They were allegedly giving out medicines for gender-affirming care on Sunday evenings. The raid took place during a “dolls” meetup. Anabolic steroids were also seized (T, innit).

• Ireland: Men who ran the Dublin marathon under women’s bibs to be given a lifetime ban

• Ireland: (current prez of EU Council) has proposed cutting the NGO budget and the NGOs are not happy. Not many people turned up to protest about this.

• Brussels: The European Network of Migrant Women issues a statement welcoming the targetting of Muslim Brotherhood 'entryism in the EU institutions

• Italy: Marina Terragni steps down from Italian children’s ombudsman role because they refused to publish her letter objecting to gendershite

• France: The left Insoumise party in France abstained from a violence against women bill because it was not intersectional enough. They are all mental.

• Ireland: A big multi-day Irish government-sponsored LGBTIQ event was kept very quiet but everyone posted about it afterwards on LinkedIn. Reams of posts.

• Ireland: The story of the trans activist psychological assault on Ireland’s most popular radio host — Birdy Guff newsletter

• Hungary: Sooooooo… all sides are just pretending to have won in the Hungarian LGBTIQ showdown?

• Norway: Council of Europe issues report on Norway and urges medical interventions for “non-binary” people, despite authorities’ report of high detransition rates

• World: Everyone should watch this interview from Genspect about Andrzej Łobaczewski’s Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism.

• US: The Ford Foundation, the biggest funder of women’s studies and then gender studies, is restructuring its funding priorities to “fight autocracy”. Gender will be part of this anti-autocracy fight (genders and “LGBTQ people”) as a building block of democracies. Be afraid.

• Slovenia: After Finland, it’s the Slovenes who are cutting the NGOs off

• Netherlands: Opinion by Jolande Wuhuis in (Dutch) Volkskrant: “Anyone who does not embrace the full gender package is quickly labeled homophobic.”

• Germany: What do you lesbian moms think of Alice Weidel’s answer about the man-woman-father-mother question? Send me your thoughts

• Brussels: Black conservative MEP Assita Kanko tells race grifters (now defunded!!) ENAR to fuck off (I’m paraphrasing) calling her “racialised”

• Brussels: No transvestites (so far) in this year’s European Parliament “priorities” document for the UN women’s meeting in New York (though the usual nutters are trying their best). Remember last year?

• Sweden: Fetishist murderer, who claimed dysphoria caused him to murder his children, transferred back out of women’s prison

• Ireland: Armagh man carried out “opportunistic” sexual assaults on young girls in a leisure centre’s showers

• Denmark: Dorte Toft wrote about a proposed new conversion therapy ban that criminalises not just behaviour but intent. Psychological abuse and coercion are already illegal

• UK: Richard Dawkins deleted his tweet calling transvestites delusional. Booooo.

• Sweden: Bernard Lane’s gender clinic newsletter: “the current situation for young transgender people remains catastrophic” and represents “the biggest medical scandal Sweden has ever seen”.

• World: We should definitely decolonise honour killings. It’s the right thing to do

• Ireland: Everyone freaked out about the consent ad. But then Brenda Power drew attention back to the real consent problem

• US: USAID has been nominated for a peace prize

• Brussels: Increasing talk of nuking paperwork-heavy gendershite policies in the next EU research budget

• Morocco: first female prime minister is ON ONE, goes viral

• Brussels: I went to this event in the European Parliament. Bunch of bastards.

• Ireland: The Council of Europe has launched some sort of plan to tackle your filthy rumours about trans women being men

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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All that may be about to change.

In 2023, a minister from the D66 liberal party tabled a bill that would allow the adoption/legal transfer of parenthood to happen before the birth, as long as one of the intended parents is genetically related to the child. The debate about it has repeatedly been postponed, but is now scheduled for the week of 14 December 2026.

Rob Jetten, the youngest-ever and first openly-gay prime minister of the country (also from the nightmare D66 party), recently announced that he and his boyf — a bisexual Argentinian hockey hunk — are expecting a child via a surrogate, using an egg from a donor. Jetten claims both the women who will carry the child and the woman who donated the egg are mates of theirs, from their social circle.

Hmmmmmm.

In this interview, women’s rights campaigner Lydia Daniel tells me about this very live debate. She comments on Jetten’s very public comments on his desire to procure an infant, and the curious timing of the re-ignited discussion. She recently went (Dutch) viral for her comments on TV comparing the treatment of puppies compared to babies subject to surrogacy arrangements (puppies get a few weeks with mom) and she has been accused of homophobia, of course, because it’s two gay lads “procuring” a motherless child. But Lydia, like many feminists, holds an equal-opps anti-surrogacy position. Some may argue (I do) that putting a child in a home with only men poses an even bigger risk to the welfare of the child. I hope we haven’t all moved so far from our biological moorings that I have to explain why that might be the case.

The proposed Dutch law would not change the legality of advertising or promotion surrogacy services, but this Christian site claims it will allow some sort of non-profit mediation, representing a “shift” in the direction of commercialisation.

The debate rages on.

Show notes (AI generated)

Lydia Daniel joins Róisín Michaux to discuss the controversy surrounding Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten’s plans to become a parent through surrogacy. They examine the proposed Dutch surrogacy law, surrogate mothers’ rights, international surrogacy scandals, the interests of donor-conceived children, and wider disputes over gender policy, hate-speech legislation and freedom of expression.

Rob Jetten, Surrogacy & the Dutch Parentage Bill

On 19 October 2026, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten and his fiancé, Argentine field hockey player Nicolás Keenan, announced that they are expecting their first child in 2027 through a non-commercial surrogacy arrangement. According to Jetten’s party, D66, the surrogate mother and egg donor are Dutch acquaintances of the couple, and the procedure took place in the Netherlands.

Lydia argues that the announcement has brought renewed attention to a proposed law that would change how legal parenthood is established after surrogacy. Róisín questions the timing of the announcement and whether the public promotion of surrogacy sits comfortably with the Netherlands’ current restrictions.

Rob Jetten and Nicolás Keenan announce they are expecting a child

D66’s official announcement explains the arrangement and states that neither the surrogate nor the egg donor is being paid.

https://d66.nl/nieuws/rob-jetten-and-nicolas-keenan-expecting-a-child/

The Dutch Child, Surrogacy and Parentage Bill

https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/wetsvoorstellen/detail?cfg=wetsvoorsteldetails&qry=wetsvoorstel%3A36390

COC Netherlands and the Rainbow Ballot Agreement

https://www.coc.nl/blog/2025/10/25/lijsttrekkers-tekenen-regenboogakkoord-met-coc/

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Dutch Court of Appeal: Contact Between a Surrogate and a Child

https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI%3ANL%3AGHARL%3A2026%3A2963

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

OCCRP: Inside the Collapse of World Center of Baby

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/inside-the-collapse-of-a-surrogacy-agency-that-left-surrogates-and-hopeful-parents-abandoned

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The Wall Street Journal: Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogates

https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/chinese-billionaires-having-dozens-us-born-babies-surrogate

The Zheng Shuang Surrogacy Controversy

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3118364/chinese-actress-zheng-shuangs-surrogacy

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The Hate Review: Forbidden Colours

https://www.forbidden-colours.com/hate-review/

European Commission: LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/lesbian-gay-bi-trans-and-intersex-equality/lgbtiq-equality-strategy-2026-2030_en

Dutch Parliamentary Debate on Criminal-Law Protections

https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/detail?did=2024D22428&id=2024Z03403

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Dutch Government: Placement of Transgender Prisoners

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/2026/03/26/tk-plaatsen-van-transgender-gedetineerden-en-tablets-op-cel

Caroline Franssen and the Complaint Over Her Public Statements

https://nieuwrechts.nl/111376-voorzij-voorzitter-caroline-franssen-moet-naar-politie-na-kritische-uitspraken-over-transgenders

For background on an earlier dispute over her remarks during a debate about Dutch transgender legislation, see NPO Radio 1’s report from January 2020.

https://www.nporadio1.nl/nieuws/binnenland/abf7cbe2-130f-45c6-afee-fed3edff777d/radiodebat-over-transgenderwet-leidt-tot-aangifte

Government Procedure to Withdraw Ongehoord Nederland’s Broadcasting Recognition

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/09/08/minister-van-plan-erkenning-ongehoord-nederland-in-te-trekken

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Unia: Discrimination on the Basis of Birth

https://www.unia.be/en/birth

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Guest

Lydia Daniel

X: https://x.com/lyd20211

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-daniel-1a1412277/

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Róisín Michaux

X: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Substack:

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

https://peaked.news

The influence of porn on the rise of transgender madness has been difficult to discuss for this reason. Many men who are otherwise gender critical get their backs up immediately when you say that porn could be leading to lots of people to troon out. It sounds too much like jealous-haggery, and the conversation is impossible.

But the evidence is clear to those willing to look for it.

The role of porn in the escalation of self-sissification is not hidden on the fora where men openly discuss their autogynephilia mental illness (and yes, it is a mental illness). The desire for shemale porn is evidenced by a quick search on any porn site. Just google “shemale prostitutes in my area”.

Where there’s a shemale, there’s a punter.

But funnily enough, even though the supply is everywhere to be seen, it’s extremely hard to find the demand. Who are the customers? Where are they? Why aren’t they open about their preferences?

You can hear the “trans women” twinks and femboys complaining about this all the time. Their admirers don’t want a relationship, and they certainly don’t want anyone mistaking them for gay. They want a quick fuck with a hyper-feminised “doll” with a dick, and then they want to go back to their wives and kids.

The only evidence you’ll find of these customers/consumers, apart from all the “Brazilian pre-op transsexual woman” ads, is on Reddit and Discord, where they creep quite openly on young, gay, feminine men. They even creep on the straight autogynephilic ones, when the latter are young enough and featureless enough to “pass” as gay.

But there’s another place where you can find trace evidence of these gynoandromorphophiles, and that’s in the straight men who rigorously defend “transgender rights” and the erasure of sex in law, to a degree that makes you wonder: what’s up with that otherwise-reasonable man? I’ll tell you what’s likely up with him: he wants a shot at a shemale. Many such cases.

A video did the rounds on Twitter recently (it appears to be AI-generated) of an apparently be-dicked beautiful catwalk model. She is female in every way except for the novelty of a penis shape in her bodycon dress. This is what these men want. And they are not proud of it. This is what “doll” means in “Protect the dolls”. You will never see its autogynephilic analogue, the “brick” lumbering manlyly down a catwalk. Not much market for that (though the demand is not zero).

Jo Bartosch wrote a book about porn with Robert Jessel. She’s a feminist and she’s a powerhouse. She’s on Twitter. Enjoy the conversation.

(And buy the book!)

This newsletter is an experiment to see how many people think this work is worthwhile. And if enough people support me with a paid subscription, I can keep going. Prove me right: telling the truth about these topics matters. I put a newsletter out every week with a roundup of gender/women/free speech news from around Europe. Thanks!

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Show notes (AI generated)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with journalist and author Jo Bartosch about the growing influence of online pornography on culture, politics, gender identity, and sexual behaviour.

The discussion centres around Jo’s forthcoming book Pornocracy, exploring how internet pornography has evolved into a powerful cultural force extending far beyond individual consumption. Together they examine pornography’s relationship with gender ideology, autogynephilia, gynandromorphophilia (GAMP), online radicalisation, algorithmic recommendation systems, Reddit “egg” communities, fetish culture, masculinity, female objectification, and the changing attitudes of younger generations towards women.

The conversation also explores the historical roots of cross-dressing, WPATH, Genevieve Gluck’s investigative work, Scottish Government funding, Stephen Ireland’s criminal case, and recent legal developments in France concerning violent pornography.

Featured Topics

• Pornocracy and pornography as a cultural force

• Porn addiction and escalation

• Algorithmic recommendation systems

• Gynandromorphophilia (GAMP)

• Autogynephilia (AGP)

• Reddit “egg” communities

• Egg chasers

• FetLife

• Gender ideology and pornography

• WPATH

• Gender Recognition Certificates

• Male sexuality

• AI companions

• Autism and Theory of Mind

• Online radicalisation

• Virginia Prince

• Sheila Jeffreys

• Louise Perry

• Genevieve Gluck

• Robert Jessel

• Caitlyn Jenner

• Eddie Izzard

• Hijra

• Sleeping Hermaphroditus

• Scottish Government funding controversy

• Stephen Ireland case

• J.K. Rowling’s “Dress however you please” tweet

• Andrew Tate

• France’s legal ruling on violent pornography

• Pornography regulation

Featured Book

Pornocracy

Authors: Jo Bartosch & Robert Jessel

Jo discusses her forthcoming book examining how pornography has become one of the most influential cultural forces shaping modern attitudes towards women, sexuality, technology and gender identity.

The book explores:

• Pornography algorithms

• Male sexuality

• Porn addiction

• Gender ideology

• Online radicalisation

• Policy implications

• Pornography’s influence on culture

Organisations & Websites

FetLife

Referenced by Róisín as a research resource while examining fetish communities, gender identity, and online sexual subcultures.

https://fetlife.com/

Aylo

Formerly MindGeek.

Parent company of Pornhub, referenced during discussion of recommendation systems and internal content strategy.

https://www.aylo.com/

WPATH

World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Referenced while discussing youth transition and online communities.

https://www.wpath.org/

Genspect

Referenced when Róisín and Jo discuss meeting at the Genspect conference in Killarney.

https://genspect.org/

Reduxx

Independent investigative publication.

Referenced through Genevieve Gluck’s investigations.

https://reduxx.info/

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

Louise Perry

Referenced near the end of the discussion while talking about making the subject more accessible for younger readers.

https://www.louisemperry.co.uk/

Anticlimax

Sheila Jeffreys

One of the foundational feminist books examining pornography, prostitution and male sexuality.

Historical References

Sleeping Hermaphroditus

Referenced during Jo’s discussion of the long historical tradition of fascination with hermaphroditic imagery.

https://www.uffizi.it/en/video/the-sleeping-hermafroditus

Hijra

Referenced while discussing cross-cultural examples of gender non-conforming communities and ancient history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

Court Cases & Legal Developments

France — Council of State ruling on violent pornography

Towards the end of the episode, Róisín discusses a recent French legal decision concerning violent “gang bang” pornography and the principle that human dignity can override consent.

Article:

https://www.marianne.net/societe/touche-pas-a-mon-gang-bang-quand-le-juge-reglemente-notre-vie-intime

Stephen Ireland

Referenced while discussing online exploitation, vulnerable young males and forced feminisation.

Article:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35652381/surrey-pride-leader-groomed-raped-boy/

Investigations & Articles

Sound Investigations — Pornhub Executive Exposé

Referenced during the discussion about Pornhub recommendation systems and internal practices.

Investigative Journalist: Arden Young

https://soundinvestigations.com/pornhub-exec-attacks-porn/

Genevieve Gluck

Referenced throughout the discussion regarding her investigative reporting into pornography, online grooming, WPATH and child transition.

https://reduxx.info/author/genevieve/

Social & Public References

J.K. Rowling

Referenced during discussion of her widely quoted “Dress however you please...” post.

Original Tweet:

Guest

Jo Bartosch

Journalist, feminist writer and co-author of Pornocracy.

Substack

X

https://x.com/jo_bartosch

Spiked

https://www.spiked-online.com/author/jo-bartosch/

The Critic

https://thecritic.co.uk/author/josephine-bartosch

Host

Róisín Michaux

X

https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Substack

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

Substack

peaked.news

Apple Podcasts

1. Taliban arrest warrant: queering crimes against humanity

2. EU funding for women’s organisations is being sucked up by “gender”

3. The EU just gave €3.5 million to hunt down “hidden” hate speech

4. Queering the Rights of the Irish Child

5. Where does the Right to Identity come from?

6. UN special expert on violence against women has something to say about Dora Moutot

7. “Feminist” member of the European Parliament has nothing to say about Dora Moutot

8. The EU Commission gives €4.6 million to the Dutch Protocol gender team

9. Norway: diplomat placed Epstein victims in his think tank

10. Paris Pride is full of perverts. Sue me.

11. Another beach junket for the EU Directorate General for Asterisk Lesbianism

12. Who can we thank? Jessica Stern

Taliban arrest warrant: queering crimes against humanity

Taliban commanders do not have a theory of gender. They do not operate according to a sophisticated framework derived from discursive constructs of perceptions of maleness and femaleness. To the degree that there is an ideology that animates the policies of the Taliban (a group of violent blackbeards with a mean IQ of a decent Scrabble score), it’s this: “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.

“You Jane” alone would probably suffice.

And yet the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants, unsealed last week, against four Taliban leaders on gender persecution charges using a new expansive definition that abandons binary sex in favour of a moveable feast that requires the perpetrators to have an ideology or at least a perception of genderedness. The prosecutor used the following definition:

“Gender refers to sex characteristics and social constructs and criteria used to define maleness and femaleness, including roles, behaviours, activities and attributes. As a social construct, gender varies within societies and from society to society and can change over time.”

It adds:

“social constructs used to define gender include ‘sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.’”

But how did this get past the conservative states that have repeatedly rejected the gender-roles framing of sex in international agreements, including the Rome Statute (the text that establishes the ICC and defines its crimes)? The answer is that it didn’t.

When the Rome Statute was being drafted in 1998, women’s rights activists thought that a biological definition of gender didn’t do enough to capture the reason why women were targeted during mass atrocities, or why we are deprived of fundamental rights even during peacetime. They met resistance from conservative countries worried that gender was a vehicle for gay stuff. Qatar even worried there’d be claims about five or six genders (had their diplomats been reading about Anne Fausto Sterling’s herms, merms, and ferms?)

The definition of gender that emerged in Rome was a compromise:

“For the purposes of this Statute, it is understood that the term ‘gender’ refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society. The term ‘gender’ does not indicate any meaning different from the above.” (Emphasis mine.)

“Within the context of society” left open the possibility to further drive home, at a later date, the argument that the nature of society’s crimes against women is far more complicated than a binary sex understanding allows. I won’t detail their explanations here, but I will make an uncharitable speculation: I think at least some of the women who lobbied to force a gender “lens” on the Rome Statute (and elsewhere) really just wanted to have their academic theories about gender validated in important fora.

The academic discipline of gender is… weak on empirical claims. “You Jane” does not an impressive conference presentation or a captivating grant application make. It might describe exactly why women are targeted in Srebrenica, or Rwanda, or Darfur but it doesn’t require much faffing around, and it doesn’t flatter gender theorists’ notion of themselves as intellectuals.

But whatever those women had in mind in 1998 was nothing on the insane queer posse who started getting involved in international law about a decade later. By the mid-aughts, gender theory was no longer about having a go at gendered hierarchies. It was about exploding the notion that sex is a stable category at all.

When the Taliban arrest warrants were unsealed last week we learned that this little five-word compromise phrase “within the context of society” was finally being called into the service of the queer project. In issuing the arrest warrant, the court stated that the wording of the Rome Statute “necessitates an interpretation that goes beyond a purely biological conception of sex”. The judges also invoked “current developments in international law,” referring to all the other international instruments that have quietly been queered.

The Taliban warrants go further; the charge of gender persecution covers not just girls and women, but also “other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression”.

I kid you not: what is being reported as some kind of coup for women and girls refers to not just gay men and cross-dressing men, but also men who don’t grow beards, and men who don’t grow their beards to the Taliban-required length. It also covers any behaviour or features of a person that departs from a regime or warlord’s “criteria” for maleness and femaleness. How is the court supposed to prove that? (See Women’s Declaration International’s submission to the ICC on the topic).

Furthermore, this legal framing relies on stereotypes as a way to identify gender persecution!

The main harm with this development is far-reaching. With this expansive definition, the ICC has handed a concrete judicial precedent to activists who can point to it as evidence that gender has departed from its biological meaning.

This is a slow-moving disaster for women’s rights.

When the roving hordes of Hutu rape gangs chose who they would rape and impregnate, they were not enacting a set of norms that discursively constructed the category “Tutsi woman”. They were not enacting a gender hierarchy and using vaginated persons as a site for the production of gendered difference. They were not policing the boundaries of acceptable gendered personae. You Jane. Or, more accurately, you Tutsi, and you Jane, were enough.

Is that a theory? Did the Hutu perpetrators have a guiding philosophy about whose bodies they saw as sexual prizes? I think the gender goblins give them far too much credit.

Funnily enough, the Rome Statute doesn’t require any “lenses” to decipher the frameworks through which race and ethnic group are enacted. Both are grounds in the Rome Statute, and as far as I can tell, they are far more nebulous than sex. Indeed, the Hutu perpetrators had to seek out various context clues to determine which women belonged to the unstable Tutsi population group that they wanted to assault. Why is there an extra layer of faff added to the definition of “woman” and not to “Tutsi”? And yet sex is far more straightforward.

Bosniak boys and men were singled out to be killed in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. To state the bleeding obvious: they were murdered because they were male. No theory, no wig, no gayface, no inner identity, no declaration or administrative certificate, no pronoun badge would have let any of those men escape their fate in Srebrenica.

The logistical exercise to sort the men took a couple of days. During this time, Serb forces were raping and otherwise sexually abusing the women and girls who were being kept apart in camps dotted around the town of Potočari. I heard about one woman who rubbed dirt on her young daughter’s face to try to make her look less attractive to the prowling rapists in the popup camp. I think about that improvised disguise often.

But like her brothers and her father, the girl could not escape her sex. A mucked up face didn’t help her, and elaborate gender theories wouldn’t have helped her either. Yes, even if Ratko Mladić’s soldiers had been indoctrinated via comprehensive sexuality education from a very young age.

You do not theorise your way out of a warlord’s determination to execute potential enemy combatants. And you do not need a framework to explain a celebratory male bonding ritual over the sexual spoils of war. And we are all only ever a military commander’s finger-click away from savagery. We are still in the jungle, even if your current comforts create the illusion that we are not.

According to the ICC’s new framing of gender, mass graves of men’s bodies is not the primary proof of “gender persecution”. The gendered regime of rules is central, and the sex (or perceived “gender”) of the dead bodies is merely the evidence that the gender regime was in place. This is pure queer theory. Sex is given a cursory and reluctant nod in the new definition, but only in the form of “sex characteristics”. This suits the queer theory that bodies are random assortments of meat lego bits squished altogether with a rule book attached about how they should look and behave.

When sex is the criterion for committing the crime, it’s clear what the prosecutor needs to prove. But an expanded definition risks totally obscuring the victim group. And in case it wasn’t obvious: a man can grow his beard, and make sure he makes it the right length. He can stop wearing makeup and take off the dress. He can still go outside and go to school, as long as he stops disobeying the rules. Even a homosexual man can refrain from doing homosexual things, and retain his ability to get an education. Women and girls have no such escape hatch.

And are the countries that repeatedly rejected gendershite in international treaties likely to carry out an arrest warrant for crimes based on definitions they have steadfastly said they refuse to recognise for decades?

The woman behind the new gender policy and its definitions, Lisa Davis, is a they/them who was hired in 2021 by the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan. If you watch Davis speak about her gender victory at the ICC on YouTube (and her current work queering a new crimes against humanity treaty), you’ll quickly notice a bizarre kazoo-quality in her voice. It suggests that she is doing what many short-haired women of her social class are doing: taking testosterone in a futile effort to escape womanhood. She probably thinks the Taliban would spare her.

The cherry on the cake? In July, ICC member states voted to remove Karim Khan from office over multiple allegations of sexual misconduct he allegedly committed against his junior female colleague. A second woman subsequently came forward claiming Khan subjected her to a constant onslaught of sexual advances.

In case you didn’t catch that: the definition of crimes against women has been rewritten by a woman who thinks being female doesn’t make you a woman, and she was put there by a man who is alleged to have committed sexual violence against his female subordinates.

For many activists in powerful positions like Davis, the personal quest to escape her sex is more than a minor character in the story. But no matter how many discursive bunches o’ words she puts together, no matter how much dirt she rubs into her face in a vain effort to be invulnerable, and however much harm she causes to women living out there in the real world, the fact is that She Jane, and no overthunk cope is ever going to change that.

EU funds for women are being sucked up by “gender”

Apropos of all of the above: last week I was allowed to tag along with a group of NGOs from the project MOTERIS as they lobbied MEPs in the European Parliament for dedicate funding for women’s organisations. The project participants claim that “gender” has sucked up all the oxygen, and “gender-based” bullshit is taking money away from actual services that women around Europe need.

They let me come with them to some of their meetings with MEPs.

The glorious thing about it was that the MEPs saw the word “woman” on the invitation and accepted because they saw no grenades in their path. The conversations turned slightly uncomfortable, however, when the elected officials realised that the women didn’t have a beef about gender funding, they had a beef about women’s funding. It was funny to watch the penny drop. Some of them walked into the meetings pretending to be saviours of the female sex but their jowls dropped as they realised they were being TERFed. Uh oh! The conversation you’ve been trying to escape for a decade somehow found its way into your ivory tower! It was so happy to be there, for the historical record.

One of the MEPs lost her shit when she realised what was going on: the Spanish/Dutch Liberal, Renew MEP Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle. I asked her: do you really believe that men can be women? Yep. Even when they’re in women’s prisons? Uh, yep. Even when they rape female prisoners with their male penises, in female prisons? She stumbled over that one. But she got really mad when I said the reason she believes all this nonsense is because she’s a fancy elite who has no idea what real life is like outside her regime feminist bubble. She did not like that one bit.

Another telling vignette: a journalist from the EUobserver came to interview one of the leaders of the project, and I asked if I could listen in. The EUobserver is pure shitlib copypasta and I knew the journalist was there because she heard the word “women” and assumed the same thing the MEPs did: she thought it was a standard intersectional genderfaff.

I watched her face as the representative of MOTERIS got to the point: diluting everything in gendershite has been bad for women. Another uh-oh! But but but what about Andrew Taaaaaaaaaaate and the manospheeeeeeeeeeere you could almost hear the wires in her brain scramble. When her article came out later that day, it did not contain the project’s very crucial central message. Of course it didn’t. That would require addressing the topic the Brussels media has also spent a decade ignoring.

All in all, a great day out. Very insightful. Every receipt packed away for the reckoning. It’s coming for every single one of you.

The EU just gave 3.5 million for an AI project that will hunt down “hidden” hate speech

The European Commission has granted €3.5 million to ten universities to work together to build a tool to uncover hidden hate speech in online spaces. That will include memes, irony, and coded language. The project is being led by someone whose forte is linguistic justice.

I have long thought that once the Borg bans Twitter and/or Substack, or forces us all to comply with speech codes that outlaw any criticism of trans mania, we TERFs would simply have to invent code words for autogynephiles and all the varieties of transvestites, pooners and assorted swivel-eyed loons who are queering everything that moves. Then we would just have to outrun the euphemism treadmill, and I was almost looking forward to it for the creative writing it would unleash.

But the Commission is literally planning to outmaneuver even that.

Queering the Rights of the Irish Child

There’s an effort currently underway to copy-paste the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) into Irish domestic law. But what does that mean? The Convention itself is nothing to worry about, but the “general comments” that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has issued down through the years are open to endless innovations.

To give a live example, the Committee is starting work on drafting a general comment on AI and children’s rights.

The one to worry about on the gender front is General Comment No. 20 which was tacked on in 2016, at the beginning the the great entrooning of everything.

Paragraph 34 stresses all adolescents’ right to respect for their “gender identity and emerging autonomy”. Paragraph 39 states that age limits should recognise adolescents’ right to make decisions about health services or treatment, and that an adolescent’s informed consent should be obtained whether or not a parent’s consent is required.

If Ireland incorporates the CRC into its law, its articles become legally actionable and its general comments become guidance for interpretation (that’s the case already in Scotland). It will become more than just activist fodder (on a more general note: who wants the laws about kids in their country to be made by elites in Geneva?)

The right to identity is contained in the Convention itself, but in the trans era, that has drifted from kinship to self-perception. You can see where all this leads.

Here’s me chattin’ to Sandra Adams about it.

Where does the right to an identity come from?

Something a lot of people don’t realise: the “right to an identity” that appears in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (and other international conventions) was the result of the work of women in Argentina whose grandchildren had been abducted by the military junta.

Women who had been kidnapped while pregnant (or who had very young children) were killed, but their kids were taken and disappeared off the radar. Hundreds of children were being raised by families that were not their own.

Their grandmothers demanded forensic research to find their genetic heirs. They claimed that existing rights — to a name and nationality — didn’t quite cover what they were trying to establish, which was their missing relatives’ and those individuals’ right to know who they are and who their people are.

So it’s not at all a coincidence that the first sex self-ID law in the world was introduced in Argentina (2012). The “right to an identity” of these children, who were known as “desaparecidos”, was a cause that was innovated upon by travesti and trans activists, notably Mauro Cabral Grinspan, a trans-identifying woman who was a signatory of both versions of the Yogyakarta Principles.

It’s bleak: the abuelas’ desperate search for their grandkids was refashioned to make it easier to challenge parents’ efforts to stop their children from undergoing life-changing medical interventions like castration and mastectomy.

In other words: Argentinian grandmothers fought for the right to a “true and genuine” personal, legal and family identity, not inauthentic self-perception-based identity that has no basis in reality.

According to the paper linked above: “...the Grandmothers’ discourse and work strengthened the trans and travesti activism’s claim to the right to gender identity, as they were the ones who made identity a matter of public concern. There, they argue that the human right to identity created the conditions for the approval of the Gender Identity Law, which led to inclusion, historical redress, and childhoods free from discrimination and violence, among other benefits.

The Grandmothers politicized biology and made identity a matter of undeniable ethical implications and consequences.”

UN special expert on violence against women has something to say about Dora Moutot

On 2 October the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, expressed concern over the conviction of journalist and author Dora Moutot.

Moutot was condemned by a Paris tribunal for the following sentence: “As women, we are obligated to be wary of people with penises.” Dora was using polite physiology-first language that she assumed would keep her safe from the highly litigious activist mob, but she was misguided. The association of trans women with penises, and by extension with male-pattern violence, was found by the court to be a public insult.

Her defence is that she wasn’t saying be wary of trans women because they are trans women. She was saying be wary of them because they are men.

Reem Alsalem said that the contrast between the way Dora has been treated over these benign comments, versus the way the way the authorities have handled the threats against Dora raises concerns about equality before the law in France.

France is infamously bad on free speech, but prosecuting someone for making a statement that not only matches sex-based statistics but also aligns with the sex-based framing of French policy on violence against women? That’s insane.

Feminist member of EU Parliament has nothing to say about Dora Moutot

Mélissa Camara is a member of the European Parliament representing France. I bumped into her at Paris Pride last weekend and asked if she had any comment on the case of Dora Moutot. She had no comment.

She was full of things to say last year when she said on the floor of the plenary chamber that men are raping women they find online, and that this rape culture must be stopped. Who’s doing the raping, though, Mélissa?

So engorged are the French elites on gendershite that they would tell you that Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists were only men because they identified as such.

Well done, you treacherous weirdos!

The EU Commission gives €4.6 million to the Dutch Protocol gender team

The European Commission has dedicated €4.6 million in funding to a project about “diverse hormone transition” coordinated by Amsterdam UMC and it is a thinly-disguised effort to normalise gender affirming care. The project claims to be about hormonal transitions generally, and it bundles medical gender transition in with puberty and menopause as just another stage-of-life “change”.

The project aims to study “biopsychosocial factors on gender during diverse hormonal transitions, including variations in puberty and menopause”, with specific attention to trans and gender diverse people and those with variations of sex characteristics. The project will also produce clinical guidance on these “diverse” hormonal transitions.

Gender InSight is just gender butchery hidden under the gloss. And the lead institution, Amsterdam UMC, is the home of the gender team whose predecessor clinic designed the dodgy Dutch protocol.

Norway: diplomat placed Epstein victims in his think tank

Norway is knee-deep in Epsteinery.

Hearings started on 30 September into the foreign service elites’ wheeling and dealing with Jeffrey Epstein over the years. Prompted by the extensive paper trail between the deceased financier and senior diplomats (and royal family), the committee wanted to know how the ministry goes about distributing aid, its internal controls, and whether personal connections have been influencing decisions.

But the suspicion is about corruption and influence, not sex crimes.

Former diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and his wife Mona Juul — major players in the secret deal that produced the 1993 Oslo Accords peace agreement between Israel and the PLO — are under investigation. Rød-Larsen made plans to visit Epstein’s island in 2011 with the fam, and he visited Epstein’s New York apartment repeatedly. He called Jeffrey Epstein his “best friend”. Epstein left $5 million each to the couple’s two children.

The suspicion is that Epstein wanted access to diplomatic channels, presumably as part of the favours he was doing for others, and Terje Rød-Larsen wanted money. Epstein placed young (sometimes wholly unqualified) Eastern European and Russian women in the New York think tank, the International Peace Institute, which Rød-Larsen ran. In some cases, Rød-Larsen gave visa assistance to the young women as a favour to Epstein. Some of the young women were allegedly abused by Epstein. It’s not clear yet whether their relationship with Rød-Larsen or others in his orbit was anything seedier.

The investigation is ongoing.

Paris Pride is full of perverts. Sue me.

Last week I reported on the plans of the Paris authorities to take anyone to court if they said negative things about Pride. They didn’t like people saying that Pride attracts perverts and paedophiles. So I went there and I can safely report: Pride attracts perverts and paedophiles.

I bought a headband off the roving gypsy family who were making a roaring trade off rainbow tat. I was trying to blend in. How did I do?

While I was there, I saw the regime feminist NGO, Nous Toutes, who drank the gender koolaid long ago. They had a trans-coloured PROTECT THE DOLLS sign on their Pride float. I asked them “Who are the dolls? Does dolls refer to feminists?” They didn’t know. One of them said “dolls” means trans kids. The only person who seemed to know the answer (it means girly gay trans women, not the Bricks) slunk off so he didn’t have to answer.

I spotted another float with social media posts plastered all over it; they were the comments that are now the subject of hate speech investigations. I interviewed one of the men manning the float about it:

Another beach junket for the EU Directorate General for Asterisk* Lesbianism

They’re taking the absolute piss, these gals. Not long back from their most recent Greek island jaunt where they now hold their annual assemblies (and where they seem to be building themselves a holiday home!) the conceptual-lesbians-with-an-asterisk went on a trip to what France’s idyllic overseas territories in the Caribbean. While there, they walked in a Pride parade.

But it’s not all fun and games. Here’s a recent publication they produced, called “A crip (cripple) and lesbian perspective on disability rights”, which is you, the taxpayer’s contribution to queering the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Aren’t you glad?

Who can we thank? Jessica Stern

Jessica Stern is an American lesbian over-achieving activist who pops up all over the shop. Here’s a rundown of her achievements in the sex-erasure project over the past decade. She’s quite the operator:

She was the executive director of OutRight International (formerly the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission) for about ten years. It’s the biggest global LGBTIQ NGO and she was the one who secured them UN observer status. She also co-founded the United Nations LGBTI Core Group (and ran the secretariat), and she was involved in a bunch of UN human rights council resolutions around the Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. She also gave the first LGBTIQ testimony at a UN Security Council (in a private meeting).

She was Biden’s Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, and she directed American Globohomo foreign policy during her term. She also spent time at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, taught the first LGBTIQ rights course at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and is now a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights focused on global LGBTIQ equality (the same place all the Power Gays seem to be spending a stint at).

She is also married to Lisa Davis, the gender goblin mentioned in the first article.

What a team. Here she is. Say thanks to Jessica.

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In other news…

• Brussels: Athena Forum is coming to the European Parliament for an event on 3 November

• Brussels: I re-read the Hate Review by Forbidden Colours more closely and they seem to be counting opposition to euthanasia as a form of “anti-gender” contamination

• Brussels: Alliance Defending Freedom investigated the men behind Forbidden Colours, who have been granted €117k in EU money for two projects (REBELS and PRIDE), one of which is about the “anti-gender movement”

• Ireland: Paddy O’Gorman wrote this account of the conversion therapy event hosted by Free Speech Union in Belfast, for Genspect:

• Netherlands: Another year, another child indoctrination session via “Purple Friday”. This guy, Geert-Jan Edelenbosch, did a running commentary on the lead-up, it’s great. He’s the best thorough Dutch gender critical gay on X.

• Germany: surgeons have operated on the genitals of nearly 300 minors (research by Athena Forum)

• Kosovo: Dua Lipa got in trouble for posting in support of a separatist militia whose members are accused of war crimes

• France: Everything Emmanuel Macron ever says about free speech is worse than the last thing he said about free speech

• Poland: Abortomat decorated like a bordello pops up near Polish parliament in Warsaw

• France: Paris school child abuse scandal: psychologist was sidelined as a “conspiracy theorist” after she raised concerns

• France: Catholic feminists mobbed the pope because they want a feminist church

• Spain: The 87-year old woman whose eviction sparked mass protests in Spain over housing has died in hospital

• Brussels: I think I know why Euractiv (now Rapporteur) will never comment on genderfaff

• Hungary: German ANTIFA enby “Maja” gets sentence reduced on appeal. He was involved in the “Hammer Gang” attacks

• France: they tried to pass a resolution (with Albania) at the UN on decriminalisation but they withdrew it. Apparently they screwed up the international LGBTIQ strategy.

• Norway: cancelled TERF Tonje Gjevjon has a Substack and it’s good. Here’s a recent article about their domestic swivel-eyed loonytune gender chief, who she calls the Protect The Dolls Minister

• Norway: I’ve been invited by Norwegian feminist professor Kamilla Aslaksen to come speak at an event in Oslo @Litteraturhuset on 19 November. Get tickets!

• Netherlands: Debate on surrogacy is to be reopened. It will take place in plenary on 12 October. The prime minister Rob Jetten has previously said he’d like to see surrogacy reforms. Yikes.

• Morocco: Morocco gets a female leader. Reports are mixed about how people feel about it.

• Balkans: Still waiting to find out if Ursula von der Leyen will force self ID in the new “roadmaps” for accession

• Sweden: Agnes Wold (finally) got fired from her radio job. Twas inevitable

• Lithuania: What’s the point of the European Institute for Gender Equality? Seems like a massive money sink

• France: Presidential hopeful and ugly bastard Jean-Luc Melenchon voices support for self-ID, calling it “gender freedom”

• France: Some famous French knickerman died. Sensible people who should know better are in the obits calling him a woman, as per

• Germany: EU-funded Transgender Europe hired a T4T femboy as their new communication officer. He calls himself a “doll” as well as “female” and does thirst posts for GAMPs on Instagram

• Germany: Women want a free menstrual products

• France: at the Fete de l’Humanite, regime feminists appeared to call for a non-repressive solution to… child sex abuse

• Serbia: New lesbian leader doesn’t want to be known for being a lesbian

• Switzerland: man who tried to live as a woman for about 30 years “What I wouldn’t give to get my body back”

• Switzerland/Germany: Anti-torture body Association for the Prevention of Torture got Transgender Europe to draft its prison guidelines

• EU: Here’s an academic paper arguing that the Supreme Court/For Women Scotland Ruling clashes with Northern Ireland deal

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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Last week, three NGOs held a conference to discuss the initiative; this time it was an invitation-only event sent out to a particular mailing list. This format — conference by email invitation only — seems to be an ever-more popular way for organisations to evade public scrutiny while pretending not to evade public scrutiny. The event did not appear on any of the websites or social media accounts of any of the organisers.

This tracks with other secretive NGO tendencies in our fraught political times: putting sensitive advocacy and communications materials behind members-only login wall, publishing almost nothing on public websites (or at least none of the controversial stuff), deleting social media accounts, cultivating very exclusive mailing lists, and only posting on LinkedIn where civil society professionals think nobody is paying attention except themselves.

It’s very complicated manufacturing consensus for your unpopular elite nonsense these days! But it’s not impossible to find out what they’re up to.

Anyway, Sandra Adams found out that there would be one of these special public-but-not-public meetings about the UN CRC and its incorporation into Irish law last week, so she signed up and went along.

The title of the conference left no room for ambiguity: “Standing up to Anti-Child Rights Movements”. Whatever the organisers have decided is a child’s right, you should be for it, and if you’re not — well they’ve got a mean name for you. There will be no discussion.

The term “anti-child-rights” is being popularised at the EU level by a Brussels-based NGO called Eurochild, (one of the co-organisers of the Dublin event last week) who used it in a 2022 report. It seems to have been inspired by Hungary and Poland vetoing an EU initiative on the rights of the child in 2021 (they rejected the initiative because it contained genderfaff).

Being anti-child-rights seems to involve having a non-extreme, non-woke opinion on all the hot-button issues: abortion, contraception, LGBTIQ+, gender identity ideology, gay men adopting babies, sexuality education in schools, disinformation, and even your opinion on immigration. Honestly it just seems like all the usual elite lib causes with a thick layer of “child rights” speak daubed on top of it.

That’s Eurochild, and they seem nuts as per. But the thing you need to know about the UN CRC is that the original text is not bad in and of itself. However, down through the years there have been various upgrades and addenda tacked onto it thanks to lobbying by various activists and in response to events and societal shifts.

And General comment number 20, which was added in 2015/2016, is all about that gendershite.

If the CRC and General comment number 20 are called into service in judicial decisions in Ireland, it might mean that a fight over puberty blockers will no longer be between a child and their parents and doctor; a judge could decide that the evolving capacities of an adolescent, their right to health, or their right to identity has been breached.

I had a chat with Sandra about it all. It’s a moving story; I just read that another committee meeting will take place next week, so I’ll be updating with any new developments.

Enjoy.

Follow Sandra on X

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Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

1. The French have lost the plot: Paris has launched legal complaints against Pride critics

2. The French have lost the plot Part II: “people with penises” is criminal but “menstruating people” is public policy

3. Hungary’s new government’s repeal of Orbán-era anti-LGBTIQ+ laws doesn’t actually repeal them at all

4. Norway: press ethics agency rules it unethical to describe the (well-documented) motivations of men who claim to be women

5. JK Rowling nuked Denmark’s reading proficiency score, claims journalist

6. Czech government human rights council now has a detransitioner on it

7. Slovenia criticised by UN Committee on the Rights of the Child over lack of autonomy for “transgender adolescents”

8. Finland is dismantling its NGOcracy

9. The HATE REVIEW: Belgian Power Gays are here to put you bitches back in your place

10. The British foreign office is getting rid of its gendershite experts

11. Belgian celebrity paedo leaves prison, appears in docuseries about paedos

12. Who can we thank? Hillary Clinton

Paris Mayor announces investigation into hate comments on Pride post

The mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, has announced that he has asked city prosecutors to investigate negative comments made on a 21 September post announcing the city’s upcoming Pride parade. The march is scheduled for 3 October, after being postponed in June because of a heatwave.

The investigations will uncover the identities of anyone who made homophobic, transphobic, racist or islamophobic comments under the Facebook post. So far, only LGBTIQ+ organisations have reacted to the news (as far as I can tell), and they are elated. One of them posted with glee: “Deleting the comment won’t help. Paris City Hall has forwarded the messages to the judicial authorities.”

France still thinks it can prosecute its way out of citizens’ dislike of rainbow authoritarianism. I suspect that this is because its lawyer-linked NGOs were so successful at very publicly destroying the lives and livelihoods of two gender critical women, Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, they think they can individually pluck out and prosecute every dissenter on an extremely polarising issue. This is, to put it mildly, not a sustainable long-term strategy. The original post that caused all the fuss is still visible on Facebook, and though early comments that are now subject to the investigation have been deleted, the hate just keeps coming.

Grégoire was no doubt getting advice (or pressure) from the country’s litigious rainbow NGOs to take legal action against Pride non-approvers, as if he doesn’t have more important things to be doing (such as coming up with a good explanation for why mass child sex abuse was able to happen in Parisian schools on his watch for a decade).

In the video announcing the legal crusade against the crude commentariat, Grégoire shows some of the posts in question. The first one is: “bunch of mentally ill people homosexuality is an abomination you deserve to die” (lack of punctuation not mine).

In any European country, from the most censorious to the most free-speechy, that comment would be very likely considered illegal because the “you deserve to die” part could be read as incitement to violence (individual judges’ mileage may vary. And as the kids on Reddit say, NAL). French law, though, allows for criminal convictions for pronouncements that are considered insulting against a person or group if they belong to a protected category of people, even if there is no person or group to take offence.

That particular post, however, is even against Facebook’s own terms of service, so I’m not sure how it got past the algorithm (you can get shafted on Facebook for calling transvestites “transvestites”, even though there are at least a thousand public and private groups of men on there calling themselves exactly that). The other comments that Grégoire highlights, however, are just statements of fact backed up by ample evidence: “bunch of perverts”, “bunch of deviants”, and “a paedophile meetup”.

Those “opinions” happen to be simply true, whether Grégoire’s clean-cut gay friends in the NGOcracy like it or not. Let’s look at the evidence:

Pride is full of perverts who make no secret about being perverts. They do not want to be considered mainstream, so get outta here with your assimilationist bullshit, Mr. Mayor. There has been a long-standing public discussion in France among “the community” about whether BDSM, kink and fetish belong at Pride parades at all, and the answer is always invariably yes. Various kinks and fetishes are indeed, according to the people who show up and enthusiastically show them off, the very soul of the movement.

Here’s an association of associations of French fetishists posing for a photo at Paris Pride last year. That’s two layers of pervs right there, running the gamut from anthropomorphophilia to whatever that paraphilia is called where you wear a full-body gimp suit and have to beg a prostitute to let you breathe. Perverts, the lot of them, and proudly so.

I logged into FetLife, probably the biggest website for paraphilias on the (surface) web, and looked for “Paris Pride”. I immediately came across this group of adult baby diaper fetishists talking about how much fun it is to meet up in public with other deviants who like to lie in adult-sized cots and shit themselves. Here’s a video they made about Paris Pride last year (it’s really creepy so you don’t have to click on it, you can just take my word for it).

Anyone who has been to Pride in any European city in the past decade knows that alongside the kids and the normies and the extremely hairless gays doing synchronised Kylie dances, it’s a fetish fest.

Grégoire has a problem with calling the participants “deviants”? These marchers are literally called Deviance. The PERVERT XXL party in the Marais is one of the biggest annual attractions. I even saw an open invitation to a post-march apéro for purveyors of anything-goes paraphilic interests.

Need I go on?

As for the comment that Pride is a paedophile meetup, you must be delusional if you don’t know that it’s an absolute viper pit of wrong ‘uns: it is a public party in honour of atypical sexual preferences, and it is drowning in fun colours, pop songs, and thousands of children of well-meaning but frankly fucking stupid (and often drunk) parents, who think they’re opening their kids’ minds by bringing them to an adult sexuality parade. Of course the paedos come along, too.

That’s kind of paedophilia’s whole thing, in case you hadn’t noticed: entice kids to talk about and think about sexuality. That’s what grooming means (some of you don’t spend hours lurking in paedophile activist forums and it shows).

But as we know, it matters less and less every day in Europe — and especially in France — if something is true or not, as long as someone is (or could be) offended by it. And to state the obvious: France, more than any other country, is on a libre expression collision course: most of the offensive comments could be said to represent someone’s firmly-held religious beliefs. The third comment that Grégoire reads out in his video says simply: “That will be funny when Islam takes over”

Grégoire and the legal gays really think that they’re going to drag all these internet anons to court and find a bunch of Jean-Pierres and Juliens with Breton Celtic pagan tattoos, when really they’re much more likely to uncover a load of Mohammads and Imranes who are under no social pressure to hide their rejection of homosexuality (prediction: the prosecutors will be asked to drop the whole thing when the perpetrators turn out to be the wrong demographic, and we’ll never hear about it again).

Luckily, I cannot be criminalised by the French authorities for my hateful-but-truthful tirade because I live in a bunker under Dmitry Medvedev’s lakeside dacha, with Julian Assange and Pamela Anderson. So don’t come looking for me because you won’t find me, you sexy Power Gays.

“People with penises” is criminal but “menstruating people” is public policy

This is old hat in the anglosphere but France seems to be getting frapped with a whole series of classic gendershite outrages all at once, and they’re not loving it.

On 25 September the government announced that from next week, reusable menstrual products will be partly reimbursed by public health insurance. They said the scheme is intended to help out “les personnes assurées menstruées de moins de 26 ans”. That is: insured menstruating people under 26 years old.

Insured menstruating people.

“Menstruating people” is used instead of “women” for two reasons: it allows male transvestites to take the collective noun “woman” from us, while leaving us a technical term to describe our biological functions (how kind). The term is also favoured by delusional women who pretend to be men but who still have all the “bits” of women (including but not limited to: ovaries, wombs, and small womanly hands).

But the problem with “menstruating people” is that apart from being horribly dehumanising to actual women, it just eventually gets sucked up into the transvestite lexical universe anyway. There is a subset of transvestites who don’t care that much about the clothes part; their paraphilic fixation is on the bodily functions of women. This subset of men have been named physiologic autogynephiles, and they insist that the synthetic female hormones they take have turned them into women who have periods.

So mentally ill are these men, that they will co-opt the “menstruating people” label anyway. Don’t believe me? Here’s a French Reddit discussion in which someone asks if “trans women” have periods. The answers demonstrate the depth of delusion.

What people don’t understand about these men is that their gnawing, desperate yearning to be actual women can never be satiated. They find temporary relief only if they can rearrange and redefine and readjust every aspect of the world outside themselves. But ultimately, every escalation eventually loses its dopamine-generating character.

You cannot, cannot outrun the compulsions of a man seeking sexual euphoria when the relief peak — being an actual woman — is unreachable.

But of course the most scandalous part of this whole story is this: in May this year, gender critical feminist author Dora Moutot was convicted in a Paris tribunal for using the phrase “people with penises” to refer to bepenised men who pretend to be women. The judge found her guilty of public insult because she reduced “trans women” to their anatomical parts.

Sometimes the misogyny is so blatant it feels like a frappe in the face.

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Hungary’s new government’s repeal of Orbán-era LGBTIQ+ laws doesn’t actually repeal much at all

Golden Boy Peter Magyar, the chiselled slickster who took the Hungarian helm after the lipidinous and gruff Viktor Orbán got booted out of office, was supposed to fulfill everyone’s wokest dreams.

It’s not quite working out that way.

The former government had passed a law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality or transgender ideology to kids. This applied to school materials, TV, ads and, famously, public Pride events.

A bunch of NGOs (including the pro-gender haters over at Forbidden Colours, see story below) put together a legal team and with the help of progressive EU governments, joined the Commission in taking Hungary to the Court of Justice of the EU over the law. The ban was found to be contrary to EU values (the first ruling of its kind) and Hungary was ordered to undo these specific statutes. Keep that last bit in mind.

Orbán’s government’s ban was spread across a number of different laws, and Magyar’s government has watered down those laws, replacing the contentious terms with bans on porn, grooming and age-inappropriate sexual content. But left untouched is the so-called Family Protection Act, which contains the old ban on giving under-18s any material that “promotes or shows” homosexuality or gender identity nonsense, and that law applies widely. What’s more, the constitution still says there are only two sexes, that a mother is a woman and a father is a man, and that protecting children’s development outweighs other concerns.

Even the 2025 rules that let police ban Pride, fine participants and use facial recognition have not been repealed.

Magyar’s government have (so far) only done the bare minimum; they seem to have cleaned up only the parts they got taken to court over, and left untouched the spirit of Orban’s bans. It was those specific parts that were keeping EU funds frozen. Magyar has what he wanted all along — money — while the Commission can be satisfied that his government has obeyed its Court’s ruling (on this particular issue — which was only one among many). Changing the constitution is a much bigger political fight, and Magyar is not in a hurry. The Commission is also unlikely to make a big deal of such an unpopular issue.

The NGOs are, unsurprisingly, not one bit happy.

Norway: press ethics agency rules article about trans-identifying men should not have been published

On 30 April, a newspaper in Norway published an opinion piece by gender critical feminist Anne Kalvig on sex and gender identity. It managed to stay online for only 2 hours and 18 minutes before the paper took it down. The Centre for Gender Equality at the University of Agder made an official complaint to the country’s press complaints body, who considered the case this week.

The ethics bodies (the PFU) ultimately upheld the complaint on the basis of “respect for people’s individuality and identity”, taking issue with the association in the article between “trans people” and delusions, mental ill-health, men’s fetishes, and porn-inspired contempt for women (an earlier version of this piece claimed that the ruling condemned Kalvig’s use of correct sex pronouns for a “trans woman” (also known as misgendering). Though the original complaint highlighted this misgendering, and it was discussed by the ethics exerts, it was not ultimately condemned in the judgement. The newspaper Dagen ran a story, however, claiming that the incident might make it “complicated” for journalists to avoid what activists call misgendering).

Anne was a professor of religious studies until she resigned in 2023 after she got fed up of being harassed over her views on sex and gender. She is deputy chair of Women’s Declaration International (Norway chapter), and she’s a member of Athena Forum’s Expert Network.

The unpublished article has been republished here.

JK Rowling nuked Denmark’s PISA reading score, says man who is really into trans nonsense (but that’s totally unrelated)

The Danes were not happy to find out that their PISA score was their lowest ranking since 2000. Regular people and pundits all flailed around in unison trying to find reasons for the slide. Is it smartphones? Refugee students who don’t speak Danish?

No, chimed in a cartoonist and writer Christoffer Zieler in the esteemed Weekendavisen. It’s those JK Rowling Harry Potter books, he said. They’re shitty books. Young people are reading these shitty books and it is turning them into shitty readers.

In response, TERFy columnist Dorte Toft answered in the same paper that the Potter-fever cohort (2000s–early 2010s) did better on PISA. And she didn’t have to spell it out, but it was inferred: Zieler’s opposition to JK Rowling might have nothing to do with plot holes or bad character arcs or whatever, but rather his feelings about the human capacity to change sex, and Rowling’s oppositional-defiant response to that intractable question. His previous comments, I am told, suggest that he is rather committed to the trans stuff, having said on multiple occasions that he has a trans person who is “close” to him.

(This is just me educated-guessing, but I’m pretty familiar with his type. If there’s no trans kid in the family, there’s a box of wigs and tights in the attic.)

The JKR-wrecked-muh-reading-scores incident reminded me of the time Swedish talking heads suggested that gender-critical national treasure Agnes Wold deserves some of the blame for the Islamic terrorist attack at Berlin Pride. Wold, who was a prominent figure in Swedish media during the COVID crisis because of her knowledge about how viruses work, was commenting online about the international spread of drag queen story hour one day when someone asked her if it was a virus. Yes, she responded mirthfully, joking that it was created in an American lab.

Just after the Berlin Pride attack, a drag queen story hour demon Petter Wallenberg brought this comment up: “The most shocking thing was the post where she calls drag artists a virus that was developed in a lab in the United States. That is anti-LGBTQ hate rhetoric — we have seen where that has led in history.” The journalist he was speaking to, Lina Stenberg then said: “The serious thing about Agnes Wold’s agitation against LGBTQ people is that she legitimises a hateful outlook and language that has consequences. She has a large platform and a large audience.”

The “virus” comment was used again by activist and author Jonas Gardell recently, who said: “When Agnes Wold claims that trans and drag are viruses imported from the US—that is exactly the same thing as when the National Socialists said the Germanic people had been infected by a virus. The backlash isn’t new.” (Wold never originally referred to “trans people”, Gardell is just having some fun editorialising).

These TERFs are responsible for so many bad things! Judith Butler once told the Guardian that gender-critical feminism is “one of the dominant strains of fascism of our time”. Bloody Nora!

The Czech human rights council now has a detransitioner on it

More than 50 members of Czechia’s civil service resigned in protest from their advisory positions on the government’s human rights council after the conservative PM, Andrej Babiš, decided to downsize and switch up the Council, spreading its work across a bunch of different government ministries.

Staff were outraged and flounced out of the chat. So they were replaced with a smaller team of more ideologically-aligned individuals, among them an anti-abortion campaigner, a former Miss World, and detransitioner Daniel Black, a lovely young lad I have had the pleasure of meeting.

Daniel thought he was a woman for a few years. Tragically, he had his genitals removed and silicone implants inserted into his chest tissue in an attempt to recreate a female-type physiology. He was later able to remove the implants but the “bottom surgery” is irreversible. He, like many other young people (male and female) will have to take replacement hormones for the rest of his life because he no longer has gonads.

Daniel will be in Brussels in November for an event on countering the transgender threat to the rights of women, kids, and gays and lesbians. More info on that event soon.

UN Committee on the Rights of the Child criticises Slovenia over lack of autonomy for “transgender minors”

In a recent review of Slovenia by the experts that make up the committee that oversees the convention on the rights of the child (CRC), the country’s government was asked if it was giving enough weight to children’s evolving capacities in their wish to transition their “gender”.

Each country is regularly reviewed on their “progress” in implementing the CRC in their individual domestic contexts. Additional “general comments” have been annexed to the original Convention down through the years which (I would argue) depart dramatically from the spirit of the original 1989 document. In relation to trans issues, it comes from the addition in 2016 of General Comment 20 that tells member states first of all that there is such a thing as a transgender child, and secondly, that these children should be able to swap their “gender” without parental consent.

Scotland incorporated the CRC into domestic law, and uses the general comments as interpretation in legal cases. Ireland, and others, are considering doing the same. I’ll be interviewing Sandra Adams about this soon.

Here are the meeting notes from the Slovenia review meeting.

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Finland is dismantling its NGOcracy

Finland’s government is cutting state funding for social and health NGOs that deal with advocacy, lobbying, policy work, or advisory functions. In the future, Finland will dedicate money towards direct, face-to-face services rather than “umbrella bodies” and groups whose work focuses on a particular identity or background.

This is bad news for underrepresented groups. However, social advocacy NGOs are grossly distorting the relationship between citizens and the state, acting as citizen stakeholders despite holding extremist views that do not represent those of the majority — sex swaps for kids being a prime example.

The relationship also works the other way: governments can make continued funding contingent on the NGOs promoting the government’s own initiatives. The most blatant evidence of this is when the Irish government practically threatened civil society NGOs to promote their ultimately insanely unpopular plan to delete women from the Irish constitution. Roderic O’Gorman said to the Irish Times: “Any organisation that sees itself as progressive and as wanting to advance progressive change” would have to explain why they do not support the plans.

This setup is perhaps why governments are unlikely to follow Finland’s lead: NGOs act like an extension of government departments. As long as they can each pretend to keep each other at arm’s length, the cosy and mutually beneficial relationship can continue.

HATE REVIEW: Belgian Power Gays are here to put you bitches in your place

The very subtly-named HATE REVIEW is a brand new compendium of European “anti-gender actors” and their nefarious hate acts, put together by a group of Belgian gay men from an organisation called Forbidden Colours.

The very shouty dossier puts all of the lib causes together — abortion, gay marriage, crossdresser fetish rights, blocking kids’ puberty, renting women’s wombs, teaching weird sex shit to kids in school — and calls opposition to any of it “hateful”. It’s an established genre of very retarded political strategising: wrap all of your political aims into one bundle, and call anyone who disagrees with it mean names. Don’t like turning little boys into eunuchs? Oh so you think forced birth is acceptable? Only a dimwit would be taken in by it.

But what’s interesting and novel about the Forbidden Colour HATE TOME is that it represents the most explicit pairing of male sexual rights with abortion that I have yet seen. I suspect that’s because what these men are really after is reproductive rights for themselves — namely, the right to pay women to be infused with their seed for a contractually-agreed fee (the very thorny topic of surrogacy is mentioned explicitly 30 times)

Forbidden Colours, though initially recipients of a Belgian royal philanthropic fund grant (the King Baudouin Foundation, or KBF), it now seems to use the KBF as a vehicle for donations from unnamed donors. It seems largely geared towards raising money from corporations. Its staff and directors have links to the corporate world. This particular report came from a fund called “G, A”. The only match I could find of an entity with that name is a foundation tied to AG Insurance, but that could be a coincidence.

The report is worth a read. Check out the “contamination” and infectious disease language. These gays are not playing around!

The British foreign office is getting rid of its gendershite experts

According to Devex, an industry publication that tracks news in the development “space”, the UK is falling out of love with its army of gender experts. Nice.

I know some very good people (who are very firmly sex realists) who studied gender or who work on very serious and studious topics that involve gender, who have told me about the madness that has gripped the field, but who still believe in the conceptual usefulness of gender as a framework for understanding why things are the way they are in society.

I agree with them in principle. But the damage done by the appropriative of “gender” is just so immense that I can no longer endorse it. If I ruled the world I would launch “gender” into the Mariana Trench.

So I was very glad to read the following about the UK’s foreign policy: "A spokesperson for FCDO told Devex that under the restructure, the department had established a new Women and Girls Department incorporating a new Women and Equalities Centre of Expertise, as well as dedicated teams working on Violence Against Women and Girls and other areas."

As many pointed out though, until we know what exactly they mean by “women” and “girls”, we shouldn’t get too excited.

Belgian man with paedosexual fantasies is out of prison and back on TV

Sven Pichal belongs to a group of people that the Flemish call Bekende Vlamingen — BV for short — which is a cute cultural quirk that translates literally as “known Fleming”. It means something like “minor Flemish celebrity” or “famous but strictly within the borders of the northern region of Belgium” (the Dutch would say Bekende Nederlander, or BN) and I think it’s an admirable testament to the self-awareness of the residents of the Low Countries that they recognise that their celebrities are not yours. The French have no such awareness (you don’t know oooo iz Jean-Claude Cotillard????? Mais non!)

Basically, Pichal is a big deal in Flanders, which is why it was a big deal when it was discovered that he was in a chat group with paedophiles where he shared photos of child rape and talked about sexually abusing his own adopted sons. The rumour going round is that he got caught when he was observed by a witness looking at photos of child sex abuse with another man in a pub, but I’ve read different stories.

The heart bleeds for Pichal, because, as was revealed during the trial, he was taking lots of chemsex-type drugs which led him to indulge in his paedo fantasies. He got about 3 months in prison total, but was released for time served in pre-trial detention. And he’s free now and ready to slither back into the role of beloved BV that he once was. How so? He participated in a “taboo-breaking” documentary series on paedophilia, in which he admitted to his fantasies and implored the public to listen to paedophiles if we want to understand them and save future victims (it’s out on streaming site on 29 September).

Another cultural quirk of this region is that people are more receptive to this message than we are in the Anglosphere (the mindset is less pronounced in the south of the country among the short-statured Gaulish types). The same willingness to understand and treat paedophiles as a harm reduction strategy is common in the Netherlands, which may or may not be related to that country’s status as the world centre of child sex abuse material servers (and other related claims to infamy).

There’s much more of a willingness to consider attraction to kids as an innate orientation that deserves compassion and understanding. That goes too far for lots of cultures from higher altitudes. So Pichal may not ever get back into everyone’s good graces, but it’s an interesting experiment, in our current permissive times, to watch how his very public mea culpa will be received and treated in progressive little Belgium. To be continued.

Who can we thank? Hillary Clinton

You didn’t expect to find Ms. Clinton’s name connected to the world project to erase sex in law, now, did you? Indeed, she seemed almost TERFy in 2019 when she did an interview with the Sunday Times of London alongside her daughter Chelsea. The women were asked if someone with a beard and penis can ever be a woman. “Ye-esss. Yes,” Chelsea replied.

Mom Clinton looked uneasy, according to the report “Errr. I’m just learning about this,” she is quoted as having said. “It’s a very big generational discussion, because this is not something I grew up with or ever saw. It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to understand what it means to be defining yourself differently.” She also said that lots of women don’t think trans women are the same as real women.

“So I respect who you are, but don’t tell me you’re the same as me.’ She also said she understood not wanting males in women’s spaces, after which apparently Chelsea shot her a death stare.

But a decade earlier, Clinton had played no small part in creating those problems. As Secretary of State, she was a central driver of the Obama administration’s decision to treat LGBT issues (including gender identity) as a U.S. foreign policy and human rights priority. In 2009 she helped get “gender identity” into multilateral UN texts. In 2010 her department changed Federal passport policy: transgender-identifying people could obtain passports in the opposite sex, with surgery no longer required, and she added gender identity to the department’s equal-employment policy. So it’s a bit rich for her to TERF out on main with Chelsea a decade later. She laid the groundwork.

As Politico wrote in 2016: Hillary Clinton was the force behind a little-known breakthrough in transgender rights. So why doesn’t she talk about it?

Indeed. Why doesn’t she talk about it?

Here she is. Say thanks to Hillary.

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In other news…

• EU: The MCC lads are back in a new guise: the Freedom and Sovereignty Institute, under the stewardship of Prof Frank Furedi, and they’re ready to start throwing some post-Orbán shapes in Brussels. And no, I don’t know where/if they got money.

• Netherlands: Lawyer representing the family of raped and murdered girl was flashed by someone masturbating in the same spot where the girl was raped and murdered. The police told her they wouldn’t bother investigating.

• Netherlands: The word “shamelips” will be removed from the Dutch dictionary

• Albania: Citizens have reason to trust Brussels more than they trust Tirana. Interview with Esmeralda Petrela

• EU: EIGE edges closer to intersectionality speak, a worrying sign for an institution that was only ever completely useless but never actually actively harmful

• Switzerland: Right-wing are debating the self-ID law after the poolside flasher Bern incident

• Ireland: Help Ian buy himself a big pair of titties! (Could he not have put a wig on???)

• Austria: Athena Forum having an event in parliament

• Netherlands: Arrests made after gang rape of girl gang last year

• EU: EU-funded project claims five babies are born every day in Belgium who are intersex. That’s a new level of elite disinformation.

• Portugal: Genspect makes a submission about gender pseudomedicine to Portuguese Parliament debate

• Ireland/World: Genspect Repathologisation campaign (REPATH) is on a mission to put transgender compulsion back in the mental illness category

• I set up a TERF Network in the NormieVerse (LinkedIn). If you’re an active LinkedInner, please join the group and let’s do some nice clean respectable TERFing on main

• Ireland: 4 out of the 5 men in women’s prisons in Ireland were sex offenders (Women’s Space Ireland)

• Russia: Moscow court fines booking 69k for LGBTIQ+ “propaganda”

• Netherlands: Dutch continue to grapple with what the data about homohaat actually mean. Is it Islam? Is it fetishists and furries and transvestites? Why not all of the above?

• Germany: Municipal councillor has orgy in city hall in Mannheim “despite ban”

• Sweden: Church of Sweden sends letter of support to trans-identifying people (943 employees signed it)

• World: Study of Malian “trans woman” is an exact spelling-out of my theory of trans mania and its links to AIDS funding. You heard it here first, folks.

• Belgium: Innovative Fanny Studies geniuses come up with more ways to “decolonise” FGM. These ones are hosting an event in Brussels next month on intersectional work on FGM (death skull emoji)

• Germany: AdF politician denounces paedophile activist, who then sues her for defamation — Reduxx

• Belgium: Parents of minor girls had to entrap paedophile groomer after police failed to act

• Belgium: KVHV, the Catholic conservatives of Gent university, were kicked off Instagram for their support of Nathan Cofnas. They made a new account

• Greece: 54-year-old woman gives birth after using frozen embryo that was 22 years old. Her only child had just been killed in a car accident. The little baby girl is doing fine

• Poland: Polish woman Emilia Koprowska missing after fight with husband over money at a techno festival

• EU: You can give feedback on the EU’s proposed revision of the Victims’ Rights Directive. Tell them to keep males out of women’s crisis centres and refuges. Fair warning: you have to hand over personal data to get to the form.

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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She sat down with me to explain what her message means, and we had a great chat about what she thinks about EU accession, democracy, corruption, women, Islam, identity, and patriotism.

Enjoy! And make sure to follow Esmeralda on Instagram

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Show notes (AI generated)

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín speaks with Albanian writer, astrologer and entrepreneur Esmeralda Petrela, whom she met during the protests in Albania that became known as the “Flamingo Revolution.”

The conversation begins with Róisín’s impressions of Albania after visiting Tirana and travelling through the countryside, before moving into the protests surrounding development in Albania’s protected coastal areas and the flamingo symbolism that came to represent the movement.

Esmeralda explains the meaning behind the protest sign she carried, which combined the European Union flag and a flamingo to argue that European standards should also mean protecting nature. From there, the discussion expands into Albania’s EU accession process, protected-area legislation, the Strategic Investments Law, Edi Rama’s government and the European Commission.

Róisín and Esmeralda discuss why an environmental protest became a much wider expression of dissatisfaction with the Albanian government, touching on healthcare, pensions, policing, corruption, informal economic activity and Albanian national identity.

The conversation then moves into Albania’s communist and atheist past, religious identity, Islam, the hijab and changing attitudes towards religion.

The second half of the episode focuses heavily on LGBTQ visibility, Pride, transgender identity, transgender healthcare and the relationship between social change, public policy and EU accession.

The episode concludes with a discussion of women in Albania, female entrepreneurship, femicide, political representation, Albanian literature and Esmeralda’s own work as an astrologer, writer and entrepreneur, including her novel Ajlen and her planned astrology app, Tsunavi.

Featured Topics

• The Flamingo Revolution

• Vjosa-Narta Protected Area

• Sazan Island

• Jared Kushner and the proposed resort development

• Albania’s Strategic Investments Law

• Protected-area legislation

• Edi Rama

• Marta Kos and EU enlargement

• Albania’s EU accession process

• Corruption and informal economic activity

• Albanian nationalism and national identity

• Albania’s communist and atheist history

• Religion and religious identity

• Islam, the hijab and social pressure

• LGBTQ visibility and Pride

• Transgender healthcare in Albania

• 20,000 Species of Bees

• HIV and transgender women in Peru

• Women and feminism in Albania

• Andon Zako Çajupi’s Fshati im

• Esmeralda Petrela’s Ajlen

• Astrology and Harta Astrologjike

• Tsunavi

The Flamingo Revolution

The episode examines the protests that emerged around development in Albania’s protected coastal areas, particularly the Vjosa-Narta Protected Area and the proposed development connected to Sazan Island.

The flamingo became the central symbol of the demonstrations because of the flamingos and wider biodiversity found in the protected wetland environment. Esmeralda explains that the protest initially centred on protecting the area and repealing legislation that allowed strategic investment and construction in protected areas, before broader grievances against the government became part of the movement.

Róisín describes seeing the natural landscape and the bulldozers that became an important visual trigger for the protests.

Albania, the EU & Protected Areas

Róisín and Esmeralda discuss Albania’s EU accession process and the environmental standards that candidate countries are expected to meet.

They discuss the relationship between Albanian legislation, EU accession chapters and the role of the European Commission.

On 14 July 2026, European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos said that environmental protection is part of the EU membership criteria and stated that before the protests began, the EU and Albania had already agreed that Albania would repeal the 2024 amendments to the protected-areas law and repeal the Strategic Investments Law. (Qeveria Shqiptare Keshilli i Ministrave)

Marta Kos / EU-Albania Intergovernmental Conference:
https://www.kryeministria.al/en/newsroom/konference-e-perbashket-per-shtyp-e-kryeministri-edi-rama-ministrit-te-shtetit-per-ceshtjet-europiane-dhe-mbrojtjen-te-irlandes-thomas-byrne-dhe-komisioneres-europiane-per-zgjerimin-marta-kos-pas/

Edi Rama & Investment in Albania

The conversation looks at Edi Rama’s promotion of investment in Albania and the controversy surrounding the Strategic Investments Law.

In March 2025, Rama urged people planning to invest in Albania to do so, describing the country as a place with investment opportunities.

Edi Rama on investment:
https://www.balkanweb.com/en/neser-do-te-jete-vone-rama-koha-qe-kushdo-qe-e-ka-ne-plan-te-investoje-ne-shqiperi-pjesa-me-e-mire-e-jona-malet/

Rama later discussed investment and the Kushner-linked project in a meeting with journalists from EU member states.

Edi Rama meeting with EU journalists:
https://www.kryeministria.al/en/newsroom/takim-i-kryeministrit-rama-me-gazetare-dhe-perfaqesues-te-mediave-nga-vendet-e-bashkimit-europian/

Transgender Healthcare in Albania

In May 2026, Albania introduced guidance concerning hormonal treatment for transgender people through the public healthcare system. Euronews Albania reported that the guidance set out medical criteria, clinical procedures and monitoring for hormonal treatment. (Euronews)

A subsequent clarification from Deputy Health Minister Eugena Tomini said the guidance was intended for adults and was a clinical guidance document rather than a final therapeutic protocol. (Euronews)

Euronews Albania:
https://euronews.al/urdhri-i-zv-ministres-se-shendetesise-terapia-hormonale-per-personat-transgjinore/

Clarification from Deputy Health Minister Eugena Tomini:
https://euronews.al/terapia-hormonale-per-personat-transgjinore-zv-ministrja-tomini-sqaron-udhezuesi-referohet-vetem-te-rriturve/

The episode also discusses a separate March for Life protest in Tirana concerning transgender hormonal treatment and public healthcare.

Euronews Albania — March for Life:
https://euronews.al/terapia-hormonale-per-transgjinoret-koalicioni-shqiptar-pro-familjes-dhe-jetes-marshim-me-rastin-e-1-qershorit/

20,000 Species of Bees

Esmeralda refers to the Spanish film 20,000 Species of Bees, directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren and starring Sofía Otero.

The film follows an eight-year-old trans girl during a summer in the Basque Country and explores childhood, identity and self-discovery. Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21113962/

Peru, HIV & Transgender Women

Róisín refers to research she had been watching concerning HIV, sex work and transgender women in Peru.

A 2024 study of 211 transgender women aged 16–24 in Lima reported an HIV prevalence of 41.5%. It also found that 50.7% reported sex work during the previous 30 days and 47.9% reported condomless anal sex during the previous six months. (PubMed)

Research:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39041820/

Women, Family & LGBTQ Rights in Albania

The episode discusses Albanian couple Alba Ahmetaj and Edlira Mara, who held an unofficial rooftop wedding in Tirana in 2024.

The couple have twin daughters and have faced legal difficulties obtaining recognition as joint parents. Reuters reported on the couple’s wedding, their fight for equal recognition and the online hostility and threats they faced. (Reuters)

Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/loving-protest-albanian-lesbians-marry-unofficially-2024-05-20/

Women in Albanian Culture

The conversation turns to women, female employment, entrepreneurship, femicide and political representation in Albania.

Esmeralda describes a cultural history in which women could be breadwinners and refers to Albanian poetry that criticised men who left women to carry the burden of work.

She mentions Andon Zako Çajupi’s “Fshati im” (“My Village”), a poem contrasting women working in the fields and running the household with men sitting in the shade and living from their wives. (Albanian History)

Andon Zako Çajupi — “Fshati im”:
https://albanianhistory.org/albanianliterature/authors_classical/cajupi_poetry.html

Esmeralda Petrela

Esmeralda Petrela is an Albanian writer and astrologer. Her astrology work and personalised astrology charts have been featured by Albanian media. (Top Channel)

She is also the author of the novel Ajlen, published by Botimet Dudaj in 2018.

Ajlen:
https://www.shtepiaelibrit.com/store/en/fiction-literature/6218-ajlen-esmeralda-petrela-9789994305476.html

Harta Astrologjike:

https://hartastrologjike.carrd.co/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

https://top-channel.tv/2016/10/05/harta-astrologjike/

Tsunavi

At the end of the episode, Esmeralda discusses Tsunavi, an astrology app she was developing at the time of the interview. She describes it as a combination of Western and Vedic astrology, offering personalised timing and predictions relating to areas including love, career, money, travel and mood.

Esmeralda says the app was still in development and that she hoped to launch it in August 2026.

Guest Links

Esmeralda Petrela

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/esmetrela/?hl=en

Host

Róisín Michaux

X
https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Substack

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

Substack

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

Apple Podcasts

1. The EPP swings TERFward

2. The chaotic confusion of sex and gender in science

3. Ukrainian woman’s death in Albania exposes horror of commercial surrogacy

4. Turkey’s anti-gay crackdown linked to Belgian politician

5. Happy two-year anniversary of the magazine article calling for the murder of gender critical women

6. Paris afterschool paedophile scandal: second guilty man gets no prison time

7. Migrant (allegedly) beheads wife after she reports him for scamming the state

8. Policeman transvestite rapes teenage girl, German press calls him “she”

9. Lithuania: Kaunas Pride devastated by Kaunas Pride’s principled stance against the corporatisation of Kaunas Pride

10. Who can we thank? Étienne Deshoulières

EU’s biggest political party is turning away from the trans cult

In 2023, a gynaecologist in the French city of Pau refused to treat a very obviously male patient. The “woman” was turned away by the gynaecologist’s receptionist who informed him that gynaecological services are for females only. A negative Google review of the doctor immediately appeared online, calling him “transphobic”. The gynaecologist exasperatedly contested the negative Google review by replying that, as a gynaecologist, he’s only qualified to treat “real women”, not a “men who’ve had a shave”.

Activist NGOs mobilised to take him to court, and they got him charged with “sexist outrage”, for which he got a €1,000 fine. His professional association then suspended him for six months (five suspended).

Upon hearing of this incident, many of you might be wondering to yourselves: how the everloving Jesus did we get here? Why is a specialist in female bodies being punished for refusing to treat someone who doesn’t have a female body? Have you ever heard anything more deranged?

I’m glad you asked.

A couple of weeks ago in Ireland, it was revealed that a man who teaches male lactation fetishists how to induce breast milk for sexual gratification had been invited to speak at a conference on breastfeeding. The week after, it was discovered that the keynote speaker at a state-funded healthcare conference at a major Irish university is a midwife who doesn’t believe in the sex binary, and therefore, doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a “woman” (she prefers terms like “birth-giver” or “service user”). This same woman is a member of the UK’s midwifery professional council.

Why are these things happening?

The answer is very boring. For at least a decade, politicians have been quietly passing legislation and soft law under the tyrannical influence of the utterly demented LGBTIQ+ lobby. The laws and policies in question look innocuous to the untrained eye (inclusion and diversity? SIGN ME UP!), but they set off the ideological equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction.

A lot of the political figures responsible for these developments either didn’t have the intelligence to understand the implications of what they were doing, or they didn’t have the courage to challenge it. A lot of lawmakers thought the rainbow NGOs would be eternally powerful, and that would help shield them from negative attention forever. Some of them no doubt accepted the lie (circulated by the same NGOs) that anyone who objected to any of it was merely a far-right agitator.

But now that the consequences of the lie are all around us, and regular people are starting to get curious about our new reality, it’s a perfect time to start laser-focussing on the very boring blink-and-you’ll-miss-it developments that got us to this point — because they are still happening.

Last Wednesday offered a perfect case study. In Strasbourg (France), Irish member of the European Parliament Billy Kelleher presented his hallmark “Gender inequalities in health” report for a plenary vote. And while it’s non-binding, reports like this one can represent the first step towards something that is. But most importantly, they provide the ammo that NGOs can then use to pressure their governments into working on their pet policies.

Kelleher has promised this initiative will help fill the gaps in research into women’s health problems, most notably endometriosis and the lack of female participants in clinical trials (the bait), but the text was packed to the brim of trans nonsense (the switch). Not only does it have all of the reality-defying cult language we have come to expect, it even shoved in some very explicit queer activist demands that have nothing to do with women’s health: it demanded gender-affirming care, a ban on any operations carried out on children with DSDs (this is not backed by medical profession, who have no idea why they are suddenly being called ‘torturers’ for fixing newborn urogenital problems) and even a call for a ban on talk therapy for people going through gender dysphoria.

Before the vote started on Wednesday, Kelleher made sure to insult all the people who had tried during the drafting process to reintroduce some reality into the document (someone had even added an amendment that would make sure that no health practitioner can be dragged to court for not treating males for female complaints, like what happened in France). But Kelleher trashed the people who proposed these amendments, accusing them of being against ‘inclusivity’, pitting ‘communities’ against each other (he means women versus horny men who want to make moob juice) and engaging in “culture wars” (there’s that term again!)

The bad news is that this horseshit did pass, much to the delight of “Billy All Genders”, as he shall henceforth be known. But the good news is that it did not pass intact, and it did not pass with as many votes as it would have a couple of years ago.

There was a time when only two or three lonely hardcore right-wing women in the European Parliament bothered to go through these texts and pick out all the batshit crazy trans stuff. But now there seems to be an army of them. The list of people who put their names to the reality-motivated amendments is longer than it has ever been.

The EPP, the (so-called) centre-right party in the European Parliament, has pandered for years to the trans cult — as a way, one assumes, of looking hip and cool to young voters. But taking the past three votes in the Parliament that considered trans issues, their voting pattern has drifted from reality-denying, to reality-curious, to reality-aligned.

The vote was split, meaning MEPs could vote to ditch some parts of the text without rejecting the whole thing. As a result, we can see exactly who voted for which part. And EPP members overwhelmingly voted against the most ideological trans nonsense. To take one prominent example, in a part of the text that named “transgender, non-binary and intersex people” alongside women, EPP members voted to remove this text by 154 votes. In a paragraph that called out member states that only offer “limited access to gender affirming care”, the EPP voted 128-26 to get rid of it. There are other similar examples (However, on amendments submitted by the hard-right parties, which made it clear that sex is biological and that medical professionals should not be punished for acting accordingly, the EPP overwhelmingly abstained from voting either way).

The pattern was already emerging in the vote on the Gender Equality Strategy, in November 2025. On two parts of that text that related to trans ideology, the EPP voted against by about 3 to 1. Since then, the NOs have grown from 100 to 154 and the YESs have shrunk from 37 to 11. By December 2025, EPP members were getting used to their newfound bravery: they voted 141 - 5 in favour of an amendment that stated only biological women can get pregnant (in an abortion-related initiative!)

Compare all this to February 2024 when the LGBTIQ+ strategy was reviewed. That document called for the full suite of trans insanity; from legal gender recognition for kids, to a conversion-practice ban, to “SOGIESC mainstreaming” in everything member states do. The EPP voted 104-11 in favour of it!

It’s probably because of this shift that there has been no vote on the new LGBTIQ+ strategy, which was launched in October 2025. The closest proxy is a vote on a fundamental rights annual report (which took place in April 2026) which “welcomes” the new LGBTIQ+ strategy and attacks bans on legal gender recognition. The EPP voting pattern for that was 86 - 12 in favour (55 abstained).

What’s clear is that they are no longer reliably voting yes on anything that puts trans language in the same bucket as women’s rights or rule of law. The new habit seems to be to peel off any ideological nonsense out of proposals by asking for split votes. Very quietly, a page has been turned. What does it mean in practice? Unfortunately, not a lot. Most of the damaging laws and court case precedents are now in place across Europe (with the exceptions of countries in the East).

The only way back to reality is to repeal, repeal, repeal, and that would take some serious political bravery.

Billy Allgenders’ hot-shoe shuffle by Sandra Adams for Women’s Space Ireland

The chaotic confusion of sex and gender in science

Another problem with Billy Allgenders’ report on gender inequalities in health is that it’s plagued all the way through with the usual nonsensical conflation of the words sex and gender.

It is not uncommon. Some EU laws and many EU communications are drowning in a terminological soup of “sex and gender”, “sex/gender”, or sometimes just “sex” on its own and other times “gender” on its own. Other times you’ll even see “non-binary “ shoehorned in randomly as if it’s the most normal thing in the world (it’s not even real).

Here’s what I have concluded: most people don’t really know what they mean by gender, they just know they have to pay genderfaff lip service and the best way to do that is to sprinkle the word here and there and hope that nobody pays too much attention to it.

So let’s pay it some attention:

As technology advances, we are discovering that there are very few areas of human biology in which sex does not matter. Men and women are different. Normal systolic blood pressure in women is 110, while it’s 120 for men. That matters. Some genes expressed in male depression are not the same genes expressed in female depression. You might consider a drug ineffective if half the trial participants got no benefit. Were they men, though? Might that be why the drug didn’t work? It’s a no-brainer: sex matters in life sciences, for both humans and animals.

But political and academic activism has been butchering this very clear line with ideological talk about gender. In a given piece of text, you can often see a battle playing out between sense (sex as a biological variable, or SABV) and derangement (gender, gender identity, gender expression, and the entirely queer ideology derived “intersex”). Anything published post-2014 (that’s my benchmark year for when everything went off the rails) is inherently suspect.

Let’s keep it real, one paragraph of a policy document or research guideline politely demands, before the next paragraph bursts in like a drunk clown on stilts to smother everything in confused identity pandering. In any given text, it’s clear that half the drafting committee are clearly normal, a quarter of them have non-binary daughters and insist on militant #kindness, and all the rest graduated in the past 10 years which means they’re goners.

Most of the time the words sex and gender are just collapsed into each other, but here’s a list of the things they can mean.

Gender is a synonym for sex: we get it, you’re polite. You want to keep the option open to use gender instead of the S word. I, too, have Victorian sensibilities and wouldn’t dare say “trousers” in front of a woman. Or you’re Danish, in which case you’re no prude but you don’t have a word in your language that distinguishes sex from gender. You’re not alone: Finnish, Estonian and Swedish don’t have a word for it either.

Sex is biology, but gender is the identity you choose to live: this is why some European countries have decided that the best translation for gender is “social sex”. You want to do girly things or manly things? Ergo you have a girl gender or a man gender. In this instance, the word gender is acting as a stand-in for gender identity (very sneaky) and when you see examples of this in the wild, you can safely assume that the intention is to bake transgender ideology into our vocabulary while not leaving any obvious trace.

Dave wants to dress up like a schoolgirl and pretend to be one. Cool cool. That doesn’t matter for biological research, though, except that anyone treating Dave (or testing a drug on him) needs to know that he has potentially been taking synthetic estrogen, progesterone, and/or androgen blockers , and in rare cases (extremely rare cases) he’s debollocked himself. But this important information can more confidently be extracted from Dave by asking him if he’s taking any medications, or if there is anything else relevant that the researchers should know (being deballsed like a housecat would fit in here).

That’s far more useful to the clinician than seeing that Dave has filled in “trans woman” or (shudder) “gender fluid” on his participant intake form.

What can a researcher or a clinician glean from the information that a female participant in a clinical trial considers herself “trans masc non-binary”? It could indicate that she has mental health issues, is very likely to be autistic, and may be taking testosterone that is slowly atrophying all her bits to dust. But again: funky identity labels cannot and do not act as a reliable proxy for straightforwardly just telling whoever needs to know it that you’re depressed, you’re autistic, or you’re on T.

As we know, you don’t have to take any hormones (or be castrated) to be ‘valid’ as a ‘trans person’ — so what earthly use is there in recording it as some kind of relevant data point? There is none.

Gender is a set of norms and expectations that matter: ok here is my most charitable reading of the usefulness of ‘gender’ in biomedical science.

In the part of Africa where Ebola outbreaks tend to occur, the disease kills more women than men, but the discrepancy is not due to biology. It’s because in many of the cultures in that region, it’s a woman’s job not only to care for the sick, but to prepare bodies for burial. In a culture where men prepare bodies for burial, the rate of Ebola infection would be higher in men. It makes sense, therefore that gender (norms) should be considered if you’re looking at a lopsided epidemiology numbers and you want to know what’s behind it.

Other examples: men famously visit the doctor less frequently than women, meaning that early signs of disease are more likely to be missed. Men also tend to do the jobs that expose them to higher levels of harmful chemicals, or that put them at other physical risk. There is research that shows that men’s cortisol levels drop in the evening because their day is done and they can rest. However, women tend to keep going after work, taking care of kids and family, including elderly parents or neighbours, or seeing friends late into the evening. Women therefore don’t experience this cortisol drop at dinner time, because we’re usually in full swing. This has an effect on our health and it’s due to gender roles (but also hugely influenced by biology!)

In the design of a clinical trial, should researchers take these norms into account? How important and how useful are they in, say, the study of drug efficacy?

The most obvious thing to point out is that it’s all correlation. Being a woman correlates with having a second workload after 6pm. But that doesn’t apply to all women, in all places, at all times, at all ages. Even in the infectious diseases example above, “taking gender into consideration” is useless without knowing the country (and probably age, status/class, clan, religion or whatever).

And how would all this be “taken into consideration”, considering that anything that makes it actionable requires that it be combined with a bunch of other variables? Is “dead body-preparer” a gender?

Even in the case of men-go-to-the-doctor-less, is this stereotype a good substitute for simply asking a patient/trial participant how often they go to the doctor?

This gender role scale claims to be able to score individuals on their masculinity, femininity and androgyny to help differentiate the effects of gender on health outcomes after a stroke that cannot be attributed to biology. The score is based on how closely males and females adhered to traditional gender norms.

Female-typical activities (cook, clean, take care of people) and masculine-typical things (have no parental duties, work in a dangerous job) predicted the participants’ scores, which placed them somewhere along the spectrum between “highly masculine” and “highly feminine”. Here’s another study calling behaviours masculine and feminine, or another one that found differences in “masculine-people’s” exercise behaviours after a stroke compared to “gender undifferentiated” people (though not feminine people)

What’s the point of this?

Here we have again the direct outcome of gender ideology: like the concept of “trans people”, it recreates the very norms it claims to be seeking to deconstruct. Like, I’m very glad women’s work in the home is taken into account when understanding why our cortisol levels are more likely to be higher in the evening. Typical gender roles can help generate hypotheses, I guess. But a clinical tool that sorts people into feminine and masculine based on the activities they do in their day-to-day lives? Wouldn’t it be better to like, ask people what they do in their day-to-day lives? As opposed to what they are expected by the norms in their culture to do?

The scale from the GENESIS-PRAXY study linked above attributed the label “extremely feminine” to some men because they looked after their kids (whatever you do, please do not start telling men this). In contrast, according to the study, “half the women (involved in the study) scored more androgynous or masculine”.

How useful is that? If an unconscious man is being treated in hospital after a heart attack, do you assume he works down a mine shaft or a toxic waste treatment plant all day? Or should you just try to find out what he actually does for a living, if that matters to his treatment? Lots of women don’t have kids, lots of men are on the dole. What the fuck are we doing here?

If you enroll a woman in a clinical trial, should you take into consideration the fact that women often get their kids ready for school every morning, which might make it difficult for them to remember to take medicine at 8:30am? Is it useful to work on the assumption that women have kids and are responsible for school drop-offs? Is a woman’s sex standing in for the expectations for her sex? Would it be better to design your clinical trial in a way that takes into account that mornings are busy times for everyone, male and female, old and young, Biafran and Bulgarian, for various different reasons?

As I’ve written about before, the Commission is toying with the idea of making intersectional gender a mandatory embed in all future Horizon Europe funding. What a confusing and counterproductive mess that is likely to be.

Am I wrong? Are there ways that gender should be included in biomedical research/healthcare that I haven’t considered? Let me know!

‘World Center of Baby’ - Ukrainian woman’s death in Albania exposes the horror of commercial surrogacy

An international surrogacy trader called ‘World Center of Baby’ founded by Ukrainians and operating in Ukraine, Mexico, Georgia, Albania and Cyprus has allegedly gone bankrupt, leaving not just staff in the lurch, but also the purchasing parents and not least of all, the women being paid to deliver the purchased babies.

One pregnant Ukrainian woman called Yana stopped receiving regular payments from the company, and made a deal with the purchasing genetic father to continue the pregnancy in Albania, but she died in strange circumstances in the rented apartment in Tirana on 22 April. Her unborn daughter died with her.

You should read the entire investigation, which covers a complicated and ruthless web of international dodgy dealings. It was carried out by a Ukrainian media outlet called NGL.media in cooperation with OCCRP, Shteg and two Italian freelancers, published 12 September 2026.

Turkey’s anti-gay crackdown linked to Belgian politician

Mahinur Özdemir, a third-generation Belgian, leads the Turkish ministry that oversees the policy that resulted in raids on LGBTIQ+ venues last weekend.

On 12 and 13 September, raids and arrests were carried out across 15 different Turkish provinces. Among the venues targeted were bars, nightclubs, activists' homes, HIV support groups, a hammam, LGBTIQ+ associations, and a gay cruising spot, according to multiple sources.

The operation was dubbed “My Family Is Safe” and most of the people who were charged are accused of “violation of decency” and “aiding prostitution”. Associations accused of “promoting LGBTIQ+ and immorality” have been put under financial investigation. While the raids were ordered by the ministry of justice, the Justice minister Gürlek tied the operation to the 10-year “Decade of Family and Population” plan order, which is under Mahinur Özdemir’s mandate, meaning her department is responsible for the policy framework used to justify the raids.

Özdemir was a member of the Brussels parliament for ten years. She was kicked out of the cdH (centrist/humanist) party in 2015 after she refused to use the word genocide in relation to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians.

After a stint as Turkey’s ambassador to Algeria, she took up the post of minister for family affairs and social services in the Erdoğan government in 2023.

Her ministry has repeatedly attacked LGBTIQ+ people, even though homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey. On 13 September, the day the operation was announced, she thanked the Justice Ministry and other institutions for their efforts to protect the family, children and young people, according to the İHA news agency. Her (very few) direct comments on LGBTIQ+ issues have mentioned “genderlessness” as a bugbear of hers, as opposed to gay people or trans people specifically. Last year in November she gave the opening speech at a family-related conference in which one of the speakers compared LGBTIQ+ NGOs to the Kurdistan militants of the PKK, and said they were being funded by Israel.

Özdemir was Belgium’s first ever hijabi MP. She said at the time: “I veil my hair but I do not veil my mind, and I advise those who criticise my hijab to go to their eye physician because their eyes are veiled by prejudice”.

Happy 2-year anniversary to this article calling for the murder of TERFs

Two years ago next month, a website called paris-luttes.info, published an article called Trans ultraviolence in which the author(s) called for the “éclatage des têtes” (smashing of the heads) of Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, the two most outspoken gender critical women in the country.

The article, signed by an “armed group” said that opposition to “transphobes and fascists” should be physical and violent, and referred to telescopic batons and explosives. The website is tied to the Assemblée antifasciste Paname. The people behind the article should not be hard to find but according to Moutot, there were multiple mistakes made by investigators that made their complaints impossible to pursue. Most of these mistakes seem to relate to mis-transcribing names and phone numbers.

Two years later, and it’s still online. Dora has, meanwhile, been convicted of injure publique and a fine for alluding to the fact that transvestites have the same rate of offending as non-transvestite men, and both her and Marguerite face brand new charges of hate speech based on other reality-based pronouncements. Happy anniversary!

Read the call to violence against non-compliant women from paris-luttes.info

Shocking scale of the Paris périscolaire affair: no prison for paedos

Every year the city of Paris needs about 14,000 people to look after kids on either side of the school day. These are the people who supervise kids in the morning before lessons start, during lunchtimes and breaks, and at the end of the school day between the end of lessons and when the kids get picked up. They also take care of kids who need help going to the toilet, and to supervise naptime (the closest equivalent term that I could find to apply to the English speaking world is ‘afterschool care assistants’).

This is low-skilled work, and it requires little prior training. The pay is bad, contracts are precarious, and turnover is very high. Everyone gets a criminal background check to exclude anyone who’s been convicted of crimes like child sex abuse, but the reality is that lots of sex offenders never get caught (at least not yet).

Put all this together and you’ve got a recipe for child sex abuse on a mass scale. But of course. Paedos go where the kids are. This is exactly the kind of role where safeguarding is of paramount importance. But in Paris, it was not.

Since the start of 2026, 132 périscolaire staff have been suspended in Paris, 52 of them for suspected sexual violence. As of late August, 203 criminal investigations were opened. 143 concern maternelles (kindergarten), 36 concern primary school, and 24 concern crèches. 184 Paris schools are involved. Three trials have taken place, two animateurs were acquitted and one was sentenced to 18 months suspended sentence.

The reports have not stopped coming in.

Germany: Yemeni collecting welfare payments for other people’s children accused of beheading his wife

A 37-year-old international protection recipient from Yemen, Danon Mohammed Saeed G, is in court this week in Munich accused of brutally murder of his wife, whose head he sawed off after she attempted to divorce him. She also threatened to report him to the authorities for claiming benefits for children that were not his.

Inspired by his brother who had been successful in the same scam, the man brought two children who were not his own to Germany, along with his wife and their actual four children, and forced his wife to raise them as her own so that he could receive social welfare benefits on their behalf.

The woman, who is named in court documents as Shahirah A., was regularly beaten by her husband. He had taken away her passport, and kept her locked in the house. She eventually initiated divorce proceedings, threatening to reveal the welfare fraud that he had been committing. The man was ordered to stay away from their apartment due to his record of violence. He decided to decapitate her instead.

Losing the child benefit allowance is what drove him to kill her, according to reporting by Focus.de, but investigators suspect that the motive for this barbaric act was a kind of power demonstration. According to them, he wanted to punish the her for her previous behavior and show her, “even in the moment of her death, who was in charge”.

German transvestite rapes teenage girl in fast food restaurant toilet. Media calls him “she”

“I don’t want to testify if he’s present,” the now-16 year old girl said about the accused, a “trans woman”, an ex-cop and Afghanistan war veteran. While the man’s identity was censored by German media for “her” protection, an anonymous tip submitted to Reduxx.info revealed:

A trans-identified male is on trial in Traunstein, Germany, for the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl in a restaurant’s washroom. The 55-year-old man, who goes by the name Maja Schmid, is a now-suspended German federal police officer, and also faces charges of possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, and the production of material depicting sexual activity with an animal.

According to Bild, the 55-year-old has confessed to both raping a 14-year-old and to possession of the animal sex abuse and child abuse content. His punishment could involve a fine and a 3 to 3.5-year sentence.

Lithuania: Kaunas Pride devastated by Kaunas Pride’s principled stance against the corporatisation of Kaunas Pride

It’s been fashionable for many years in Western European countries to hate on “corporate Pride” parades. This has resulted in “fringe”-type Prides that reject the corporatisation and mainstreaming of Pride. These “off” events try to create a grungier and queer-er vibe than the main show, all in service of pretending that there is something rebellious about being part of the rainbow crew (there is not. It is the most conformist, institutionalised “subculture” that has ever existed).

This backfired on the organisers of the Pride event in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas this year, as the institution is apparently not established enough that its participants can afford to performatively bite the hand that supports them.

This post appeared on their LinkedIn account shortly after the “flop”, lamenting that the parade attracted only 500 marchers (compared to about 2,000 in 2021). The organisers rejected not just commercial businesses, but also institutional support (from, for example, embassies of progressive countries) and supportive politicians and even the mainstream LGBTIQ+ rights movement. They also tied the parade to Palestine and anti-capitalism, alienating normie allies. The low turnout, says Monika Antanaitytė (who works for the mainstream NGO, LGL) feeds the narrative that LGBTIQ+ supporters are a fringe concern engineered by Brussels.

Antanaitytė’s post:

“I hate saying it, but we have to be honest: Kaunas Pride was a #flop, and this one may hurt beyond ‘community politics’. 500 marchers. That wasn’t bad luck. It was the anti-strategy. By branding itself the “pure,” anti-corporate, anti-LGL, no-sponsors, no-institutions alternative, Kaunas Pride told our #allies they weren’t welcome, and they...listened. This is a massive gift to the #FarRight. A divided Pride of 500 writes that script for them, right as we head toward 2028.”

She added: “#puritypolitics that empties the streets is a luxury we cannot afford.”

Who can we thank? Étienne Deshoulières

Étienne Deshoulières is a French lawyer whose Parisian firm specialises in intellectual property and tech. His firm also has a dedicated LGBTIQ+ strategic litigation programme, and they work pro bono in collaboration with NGOs like Mousse and Stop Homophobie. He has been involved in a large number of cases (this source cites 200 legal proceedings over more than a decade) targeting homophobic or transphobic speech, involving politicians, the media, social media platforms, and critics of gender-identity ideology.

A recent example is the 2026 conviction of TERF Dora Moutot for remarks she made on TV about a man called Marie Cau who wants to force Moutot (and everyone else) to pretend he’s a woman. Deshoulières represented the NGOs in that case. He’s taken similar action against others for misgendering, statements that treat sex as distinct from self-identified gender, or that criticise medical transition for kids.

Deshoulières’ strategy has been most harmful in its ability to silence all criticism of trans extremism in France: disagreement over sex, sports, prisons, youth medicine, and women’s spaces are legally hazardous. He has personally done a lot to raise the cost of resisting trans nonsense, and you can thank him the next time you find yourself wondering why the resistance to this ideology has seemed so muted in France.

Here he is. Say thanks to Étienne.

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In other news…

• Ursula von der Leyen didn’t mention queer bullshit in State of the EU speech, and nor did any of the grandstanding lefty looney MEPs.

• EU racism NGO certainly seems to have been defunded because of links to Islamic extremism… but they’re taking the EU funding agency to court. Won’t that expose them?

• Charles Murray’s wife’s IQ is higher than his, according to Charles Murray

• Reem Alsalem criticises Portugal’s self-ID law

• Paul “Petra” De Sutter got booed by activists from the group Students Against Cofnas upon arrival at Gent Universities opening ceremony — I saw PDS in the flesh for the first time!

• Belgian teacher was forced to choose between her hijab and her teaching job. She is now unemployed

• EU Kids Act: the European Commission wants to card everyone using social media

• Celine Dion, god love her, seems to be making it through her French gigs. Here’s my favourite thing about Celine Dion.

• French 14-year-old girl sold online, raped 950 times

• What will the Sweden Democrats’ loss means for the anti-paedophile law? Throwback to my interview with mom-activist campaigning for a legal change

• Luxembourg to loosen rules on transgender “healthcare”

• Is the EU planning on downgrading Montenegro’s sex self-ID requirement in new accession “roadmap”?

• The conversion therapy ban in Northern Ireland will be detrimental to regular therapy — Stella O’Malley

• Left-wing parties stand up in favour of Muslim Brotherhood-linked NGOs in the European Parliament

• 55 victims of Antwerp fetish dentist identified so far

• Imprisoned Betty Lachgar gets feminist award in absentia from Belgian laïcité organisations

• Mohammad raped and strangled jogger in a bush in Malmö. He said he "wanted to give her love"

• After fifth rape, “too-dangerous-to-be released” Palestinian finally getting deported from Denmark

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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1. French women are performing purdah on social media for clout

2. Belgium’s sex education system is dodgy as hell

3. Brussels cinema cancels screening of film about trans kids because it’s against their “values”

4. Holy-but-horny Indian guru spared an Eiffel eyeful of impure women

5. Swiss government will ban conversion practices even though they found “sparse” evidence of it

6. Europe’s immigration slayers: a lesbian, a single mother, and two left-wing feminists

7. A plastic surgeon privately offered to fix Mette Frederiksen’s nose and she publicly declined

8. Trans activists celebrate Bulgaria trans court decision — but no law looks forthcoming

9. Charlie Hebdo lawyer thought trans-TERF case would be a breeze

10. Miroslav Diordjevic’s trans cadaver work is being paid for by Serbian state science fund

11. Who can we thank? Daniel Van Oosterwyck

French women are performing purdah on social media for clout

The English translation of the word hijab is not ‘veil’ or ‘headscarf’. Hijab is not a value-neutral noun that describes a garment like ‘hat’ or ‘t-shirt’. In its original Arabic, it’s not really even a noun. It’s a verb-noun (aka a gerund), and it means ‘concealing’ or ‘partitioning’.

It describes a practice, not an object.

Hijab certainly doesn’t mean ‘freedom fashion’, or ‘empowerment cloth’ or ‘girlboss garment’. It refers to the act of hiding something from something, placing a barrier between two things. In this case, placing a barrier between men’s eyes and the excitatory properties of a woman’s potentially too-lovely head and neck, as a way of protecting her perceived moral purity from his volatile sexual impulses.

You might think the Islamic veil is analogous to a t-shirt that covers one’s lovely, too-stimulating breasts. Sure, there’s an argument to be made there. There are all kinds of weird norms (especially pertaining to the sexes) practiced by all cultures that don’t make much sense. But there’s an obvious difference between your head and your boobs here: women don’t sit around with our baps out at home when only our female friends, relatives and kids are around. I don’t take my top off to cook my kids’ dinner, like hijabis de-partition their sexy heads while at home.

No matter what room-temperature-IQ ‘intersectional feminists’ have wordily led themselves to believe, hijab is not something to be celebrated. It is not just ‘something you wear’, it is something you practice in order to protect and project modesty, whether it is imposed on you or not.

The fact that Muslim women can’t participate in certain aspects of Western life (pools, gyms, meetings etc.) unless they are partitioned has gotten all twisted up in nu feminist thought, which increasingly treats the partitioning itself as a type of liberation. In reality it’s more like a theft: someone stole your car, and the thief gave you a bus pass. Maybe you should stop celebrating the bus pass, and ask for your car back?

Whatever, let people wear what they want. Sure. But if wearing a veil over your luscious, temptress ears is considered an act of modesty, then not hiding your sexy flappy listening holes risks very quickly becoming a signifier of immodesty, dishonourableness, and even sinfulness or sexual availability. Just add time and scale.

I was recently at a school meeting with about 120 other parents. Half of the mothers were still in summer gear: sun dresses, bare arms and shoulders, shorts, and sandals. The other half were wearing this head-and-neck partitioning gaze-concealment modesty garb, and quite a few of those women had paired it with those horrendous (though probably very handy!) all-concealing, full-body sacks.

The Madonna-Whore contrast between the harlot blancos and the Muslimas was striking. Muslim men would have been so proud of their modest women, if only they had been in attendance (children’s education is not for Dads ooga booga me big man me sit on fat arse watch porn on phone wait for dinner ooga booga).

So it has been really infuriating to watch how enthusiastically young woke women in France — most often the queer/polyamory/sex-work-is-work crew — have been performing this self-effacement on social media and selling it as some kind of go-girl liberatory statement.

They’re doing it because the nationalist-populist Rassemblement National party announced that, if elected, they would ban the hijab in public (this is a long-time project of Marine Le Pen’s). It’s a stupid idea because it’s so divisive — there are too many women who want/are forced/are gently pressured to self-conceal now, and it seems that there are no more universalist feminists left in France to produce all the theory and the opinion pieces and other ‘content’ to support a ban. What your mother called ‘feminism’ has been utterly captured by a combination of Third Worldism and male sexual paraphilia. The Ni putes ni soumises era is well and truly behind us.

A hijab ban is practically unworkable, too, even if it had widespread support (and likely unconstitutional). A video went viral of a French MEP asking one of the RN reps how the authorities are supposed to tell the difference between an Islamic veil, a Catholic nun’s habit, an Orthodox Jewish woman’s scarf, or a woman undergoing cancer treatment hiding her hair loss. It was an easy gotcha that demonstrated how silly the whole thing is. One wonders to what extent it was just a gimmick on the part of the RN to wind everyone up.

Women who are lucky to live in the West are stupid to endorse this sartorial sexual partition for clout, because it risks further entrenching the honour/dishonour dichotomy for the rest of us. Hijab is about honour, and we do not live — nor should we want to live — in an honour culture. And we all know that many women who claim that they choose to veil up are socially pressured into doing so. The consequences are hard to deal with on a daily basis. There may not be a gun held to their heads, but just think back to what it was like entering a supermarket during the height of COVID when you had forgotten to bring a mask. Tsk tsk. And the more hijabs in society, the more hijabs in society. I see it in my own heavily-Muslim neighbourhood.

I think the best thing to do is to be respectful and above all normal to all of the women who wear it, while continuing to challenge the claim that it’s ‘just a piece of cloth’ or that it’s in some twisted way a symbol of female empowerment akshually.

The I-heart-my-hijab ladies, the ones who say they wear it because they choose to wear it (often alongside a full-face of trowelled-on foundation, eye gunk, insane-looking lashes, tattoo eyebrows etc.) are like the self-declared “sex workers” who pretend prostitution is kool because they are freely choosing to prostitute themselves. These women get rolled out for the cameras and interviews as mascots for the message that it’s a job/scarf like any other.

Both types of woman promote the illusion that the enterprise of sex-for-pay/self-concealment is girlbossism, all while hiding the reality of the millions of girls and women who have zero choice in the matter. So while I won’t fight for women to be deprived of their stupid modesty cages, whatever form they take (or try to stop them dehumanising themselves by selling access to their vadges for coin), I certainly hope these stupid bitches stop promoting these things as some kind of empowerment.

We may find ourselves in a situation very soon where we might indeed find it favourable to segregate our heads, necks, and seductive shoulders from the lustful gaze of sexbeasts in the hope that they find us pure enough to be worthy of being left unmolested. However, I don’t think free women should contribute to the creation of a society in which them’s the choices.

Intersectional woke feminism seems to be taking the worst aspects of human nature and trying to appease its various base impulses in the hope of not getting raped first or worst. Piss off.

Hilariously, there’s been pushback to the pushback. I’ve seen Instagram posts of wokester hijabis claiming that non-Muslim women are appropriating their oppression (lol of course!) and now there’s an entire suite of aggrieved social media posts about this stolen valour. “You don’t get to cosplay our oppression” they say. Ah bon? Your oppression? Are we getting closer to the admission that this ‘choice’ is not really a choice at all? Ah no. The oppression is coming from non-Muslims who think the proliferation of veiled women is a horrifying symbol that civilisation is devolving to a more primal mean. Oh no, the oppression is not emanating from the cultural norm that associates the veil with our worth as humans. Could never be that.

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Belgium’s sex education system is dodgy as hell

All national governments have been under pressure for at least a decade to introduce a form of what’s known as comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) to their national school curricula. This global initiative originated with the WHO and UNESCO, and it’s incredibly controversial, as you may have heard.

One of the aspects of CSE that has drawn attention is the use of third-party providers to deliver the lessons (dedicated classroom-based lessons are expected to be provided alongside CSE-type content weaved through other school subjects). The WHO/UNESCO blueprint suggests that schools hire external providers to give these lessons for various reasons (including overcoming teacher discomfort), and this is how these lessons are being carried out in many EU countries.

During dedicated CSE classroom lessons, third-party providers are instructed to invite the kids to talk about topics that the kids themselves choose (according to a defined set of themes). Why is it designed this way? This ‘student-led’ method is supposed to ward off accusations that inappropriate sexual content is being imposed on children (the common critique levelled at the CSE model).

It is expected (hoped) that the kids will themselves bring up the ‘right questions’ (about puberty, condoms, consent, STIs etc.) It’s a clever workaround in theory: let the kids bring the content. You just have to hope that the kids don’t bring up inappropriate topics, or irrelevant topics. I have anecdotal evidence (and personal experience) that both happen.

The result is that external providers can (and do) end up nudging the kids in the ‘right’ direction. There’s also the fact that the providers are all, again to varying degrees, captured by insane woke politics about wrong-body genderism, as well as harm-reduction ideologies about sensitive topics like prostitution and chemsex. Ultimately, the CSE model is an experiment, and I don’t believe it will ultimately prove to be successful by the designers’ own standards.

Anyway, considering all that, you would hope that the third-party providers that are being hired by schools to work out the CSE experiment in real time would be subject to strict safeguarding measures. Who are these people? Can anyone take a job as a CSE teacher and hop from school to school directing conversations with kids about sex?

Individual countries are free (within limits) to design and deliver the CSE programme in whatever way they want. Whether or not they meet the standard to be considered to have implemented CSE correctly is subject to monitoring by various UN bodies. It was hoped that a uniform CSE ‘best practice’ design would emerge, but it ended up a patchwork (world-building by bureaucrats takes too little account of human nature, and their grand schemes rarely seem to translate well in the real world).

In Belgium, according to the law governing the provision of CSE, third-party providers of classroom (and extra-curricular) lessons must be attached to officially accredited organisations. They must go through a week of training, and they are expected to have a criminal background check (carried out by the organisation they are hired through). There is no other mandatory educational or professional requirement. In 2025, 17 providers were found to be “unaccredited”, according to a ministerial question, but there is no detail given as to how they found themselves in front of children.

One accredited provider (though it seems to have been removed from the list some time this year) has long rung alarm bells for me: the Brussels-based Love Health Centre. It was founded by a former Halliburton engineer called Olivier Mageren who, after a psychological breakdown, retrained for two years as a sexologist and signed up to become a certified CSE classroom provider. Mageren has been seen delivering CSE lessons (called EVRAS in Belgium) as recently as June in European schools (according to a source who must remain anon), the eye-wateringly expensive private schools that serve the children of EU institution staff.

Alongside his school work, Mageren has designed or co-designed an extensive programme of explicit sex-themed activities for adults: from mobile bike sex talks delivered in public (called “bike sexo”), to taboo-busting sex theatre shows, sex dinners, sex retreats, sex meditation, “liquid love” sessions (adults get together and roll around in oil), orgasm workshops, genital casting, lube-making, massage of various types (curiously, he’s happy to do these massages for free and according to one very enthusiastic alleged reviewer, he will “pour pure unconditional love through his hands”). He’s got a sex podcast, hosts sex discussion circles about whatever you want, gives sex talks (a Google review showed a happy customer thanking him for his “Focus on the Balls” session) and you can even pay for access to him and his wife’s intimate exchanges on Telegram.

He sells encrusted wooden dildos, and according to his website, he will soon offer access to videos of men masturbating (so you can learn how to do it better). He has published a picture-diary about penises (one assumes, his own), and is apparently writing similar large-format books about other men’s dicks. He has also created a kind of journal for teenage boys to track their ‘cycle’, which seems to be about masturbation.

But does it matter what the Love Health Centre is doing, as long as it’s not part of Mageren’s classroom EVRAS/CSE lessons? That’s where things get blurred. Using the EVRAS label and its institutional language, he advertises extracurricular child-focussed activities alongside the adult-focussed activities, for kids as young as 12, and it’s hard to see where one category begins and the other one ends.

He has spoken publicly about how central working with young people is to his professional identity. Mageren wants to make talking about sexuality part of people’s everyday lives, from a very young age, and he thinks adults should be sharing their own sexuality with young people. “When you feel comfortable with sexuality and have the opportunity to share it, let others know.” Young people “crave honest and direct discussions with adults,” he writes, and he frames adults who keep private lives private as “unavailable”. According to videos he has posted on YouTube, he advocates ignoring norms based on morality in favour of listening to the body, and connecting sexual pleasure to every part of life (school included).

To this end, he offers private EVRAS/CSE lessons to adolescents, as well as five-day camps (without parents), where children as young as 12 can go deeper into EVRAS/CSEthemes (because he insists that the school-based system is insufficient). Other activities he proudly advertises include improvised theatre performances for teenagers that are designed to progressively normalise increasingly explicit sexual topics (these performances have taken place in the European school system in Brussels on a number of occasions). In 2023, he presented a theatre production called Orgasms to secondary students, paired with an EVRAS/CSE session.

Mageren also developed a smartphone app that invites young people to get over their discomfort in EVRAS/CSE classes by allowing them to choose from 108 possible discussion topics (“taboos”, “fellatio”, are among the thematic examples on his site) so that the facilitator can address these themes in front of the class. His female co-collaborator at the Love Health Centre (I can’t confirm whether or not she is also going into schools) has spoken of “experimenting” with their practice through their “daily” contact with young people.

One very bizarre child-focussed activity Mageren offers is the “White Tent” experience, a session in which a boy and an adult (not necessarily parents or guardians) are invited to discuss the boy’s sexuality together with Mageren. The “white” refers to semen, he helpfully notes. But his services for children can take any form you like (private sessions, home visits, Skype, drop-ins), all of which represent an adult offering one-to-one intimacy with a minor to talk about sex, including away from the prying eyes of parents and school staff. There is nothing on the entire website or any of his platforms about chaperone rules, parental consent, recording of sessions, or a child-protection policy.

His YouTube channel is even more bizarre: among a bunch of videos with very few views, there is one video of Mageren tickling a female infant close to her intimate parts, and it has drawn roughly 71k views (and growing). Why has a video like this — on a channel otherwise barely watched — attracted so much attention? Content like this featuring young children in intimate contexts is known to attract a particular type of audience. Why is it still up?

The organisation for which Mageren was previously providing EVRAS/CSE lessons, Axado (a group of sexologists) told me he no longer works for them. Meanwhile, according to the official list of EVRAS/CSE providers, the Love Health Centre is no longer EVRAS-accredited. Yet he is still providing classroom lessons, and his website still uses the EVRAS label for advertising its services.

I have asked the European school (in Ixelles Brussels) for more information, as well as the government body responsible for regulating EVRAS provision, and Mageren himself under whose auspices he is still allowed access to 13- and 14-year old children to spread his bizarre obsessive philosophy.

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Brussels cancels trans kids film over “values”

“Generation Trans”, a film by Québécois director Jean-Pierre Roy, was provisionally agreed to be screened at Cinema Aventure, an arthouse cinema at the centre of Brussels. However, according to Roy, the cinema emailed him to say that the film didn’t correspond with the cinema’s values, and was being removed from the programme.

The screening was being co-organised with the Belgian parents’ support group Cry For Recognition and Isomer (a Belgian evidence-based medicine association). It had already been deprogrammed in Quebec City after the venue received threats.

Now the cinema disputes Roy’s claim that their comment about “values” was about the content of the film. Rather, head of programming Jérôme Branders told me by email that it was the way in which Roy communicated about the event that was contrary to the cinema’s values.

I smell a backtrack.

Holy-but-horny Indian guru spared an Eiffel eyeful of impure women

Some holy Indian guy came to France with a bunch of his followers to inaugurate a new temple, and they decided to go visit the Eiffel Tower while they were there, as you do. But that meant that all women would have to make themselves invisible so that the old geezer guru wouldn’t have to sully himself with the sight of our impurity. And the company that operates the Eiffel Tower agreed! The women were asked to hide out, or they were sent to a designated room to wait out his visit (the Guardian has more details).

The Paris authorities later apologised, for what it’s worth, and the female staff shut down the attraction by staging a walkout on Monday. Here’s a picture of the old todger (below). I was amused to learn that his movement is called BAPS lol.

For their part, BAPS claim their request had nothing to do with the sex of the staff, but the evidence points the other way.

Swiss plan to ban ‘conversion practices’ despite finding little evidence it’s happening

A tale as old as time: queer NGOs insist that the SCOURGE of torturous conversion therapy must be outlawed immediately! then committees and task forces and budgets are put in place to root out the phenomenon, only to find sparse evidence that it is happening.

This pattern has been repeated in countries all over Europe and now it’s Switzerland's turn. A research team couldn’t find proof of conversion therapy, so they relied on a survey run by academics who have publicly supported a ban. That survey found that 15.5% of trans-identifying people claim to have been subject to conversion practices (they were asked whether they had “been the target of attempts to change or suppress their sexual orientation and/or gender identity”, which could cover conversations with parents being confronted by a teen who tells them they are the opposite sex). The authorities nevertheless said they are ready for a ban, as a patchwork of cantons have already introduced their own bans. The law will likely criminalise parents who don’t affirm their children’s wrong-body delusions.

I wrote about how this played out in other countries in Unherd.

Europe’s most hardline immigration slayers: left-wing feminists, a lesbian, and a single mother

Women get a lot of jip for being bleeding-heart soppy left-voters who are destroying civilisation. But the EU has only two female leaders, Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen, and they are the most immigration restrictionist of the whole lot.

Despite coming from the opposite ends of the political spectrum (Meloni from the hard-right, and Frederiksen from the socialist left), they came together to make a pact about lowering immigration numbers, as they both see the arrival of large numbers of men from medieval-style honour cultures as a net negative for women and girls (and of course, gays).

Does being a girlmom have something to do with it? Or are they just good at predicting second-order effects? In Frederiksen’s case, as Europe-watcher Ruben Cober recently explained to me, her immigration restrictionist stance is a political strategy: give the voters what they want (less immigration) and you can hold on to power. I’m no political strategist, but that seems… obvious?

Frederiksen and Meloni have explicitly linked immigration to feminism and women’s safety. Meloni, a single mother, is hardly your idea of a traditional trad-fash she is portrayed as. Meanwhile, the leader of the far-right German AfD party, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian (who adopted her partner’s children as her own) and Sahra Wagenknecht, one of the most important politicians in Germany right now (for her power to grant the hard-right AfD the power they seek at state-level) is a left-wing populist.

Unfortunately, you cannot be a feminist or a women’s equality advocate unless you believe all the things. Regime feminists have decided that you can only be in the feminist club if you fight to abolish prisons, deify grotty transvestites, and put watermelons in all your bios.

As they say: “If your feminism doesn’t include (insert unrelated thing), it’s not feminism.”

A plastic surgeon privately offered to fix Mette Frederiksen’s nose and she publicly declined

Ageing results in declining fuckability (F) and can result in a reduction in female social status, and thus access to resources. So some women try to boost and/or maintain F , particularly those who have occupations in which being a frumpy bitch is just not an option. Mette Frederiksen, mentioned above, received a very generous offer from an aesthetic surgeon to help increase her F by “fixing” her nose. But she turned the offer down in a very public manner, taking to Instagram instead to reveal that down through the years she has received all kinds of helpful advice about her appearance — about her teeth, her hair, a wart on her nose, and advice about botox. But, she said, as she approaches 50, she is happy with her body. The poor sod thought he was being helpful. Hey wench, I’ll repair your wonky shnoz!

But she responded instead: “today, I’m sending an extra loving thought to all of you who have to put up with the ‘perfect imperfections’ we all walk around with every day.” Aww.

Trans activists celebrate Bulgaria trans court decision — but no law looks forthcoming

In July, the Bulgarian Supreme Court declared that administrative change of legal sex must be once again allowed via a judicial procedure, in order to align with EU rules. All such changes had been effectively banned in 2023.

Activists rejoiced.

But there’s no sign that the Bulgarian government has any plan to introduce a new legal gender recognition procedure, never mind self-ID. The July decision concerns four individuals who challenged the courts to have their IDs changed. NGOs (at home and abroad) still need to put pressure on parliament to create an actual legal procedure, not just put the workaround back in place.

The courts are now just back to doing the case-by-case process that existed in the past.

In terms of medicalisation, there are no protocols or pathways for trans medicalisation in Bulgaria. Endocrinologists told the government in response to a ministerial question (in 2024) that they cannot prescribe cross-sex hormones because there are no medical indications, no drugs registered in Bulgaria for that use, and no such recommendations in current treatment guidelines. However, there is evidence (via NGOs) that endocrinologists are prescribing hormones off-label.

Charlie Hebdo lawyer thought TERF case would be a breeze

I held a X space last weekend with France’s most terrorised TERFs, Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, about the (most recent) legal witch hunt against them. I’ll put the full recording online soon, but one thing has stuck in my head ever since the discussion:

Dora was convicted this year of “public insult” (now on appeal) over her comments on TV a few years ago that made transvestites feel sad. Her defence lawyer is Richard Malka, the same guy who defended the infamously (and fatally) irreverent Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in numerous ‘incitement’ cases before the courts.

He thought this TERF stuff would be a breeze. Dora said his confidence was largely based on the fact that he had no idea what he was dealing with. Having faced down the most rabid religious ideologues, he presumably thought the nonsense merchants of the trans fad would be a shoo-in He was soon disabused. Clearly the first time he had dealt with the wrath of the aggrieved woke.

The recording of the X Space will be out soon (bonus: we also had Tangui Le Dantec on, a Parisian teacher who has just lost his job over a sex-is-real wrongspeak)

The ladies just wrapped up a crowdfunder to pay for these new legal complaints. There are 6 new complaints in total, 3 of which are against Marguerite alone (one of them is for posting a video of a big fat gross adult baby and asking if perverts such as he could one day “identify” as whatever age they want).

Follow Dora here and Marguerite here.

Miroslav Djordjevic’s gender work is being paid for by Serbian state science fund

Last week I wrote about a Serbian urogenital surgeon called Miroslav Djordjevic who is on his way to fulfilling his dream of creating a biobank of genitals and reproductive organs that can one day be transplanted onto/into people seeking to escape their sex.

I got some horrified responses to this about transhumanism and Rothblatts and so on, but by all accounts this work is being funded by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia under its IDEAS programme.

While the organ bank will likely be located at Mount Sinai where Djordjevic practices (and where the market for his wares has the most… girth), the preliminary work on cadavers is taking place at the Forensic Institute of the University of Belgrade. That is likely because the use of cadavers for medical research is less strictly regulated in Serbia. In the US, donors would have to opt in for their body to be used, and an opt-in for genitals in particular would also be required. In Serbia, the authorities can order an autopsy (even against the wishes of next of kin) and whatever happens to the body next is less strictly controlled.

Who can we thank? Daniel Van Oosterwyck

Every stupid gender recognition law in Europe can be traced back to its very first applicant.

In 1966, a very dysphoric Belgian woman, who was working in the European Commission (then known by a different name), began ‘living’ as Daniel. The Commission later covered part of her surgery costs and issued her an employment card as Mr Daniel Van Oosterwyck. She started on hormones in 1969 after Belgian specialists (and British psychiatrist John Randell) diagnosed her with “transsexualism”. In 1970 she had a mastectomy, a hysterectomy, and ovariectomy. A ten-stage phalloplasty followed in London between 1971 and 1973.

But when she tried to get the Belgian authorities to recognise her as male, claiming an error had been made on her official registration record, she was refused.

So she escalated it to the European Commission of Human Rights (now defunct), claiming that the Belgian government’s refusal to change her official records was a breach of three different articles of the Convention, and the Strasbourg Commission found that indeed it was a breach of her right to a private life not to recognise her as male. It never got anywhere for boring technical reasons (the next court dismissed it on a procedural technicality) but the ball was set in motion: the Commission had recognised a privacy breach (Article 8) and that defined the Court’s future rulings: sexual identity was now firmly set within the frame of the right to private life under Article 8.

“Transsexual” activists all over Europe took note that it was the soundest legal framework for future litigation. No longer would they appeal for document changes on the basis of an “error”. Privacy and identity were to become the (winning) legal battlefield for trans rights. The rest is history.

I couldn’t find a photo of Daniel, but here is the book she wrote about her experience, and a poem about god mistakenly putting a boy’s soul in a girl’s body:

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In other news…

• Norwegian families with daughters avoid living in areas with non-Western immigrants WHAT A MYSTERY WHAT COULD POSSIBLY EXPLAIN THIS? I guess we’ll never know

• Ghent students are not done protesting Nathan Cofnas (term starts back up on 21 September)

• Two girls kidnapped and gang raped in Mallorca. The attackers get sex education/consent training and a restraining order, but no prison time

• Girl violently anally raped in Copenhagen park

• Why so many rapes in Italy?

• Austrian woman raped to death by men her husband invited to rape her while she was drugged

• No bail for alleged rapists in Galway; one of the Jordanian suspects said he should be released to see his new wife. A drunk girl asked them for help finding her friends and they pulled her into a car and took turns raping her

• Irish state-sponsored trans health conference includes a session on “ukulele endocrinology” (the official programme has been taken off-line)

• Allegations of ‘open secret’ abusive treatment of women by Kneecap, warning to New Zealand concert-goers

• Silvan Agius takes up Council of Europe job. CoE staff rules cover actual, potential and perceived conflicts of interest, and yet Agius is still listed a co-director of his new DEI consultancy, aequitasbridge, which already lists two different Council of Europe entities as clients

• Europe’s largest political science conference (which took place in Krakow last week) had only lefty papers - Eric Kaufmann

• Belgian kindergarten teacher wants to be called non-binary, parents told to change schools if they don’t like it

• Danish research: when women out-earn their husbands, their dicks literally stop working. Bruised sense of self, or are they just pornsick?

• Ursula von der Leyen is a horse girl? And there’s a horse group in the European Parliament? And it is led by the woman who introduced Belgium’s first legal gender recognition bill?

• Council of Europe has meeting about how to turn all their sneaky ECtHR legal judgements into actual laws

• Anti-whiteness race grift NGO loses EU core funding. Oh no!

• Genspect: How to raise safeguarding and governance concerns with the Irish health service

  Austria headscarf ban in schools enters into force

• German-language guide for schools on dealing with the trans issue

• Ireland: man who teaches breastfeeding kink dropped from breastfeeding support conference

• French activists want a law against “serophobie” (discrimination on the basis of being HIV positive)

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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1. The EU’s Fanny Studies spending spree

2. Gender loons are trying to trans the new EU research budget

3. Italian researchers created a ‘gender ideology’ conspiracy scale

4. Did Nathan Cofnas break Belgian law?

5. Both Slovakia and Poland have now disobeyed the EU’s top court on gay marriage.

6. This Serbian surgeon is following his dream of creating a repository of penises that he can sew onto sad women

7. UK court is forced by Strasbourg to deal (again) with a deranged bald woman who wants an X on her passport

8. I did an interview with Stella O’Malley from Genspect about my gender clinic adventures with my imaginary daughter

9. FGM NGO issues clarification: gender affirming care is not the same as FGM

10. Fuckparade apologises over pro-raver anti-Hamas remarks

11. French men are getting their Adams’ Apples shaved in a quest to not look like men, and now they can’t talk

12. Lesbian paradise holiday update: are they building a permanent centre on the island of Lesbos?

13. “They hadn’t read the room in Northern Ireland” - interview with Nora Calder

14. Who can we thank? Ailsa Spindler

Fanny Studies: Brussels’ woke waste problem

Ever since Saint Jason Arday ascended to the great Munchausen’s treatment clinic in the sky (RIP), the academic scandal that triggered his tragic downfall has been snowballing into something much bigger than the sum of its parts.

The woke mega-reckoning we have been waiting for may be upon us, as more and more pretenders-not-to-notice are forced to take a critical look at the conditions in Western universities that enabled Arday’s rise and fall.

Arday himself was just a chancer who gamed the system like any good chancer ought, and there’s a risk of getting distracted by his personal foibles. But his tall tales were merely the shiny object (he was literally shiny) that should now lead to a serious health check in the humanities and social sciences.

The scam at the core of Arday’s hustle was a twofer: not only did he plagiarise the research papers he presented as his own; the work he plagiarised was grievance activism larping as scholarship. His field, sociology, is particularly susceptible to trendy political fads — currently, ideological wokeism — far more than other fields of inquiry (he would have had a much harder time getting away with it in the quantum mechanics department).

Unfortunately, in the EU-based press thus far, reporting on the Arday story has mostly stuck to the man himself and the treatment he received. Where journalists have dared to zoom out and examine the wider context and implications, they have tended to focus on the phenomenon of DEI hires in academia, rather than the problem as it pertains to the ideological capture of the social sciences generally. German outlets seem to have gone the furthest: apart from a lot of coverage of “woke’ hiring practices, a few have ventured to question field-level claims about a fall in standards.

A growing chunk of publicly-funded research is polluted by woke ideology. But what is this ideology? In my understanding, it is an operating system that assumes that all inequalities are the result of prejudice against historically marginalised groups. And all this prejudice always has a prejudicer — a person or institution in a relative position of power over the prejudicee.

Any social phenomenon can be fit into this formula. When I kick “poor marginalised trans women” out of the women’s toilets, I am an oppressor clinging to my ill-gotten status as “a real woman”. My cisheteronormatve anti-kink positionality must also be problematised. Who am I to set boundaries around acceptable public behaviour? That’s just me tripping out on my power.

I suspect that some people are attracted to this kind of academic career because according to this model of how the world works, if you have no claim to being a victim (or worse, if you’re in the villain/perpetrator role), then your only shot at redemption is to be the best helper of the oppressed victims. If you look at the now-infamous video of Hilary Cremin welcoming Arday, she looks like the way Mother Teresa used to look at the emaciated povvers in the slums.

These sociologists, who back up their assumptions by laundering dodgy grievance-based faff that has gone before, start their research projects with the cause of all the world’s social ills already sorted out — all that’s left is to describe every instance of it and offer ways to even up the score. The possibilities are endless.

I decided to look into some of the EU-funded research that fits this grievance model, which I prefer to call Fanny Studies*, and I found that this domain of… investigation… is consuming vast sums of EU taxpayer money while bringing very little to the world apart from fodder for activism and more grievance.

(*Fanny Studies is a term coined by Charlotte Gill, a one-woman British government spending accountability machine — “Woke Waste” is also a term Charlotte uses, check out her Substack.)

I looked at some examples of gender, sexuality and race-related funded research, as well as anything that involves fannying around about victimhood and muh marginalisation. In Europe, gypsies are included in the victimhood repertoire, too, but this identity has so far failed to get completely wokified. There may turn out to be features of the culture of gypsy/Roma/traveller communities that may make them immune to this kind of bullshit. It will be interesting to see how that effort pans out. Worryingly, it looks like “neurodivergence” is increasingly getting scooped up as a ripe topic for some fake-investigative fannying around (neurodiversity was, indeed, one of the load-bearing grievance pillars that propped up Jason Arday’s grift).

So here as some examples:

The EU gave €1.9 million to the researchers of a project called WEIRD, which “centers disability and queer knowledges to challenge ableist and cis-heteronormative assumptions in environmental research, action, and policy”. The researchers will work with “emancipatory sustainability transformations that rely on subversive social norms” which involves “cripping environmentalism”. The theoretical foundations of this is eco-crip theory, and I’ll just let you google that to see how insane it is.

They promote “trans* and queer science” (as opposed to the very-bad, no-good science-science), and insist that sustainability must be rooted in “care and emancipation”. Earlier this year they had a workshop on “monstrosity” (yes, monsters) by a woman pretending to be not-a-woman, who criticised the messaging around chemicals that are harmful to human brain health (that’s ableist!). She suggested instead that we find “ways of living with polluted metabolisms”. The workshop attendees then did a stream of consciousness free-writing exercise which they turned into bad poems and read aloud to each other. The project also hosted a workshop called Transecological Relations: The Animal-Animal, More-Than-Animal, Human Animal, More-Than-Human and the Even-More-Than-That" hosted by someone called Ely/iott (a first name that’s also a neopronoun?) There were even more poems.

INTERMAPS, meanwhile, got €1.2 million to create a web-based tool where you input all your feelings about your intersectional oppressions, and then you get a little graph like the one below that shows you, uh, all your sads but like, in a graph.

The researchers argue that mapping technologies use hard, measurable data like coordinates, boundaries, distances, and populations, but fail to capture humanist, feminist, decolonial, queer, and Black perspectives. They wanted a sciency-looking thing that would allow people to map their personal sob stories, emotions, and “shifting boundaries”. The project team literally hired a web development company to build this tool, who must have thought they were insane.

In a paper from the project called “Resisting and transgressing cisheteronormativity at home: LGBT+ youths’ active strategies” one of the researchers groaned in big words about the emotional labour that “queer kids” are forced to endure in the face of '“adultism” and “cisheteronormativity” in their parents’ homes. 30 of the researcher’s mates and mates-of-mates who identify as “queer” were asked about how they feel in the various rooms of their parents’ houses, through the lens of their sexuality and gender identity. It appears that bathrooms have a particular salience for people with funky sex identities. Public bathrooms have been extensively explored as a way to express your funky genderfeelz, we’re told, but has anyone done a study on the bathroom at home? It’s a place for performativity and sexual pleasure, the mates-of-mates reveal. This is evidence of something (not sure what) and it will lead to more opportunity for discussion (not sure about what).

The project DCitizens (€1.2 million) helped move us all “Towards Neuroqueer Spatial Justice” while BORDER-TRANS wants to reject western notions of why feminine men from Venezuela and Paraguay sell sex to men in Brazil (I can tell you why, it’s because there’s a market for their curious physiology. It’s not complicated). This RavEcs (Rave Ecstasy) guy has been given €200k to study how ecstatic raves help with de- and re-subjectivation as part of their gender identity journey. SQUAT, which has just been signed (also €200k) wants us to treat squatting as a serious rights-based housing practice deserving legal-philosophical reappraisal, rather than accepting the standard “trespass/law-breaking” framing.

POLITENESS (€260k) will explore how black dancers in Switzerland are perceived through a “white lens”, addressing the double marginalisation faced by Black LGBTQIA+ dancers othered by the “white gaze”. It “aligns with the Black Lives Matter movement”. Or what about this explicitly anti-Zionist (slipping sometimes into anti-Jewish) decolonial geography waffle, or REPTARQ (Ecstatic Utopias: Reorienting audiovisual Evocations of Place Towards A Relational Queer future) a bargain for only €258,000, which is a study of utopia beyond climate collapse, as informed by the author’s experience of being queer in a straight society. It seems to involve making psychedelic art using queer aesthetics and transcendent experiences, all of which will help reorient the future. Ok little buddy!

This one is my favourite: in 2019, €2 million was given to a researcher called Shanshan Lan for CHINAWHITE, a study how white people are faring when they go to China for work. That indeed sounds like a very interesting sociological study.

But Lan’s thing is “whiteness theory”, and you can almost feel the glee with which she reveals that white people’s “white privilege” is stripped away when they are in China. However, she found that “white people still demonstrate a certain degree of agency in manipulating the Chinese gazes for their benefits through the strategic performance of different versions of whiteness.”

She reported that one woman working in an English school had had to alter her presentation of her “white femininity” (you can almost hear the cattiness). The preference for white teachers in China is caused by global “white supremacist ideologies”, according to Lan. Isn’t it amazing how white people are the reason why Chinese people do racist things?

I, a white person, used to teach English as a foreign language to rich executives, and when the Japanese car guys would find out I was Irish, they would get their secretaries to call the school and ask that I be replaced with a British teacher instead. They were worried they might end up speaking English with a Dublin accent (you fucking wish, mate! You can’t even say R!). They don’t want a Nigerian-inflected accent, but they also don’t want to sound like a Kiwi. That’s not to say people aren’t racist, but sometimes there are other explanations for things than white-man-bad.

But the field of gender grievance is where EU funding waste really shines: there has been so much money given to academics who purport to want to figure out why oh why people hate gendershite, and what we can do to make sure these people (normies) don’t get anywhere near power. These ‘anti-gender’ projects are infuriating, because it’s very obvious to me that if you mix women’s rights up with transvestitism and child ‘sex changes’, people’s enthusiasm for the whole lot will suffer.

But no, we have to pretend not to see the link. Here are some of the projects that have been funded to pretend (in fancy language) not to understand why anyone would reject trans-inclusive intersectional ‘gender frameworks’: RESIST (€2.3 million), BeyondOpposition (€1.9 million), PushBackLash (€2.1 million), CCINDLE (€2.7 million), FIERCE (€2.5 million) TROUBGEN (€2.5 million), UNTWIST (€2.7 million).

All of these projects look, on the surface, like they’re about the backlash to ‘gender equality’ but what ‘gender equality’ now means is crossdressers and kids mutilating themselves, and lactation fetishists joining women’s breastfeeding groups. But none of that (combined) €16.7 million will be able to come to that conclusion, because their entire academic careers are now predicated on protecting the trans lie at all costs.

Anyway, I think you get the idea. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

There was something that struck me in my research: sometimes I would come across a fanny studies-sounding project whose description was completely off-the-wall, blatant activism, but then I would look at the researchers involved and their previous work, and I would find nothing at all to suggest that he or she was anything other than a very serious, non-ideological sociology scholar. They may have an entire career built on studying inequality, but their work was evidence-based and neutral. And often the work produced as part of the woke-sounding project itself even seemed to be antithetical to the woke assumptions built into the project marketing. It was bizarre.

A good example is the project UNDETERRED (€3 million) which stands for “Unintentional Discrimination Detected and Racism Reveal and Deactivate”. That description makes it pretty clear what the project thinks and wants to find. But I found a video of the opening conference in Bordeaux where one of the lead researchers seemed eager to insist that he’d got involved in the project on the basis that this was to be an open, neutral enquiry. He was almost warning the others that he wouldn’t be entering into it with an ideological bias. Which is bananas, because the project name and description suggests the whole thing is 100% grievance-based.

Why would anyone do this? I reached out to the researcher from UNDETERRED to ask him but I got no response, so I spoke to other academics about what might be going on. It seems like it could be a mix of things: younger researchers are indoctrinated in this stuff by the time they get to university, while older scholars seem to be going along with a trend. Indeed, I asked Claude to help me match ERC-funded project descriptions to the researchers’ previous output, and a pattern emerged: the longer a researcher has been in the field, the more likely it was that their previous work did not at all vibe with the ideological, woke-coded research they were involved in. Conversely, the younger the researcher, the more likely it was that their small back catalogue was as woke as the project description suggested.

A TERF academic explained to me that when your research proposal is rejected you have no way of knowing why it was rejected, because evaluations are not transparent. The only clue is to look at what did get funded, and take your cues from there. And if the successful projects contain trendy gobbledygook (she told me that at one point, ‘mindfulness was all the rage, now it’s ‘queer’, ‘intersectional’, and ‘decolonise’) then you’re incentivised to use the trendy keywords in your own research proposal.

The project (De)Colonizing Sharia? might be a good example of this phenomenon. The PI seems to be a very serious scholar who wants to know what effect Western laws had on Sharia law. In this description of the project on her university website, she was sure to make a point about the misleading title.

Does this mean that proper scientists are dressing up their grant applications in woke-sounding nonsense as a way to catch the attention of evaluators? Are financial incentives for leaning in to the grievance model dragging good scholars into its nonsense morass? Incredible, if true.

What’s harmful about all this, of course, is if this woke shite is getting money thrown at it, what areas of study are not getting support? Also, all the ‘output’ of this expensive fannying around gets recycled back through the EU’s policy-making apparatus, meaning it escapes the nonsense lab and infects everyday life via public policy and law.

In EU member states, these silly programmes can and do draw the attention and ire of the public and the press, which helps slow their roll slightly. But the setup of the EU government means there is very little attention paid to grants handed out to researchers by bureaucrats in Brussels. Funding trendy academic pursuits is felt less directly by anyone on the ground in real Europe. Despite the fact that it represents a huge pot of cash, once per-capita’d among 452 million EU citizens, I guess it’s too insignificant an amount for anyone to get very bothered about. One can only hope that the next EU budget, which is currently being negotiated, the next research slice (called FP10) will get the scrutiny it deserves.

If we want to make sure that universities maintain their place of prestige high in the people’s hearts (and avoid it going the way of the media) we’re going to have to — as they say in the grievance business — “deconstruct” it.

Gender loons are trying to trans the EU research budget

Since 2022, it has been mandatory for anyone receiving EU funding to have a Gender Action Plan. This rule applies to public bodies, research institutes (public and private), and all universities, and the only exceptions are private businesses and non-European applicants.

Luckily, the Gender Action Plan policy was conceived and designed before the great entrooning of everything, so it only covers equality between the two sexes, and not mysterious inner genderfeelz. But that might be about to change.

Sometime around 2022, just as the new gender rules were coming into force, the Commission started putting in place the architecture to overhaul that system to make it “intersectional”. Intersectionality is empty virtue marketing, but it’s also a solid clue that trans nonsense is involved (a person at the intersection of being a woman and being trans = bloke in a dress). To design the new policy, about 10 new research projects were established (and generously funded) to work on Inclusive Gender Action Plans that go “beyond a binary understanding of gender and integrate(s) multiple axis of oppression and privilege.”

A special subgroup has been set up to work on these new plans, and this booklet they produced last year claims that being inclusive means “taking into account the biological characteristics (sex) of women, men and intersex persons and the – changing – social and cultural features (gender) of women, men and non-binary and transgender people”. Here’s a workshop from June on what a Gender Action Plan would entail.

If they are successful, it will mean that in order to qualify for an EU grant in the future, applicants may have to prove that they have trans-inclusive and non-binary policies in place, or show that they have adapted their HR systems to report on not just sex stats but also the gender/gender identity of their staff and students. Some universities have been held up as models to be emulated, including George Soros’ Central European University which has put in place anti-deadnaming and anti-misgendering policies, as well as medical transition cover for people who want to surgically Legofy themselves.

These researchers from Ireland, among many others, are really gunning for these strict rules to be put in place.

The incentive will be very clear: to score higher on your application in a highly competitive application process, you will want to be sure to tick all of Brussels’ boxes. A trans-inclusive policy would run headfirst into British law that sex means sex for the purposes of the Equality Act (post-Brexit UK institutions are once again eligible for EU funding as of January 2024).

Some of the ‘stakeholders’ involved in designing these plans are adamant that everything must be trooned, while others are not mentioning the issue, or skirting around it. I suspect, as always, the Commission is hoping that whatever course of action they take, people will just pay no attention to it and it will go away. But I think those days are over.

Italian researchers created a ‘gender ideology’ conspiracy scale

Thanks to these Italian researchers, your TERFy derangements can now be psychometrically measured with the Gender Ideology and LGBTQ+ Lobby Conspiracy Beliefs scale. The scale, which was first published in 2024 and has just been translated into Spanish and ‘validated’ on a sample group in Chile, posits that a belief in ‘gender ideology’ is a sign of conspiracy thinking. Here are some of the statements in it, participants have to score themselves on a scale of one to five: “There are very powerful LGBT people who manage to influence the decisions of the Parliament and the Government, to the detriment of other citizens”. Cinq points. “Some very powerful people want to spread ‘gender ideology’ in schools to indoctrinate children”. Cinq points. “A group of LGBT people has organized to infiltrate all major sectors of society to increase their influence on it”. Cinq points.

Those are just facts?

One of the frustrating things about dealing with these people is that they refuse to even acknowledge that “gender ideology” is real and that they are operating according to it (GLAAD calls it “a malicious rhetorical construct”). It is repeatedly denied to exist at all in any sense other than a bogeyman made up by the far right. The Italian researchers do the same, calling it “supposed gender ideology” unwilling to even concede that there is a theory, or a framework about gender.

I don’t really get it — do they want us to think that they are impervious to ideology, that gender faff is just the air we breathe? They want us to believe there’s no underlying belief system propping up their claims that any man can put a bow in his hair and be a woman? The rainbow crosswalks, the pronouns, the hectoring, the dedicated days, weeks, months, the millions in funding, the cult-like adherence …. There’s no animating set of values and beliefs?

“Not an opinion, but a crime”: Did Nathan Cofnas break Belgian law?

There’s a phrase you come across often in Belgian social media comment sections under posts about heated topics: in Dutch it’s “geen mening maar een misdrijf” and in French it’s “pas une opinion, mais un delit.”

It means “It’s not an opinion, it’s a crime.”

I see this all the time when anyone dares say something TERFy, because in Belgium comments that are negative about identity groups can be interpreted as inciting discrimination or hatred. And a few months ago, when Nathan Cofnas was hired at Ghent University, a Belgian appellate judge wrote an article in which he claimed that Cofnas’ work on disparities between races (which Cofnas also calls ancestral groups) cannot be defended in terms of academic freedom or free speech, because Belgium’s anti-racism law was written to catch any conclusions that assert a hierarchy between racial groups.

It is the same law and the same logic that got Dries Van Langenhove convicted — the judge found that he was spreading ideas of racial superiority in a lecture in which he compared crime rates between different racial groups. The judge disregarded whether or not the stats were true, in that case. The same could be applied in Cofnas’ case, in theory.

Read the judge’s opinion here

Both Poland and Slovakia are now defying top EU court over recognition of gay marriage

Poland’s constitutional court overturned the plan to recognise same-sex marriages that took place in other EU member states, and the government of Slovakia did the same, repeating at the end of July that it will not recognise same-sex marriages conducted elsewhere in the European Union. Both are now openly defying an order from the EU’s top court that EU countries must recognise the legal effects of these unions.

In related news, a Slovak man who married his male partner in Britain in 2022 has lost his Slovak citizenship. People who acquire another citizenship through marriage (or while residing permanently) in another country can retain their Slovak citizenship, but that doesn’t cover same-sex unions. The Slovak Ministry of the Interior notified the man in March 2024 that he would no longer be a Slovakian citizen. The case is now being addressed in the two top European courts: both the CJEU and the ECtHR.

This Serbian man is building a penis bank

One of the most well-known (and some say, the best) surgeons in the world for ‘bottom surgery’ is a Serbian man called Miroslav Djordjevic. And Miroslav has a dream: his dream is that one day, all of the penises that are removed from the bodies of men during male-to-female gender-affirming surgery can be re-used and sewn onto the crotches of women during female-to-male gender affirming surgery.

To do that, he plans to build a repository of penises, as well as other reproductive organs, namely uteruses (to implant into men). The preparatory work for fulfilling this dream is already underway at the Forensic Institute of Belgrade. The penis bank may ultimately end up in Mount Sinai clinic in New York, where Djordjevic also practices, presumably because the market for trans penis implants will be larger there.

The first phase of the project involves perfecting the process of penis removal, to make sure it’s in good shape to be stitched onto the female recipient. One of the team’s most recent papers examined how to check that the penis doesn’t have internal trauma, because if a penis was damaged somehow (perhaps due to sexual trauma, or cancer), it might not be good to attach it to someone else.

It makes total sense not to throw away these dicks, as Djordjevic has made clear in a number of interviews. Why would you try to fashion a dick out of a woman’s arm or thigh when you have all these perfectly good penises going in the trash?

Of course there is a very good reason why the material for the pseudopenis must come from the body of the woman herself: a donated penis would likely be rejected if it came from a stranger. So the next step, according to Djordjevic, is to either find someone who is already on immune-suppressing drugs who wants a stranger’s penis attached to them, or find two people from the same family, one who wants his penis removed and the other who wants to have this penis attached to themselves.

Never give up on your dreams!

British woman’s quest to get X on passport passes first test at ECtHR

A woman called Christie Elan-Cane started legal proceedings against the British government in 2013 after the passport office refused to officialise her claim that she is neither male nor female. Gerrup, they told her, and thus started a years-long mission to fight them over it.

She claims that she has been grotesquely failed by the state, has no civil rights, and is treated like she is “less than human” (check out the sad music in the background of that video!!) The case made it to the UK Supreme Court in 2021, but the court ruled that the government's refusal to issue gender-neutral X passports did not breach her human rights

But she has just had her case found admissible by the European Court of Human Rights who have issued a formal request that the UK Government, asking them to submit a response. They have until 16 October to respond.

I did an interview with Stella O’Malley from Genspect about my gender clinic adventures with my imaginary daughter

I’ve been ‘touring’ my fake daughter around the clinics and for-profit hormone peddlers for the past couple of years. I describe some of these adventures to Stella O’Malley of Genspect, with some new info on the Antwerp clinic (ZAS Cadix) where I went undercover and had a 50-minute consultation with a gender goblin about drugging my extremely mentally ill child, a female-to-male self-harming autist I call “Max”. This is the same clinic where the Irish health services has been sending kids ever since the Tavistock closed down.

Enjoy my AI face!

FGM NGO issues clarification: gender affirming care is not the same as FGM

“My infographic that insists that gender-affirming care is not at all similar to female genital mutilation is raising a lot of questions already answered by my infographic that insists that gender-affirming care is not at all similar to female genital mutilation.”

An “End FGM” Network seems quaint in these cultural-relativising times.

Berlin Fuckparade organisers issue apology after NOVA pro-raver post

The Fuckparade is an annual summer techno street party in Berlin, and on 20 August, they put out a statement on their Instagram account standing up for the only people who really matter: the ravers.

It was in response to complaints that there was a lack of Palestine flags in their alternative hardcore street techno festival. Whoever runs their Instagram account, rather than apologise, instead criticised Hamas for committing violence against “dancing people”, which is understandable because anyone who is an enemy of a rave party is an enemy of a Fuckparader.

They did not get away with it.

They had to apologise very forlornly and distance themselves from the individual who made the post honouring the Dancing People, and what’s more, they made clear that the apology was more like a pre-apology, which they are just putting out as they work on a longer thing. “We ask for some time to appropriately address this incident within the Fuckparade organizing team and will publish an official statement in the near future.”

French men are getting their Adam’s Apples shaved and losing the ability to speak

There’s a lot of talk about women removing their perfectly healthy breasts and entering menopause in their 20s in their quest to trick you into thinking they are the opposite sex, but there has been relatively little thought given to the men who are maiming themselves for the same reason.

It might be because the male trans journey relatively rarely involves removing the genitals; most of the time when you hear that a man has undergone ‘gender-affirming surgery’, it just means he’s got some big-ass knockers stitched onto his chest.

But there is another type of surgery that some men are putting themselves through that is much less often commented upon, and it’s a surgery that appears to have minimal levels of success. That’s a lesson French men have been learning the hard way.

Getting your Adam’s Apple shaved down is one of the methods some men think will contribute to them passing as women. However, it’s not without its risks: your vocal chords are attached by a ligament that lies very close to where the surgeon must shave. A French guy on Reddit recently shared his experience in a detailed essay about the hell he went through and the multiple expensive surgeries he had to undergo, as well as his discovery that his case is not at all uncommon. He reports that speech pathologists are starting to deal with a growing number of men who have lost their voices this way, and that “about fifteen of us in France have already shared our experiences…and medical articles are finally beginning to appear on the subject.”

Update: EU asterisk-lesbians* have an office on the hard-to-reach holiday paradise island

Who is paying for the renovation of this building on the hard-to-reach lesbian party beachtown on the hard-to-reach lesbian paradise island of Lesbos? The Eurocentralasian Lesbian Community (EL*C) is one of the NGOs that gets millions in EU funds to represent lesbians (men included) and despite their obligation to spend the public’s money responsibly, they have been organising their events on the extremely remote spot that is probably one of the most expensive places to fly to in all of the EU.

And I just discovered that they have either bought, or leased, a building in which they are carrying out extensive building works to adapt it for more events in the future, suggesting it may become a more regular base from which to conduct their “community building”. EU funding rules don’t allow for the purchase of property or renovation work, but they allow for adaptations that make a venue more accessible, for example. One assumes that refers to wheelchair ramps. But this looks much more extensive and expensive than a mere wheelchair ramp.

They have called it “the EL*C office”.

That’s quite the luxury. Flying and shipping lesbians from all over Europe and Central Asia to this far-flung holiday island is eye-wateringly expensive compared to getting everyone to, say, a bleak conference room in Barcelona or Brussels. But that’s the beauty of being an EU-funded NGO. You can do whatever you want, all the time, and nobody pays any attention or demands any accountability. I wouldn’t even care if it weren’t for these women’s steadfast determination to erase women as a sex category in EU law, and to pretend gross autogynephiles can be lesbians. All this while snacking on olives and sipping ouzo on the public dime.

I have written to ask who is paying for this luxury project, I will update if I hear back.

They hadn’t read the room in Northern Ireland — interview with Nora Calder

Interview about the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland and how the recent drama over the cancellation of their event in Belfast.

Who can we thank? Ailsa Spindler

ILGA-Europe began as a gay and lesbian rights organisation in 1996, established as the European offshoot of ILGA-World (which began in the UK in 1978). According to Nico Berger, who worked for the organisation in the early days (and now runs a BDSM club), transgender people were added to ILGA-World’s mandate a conference in Rio 1995, a location that made the addition logical because the local gay and trans groups had a history of working together (travestis are gay men innit). That’s how ILGA-Europe inherited the trans issue, despite trans people having nothing to do with gay and lesbian movement in Europe at the time.

The very first executive director of ILGA-Europe, Ailsa Spindler, was a man masquerading as a woman. He took up the leadership role just as the organisation added trans issues to its official work programme. This 2000-2001 activity report shows how the organisation was trying to add ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender appearance’ to EU documents whenever they could, as well as trying to make sure ‘gender identity’ was considered under the protected ‘gender’ (sex) ground in EU law.

They were doing this because they had received EU funding for an office and staff, but they were restricted to working on sexual orientation only (under Article 13 and the employment framework directive). That document also declared their new mission of adding more trans members.

Spindler came along the year after.

He has a a classic back story: wife and two kids, transition, divorce, trans activism. Under his tenure, in 2003, the organisation began a working group on trans issues, and their first job was to work out words and definitions “as many problems had been experienced at EU level”. The problem wasn’t just the English language, it was all of them, as ILGA-Europe, as per its mandate, was supposed to represent people all across the EU.

The annual meeting in 2003 had two panels on trans issues, but it was still not supposed to be part of their officially-funded work. Help came in 2004 when the Sigrid Rausing trust gave the organisation a grant to work on Eastern Europe, the Council of Europe, and transgender issues.

Spindler managed to get himself elected to the management committee of the Platform of European Social NGOs, an influential position, but he went back to Scotland after only two years to take up a different NGO job (I was told by someone who worked with him that he was not a nice person, and not a great manager). Here’s the newsletter announcing his departure.

He eventually ended up in Kerry and then Cork (Ireland) to work on other taxpayer-funded trans activist projects. He seemed particularly keen on getting men into women’s sports. In 2024 he stood for election (as a woman) in the ILGA-Europe executive board elections, but lost.

Here he is. Say thanks to Austin (Ailsa).

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In other news

• Sybilla Claus takes the piss out of Amsterdam’s new Walk of Pride paving stones project

• Amsterdam city officials under fire over queer-only housing development

• Go hard or go home: Sara Morrison is going back to court: she’s appealing the ruling of her dismissal case and she needs your support!

• Norway: lesbian grovels, resigns from Pride event she founded after she invited known TERF operatives

• France court strikes down under-15s social media ban. That might make it a harder sell at EU level

• Bernard Lane: survey suggests Dutch protocol think the Dutch protocol should be abandoned

• University of Ghent voice study “underscore(s) the importance of early puberty intervention” in boys so that they grow up sounding like women

• Irish UPR kicks off soon. This is how NGO wishlists get laundered though the UN so your government can claim they were forced to do things

• Gangbangs in one Paris neighbourhood have been banned because they’re a violation of women’s dignity (not banned in all of France, as I mistakenly recently reported)

• Half of the immigrants in a Swedish study think homosexuality is unacceptable

• Dutch man wins the right to have his womanface facial surgeries reimbursed by state insurance

• African migrants in Europe are promoting a pro-FGM campaign in Mali

• French MAID: Right to assisted dying established for patients with “conditions assessed as incurable and causing unbearable pain”

• Iceland says No to more talks about joining the EU

• Montpellier: man pretending to be woman violently attacked

• German hospital porter charged with raping 6 dead women, one dead man

• There are 115 women for every 100 men in Latvia

• Woman raped in train station during Galway races

• Hate attacks on gay people using Uber and other rideshares are on the increase in the US. Is it happening in Europe?

• Girl moms Meloni and Frederiksen want to do something about mass immigration

• More stories of teenage boys targetting gay men on hookup apps: this one resulted in a murder in Austria

• Dutch We Claim the Night campaigner asks for better infrastructure, but won’t take into account gangs of horny, aimless immigrant men just moping around aimlessly

• Young prostituted woman stabbed to death in Marche-en-Famenne (Belgium)

• State of the European Union (the absolute HACK of it), speech on 16 September. I will livestream. This is where Ursula von der Leyen drops hints on what she’s got planned for the year. See my pinned tweet for the stream on the day

• France: Airbnbs have a brothel problem. Owners who don’t prevent them being used for prostitution face huge fines

• French police man (head of gay police NGO) violently attacked in Paris

• Video: nightmare for women in Ceuta migrant centres

• ILGA-Europe podcast: Did Armenia anti-gay activists create a fake Pride festival?

• Irish MEP claims women and girls are being used as a “shield” to target the trans community

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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I can’t even remember what I thought news was back before I had this earth-shattering epiphany. Did I imagine there was some kind of mineral-rich spring of Things That Happened, a bubbling geothermal pool of eternally-replenishing events and developments, into which editors and journalists daily lowered their buckets? There’s no point in everyone turning up at the courts, the car accidents, or the scenes of the sexual crimes and standing around asking W questions about it. The media fetches all the things that happened, and serve them up to us fresh so we can go about our daily lives. Don’t they?

As I was belatedly to learn, barring major events like tsunamis, deaths of celebrities, or elections, what’s ‘news’ is the decision of the people who work in a given news company. If there’s a gang-rape at a Galway train station, a reporter is just as likely to come back from a trip to the news well with a bucket full of story about an Irish language dispute concerning the same station, while side-stepping the arguably more important headline story. But what about the gang-rape!? cry the eyewitnesses and the locals and the independent politicians and the comments sections and the stubborn, swivel-eyed loons shouting on Twitter and YouTube street corners.

But those people are not official newsbringers. You can safely ignore them. We open the paper or zap on the Six O’Clock news on the day of the train station gang-rape and Lo! it didn’t happen. Phew, that’s a relief.

The absence of the story in the official newsbringer channels, sites, and pages does more than just keep people ignorant of a thing having happened, it does something far more insidious: surely… surely… if something so momentous, so consequential, so indicative of a larger societal issue had taken place, it would have been served to us? The fact that it hasn’t been reported says something about the people who are claiming it did happen, or claiming that it matters. It says either that the people bleating on about it are wrong, or that they are trying to make news of something that isn’t news. Either option points to a nefarious agenda on the part of the stubborn town criers insisting it’s important.

Millions of us lumber along under this cloud of received naïveté. I was only snapped out of it because something that I knew to be news happened, and then it happened again, and then it happened over and over and over again, and the media decided it didn’t happen. And only after much, much cajoling, they acknowledged begrudgingly that ok, maybe it happened, but it wasn’t news enough for it to qualify as having happened-happened.

In that sense, the recent running media coverage in Northern Ireland surrounding the scrubbing of the Women’s Rights Northern Ireland event from an annual cultural festival programme was incredible. It was treated as the newsworthy event that it was.

Northern Ireland’s media class (though not its political class) seems to have accepted and acknowledged that there is a conflict of rights between an existing policy (women can keep men away from us, sometimes) and a newer, more fashionable policy (women cannot keep men away from us because men are sometimes actually women themselves).

And though the NI media establishment has been just as conveniently craven as their counterparts in other jurisdictions, it may be harder to ignore the erasure of sex in law there, for a few different reasons.

First of all, Northern Ireland is affected by the UK Supreme Court pronouncement that woman has a biological meaning in law, so news editors can’t be accused of “obsessing over trans people” by reporting on it (a common trope on the activist side to deflect attention from their insane demands). The fact that there is a squabble brewing over which jurisdiction's laws apply in the courts in the context of male access to women’s spaces and services — the UK’s, the EU’s, or some domestically-derived third thing — has pushed the entire trans issue further into the ‘mentionable’ category of current affairs.

Secondly, the size of Northern Ireland, and the concentrated nature of its mainstream media offering, helps focus everyone’s attention more or less on the same time thing at the same time. Thanks to previous reporting on the issue, including some straight-reporting on Sara Morrison’s workplace tribunal dispute, the general public had a decent level of prior knowledge on the topic. Thirdly, there’s the fact that the BBC (which has a Northern Ireland channel) was embarrassed about revelations about its one-sided transactivist content last year. Editorial policy change might more quickly be felt on such a small terrain.

Also, as anyone who followed last week’s events will know, ur-TERF JK Rowling jumped into the fray, adding to the newsiness of the affair. And of course there’s always the sneaking suspicion that there’s a secret TERF working on the news desk.

All of this meant that the incident(s) got pretty good coverage overall. And coverage is pretty much all anyone ever expected or wanted: acknowledgement that a policy or legal development clashes with an already existing policy or law, and acknowledgement that the effort to sort it all out is leading to some drama. This allows the public to make up their own minds on the issue, which they are now free to do, despite some outlets’ best efforts to steer opinion in their preferred direction: Sex Matters have done a detailed autopsy of the local reporting of the incident and found a lot of it to be bad, biased, or incomplete. But one thing they cannot fault the media for is the fact that the coverage happened at all. And that, for TERFs, is major news in itself.

Nora Calder, one of the women behind Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, who acted as spokeswoman during a number of media spots during the drama, told me that the establishment has perhaps underestimated the degree to which people in Northern Ireland have been knowin about this issue, and have come to their own conclusions about its newsworthiness. By continuing to ignore or downplay it, media companies risk further shitting all over their own credibility — something that (as I have been told by a number of journalists) editors in other countries are very much fretting about, but are unsure about how to resolve.

It’s a bit like the tax bill you thought would go away if you shoved it deep enough under the pile of instruction manuals for electrical appliances in the kitchen mess drawer (true story). This stubborn not-news about trans activism versus women’s rights just will not fuck off. The media is slowly and sourly putting their finger under the seal of the envelope and ripping it open.

The cultural sector did not get get the memo, of course. The utterly mortifying grovelling of the Féile festival oragnisers to appease the online activist mob felt almost retro; their hastily-drafted Instagram knee-bend in which they announced that no TERF would darken their stage harked back to an earlier, sillier time. Those days are clearly over; requests to join Women’s Rights Network are through the roof, Nora told me.

Enjoy the interview.

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Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

Show notes (AI generated)

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with Nora Calder, one of the women involved in running the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, about the extraordinary events surrounding the cancellation of the organisation’s planned panel at Féile an Phobail in Belfast.

The conversation traces the story from the original application for a panel on women’s rights, sex-based rights, single-sex spaces and women’s sport, through the panel’s acceptance, the subsequent social-media controversy, the cancellation by Féile, and the legal and political fallout that followed.

Nora explains what happened behind the scenes as the Women’s Rights Network sought to have the event reinstated, including the organisation’s attempts to engage with Féile, the legal process, the support that came from women around the world, and the decision ultimately to organise an alternative event.

The discussion then moves beyond Féile to the wider political situation in Northern Ireland, including the Equality Commission’s judicial review, the UK Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, Sarah Morrison’s case, BBC coverage of the controversy, engagement with Justice Minister Naomi Long, and the forthcoming Northern Ireland election.

Featured Topics

• Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland

• Féile an Phobail

• The cancelled “Respect, Rights & Reality” panel

• The original Féile application

• Sex-based rights

• Single-sex spaces

• Women’s sport

• The UK Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling

• The online campaign surrounding the Féile panel

• The cancellation of the event

• J.K. Rowling’s offer of legal support

• The legal challenge against Féile

• The alternative event in Belfast

• Sex Matters

• Fiona McAnena

• Athena Forum

• Gaels for Fair Play

• Women’s rights activism in Northern Ireland

• The political divisions of Northern Ireland

• The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland

• Article 2 of the Windsor Framework

• Sarah Morrison

• BBC Spotlight

• Nolan Investigates

• Stonewall

• Naomi Long

• The Alliance Party

• Northern Ireland’s prisons and women’s services

• The March 2027 Northern Ireland election

The 2025 Féile event was titled “Whose Victory Is It Anyway? Why the UK Supreme Court Ruling Is Not a Victory for the Feminist Movement” and was organised by Féile’s Debates and Discussions Committee. The event argued that the Supreme Court ruling was regressive for feminism. (Féile an Phobail)

Féile 2025: Whose Victory Is It Anyway?

The Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland

The Women’s Rights Network is a UK-wide organisation campaigning around the rights and interests of women and girls.

Nora discusses the work of the Northern Ireland branch, including political engagement, campaigning, Freedom of Information requests, judicial reviews and public events. She explains that the Northern Ireland branch works both independently and with the wider WRN network, sharing information and research between regional groups.

Women’s Rights Network

Women’s Rights Network on YouTube

Women’s Rights Network YouTube channel

The Planned Panel

The planned event was titled:

Respect, Rights & Reality: Women’s Voices from Ireland and Europe

The panel was intended to bring together women from Northern Ireland, Ireland and Europe to discuss sex-based rights and the legal and political questions surrounding them.

Among the organisations and speakers discussed were:

• Women’s Rights Network

• Athena Forum

• Gaels for Fair Play

• Sex Matters

Fiona McAnena from Sex Matters subsequently agreed to participate. Nora describes the excitement among the organisers after the event was accepted and speakers began agreeing to take part.

Sex Matters

The Cancellation

On 21 July 2026, Féile an Phobail cancelled the WRN Northern Ireland event.

Féile said it had been unaware from the initial submission that the event would “promote campaigns against rights for the Transgender community” and said the event was being withdrawn from the programme.

WRN Northern Ireland responded that the event was explicitly a discussion about women’s sex-based rights and that this had been made clear in the original application. The organisation said it was shocked and disappointed by the cancellation. (Belfast Media Group)

The cancellation became the central controversy around the festival, with media coverage, political debate and an increasingly intense online response.

Gript: Rights group says ‘women will not be silenced’ as Féile cancels

BBC News NI: Organisation ‘shocked’ after Féile cancels event

J.K. Rowling & The Legal Challenge

J.K. Rowling’s X account

BBC Coverage of the Controversy

BBC Radio Ulster / BBC Audio coverage

Sex Matters: BBC Northern Ireland’s coverage of the cancellation of WRN NI’s panel

The Legal Dispute and the Alternative Event

Newsletter: Women’s Rights Network event goes ahead in Belfast after Féile cancellation

Video

A video connected with the Féile controversy and WRN Northern Ireland:

Watch the video

Women’s Rights Network & The Broader Political Picture

The conversation moves from the Féile controversy to the wider political landscape in Northern Ireland.

Nora discusses attempts to engage senior politicians and her meeting with Naomi Long, the Justice Minister and leader of the Alliance Party.

She describes repeatedly asking Long to meet with WRN before eventually securing a meeting, where they discussed prisons, policing, intimate searches and women’s services.

Naomi Long / Alliance Party

Further Reading & Listening

Féile Cancellation

Gript: Rights group says ‘women will not be silenced’ as Féile cancels

BBC News NI: Organisation ‘shocked’ after Féile cancels event

Sex Matters: BBC Northern Ireland’s coverage of the cancellation of WRN NI’s panel

The Replacement Event

Newsletter: Women’s Rights Network event goes ahead in Belfast after Féile cancellation

Féile

Féile an Phobail

2025 Féile panel on the Supreme Court ruling

BBC Audio

BBC Radio Ulster / BBC Audio

Video

Watch the Nora Calder / WRN-related video

Guest Links

Nora Calder

Instagram

X / Twitter

Women’s Rights Network

Official Website

YouTube Channel

Host

Róisín Michaux

X

https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Substack

Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

Substack

peaked.news

Apple Podcasts

Rona was sued by a psychotherapist called Sabine Maur because she shared a video in which Maur could be seen telling fellow mental health professionals how to fiddle with insurance forms so that ‘gender-affirming’ mastectomies get reimbursed for women claiming to be ‘non-binary’. While female-to-male breast removal is considered totally sane in Germany, breast removal for female-to-non-binary is not, which is bizarre, to be fair, because neither of these things is actually real.

The Maur video was not originally shared by Rona, but she did share it once it was already online. Rona also made comments on Maur’s dubious practices.

Because she is a known (and much-hated) entity in German feminist/queer circles, Rona was the one who was pursued in court for this already-public video. In the interview we get into the details of what went down during the legal proceedings, and we also talked about Rona’s strategy of being gloriously defiant. Like a growing number of women being hounded over this trans nonsense, Rona has decided to take on her detractors rather than slinking away in fear and silence.

You love to see it.

“Did you consider coming out in defence of those women?”

Meanwhile, I spent 24 hours in Belfast on Tuesday in order to cover the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland non-reinstated Féile and Phobail event. If you missed all that and you have no idea what I’m talking about, I recommend you read this article by Helen Joyce and my running thread of the conference content.

Bonus: enjoy this awkward confrontation between myself and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, neo-Laundry Nun Ailbhe Smyth (prolific Irish prawn sandwich brigadier feminist), and even the brand new Lord Mayor of Belfast.

After a whirlwind few hours in Belfast, I had an hour or two’s worth of kip on Dublin Airport floor before heading to Amsterdam to attend (incognito) the World Pride Human Rights Conference 2026. The event confirmed all my priors: it was never about gays, and always about AIDS, and you can tell because thanks to funding cuts, gay activism is going back to being about public health. It will be less and less about the warm-and-fuzzy human rights as the funding pot shrinks. One UNDP attendee accused the Global Fund of abandoning ‘the community’ to become more like a “commodities fund” (the commodities being HIV drugs and medical infrastructure). This was inevitable.

Also, gay is trans in the places in the world where HIV is worst, which is why western countries who invest in AIDS work are so desperate to ‘affirm’ the homophobic ‘third genders’ in these places. If that’s confusing, listen to my interview about it with Stephanie Winn from a few weeks back.

I asked a Pakistani ‘trans woman’ point-blank: if it was ok to be a gay man in Pakistan, would there be fewer Hijras or whatever these men are called over there? Oh yeah, he said emphatically, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then I asked a senior Dutch diplomat if he could see how reinforcing these ‘half man’ identities is just a different kind of homophobia, and that by celebrating all these third genders — as part of Western donors’ effort not to appear all colonial — they could perhaps be making things worse? He literally did a massive shrug and wished me a good day.

Finally, I spoke to Luke Sheehan for the Irish podcast Cassandra Voices a few weeks back and the episode has just gone online. I did a lot of hyperactive waffling about how the EU works, and we also talked about Irish culture generally and why we’re so susceptible to woke cultism.

Podcast: On Europe, Gender and Sh*tposting with Róisín Michaux

I’ll be publishing a backlog of podcast episodes over the next week or two, and some other bits and pieces. If you like/appreciate my work, I can only keep going with your support. Please share this newsletter with someone you think might like it, upgrade to a paid subscription if you’re on a gratos plan, or donate to my PayPal below. Every little helps. Thanks bud.

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Show notes (AI generated)

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with German feminist activist Rona Duwe about Germany’s rapidly changing gender identity landscape, her legal battle involving psychotherapist Sabine Maur, and the wider implications for women’s rights, medical ethics, freedom of expression, and public policy.

The discussion examines Germany’s conversion therapy legislation, gender medicine for minors, the role of the German Psychotherapists Chamber, health insurance reimbursement for gender-related treatments, freedom of speech, investigative journalism, self-identification laws, prison policies, and feminist activism.

Rona also discusses her ongoing projects documenting gender-related cases across Germany, her legal victories, and how public support for gender-critical voices has evolved in recent years.

Featured Topics

• Germany’s Self-Determination Act

• Conversion Therapy Ban

• Sabine Maur legal case

• German Psychotherapists Chamber

• Gender medicine for minors

• Health insurance reimbursement

• Non-binary medical interventions

• Medical ethics

• Freedom of expression

• Investigative journalism

• Women’s rights under Article 3 of the German Constitution

• Women’s prisons

• Public activism in Germany

Sabine Maur

Former Vice President of the German Psychotherapists Chamber.
Instagram

The episode centers on legal proceedings following Rona’s criticism of Maur’s role in developing treatment guidelines for minors and allegations relating to a webinar discussing insurance reimbursement for non-binary medical interventions.

Alice Schwarzer

Germany’s best-known feminist and founder of Emma Magazine.

Official Website

https://www.emma.de/

Genevieve Gluck

Investigative journalist for Reduxx, referenced during the discussion of Germany’s historical relationship with gender ideology.

Reduxx

https://reduxx.info/

Magnus Hirschfeld

German physician and sexologist whose early work on sexuality and transgender medicine is discussed in relation to Germany’s historical background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld

Günter Wallraff

Germany’s most famous undercover investigative journalist.

Referenced when discussing how the court compared Rona’s reporting to investigative journalism conducted in the public interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Wallraff

Marie-Luise Vollbrecht

German biologist referenced while discussing the changing public atmosphere surrounding gender-critical speech in Germany.

https://cne.news/article/3976-conservative-biologist-wins-court-case-over-gender-view

Frauenheldinnen

Women’s rights organization supporting legal campaigns and crowdfunding related to Rona’s case.

https://frauenheldinnen.de/

Was ist eine Frau?

Campaign website documenting gender-related cases across Germany.

Website

https://was-ist-eine-frau.de/

Interactive Case Map

https://was-ist-eine-frau.de/nur-ein-einzelfall/

WPATH

World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Referenced during discussion of international treatment guidelines.

https://www.wpath.org/

Emma Magazine

German feminist magazine founded by Alice Schwarzer.

https://www.emma.de/

Laws & Policies

German Self-Determination Act

Germany’s legislation allowing legal change of sex without previous legal requirements.

https://www.bmj.de/

German Conversion Therapy Ban

Discussed throughout the episode in relation to psychotherapy and gender identity treatment.

https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/

Article 3 — German Basic Law

The discussion covers proposals to include “sexual identity” alongside sex protections in Germany’s Constitution.

English text

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/

Medical Topics

Johns Hopkins – Metoidioplasty

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/metoidioplasty-for-gender-affirming-care

Cleveland Clinic – Phalloplasty

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/procedures/21585-phalloplasty

Companies Discussed

GenderGP

Referenced during discussion of cross-border hormone prescribing.

https://www.gendergp.com/

Imago

Referenced during discussion of online European hormone services.

https://imago.tg/

Guests

Rona Duwe

Website

https://was-ist-eine-frau.de/

Substack

ronalyze

It's not a human right to be a woman

Von Rona Duwe

Twitter
https://x.com/ronalyze?lang=en

Host — Róisín Michaux

🔗 X (Twitter)
https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

🔗 Apple Podcasts — Peaked

1. Homocaust denial: rainbow NGOs refuse to name the problem of Islam-inspired anti-gay violence

2. German left’s answer to Berlin Pride attack: a paedo-friendly constitution

3. Teenagers tried to buy bombs on Telegram to attack Belgian Pride

4. Homophobic Grindr attacks not quite homophobic enough, French judge rules

5. Belfast TERF standoff ends with victory for Féile’s Sinn Féin hardlads

6. Montenegrin women are getting period leave. Will they get defined out of law?

7. One of the women on the proposed euro banknote hated gays and jews

8. France is getting self-ID lite

9. Epstein’s man-in-Paris found dead in his apartment

10. UNESCO held a Pride event and some guy humped the conference room floor!!

11. Irish school celebrates mandatory Saudi modesty garments

12. Who can we thank? Michael O’Flaherty

13. In other news…

Why rainbow NGOs refuse to name the problem of Islam-inspired anti-gay violence

Before you reach for an ‘—ism’ to call me, bear in mind that inquiries carried out in the UK found that it was the fear of being called racist or Islamophobic that prevented authorities from doing anything about the mass rape of working-class British girls.

NGOs are getting millions in EU money every year to represent the needs of ‘the LGBTIQ+ community', an ever-expanding motley universe of odds and ends that once represented plain old homosexuals. And yet these organisations are not just ignoring, but even perhaps obfuscating the biggest threat their community faces in Europe in the present day.

I am referring to the repeated violent attacks against gay men that are being carried out mostly by teenage boys and very young men who have a religious- or culturally-inspired disdain for homosexuality.

In France, there was a Grindr-ambush type attack against a gay man on average once every four days in 2024. I’ve written about these attacks before, so I won’t repeat myself, but suffice to say: the profile of the people carrying out these attacks fits a specific pattern, and the methods are always the same. This is not speculation, and it is not racism. It’s data, and where data doesn’t exist (because reports and prosecutions are low), context clues, anecdotes and first-person observations fill in the gaps.

So why won’t the publicly-funded NGOs — at least 7 of which are getting full-time operating grants from the EU taxpayer — name and address this very real issue? This question is particularly acute after last week’s terrorist attack in Berlin, carried out by a man inspired by a strain of Islamic ideology that explicitly condemns homosexuals as targets for violence.

All of these NGOs have more or less the exact same stated mission, and they all claim to represent the same expanding bath sponge of alphabetised sexual personalities (and the dubious ‘plus’). They have no issue naming other groups they’ve identified as ‘anti-LGBTIQ+’, nor do they seem to have any compunction about psychoanalysing and demonising women like me for the wrongthink that men and women are biologically different and that that fact matters.

Perhaps they could dedicate some resources to an outreach programme targetting Muslim community leaders, to raise awareness of the epidemic of app-based ambushes, the rising trend of fly-by attacks on gay bars, or say, the fanatical thinking that led a man on a murderous rage at a Pride party.

The growing Muslim population in Europe makes all of this more likely to reoccur. And yet everyone is just watching it happen like it’s an inevitable outcome of multikulti. Faith-based outreach programmes used to be standard fare in gay rights organising, but for reasons I will guess at here, such initiatives have fallen out of favour.

Read (FR): The Islamic hatred LGBT activists refuse to see — Nora Bussigny

One thing I have learned about advocacy NGOs is that they have no desire or incentive to tackle difficult problems. Who would want to tackle difficult problems? That might mean failure, and failure might mean your grant-maker would no longer want to fund your business-casual NGO lifestyle. A much better strategy is to exaggerate a minor, easily-fixed issue, or even better, make up a fake problem, so that you can ride in on your tax-payer funded horse and pretend to fix it.

In the non-profit sector, the market for your product is the decision-makers who need to sign off on the next cheque. Real-world outcomes end up being largely immaterial, which is why the NGOs are currently lobbing mean names at anyone — including many gay men — who point to the problem of radical Islamic homophobia.

Rather, they want you to go along with their own KPIs, the ones they have chosen for their ability to appeal to donors.

ILGA-Europe, the granddaddy of Brussels rainbow NGOs, is currently laser-focussed on bullying conservative Eastern European municipalities into hosting garish and obnoxious Pride parades, grandly framing any refusal to host these aesthetic horrorshows as an Assault On Democracy Itself!

The town of Oradea in the west of Romania is the latest victim of this queer imperialism (it’s the third in total, after the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Pécs got the same treatment). The local authorities in Oradea refused a Pride permit this year for the fourth year in a row. In previous years, they had offered spurious admin or technical reasons for the refusal. However, this year they just came out and said it: we don’t want to allow your parade for ‘morality’ reasons.

Now, I hate Pride as much as the next guy, but I don’t think this is right on freedom of assembly grounds, as ILGA-Europe are arguing (other NGOs are also currently being paid by the EU Commission to fight these bans). However, I know from personal experience that you can’t bully your way into people’s hearts. The blunt instrument of Pride — a tacky, noisy and tasteless rainbow nightmare, literally hell on Earth — is not to everyone’s taste. And if your North Star is to make life better for gay people, bullying municipal authorities into flooding their towns with this tat against their will is not the way to win people over.

It might make sense for ILGA-Europe to sell Pride-maximalism as a strategy to donors (the results are, after all, visible and measurable), but its broad application smacks of, well, colonialism. And that’s before we get to all the fishnetted-tits, exposed dicks, puppy and nappy fetishists, and the alarming cutesification and kiddification of it all. I understand the movement logic of build-it-and-they-will-come, but if the people of Oradea don’t like the local authorities’ decision to refuse the puppy-mask gays a permit to hump each other on their town fountain, well, they can vote the prudes out in the next election.

So that’s where ILGA-Europe’s millions were pointed when a second-generation Lebanese-German martyr-larper was renting a minivan in order to mass-murder normies at Berlin Pride parade for the Paradise likes and subscribes.

At the time of the attack, ILGA-Europe, apart from queer-bothering Romanian conservatives, was posting on LinkedIn about defeating the ‘anti-gender’ and ‘anti-rights’ movement. But who does that refer to? Was Abdul B., the rental car rager, included in that enemies list? Of course not. That’s a phrase that is only ever used to refer to people like me (there are two sexes and no human has ever switched from one to the other), Christian groups who are against gay marriage, gay adoption, and genderfaff in schools (hard agree on that last one), and various leaders of the latter persuasion who mix their ick for gay shit up with nationalist politics, presumably for the votes it promises.

Meanwhile, while Abdul B. was in the ISIS-allegiance confessional, the asterisk-lesbians* of EL*C were planning their next big escape from capitalism and mass tourism (and ignoring my emails, DMs, PMs and replies about it), announcing plans for a ten-day working holiday in an uber-remote party town on the island of Lesbos (Lesbos — lesbians — geddit?), a fun-filled publicly-funded junket during which they will celebrate themselves and their own wonderfulness. A quick look at EL*C’s work programme (which is essentially just sub-granting to even loonier NGOs around the EU) and it quickly becomes clear that everything they touch turns to troon.

IGLYO, of Denton’s fame, brought 24 identically-quirky queer kids to Dublin to also talk about countering the ‘anti-gender movement” (no Abduls there, either). Notice in the video below that the only threat to ‘queer people’ that is mentioned is said to be coming from the United States and the UK.

Meanwhile, Intersex Europe (OII Europe), Transgender Europe, and the EGLSF have been making life hell for paediatric urologists, pressuring the UK government to let teachers trans kids behind their parents’ backs, and chipping away at the female sports category, respectively.

Conversion therapy bans are another great example of the fake-problem problem. Very little evidence of ‘conversion practices’ was found by European NGOs that had sold it to their governments as a huge problem that must be addressed immediately. Sure, in theory conversion therapy is awful, but in practice, is it happening? The answer is tricky in that no, very little evidence was found that it was happening in the communities that the NGOs were brave enough to study: white Christian ones. Had they poked around in conservative non-white (and especially non-Christian) communities, in which the chances of living openly as a gay person is near zero, they wouldn’t have had to scrape together so many tryhard ‘case studies’.

But they didn’t go looking in those places, because that would be too difficult. Instead, they focussed on criminalising therapists who try to talk kids out of their wrong-sex delusions, and parents who don’t ‘affirm’ same. That’s much easier.

Instead of naming this problem, the woke elite have used their statements and pulpits in the aftermath of Pride to point the finger at the far-right (whose anti-gay activism involves scary-looking black-clad men protesting on the margins of Pride parades), and making vague allusions to people who quibble with their insane demands, generally.

You need to watch this video below about a young Australian woman’s mission to find far-right anti-gay violence in Germany. So convinced that she would find at Germany’s anti-gay epicenter a writhing nest of white supremacist Christian nationalism, that she premised her entire documentary on it. When she failed to find any, carried on with the narrative anyway to an absolute cringe degree.

I looked up the claims of ‘queerphobia’ made by the people in the clips below, and sure enough, what evidence is available points not to skinhead fash, but at the other unmentionable ‘community’. I really urge you to watch the video to get an idea of the level of derangement we are dealing with.

“Brave documentarian captures the violent reality queer Berlin faces”:

I suspect there are three main reasons why this problem won’t be named any time soon: firstly, NGOs might risk losing funding if they were to implicitly target their government paymasters’ immigration and integration policies. One does not get to sit so close to the centre of power and get away with slagging off the King. This dynamic — the government-funded-non-government paradox — once ossified, results in this patent absurdity.

Secondly, they’d get piled on by their own woke staff and stakeholders, who are all drunk on suicidal performative kindness; and thirdly, they might fear becoming targets of Islamic extremists themselves.

But most of all, it’s just too difficult.

Sickeningly, this attack on Pride in Berlin will be used to fundraise for ILGA’s Pride-Is-Democracy-Itself campaign, to harass mayors of conservative cities about refusing permits for public sex raves on their stately promenades. The perpetrator of the Berlin Pride attack, and others like him, will never be named by these organisations, nor will his motivating ideology. All the other violence will also go unattributed. Or worse, it will be attributed to the vague ‘anti-rights actors’, bogeyman making sure it never gets addressed.

And yet we are paying those organisations to keep gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and yes, transvestites safe. They’re not doing their job, and if they’re not going to do their job, they need to be defunded. There’s no need for them to start demanding remigration, and no need for any form of ‘hate’, as they put it. All we need these organisations to do is to name the problem and address it in a grown-up way. Data already shows gay voters are opting for right-wing parties, and ILGA’s refusal to name this specific source of violence is going to keep pushing them in that direction.

Then they’ll get defunded anyway, and they’ll deserve it.

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German left’s solution to anti-gay violence: a paedo-friendly constitution

In the immediate aftermath of the Berlin Pride attack, left-wingers came up with a foolproof fix to make sure it doesn’t happen again: by adding something called ‘sexual identity’ to the country’s foundational legal text, known as the Basic Law.

EMMA magazine wrote about how this would not only be a danger to women’s rights: ‘paedosexuals’ have long campaigned for this amendment, for obvious reasons. They write: “aside from the fact that such a ban on discrimination wouldn't deter a single Islamist attacker… pedophiles are already poised to seek protection as a "discriminated minority." And they are not the only ones.”

Paedophile activist lobbied for ‘sexual identity’ to be added to the German constitution

Correction: an earlier version of this attributed the EMMA article to Eva Engelken, who is not a writer for EMMA but the CEO and founder of Frauenheldinnen. Thanks for the tip-off.

Two Belgian teenagers planned to bomb Pride

It was revealed this week that in the summer of 2024, teenage boys allegedly plotted to bomb a Pride parade in the Belgian city of Leuven. One of the boys tried to buy explosives from an undercover copper posing as an arms dealer on Telegram. When the jihadist and the fake arms dealer met up in person to discuss the sale of “powerful explosives”, the former said he had accomplices who were ready to die as martyrs.

The same would-be attacker was later overheard in prison saying “All Americans are gays and I will go there to kill them all”. He called Pride an alcohol fest (not wrong) and exhorted his co-conspirators not to have any pity for anyone that was maimed or killed. The planners had first intended to target Brussels Pride but seem to have shifted focus to Leuven, a much smaller town which potentially made it easier to target. Two men are now up on charges for, among other things, participation in a terrorist group and preparation of a terrorist crime. The first hearing will happen in mid-November.

Grindr attackers who targetted gay men didn’t really hate gay men, rules French judge

A court case concluded in eastern France last week that involved a gang of young men who carried out a five-month spree of violence against gay men between July and October last year. The assaults were only stopped when the gendarmes caught some of the men fleeing the scene of an attack.

The victims were all contacted on hookup apps like Grindr, and when they went to meet their dates, they were violently assaulted and robbed. An estimated 13 to 20 ambushes (guet-apens) were covered by this investigation. Almost all of the perpetrators got suspended sentences, except the ‘most violent’ one.

And according to the judgement, anti-gay hate was not a motivating factor in the attacks.

The judge was persuaded by the perpetrators’ defense that even though they targetted gay men specifically because they were vulnerable and unlikely to report their assaults to the police, it did not constitute homophobia. This is despite the fact that the victims claimed to have had anti-gay insults hurled at them during the attacks.

France recently introduced a national plan to do something about these guet-apens, and the plan repeatedly notes a specific demographic data point: the perpetrators are almost invariably teenagers. This information should help with prevention. It is a helpful data point. There is another data point that could also prove useful in preventing these attacks, but that data point is not included in the prevention plan.

It will all come out in the public inquiries in years to come that a vital identifying factor that links these attacks was avoided for fear of Islamophobia accusations. How many victims will there be before then?

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Belfast TERF standoff ends with victory for the Féile hardlads

This is a very live situation and subject to change, and I’ll be writing a lot more about it after I go to Belfast next week, but here’s the state of affairs on the Féile situation as of writing: yesterday (Wednesday 29/7) Féile bosses met with Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland to find a solution to the impasse over the cancellation of their panel event at this year’s festival.

As a reminder, WRN NI were dumped from the programme after a successful online pile-on by the North’s leftist/Republican goons. WRN NI responded by asking to be reinstated, Féile refused, and they were due in the High Court to hash it out in front of a judge. However, they apparently agreed on an out-of-court settlement that nobody is allowed to talk about. Both camps put out confusing and contradictory statements about what happened, but the bottom line is this: the women were dropped from the contract over their defense of sex-based rights for women, and the de-platformed event will go ahead anyway elsewhere in the city.

If you want to read about the shenanigans, search for Féile on X. SEEN in journalism is reporting on the develoments. And listen to this spat between Sex Matters’ Helen Joyce and staunch defender of transvestite rights, a local journalist called Allison Morris who reports on violence against women for a living and yet can’t bring herself to abandon the elite TWAW cult belief (rumour has it there’s a close acquaintance of hers who has trooned out — but whatever ye say say nothin’).

Montenegrin women are getting period leave. But will they get defined out of law?

The small Balkan state of Montenegro is on the cusp of joining the EU, a process that started all the way back in 2012 but has sped up due to the EU’s desire (need?) to expand its geopolitical influence in the face of global realignment of strategic priorities, to put it fancily.

As part of the accession process, Montenegro needs to reform a lot of its laws, including those pertaining to LGBTIQ+ matters and ‘gender equality’. One of the areas of law that needs ‘modernising’ is legal gender recognition for people claiming to be the wrong sex (or to have no sex at all, or to be a combination of both sexes, or some other thing), and the draft law is just sitting waiting to be passed.

But that has not yet happened.

Montenegro is definitely joining the EU and the negotiations are very likely to be done and dusted by Christmas. The Council has already started recruiting Montenegrin-language speakers (another controversy waiting to explode), so that they can translate all the membership documents. But to get to that point, a decision will have to be made: pass this sex self-ID law, drop it, or design a new one that doesn’t undo women’s hard-won gains in favour of crossdressers and opt-out gays.

Meanwhile, perhaps to make up for the delay and prove their woke bona fides, the government has just passed a new law to allow two days per month of ‘period leave’ for women who suffer from unbearable monthly period pain.

Now, I know women who have endometriosis, which by the sounds of it, is not dissimilar to the pain levels of active labour. So the law makes me happy for those gals. However, women are also chancers (that’s how you know we’re fully human) and the law is likely to be abused. In order to be able to benefit from this monthly time off, you have to have a doctor certify your condition once a year. That’s a lot of leave.

But my real quibble about these kinds of laws is that they are the ultimate manifestation of shitlib girlbossism. I’m extremely skeptical of anything dressed up as ‘women’s rights’ as long as the painful political decision to define what women is avoided. All the leanin-isms of lib feminism are about corporate board quotas and period poverty (not a real thing outside of Sub-Saharan Africa), and a lot of it smacks of “look busy!” bullshit. It’s easy to introduce period leave, and a lot harder to stand up to the queer elite (at home and in Brussels) by defining women as biologically real. If the word is left undefined, it is an open category for reinterpretation. And reinterpret it, they will.

I’m just not impressed by tokenistic ‘gender equality’ measures (surely women with endo get doctors’ certs already?) But Brussels bureaucrats love this shit, it’s how they measure ‘progress’. So job done, I guess. The Montenegrin government bragged about how this made them the second-ever country after Espain to give this right to women, without realising that if you’re praising Espain on ‘gender issues’, you’re fucked because that country has wiped women out of their laws.

All that said, I’m happy that women and girlies will now have some high-up backup for their hot water bottle bed-days (though whether these policies produce on-the-ground backlash — making women seem incapable and unreliable — remains to be seen).

One of the two women on the proposed euro banknote allegedly hated gays and jews

The European Central Bank is currently redesigning euro banknotes, and it has put out ten different designs and asked the public for feedback.

Half of the designs feature famous dead Europeans, and the other half feature birds. The personalities are: Maria Callas, Beethoven, Marie Curie Skłodowska, Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci, and Bertha von Suttner. I hadn’t heard of any of the women apart from Marie Curie, but now I know something about Maria Callas, a very beautiful and talented opera singer: apparently, she allegedly once told an acquaintance: “I hate homosexuals. And I hate Jews.”

Yikes. Way too soon. Beethoven and Cervantes likely had choice opinions on gays, jews, women, gypsies, idiots, cunts, Huns, Gauls, Slavs, blacks, browns, and all the rest, but they’ve been dead longer so it doesn’t count. Them’s the rules.

Callas is (was) being considered for the fiver.

France is getting self-ID LITE

This seems like a desperate attempt to entice some wokes away from the left ahead of the elections, and I think the chances it will work are slim.

Aurore Bergé (wimmin’s and equality minister) announced that the government would make it somewhat easier to change your sex on your official documents, though it stops short of going full self-ID. Going full self-ID would be complicated in France, not least because Macron once called the idea “ubuesque” (absurd, LOL) but because French civil law explicitly states that there are some areas of life that you can’t just up and assign to yourself, and your sex is one of those things.

The professional queers seem to be surprised by the move — and disgusted that it doesn’t go far enough (nothing is ever far enough when your entire identity is being a victim of the CIStem).

The proposal is part of a slew of new queer measures announced this week as part of a new national strategy, and it covers all kinds of other ubuesques that we have come to know and loathe.

Epstein’s man-in Paris found dead in his apartment

David Siad was a French modelling agency scout whose name came up thousands of times in the Epstein files. He came under investigation 2026 for rape and human trafficking in connection with this ‘recruitment’ of women for Epstein’s perverted consumption.

Siad denied everything up to the last minute, insisting that his relationship was professional, pleadingly insisting to CNN just a few weeks ago that he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes. Prosecutors hadn’t got enough on him to bring any charges prior to his death, and criminal proceedings against him ended when he did. His lawyer has told French media outlets that he died of a heart attack, brought on by the stress and anxiety of the investigation.

Some people do just up and die. Others need to be silenced because they know things about important people. Not to be a conspiratard, but I will say that I’m very interested in what kinds of revelations a post-Trump future will bring.

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Irish school celebrates mandatory Saudi modesty garments

An Irish secondary school had a lovely cultural enrichment day last week when pupils were treated to an immersive exhibition on the culture of Saudi Arabia. As part of the experience, students were introduced to select local coffee blends, assorted foods, and female pupils were even invited to enjoy the experience of wearing cumbersome and restrictive modesty garments that cover the entire head, neck, and chest, leaving only enough space to see out of which one can see things in front of one. This rich cultural heritage of concealing the sight of women from susceptible libidinous males was reenacted in an apparent spirit of celebration and glee.

Women — a type of human that’s sort of like a real human, but sexually arousing and of a lower caste than the standard human — wear these garments against their will in many parts of the world, which the girls may or may not have been told before they tried them on and posed for the camera. Delightful. Don’t they look great?

UNESCO: man humps the floor at diplomat event in Paris

Is there no institution that hasn’t beclowned itself at the alter of troonery?

UNESCO, that hallowed institution, hosted a diplomatic event in Paris recently in which a panel of speakers talked about clever, high-level ways to decimate women’s rights. They invited Dutch darts troon Noa Lynn Van Leuven, the awful lumbering transvestite who was kicked out of women’s darts and is now a celebrity misogynist available for speaking slots on tranels. Then they had some kind of awkward party in the conference room, where what looked like transsexual prostitutes did the bizarre cerebral-palsy-looking flappy hands Vogue dance and even a headstand, for some reason, and then some man humped the conference room floor. I nearly died.

Brutal.

EU countries that didn’t introduce queer national strategies are getting a visit from the Dutch

If you’re from a country that hasn’t implemented a national LGBTIQ+ action plan as per European Commission instructions, there’s a plan B in place to work around you. The plan: target the capitals instead.

Democracies have one major deficit, as far as the EU bosses are concerned, in that elections produce the results that represent all of the country’s preferences, not just those of the cosmopolitan elites. The hicks get a vote, too and that’s a major problem. That’s why countries that have not obeyed Brussels’ ‘soft law’ edict to introduce a laundry list of queer-friendly bananery will be targetted via the municipal authorities in their biggest cities.

Left-leaning mayors, who may be eyeing top jobs abroad, are often very eager for opportunities that demonstrate to Brussels’ players their ease with progressive policies. The more insane the policy, the better.

As such, the Commission is paying a Dutch trans NGO to ‘share best practice’ with the brutes in Bucharest and Bratislava, along with the coordinators of Budapest Pride (Budapest city officials overruled an Orban interdiction on Pride) to show them how it’s done. This is the CITIES4EQUALITY project description: “Building on Budapest’s example, where civil society involved the municipality to co-organized the 2025 Budapest Pride March with over 350 000 participants joining in spite of the national ban, the project enables cities and service providers to translate EU equality standards into a sustainable daily practice.”

This is the Dutch partner in the project. Look how bananas it all is.

Who can we thank? Michael O’Flaherty

Michael O’Flaherty (or ‘Yogyakarta Mick’, as I unaffectionately refer to him) is a big wheel down at the gender factory. A gay Irish ex-priest, and the son and grandson of prominent mayors in Galway in the west of Ireland, O’Flaherty ditched the priesthood as an early adult, opting instead to work on a ‘human rights career’, right when that was starting to be a thing. he has held various UN posts, and is currently the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe.

O’Flaherty and others came up with a plan in the mid-aughts to make an official-sounding unofficial declaration about existing human rights treaties, conventions etc. and how they already apply to gays, lesbians and people with diverse ‘gender identities’. In 2006, he helped gather a bunch of human-rightsy bigwigs from UN bodies, as well as assorted activists, and they all shlepped to the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta where they put together a document that they hoped could be used as an advocacy ‘tool’ to convince the unconvinced that gay rights are human rights. That document became the Yogyakarta Principles.

Of course, what we consider to be ‘gay rights’ manifests very differently in other parts of the world. In many cultures, ‘gay men’ are ‘third genders’, or as an Albanian woman recently told me, ‘half-men’ and other homophobic adaptations. That’s why an open gender category would have to be included in the Yogyakarta initiative if they wanted to really make sure all the same-sex attracted men were covered (when African evangelicals say that ‘gay’ is a western phenomenon, that’s probably partly what they are talking about).

It was early days in the T takeover when the Principles were drafted, but already two trans mascs were present in the room: Mauro Cabral Grinspan (leading promoter world’s first ever self-ID law, in Argentina) and Manchester’s favourite self-hating lesbian, Stephen Whittle.

Craftily, the Indonesian location was selected as a way to convince people that the Principles were not an imposition from libertine Gayropa (I’m not sure the city’s Islamic Sultanate is happy that they are now so closely associated, at least in the West, with the foundational document that trooned all our laws.)

O’Flaherty was the rapporteur responsible for drafting the final document, which did indeed become extremely influential. One of the Principles was that everyone should be able to have their self-defined gender identity recognised, which was finagled by the activists and experts out of the right to recognition before the law (as laid out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights).

O’Flaherty intervened in the drafting of the Irish Gender Recognition Act almost a decade later when, in an article in the Irish times, he claimed that any kind of gatekeeping of requests to commit sex falsification would be a violation of international law. There is no international law that says people have the right to change sex, but that was the point of the Yogyakarta Principles: present controversial interpretations of existing international human rights law as if they were legally required, even though they have no binding legal status. This was O’Flaherty’s genius plan, and it certainly worked. Ireland passed a full self-ID law not long after.

Here he is. Say thanks to Mick.

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In other news

• New report on violence against mothers by UN expert on VWAG, Reem Alsalem

• Follow this Albanian TERF on Instagram

• Montenegro: new government website dedicated to explaining how same-sex partnerships work, one assumes in response to complaints (perhaps from the EU Commission?) that even though the right to partnerships exists, there’s no easy-to-access info

• Marine Le Pen kicks off her campaign tour (minus the electronic ankle monitor — that ruling has been appealed)

• KPOP fight erupts between Polish girls and Belgian girls over the dirt and danger of Brussels

• Dutch researchers developed a predictive test for ‘implicit’ anti-trans bias, which can reveal a preference for ‘cis’ people over ‘trans’ people

• Trans woman attacked and spat at in Berlin

• Bulgaria: controversial study that claims to show same-sex parenting is bad for kids presented at anti-gender ideology conference in Sofia

• Bulgaria forced to introduce legal sex deception after CJEU rulings

• Germany: what the fuck is this

• France: British expat in rural France is championed as stunning and brave victim in neighbourhood spat, but there’s probably much more to this sob story

• Women make up the majority of professional judges in every EU country except Ireland.

• GILEAD won’t sell Lenacapavir even in the countries where the tests were carried out leading to protests at the annual AIDS conference in Brazil this week. Listen to me explaining to Stehanie Winn the link between transmania and AIDS funding

• Alexander Platz metro station in Berlin got a ‘gender-neutral’ makeover for Pride

• Man shot 6 people dead in a mother and baby home in Germany

• Corporate partnerships at PRIDE: listen to the excellent Tanya de Grunwald talk about risks businesses face when they go all-in on LGBTIQ+

• Leftards out in force to protest the removal of rapists, murderers, back to Afghanistan

• Suzy Eeckelaerts’ excellent takedown on nonsense at a Queer Sports event in Belgium

• “More Botox for you!", female Hungarian MP told in Parliament

• The Fake-Fake woman neo-Nazi is playing guitar in prison, and apparently still posting on X

• Experts at the UN Human Rights Commission urge walk-back of IOC sex-testing decision

• French man accusing Bucharest police of anti-trans abuse

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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1. An abundance of caution: cockblocked by the Digital Services Act?

2. Is anyone fact-checking these fact-checkers?

3. Northern Ireland: TERF tribunal defeat, event called off, policeman devastated by Pride pullout

4. A whopping two-thirds of “trans people” are “non-binary people”

5. “Conference” or ten-day publicly-funded lesbian beach party?

6. Germany: 28,923 sex changes have been registered since January 2024

7. Newly-elected Transgender Europe director is seasoned women*’s rights/ regime feminist

8. German university protest: not going according to trans plans

9. France: pileup at the intersection — not a good time to be a fat lesbian jew

10. German politician who passed anti-surrogacy bill buys a child via surrogacy

11. Germany: open-air sex party causes infectious disease outbreak before it even starts

12. Who can we thank? Thomas Hammarberg

13. In other news…

An abundance of caution: cockblocked by the Digital Services Act?

The Digital Services Act is the EU’s labyrinthine regulation that dictates (in an indirect way) what can and cannot be said online. Ever since it started its rollout in late 2022, there has been a lot of fearful commentary about how it might scare social media platforms into over-moderating content. And I think that fear has just played out in relation to a post of mine on X, and I want to use the incident to demonstrate what those fears were/are all about.

First, some background: as anyone who reads my rants n tweets knows, I was fired from my job at the European Commission in March because I was TERFing on the job; I had set up an internal staff network for people who are worried about the insane sex-erasure mania that has gripped all levels of the EU civil service and the European school system. And while there are plenty of other staff networks and groups in the Commission (covering all kinds of themes), it was clear from the start that defending women’s right to a word that defines us is the spiciest of all hot topics, and it’s not even close.

Anyway, one of my biggest detractors was a powergay who headed the big LGBTIQ+ staff group. He hounded me (and others in the staff group) around the intranet, and complained about us (apparently many times) to HR. He even expelled me from his LGBTIQ+ group for wrongspeak in a very public online meeting, in which he gave me a big spiel about what a terrible person I am before kicking me out of the Zoom in performative disgust.

Suffice to say, it is possible that he was involved in getting me ejected from my job.

I have known for quite some time that this particular gentleman has been selling his soiled underwear and socks on the website Vinted. I know this because for a long time, he linked to this “side-gig” right in his X bio, next to his job title as European Commission official working in trade policy (a job for which he is forced to do a lot of global jet-setting in business class, the poor lad).

As per his public Vinted bio (now scrubbed), he said customers could make “special requests”; and in order to make it clear what he was talking about, he had added socks and underpants emojis. He urged customers '“don’t be shy”.

Intriguing.

But it was confusing: he only ever seemed to sell new socks and new underpants, all still in their wrappings. And all his “customers” (who left invariably positive reviews) seemed to be made up of triangle-torsoed topless gay men whose avatars were all pouty poses and thirst shots. Surely this is some kind of weird sex thing, I thought. But why on earth would anyone want to buy brand new (and not very fancy) boxers and socks?? Why not just go to H&M?

Oh.

Sure enough, this trade envoy was selling used knickers and socks at scale, which is why he had to keep replenishing his stock with new packets of undergarments. And on his Telegram bio (where he shows his real name and face) he told me his service includes adding … his own special sauce… to the items. All of this was linked via his X bio right next to his (very blackmailable) job.

I kept this information to myself for ages, because even though it’s gross and weird, is it really relevant? The guy is into some weird shit. So what? Besides, h’s a gay man, unencumbered by the “heteronormativity” that keeps the boring straights from selling their jizzy knickers in their public social profiles. Gay lad sex shit has no limits, and if you try to put limits on it, well you’re some sort of Nazi.

I even said nothing when I found his horny posting on X, which mostly consisted of replies to porn accounts in which he commented enthusiastically about sucking, fucking, dicks, and cocks and the occasional urine fetish stuff. This is not very professional, I would venture. But who cares?

I knew all of this the whole time this dirtbag was haranguing me inside the European Commission, all while he presented himself as some Tintin-type who just wants world peace. And even when I got sacked (which, again, he may have been involved in, but I cannot confirm because the Commission keep fobbing off my GDPR requests to try to find out who is responsible), I didn’t say anything about his very public pervy escapades.

However, after lengthy consideration, I no longer think of this as a private affair.

I recently started to realise that I was holding off on talking about it because I am aware that it looks too much like revenge, and revenge is trashy. But regardless of what was done to me personally, I have come to think that it does indeed say something quite important and of public interest about the European Commission, and the character of the people who have been allowed to run amok inside it.

One of the reasons why “trans” has been able to advance as far as it has is because weird male fetishes keep being pandered to. If these are the people making the rules (I have heard that the staff LGBTIQ+ group is consulted on EU policy, and it openly advertises its membership of the lobby NGO ILGA-Europe), surely the behaviour of the secretary general of this internal LGBTIQ+ special-interest group, who has such blatant disregard for the rights of others, while at the same time having such a cavalier attitude to advertising his own high regard for schlongs and dongs, is important for the public to be aware of?

He is one of the very loud sex-erasure advocates inside the EU civil service, the same lads who are putting pressure internally to have surrogacy allowances as part of the staff reimbursement scheme. I think it’s relevant to know that this influential man thinks public cockposting is kosher, but saying women are adult human females is a fireable offence.

So I tweeted this information out, including his name, and he quickly reported my tweet as abusive/harassment to X. When I posted that he had done that, he reported that post, too. While X was figuring out whether or not I had broken any rules, they made my post invisible. My appeal eventually failed, and the post is now being permanently withheld.

But here’s the thing: according to X, the post has been withheld because it breaks X’s rules. But that makes no sense because it’s only withheld in Belgium where I’m currently based. Everyone else can see it; even TERFs just over the border in the Netherlands and France have told me they can see it.

If this post breaks X rules, why is it visible to anyone at all? Why isn’t it deleted for everyone?

And this is where I suspect a long-feared feature of the DSA is playing out: it is not clear whether or not the post would actually break Belgian law, if it went to court . But in case it was found to be illegal, X could potentially be punished — with huge fines — for failing to act on a report of illegal content. X is not going to wait for the outcome of some drawn-out TERF-perv legal spat to decide whether the post should be made invisible or not, they’ll just do it “out of an abundance of caution”.

This incident is worrying because it demonstrates that it is the fear of an unknown adjudication that is driving content moderation decisions. This incident with Jimmy JizzyJocks is not very important, but what about much more vital information shared on X, say during election time? Will X delete content at a country level if a candidate makes comments that X worry might be shown to be illegal?

What should bother everyone: the decision as to whether or not to take a risk and say something “dangerous” — but that you think is important — is no longer in your hands. This is what the Commission meant when they said platforms have to “take responsibility” for the content to allow to circulate. With traditional media a lost cause, social media (in particular, X) is one of the only places with reach that allows for free expression about contested topics.

The European Commission wants to threaten to fine Elon Musk billions for your decision to go public about something you consider worth sharing. The risk is his profit, and not your reputation, even you have decided, like me, that your reputation is worth sacrificing.

That should probably worry us all. 🩲🧦

Is anyone fact-checking these fact-checkers?

Last week UK TERFs and free-speech watchers were up in arms over a report about “false and misleading information” published by the government’s Office for Science. The report based its analysis of a dataset provided by the EU-level fact-checking outfit, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). And what the EDMO considers false or misleading includes anything from calling provenly-male Olympic boxers male, to “delegitimising” the EU.

The EDMO is the Brussels-based body that coordinates a crew of gold-starred fact-checking “partners” in all EU countries. These fact-checkers are not the same as the DSA-related “trusted flaggers", and here’s a quick breakdown of the difference: trusted flaggers are organisations that apply for the job of looking for “harmful” and/or illegal posts online. A post that has been flagged by the flaggers has to get special attention from the social media company (meaning, specialer attention compared to posts flagged by regular users of the platform), thus fast-tracking them to the top of the queue to be assessed.

Trusted flaggers don’t just cover wrongthink about “transgender athletes”; they can also be tasked with spotting consumer scams or child sex abuse imagery. A steady trickle of organisations is being added to the trusted flagger database all the time (scroll down and search by country).

Meanwhile, “fact-checkers” are another group that social media platforms are encouraged to work with. Let’s say an article claiming that Vladimir Putin has died starts to circulate online (obviously misinformation/cope because that wanker will never die): these trusted fact-checkers, who are either media outlets or special fact-checking enterprises set up precisely to meet this DSA-shaped need for fact-checkers, then “debunk” the article.

According to the world-building fantasies of the European Commission, what would happen, ideally, is that social media platforms would publish the debunking articles, indeed favour them algorithmically, and downgrade algorithmically any posts or articles that contain the dead-Vlad misinfo.

This manipulation of the market is understandable when you consider the loopers out there in internet land; but it also means that we would end up with a Sovietised news ecosphere.

I took a look at how these fact-checkers have treated my topic of interest, and it was not good. One of the articles produced by a Dutch fact-checker blared: “Fake news about an EU vote on trans women is propaganda from anti-trans activists”. But if you read beyond the headline, you will see that the claim that was circulating — that the European Parliament recognised “trans women” as actual women — was entirely correct (I live-tweeted the EP debate that went viral, so I was happy to see I was singled out as a misinformer in this particular fact-check). The article used that headline and buried in the body some other claims that were less easy to verify, thus giving the impression that the whole story was bunkum.

Rather, the article “debunked” the claim, made by someone on social media, that it would be legally mandatory to call “trans women” by the honorific “Miss”. Which, to be fair, is basically true at least in Germany, where you can be criminalised for “outing” someone. This is someone’s interpretation of German law, as it currently stands, and has nothing to do with the vote in question.

I also noticed that this Luxembourgish '“fact-checker” did something similar: yes, the European Commission is very much encouraging member states to introduce sex self-ID for children, it put it right there in black and white in the last two soft-law LGBTIQ+ strategies. The debunker of this claim, which is, again, an interpretation of the intentions of EU soft law, plays around with the fact that nobody really cares about the difference between soft law and legislation. The author just debunks something else entirely, while actually confirming in the body of the article that the central claim (made by me and many others) was, in fact, not fake at all.

The fact-checkers don’t seem to have a good grip on the details of the trans stuff generally, and these articles, the only two I looked at, certainly seemed to be spreading false — or at least misleading — information all on their own.

Northern Ireland: TERF tribunal defeat, event called off, policeman devastated by Pride pullout

Lots going on in Northern Ireland this week.

First of all, the devastating news that the lovely Sarah Morrison has lost her tribunal case. She was investigated by her employer after she spoke at a Let Women Speak event, and the stress of the investigation (and the public witch-hunt she was put through) forced her out of the job. The judge found that the Belfast Film Festival’s decision to investigate Morrison was “not influenced by [Morrison’s] political opinion itself but by concerns regarding the impact of the situation upon matters central to [Morrison’s] role”.

The Belfast Film Festival is deeply ensconced in the lanyard-elite, which is ruled by strict ideological conformity to this history-defining trans social hysteria, and so they justified their treatment of her — someone who refuses to go along with this hysteria — by saying that it was bad for their brand and their relationships with other organisations in their milieu. The tribunal judge liked that argument.

Morrison’s speech was an extended call-out of Northern Irish NGOs that ostracise women for placing sex above “gender identity” in the provision of women-only services such as rape crisis centres.

Morrison is currently figuring out what she will do next.

Also Northern Ireland: the local branch of Women’s Rights Network were booked to speak about sex-based protections in law on a panel at this year’s Republican/Irish unity festival, called Féile an Phobail (Fayla on Fubble). When the inevitable queer crew cancellation campaign got wind of it, the organisers pulled the panel immediately and grovelled about “demonisation” of “communities”, pretending that objecting to transvestites in women’s changing rooms is just like the bad old days of The Troubles (lol).

WRN NI are now demanding that the event be reinstated, and it looks like some awful old witch is offering to cover the legal costs if the organisers refuse. You love to see it folks!

Also Northern Ireland: the deputy head of the Northern Ireland police (the PSNI) claimed that the decision not to participate in the Pride parade this year was the "hardest and most difficult thing that I have been involved with in 25 years in policing". As a police chief in Northern Fucking Ireland! That’s quite the statement!

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Two thirds of “trans people” in the EU are “non-binary”

A lot of people fell for transmania because they assumed (and still assume) that they understand what “trans person” means, and that understanding is based on the tropes that they were spoonfed back in the early days of professional trans organising.

A trans person, we used to be told earnestly, is a man who is quite literally trapped — like a wet cat trying to claw its way out of a bath — inside the body that is not his. A female version of this was also invented for butch lesbians at some point, but the uptake for that personality type was low until Tumblr was invented circa 2011.

But the “wrong body” myth no longer makes any sense now that sex is more like an ice-cream flavour or a star sign. And yet even though the whole trans thing has been revealed (surprise!) to be utter tosh, the sympathy and concessions and funding is still being directed towards the group of people who claim to represent these wrong-bodied souls of yore.

According to this Transgender Europe report, 65% of the people who are claiming to be trans are actually claiming to be neither wrong-bodied male nor wrong-bodied female, but a third, uncategorised thing. Perhaps there’s no wrong body involved at all. Who knows!

What is for certain: activists are going to use this data point to feed their advocacy for recognition of non-binary identities. The majority of these cases are, as we see from the German data below, women trying desperately opt out of womanhood (and not necessarily opt-into manhood).

“Conference” or ten-day lesbian beach party?

If you want to get an idea of how grandiosely off-the-hook EU public spending on queer nonsense has gotten, just check out the details of this junket. This takes the biscuit.

This group of professional lesbians-with-an-asterisk (the asterisk is for men-lesbians), called EL*C, is going for TEN DAYS to a paradise-like beach resort town on the remote Greek island of Lesbos for their annual conference next year, which, apart from conference-type content, will have a full agenda of “exhibitions, performances, music, comedy, films, sports and gastronomic events”. TEN DAYS!

It will be held in the “bohemian-chic hippie town” of Skala Eressos, a place that’s popular among lesbian (now “queer”) holidaymakers. They EL*C held this year’s week-long conference in the same destination.

It’s not just that the island itself is extremely remote and hard (and expensive) to get to, the location of the conference is remote on an already-remote island. Explaining why it was necessary to have their beach-party-I-mean-conference in the most far-flung corner of Europe, a place that also just so happens to be a paradisiacal wellness-type holiday town, we get this: “We choose to gather away from political capitals because we believe the margins are not the edges of our movement, on the contrary, they are where new imaginaries, alliances and ways of organising are born.”

Oh I see!

And apparently, capitalism is a big part of what’s getting Europe’s professional lesbians down — as well as mass tourism, apparently — ergo it will be good for them all to take an off-grid holiday I MEAN WORK EVENT to catch a breath from all the capitalism and yucky mass tourism that the plebs have to endure.

I went to one of the lesbian-asterisk conferences in Rome last year and I sat in a room where they all schemed to get males into women’s sports competitions, because that’s the fashionable thing in regime feminism right now. EL*C got at least €1 million in funding from the Commission in the most recent (declared) installment, and I don’t see much work being produced.

Eroding women’s rights at the beach on my tax money while moaning about capitalism. Pretty fucking cheeky! Someone needs to DOGE the Commission. This is starting to get insulting.

Germany: 28,923 sex records changed in official registries since January 2024

According to my calculations, there are about 17,000 women in Germany now registered as “male”, “gender diverse” or “no specification”. Stats are based on this report: Data on changes in gender registration for the years 2024 and 2025 and preliminary results for 2026.

New Transgender Europe director is a regime f*minist

A woman called Juliane Rosin has just been announced as the new leader of the EU’s leading sex-erasure NGO, Transgender Europe. She has a solid pedigree, with 15 years in professional wom*n-related organising in Germany, and her selection suggests to me that TGEU, who receive millions in EU funding, are planning on leaning into their “transfeminism” schtick.

The Council of German women’s organisations — which she co-led — is 100% transcaptured. She may be much more dangerous, access and influence-wise, than the oddballs who have done the job before her. I wish her luck lassoing all those aggrieved enbies.

Trans cancellation plans did not go smoothly for activists

Activists at a university in Dusseldorf were absolutely livid that a female professor called Ute Johanna Bayen was scheduled to give a talk on the topic of the development of trans identities. They called for her to be sacked, but because it’s not 2020 anymore, they had to settle instead for a protest and the lecture went ahead (despite their disruptions). This is a change from Marie-Luise Vollbrecht’s treatment in 2022. Progress, I guess.

They petulantly demanded that the university monitor the professor’s statements “with regard to their academic validity”, adding: “should discriminatory statements be found, personnel consequences must follow.”

Intersectional pileup: bad time to be a fat lesbian French jew

France looks like it’s going through a paroxysm of left-wing extremism right now, and part of the reason they are so rabid (beyond the looming spectre of LePen/Bardella election success) is that some good-looking and brazen young ANTIFA men got elected to government positions, and this has emboldened the Street Fighter larpers in the movement.

They are particularly het up about Palestine, and people who have made favourable comments or gestures in the direction of Israel have come under fierce attack. This has been done in the form of “cultural boycotts”, which means cancelled concerts and talk events — all standard fare.

But an event on Saturday night showed that they are ready to amp things up.

Their victim this time was a woman who would normally be a darling of the intersectional Left: Barbara Butch. She was the DJ at the centre of the infamous opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, after which she got a huge amount of online abuse from right-wingers and Christians. They went after her her performance not just because she’s another obnoxious fatty bombatty with a diverse and fun sex identity she wants to talk about all the time, but also because the set in which she played a central role was a queer recreation of the Last Supper. Four men were later convicted in court for bullying her.

Now the Left is after her because she signed a letter in support of an anti-semitism law, even though she later said she regretted it.

For the past few months, members of the Islamo-left LFI party have been urging boycott of her events, but a scheduled concert went ahead in the southern city of Grenoble at the weekend. A couple of hundred activists mobbed it, unfurling Palestine flags and chanting pro-Palestine slogans while she was in the middle of singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” (the irony).

But the mob started to get out of control. She began to be pelted with rocks, gravel from the ground, and unidentified liquid. The crowd worked itself into a frenzy. In the midst of it all, a local councilor of the LFI party, Allan Brunon, was seen happily egging the protest on. Another LFI activist created the image below.

Barbara Butch had to leave the stage.

It would be interesting to know if homophobia on the part of the LFI’s huge Muslim constituency was a factor. If not, it’s only a matter of time before that queer tolerance facade of the Islamo-Gauche coalition begins to crack.

Germany: human trafficking for me, but not for thee

A political crisis over commercial surrogacy broke out in Germany recently when Jens Spahn, a parliamentary group leader for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, acquired a baby in the US via surrogate.

This is despite the fact that surrogacy is illegal in Germany, his own party re-affirmed this by vote as recently as February this year. Not only that, but Spahn had previously criticised the practice publicly, telling GQ in 2015 that as a gay man and a Christian, he struggled with the idea of surrogacy.

Birgit Kelle, a journalist known for writing about surrogacy (she published a book on it: Ich kauf mir ein Kind, in 2024), who is also involved in the Casablanca Declaration, pointed out that Spahn was not the only gay CDU member who deliberately circumvented the surrogacy ban to get a child abroad. In Germany, surrogacy is strictly prohibited under the Embryo Protection Act, and artificial insemination (for this reason) and the arrangement of a surrogate mother are punishable offenses. The woman who carries the pregnancy is always legally considered the mother of the child, according to the law as it stands.

Spahn was forced to resign by Friedrich Merz, saying the “increasing relentlessness in public discourse” had given him “deep pause for thought”.

WHOLE festival: open-air sex party causes infectious disease outbreak before it even starts

There’s an outdoor queer festival called WHOLE (yes, it’s a reference to one’s “hole”) that takes place every year in Saxony-Anhalt, and the communications around the event offer a perfect glimpse at the chaos inside the weird coalition that has built over the years between party gays and their new zisters-in-arms in the queer/poly/fat/neurodivergent/disabled/extremely aggrieved safe-spacey female rainbow brigade.

These women have invaded classic gay cruising culture with demands for things like “accountability” and “intention setting” and “checking your privilege”, to hilarious effect.

Complaints were flooding in before the event even started that the video reels used as ads for the festival didn’t feature any fat, odd, or sick-looking people (because “circuit gays” who come to these festivals like hot people! They are not here to “do better”. They’re here to have sex with hotties, you utter goons!)

Things took a turn for the darker when norovirus spread among the crew right before opening day, causing multiple reports of severe stomach illness. The local health authorities had to be called in.

I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum or whatever, but I find this infection outbreak kind of unsurprising? It’s basically a massive, open-air sex village, with glory holes dotted throughout, chemsex expected (encouraged?), and all kinds of other fun activities that are basically about inserting your bits into other people’s bits and swirling them around. But the tips provided to festival-goers on avoiding contamination with norovirus: Make sure to wash your hands!

The cutesification of it all via the aggrieved rainbow ladies just gives the whole thing extremely creepy vibes. It was a lot less weird when the gays weren’t decorating their orgies like a two-year-old’s birthday party. I wonder how this partnership will work out in the long run? I noticed the division during Dublin Pride this year, too. The hot, coiffed, chiseled and tanned gay men were all in one part of the city trying to hook up with other hot, coiffed, chiseled and tanned gay men, while the “official” Pride party in Merrion Square looked like a My Little Pony sex dungeon, full of oddballs, perverts, and children.

WHOLE has to be seen to be believed.

Who can we thank? Thomas Hammarberg

Thomas Hammarberg is an old Swedish guy who spent his career as a diplomat and “human rights” figure. He’s had stints as chair of Amnesty International’s Swedish section, Secretary-General of Amnesty International (during which he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on the NGO’s behalf), and a bunch of other similarly prestigious gigs.

He was the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights from 2006 to 2012, and his role in the institutionalisation of gender identity was foundational: he produced a document in 2009 called "Human Rights and Gender Identity", a pivotal moment in the Council of Europe's move transward. He made gender identity recognition a prominent feature of his mandate, apparently at the behest of ILGA-Europe, and this document became the central activist cudgel for trans activists for years.

It was a pivotal time, when the two principal “streams” of trans activism can clearly be seen to come together: Western transvestites, which use to be mainly straight male transvestites/anatomic autogynephiles, and the exotic '“third genders” who are actually just gay men in deeply homophobic cultures (and who are genuinely victims of brutal, systemic violence). The dire situation of this latter group of “trans women”, who are accommodated by their cultures as prostitutes-in-drag, and the murder of one of these men in Portugal in 2006, were proffered to Hammarberg as a way to convince him that “trans” is all one thing and the activists should be given everything they wanted. The chronically bad situation of these men in places like in Turkey (a Council of Europe member state) was also presented as an alibi. The rest is history.

I managed to get my hands on Hammarberg’s personal email address a couple of years ago (he’s retired) so I asked him if he could have foreseen where this would all lead. You’ll be terribly shocked to hear that he didn’t answer me.

Here he is. Say thanks to Thomas.

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In other news

• The EU wants to “queer the outdoors”

• Multiple EU grants — including multi-year “core” funding — for this NGO whose only goal seems to be to decimate women’s sports

• Joint letter from European NGOs to the UK government challenge the claim that keeping kids’ sexual identity secrets from their parents is a safeguarding risk (it’s a safeguarding risk)

• Women’s tennis is for women once again. Martina Navratilova claims to have had nothing to do with it but let’s credit her anyway

• A project about going to raves as a way of developing your gender identity, or something, funded to the tune of 200k by the EU

• Natural Women’s Council protest SuperValu chain over queer kids partnership

• Natural Women’s Council protest monument to self-harm (also paid for by the EU) in Dublin centre

• Belgium is considering an amendment to the constitution that could lead to more prosecutions for “transphobic” online hate. It would try these cases in a lower court instead of the (more arduous, expensive) criminal court

• Little girl walks onto the World Cup final football pitch wearing a modesty garment (to repel sexual excitement), even though she’s only about 10 years old.

• Conscription has pushed more Ukrainian women into jobs previously held by men — just like in World War II

• Kyrgyzstan: UN experts criticise advancement of law restricting gender identity and expression

• Guy drafting new Irish model of trans “care” is to step down at the end of the year. Concerns raised about “Icelandic model”

• Attempted murder of female police inspector investigating European Parliament corruption

• Austrian court rules ski resort hotel’s burkini ban is discriminatory

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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1. Queering the Balkans: geopolitics meets trans rights

2. Albanian minister falsely claims WPATH “affirming care” is prerequisite for EU membership

3. German boxing promoter murdered in Vienna, Chechen GAMP boyfriend caught on the run

4. Malta: closing in on who ordered TERF journalist’s murder

5. No charges made yet against Swedish trans paedophile suspect

6. Neo-Nazi: not woman enough for a woman’s prison

7. President of EU court, who presided over ideological capture of European case law, reelected

8. Belgium: after 19 months of prostitution contracts, what have we learned?

9. Beating back Pride bans: the new democratic frontier

10. Prominent Swedish LGBTIQ+ activist caught in a paedophile sting

11. EU staff getting warmed up to accept Islamic sex-segregation culture

12. Who can we thank? Frances Fitzgerald

13. In other news…

Queering the Balkans: geopolitics meets trans rights

It’s a very simple question: will Montenegro be allowed to join the EU if its government doesn’t pass the sex-self ID bill that has been sitting waiting to be passed since 2024?

The deadline for closing on all the reforms demanded by Brussels — which cover everything from judges to juvenile justice to sustainable seaport infrastructure — is fast approaching. Civil society NGOs, some of which are directly funded by the EU, insist that joining the bloc requires giving all Montenegrins the “fundamental right” to self-selected-sex-by-signature. The European Commission included the self-ID bill in its reforms checklist, and the text of the draft bill itself declares itself to be a requirement for EU membership.

And yet nobody wants to answer the question: is it a dealbreaker, or not?

All EU accession states (there are 10 in total) are under the same pressure, but Montenegro is next in the membership queue so they can’t escape the question for much longer.

The Irish government, by happenstance of history (and alphabetical order) is chairing the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, and end-stage negotiations with Montenegro were on the table as they took over the role from Cyprus on 1 July. Irish leaders have declared, repeatedly and enthusiastically, their intention to close the deal on Montenegrin membership, pre-announcing it as the signature achievement of their six-month tenure in the job.

And yet they won’t answer the question about sex self-ID, either.

The EU “enlargement” mission has kicked into high gear lately as a way to counter Russia’s advance into Europe (and also, I suspect, as a way to reverse demographic decline without having to replenish the aging workforce with men from the Kashmiri Kush and other cradles of misogyny).

The standoff over self-ID in Montenegro signals a broader impasse over LGBTIQ+ rights. Progressive politicians are full of enthusiasm for “legal gender recognition” as long as the details of what it entails are not revealed. At a certain point, however, the surface gets scratched, and when it does, very few people in the political class seem ready or willing to stand up and say: yep, queering the civil registry is a fundamental right.

The NGOs desperately want such a full-throated (public) defense from the Commission and the Irish leadership, but they are never going to get it because it is political poison. Reports suggest Montenegrin leaders who once commissioned and championed the bill have (probably) had to bargain it away with conservative members of their coalition behind closed doors. They have no intention of going to bat for such a turd of a law, which was an over-delivery of the EU acquis: the baseline requirement is legal gender recognition without surgery (not full self-ID).

What was once considered an easy, low-cost progressive win that would get all the kids on board and make Brussels bureaucrats and NGO brats happy, has become extremely politically volatile. It is terribly embarrassing that in the frenzied years of woke, so many Western governments submitted to the screeching queer activist elite demand to erase sex as a coherently-protected class in law, and even more embarrassing that they tied it to EU values and forced it down the throats of candidate countries.

If they all back down on self-ID now, the rainbow mafia (local and global) will be up their arses. If they don’t, all the rest of us will. Irish people can’t do much about de-queering our laws without an overhaul of our entire political class, but the Montenegrins (and the Albanians, and the North Macedonians, and the Ukrainians…) can still stop it.

I travelled to Montenegro and Albania last week (thanks for the donations) in order to ask people what they think about it all. It was a bit of a struggle. I realised quickly that there was a Goldilocks zone of people I should ask: if they were too low down on the class ladder (cleaning ladies, Roma) they didn’t speak English well enough (or at all) to understand the question, but if they were too high on the class ladder (NGO workers, anyone very-online) they were fully fluent in English but much more likely to be scared to voice opposition to anything EU-coded. For the latter group, full anonymity had to be guaranteed.

Everyone I spoke to had difficulty sussing me out: was I anti-EU, or pro-EU? It was very hard to explain the gender critical position, which has nothing to do with one’s views of the EU Single Market or geopolitics, and everything to do with the steadfast conviction that fetishistic transvestites are not women. Opposition to the self-ID law is very much tied to the conservative minority (someone from a Serb conservative group called it “freaky, perverted and insane”) and anyone who wants to make a good go of their prospects in shitlib euroland, has to be extremely careful not be be associated with a filthy TERF, or be caught on mic sharing unorthodoxies about sacred shitlibboleths.

In deciding who to approach to ask about it, I found a sweet spot: people working in service sector jobs that required them to be able to speak English, but not have a professional degree (none of the professionals in any kind of NGO wanted to speak to me once they figured out my deal). Nobody I spoke to, barring a couple of TERFs, had considered that sex self-ID undermines the rationale of all sex-based protections, as well as all the “empowerment” projects that governments love to brag about.

While transvestite males would have a hard time encroaching on women’s spaces and services, even in the capitals Tirana and Podgorica, there is a much more present danger: in places where being gender non-conforming is tough, the temptation to trans is strong, especially among butch lesbians who can easily get their hands on testosterone and become short-statured male-impersonators instead of failing to live up to the sexy skinny Slavic feminine ideal.

Montenegro has a native population of only 600,000 people. The “queer community” is very small. There are much more pressing issues about identity, far more pressing fights about flags and language to do with its recent unstable geopolitical arrangements. As we have learned in the rest of Europe, ignoring this issue is an easy way for politicians (and media) to avoid taking an unpopular stand on it. The Irish leader Michael Martin, who is about to take a lead role in deciding when Montenegro has done enough to demonstrate its progressive bona fides, has called the sex erasure project a “culture war” imported from over yonder in TRUMP’S AMERIKKKA (and JKKK Rowling’s TERF Island).

I predict that Montenegro will join without ever passing the self-ID bill, because Brussels needs enlargement more than it needs queer-addled gender delusions that will piss everyone off except a small niche of fluorescent extremists. And I think everyone currently refusing to say so knows it.

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Albanian minister falsely claims WPATH “affirming care” is prerequisite for EU membership

There have been attempts to queer/genderfy/de-heteronormativise legislation in Albania as part of the same “reform” mission mentioned above. This has included attempts to expand the meaning of sex, and replace the words mother and father in gender equality law with the terms “parent one and parent two”. However these attempts failed because Albanians are more free than we are in Western Europe to call it out for the bullshit that it is (they don’t get called fascists and lose their jobs for straight-talking about the facts of life…yet!)

But one initiative did get through: in April this year the health ministry introduced WPATH-based guidelines for gender affirming care to the public health system (adults only).

In a demonstration of how the EU can be a useful alibi for unpopular topics, the Deputy Minister of Health and Social Protection, Eugena Tomini, explained the move by saying she was merely following orders from Brussels. Specifically, she said, making the (disgraced) WPATH protocol available to Albanians aligns the country with EU directives related to health. However, the EU does not have a mandate to issue directives on health, there is no binding law on the topic.

And yet despite this, the EU Commission progress report for Albania did mention their lack of healthcare for trans people.

Beyond the blame-Brussels dynamic (which all EU leaders do when it suits them), it also shows the power of soft law. Desperate to join the EU club, accession states are vulnerable to the wildest woke dreams of the EU elite.

German boxing promoter murdered in Vienna. Chechen GAMP boyfriend caught on the run.

The “trans murders” that we get repeatedly battered over the head are always a repeat of the same dynamic: a nominally heterosexual man having sex with a “trans woman” who ends up killing him in (probably) murderous self-disgust. The murder then gets blamed on lesbians angry they can no longer have meetups without autogynephiles.

It seems like a fairly regular occurrence in Europe. Here’s the most recent one: a 70-year-old German man, an activist and former boxing promoter who went by the name Etchika Pollex, invited a 27-year-old man from Chechnya to come and live with him in his apartment in Vienna. The Chechen man is presumably the person referred to as his “partner” in the video below (reports claim they were in a relationship). Shortly after this video was made, Pollex was stabbed to death in his home. Shortly after that, the Chechen “partner” was caught on the run in the French Riviera.

We need to get serious about who is doing the trans murders. We need to talk about GAMPs.

Malta: closing in on who ordered TERF journalist’s murder

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown up by a car bomb in 2017 because she wouldn’t stop reporting on government corruption. In the years since, multiple people have been tried, convicted and/or imprisoned for the killing, including the planters of the bomb and the guy who paid them.

Ties to senior Labour figures have been alleged for years, and this week in court, the former economy minister and former chief of staff to the Prime Minister (Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri) were again singled out as the ultimate masterminds behind the plot.

Caruana Galizia was deliciously critical of all the cronies in the upper tiers of Maltese politics. Her last-ever post on her blogging site, Running Commentary (which is still up) is about one of the men who allegedly organised her killing.

She also generously mocked Malta’s clumsy attempts to burnish its progressive bona fides by introducing self-ID and conversion therapy laws before (almost) anyone else. She wasn’t taken in by the antics of the famous celebrity “transsexual” Joanne Cassar who kicked off the trans rights movement in the country. She was acutely critical of the woke cosplay of the utterly corrupt government who used LGBTIQ+ rights as a “smokescreen” for corruption and to appeal to Brussels/EU audiences.

She was a TERF before I even knew what a TERF was.

Her sons run a journalism foundation founded in her honour, but I couldn’t entice them to look into the role of particular Maltese activists in the millions of euro that the Commission started pumping into the trans project post 2014. The foundation gets its funding from the EU itself, so it’s perhaps not surprising.

No charges made yet against Swedish paedophile suspect

A few (entirely predictable) events happened in the past few months to make Swedish people question the wisdom of sex self-ID.

One of them involved a man called “Vilma” Andersen, a fetishistic transvestite who collected child sex abuse material, and who was recently released early from prison after serving time for trying to kidnap a little girl. After his release from prison, he started calling himself by a woman’s name and dressing in women’s clothes. Now he is the prime suspect in the murder and dismemberment of a young woman who was abducted on Christmas Day. Charges against him were due to be filed in mid June, but the investigation has not finished yet.

It is in this context that the people of Sweden have been asking: do we really have to call this scumbag “she”? and learning that according to the new rules, yes you do.

It is a sign of the deranged times that it is now taboo to say that there is a long-established pattern of paraphilic cross-dressing in males who commit sexual homicides. In February 2026, the actor who played Buffalo Bill, a crossdressing rapist/murderer in the film Silence of the Lambs, as well as the producer of the film, apologised for portraying this well-known trope.

Former cop and Twitter TERF Diane Alastair has written about the phenomenon extensively.

Neo-Nazi: not woman enough for a woman’s prison

Neo-Nazi transvestite “Marla”-Svenja Liebich was extradited back to Germany on Wednesday from Czechia, where he was on the run. Initially, he was transferred to the women’s prison, but the prison authorities quickly transferred him to the male estate.

Almost without exception, the media and regime activists are calling him “she” and yet none of them seem to be up in arms about the cruelty of putting “her” in a male detention centre. What gives? He’s woman enough for she/her, but not woman enough for a women’s prison? I smell inconsistency. Or perhaps this self-ID malarkey is not as watertight as we were made to believe?

President of EU court, who presided over ideological capture of European case law, reelected

Koen Lenaerts is a senior Belgian judge who has been on the bench since 2003, and has been president of the Court since 2015. As such, he as presided over the switcheroo from the trans medico-legal model to the anything-goes social justice model of trans. It’s on his watch that EU jurisprudence got infected with the terminology of the trans cult, which now includes such fantastical concepts as “non-binary” and “non-cisgender”.

And he has just been reelected for a new term to last until 2033.

Lenaerts didn’t introduce trans pseudoconcepts to the Court, of course. In 1996, long before he took up his post, a British man convinced the court that “gender reassignment,” counted as sex discrimination under EU equal treatment law. What’s changed under Lenaerts tenure is that ruling by ruling, “gender reassignment” has been quietly expanded and ultimately sidelined, with “gender identity” now a freestanding legal category that applies to “trans” cases.

Lenaerts was also the one who proudly announced the court’s innovative finding that Hungary’s anti-LGBTIQ+ legislation broke not just EU law but EU vibes. Failing to affirm gender identity is now treated as an assault on the Union’s identity itself. This was a first.

Lenaerts is an integrationist, meaning, anything that makes the union more unified, he’ll rule in favour of it. So we can expect the most progressive laws will become everyone’s laws, given enough time and strategic litigation.

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Belgium: after 19 months of prostitution contracts, what have we learned?

Nearly two years after the Belgian law on employment contracts for sex work came into force, very few bordel licenses have been granted and very few prostitution contracts have been signed with “workers”.

In 2024 the government passed a law that allows you to pimp people out for sex for your own financial gain, as long as you get a license and meet certain compliance requirements. These requirements are intended to keep bad actors out of the business, and the “workers” safe and psychologically healthy and happy. This utopian ideal completely ignores the fact that only bad actors would be involved in such a business in the first place, and the psychological safety and happiness of the women who work for them is unlikely to be their animating motivation.

The result is that Belgium gets to brag about being super progressive and liberal, while in reality everyone continues to operate in the same sordid grey zone that they always operated in. So virtue. Much signalled.

Below is a shot of an ad for a job in the tiny Belgian town of Gembloux, which includes this sad detail: “After a video conference interview and acceptance of your application, we can pick you up personally and cover your plane ticket if necessary.”

There’s a point at which you have to wean yourself off libertarian bro-ishness and accept that some freedoms create terrible incentives that make the world a much worse place for young, vulnerable women and girls. If you could just put your dicks in a bowl of ice maybe?

Beating back Pride bans: democracy’s new frontier

A project called ReAssemble, which was funded to legally challenge Viktor Orban’s ban on Pride, has just started, even though Orban is gone, Pride Budapest went ahead this year, and the surveillance measures (intended to identify anyone who violated the Pride ban) were never used. But more pertinently, the Court of Justice of the EU has told the Hungarian government they have to repeal this Orban-era law , and it’s only a matter of time before Peter Magyar, the Golden Boy who will fulfill everyone’s libbest dreams, follows suit. In other words, the strategic litigation the ReAssemble project was conceived to fund has already been carried out, been successful, and its resulting ruling is about to be implemented.

And yet two Hungarian NGOs (the Háttér Society and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee) are still getting €115,000 for this phantom problem. When I asked the Commission and one of the NGOs about it, my email was forwarded to Head Prefect of the EU spokesperson’s service, Anna Gray, who said I wasn’t a real journalist (the EU press service refuse to grant me accreditation because I merely “post on social media”).

Meanwhile, ILGA-Europe, the gay rights organisation that ran out of road ages ago and now just scoops up random causes in order to keep their funding going, is calling for serious repercussions for any country (EU or not, the appeal is also addressed to the high representative for external affairs) that attempts to interfere with the weird kid-friendly fetish fest that is Pride, because Prides are the strongest sign of a healthy democracy, apparently.

Prominent Swedish LGBTIQ+ activist caught in a paedophile sting

Martin Johansson is a celebrated national LGBTIQ+ activist involved in RFSL (the Swedish Federation for LGBT Rights), having once sat on the organisation’s board at the regional level. He has won awards from RFSL for his activism.

Last week, Johansson was exposed by the vigilante group Dumpen, who caught him attempting to meet an online decoy he believed was a child. Johansson’ partner was also involved.

RFSL runs trans camps for children under 13 where they can explore their gender identity. They also push self-ID laws for minors, and fought to keep explicit books accessible to middle schoolers. Preschools hosted Pride parades for toddlers until it was ruled illegal by an ombudsman. Their “normkritik” projects train teachers in queer theory and gender fluidity from early school years.

If you think this is premature sexualisation of children, or that blokes like this are dodgy af for pushing it, you’ll get called mean names.

Notice the fun coloured badges he’s wearing during his “meeting” with a child he thinks he’s about to violate.

EU staff getting warmed up to accept Islamic sex-segregation culture

I was pleased to hear that the European Commission held a webinar on “freedom of belief” for staff soon after I was fired for my beliefs. I thought: well at least others will be free to say that men cannot be women no matter how horny it makes them. But then someone showed me the transcript of the webinar.

The presentations seemed to centre around the confrontation between Islamic modesty codes (and being weird about sex, generally) and women in the workplace. One speaker claimed that the COVID-era practice of social distancing was great for Muslim men because it meant that they didn’t have to shake women’s sexy hands. Another speaker said staff should get trained up on gulping down their discomfort about women who wear modesty garments.

I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.

Who can we thank?

Frances Fitzgerald is a veteran Irish politician who served as deputy PM, government minister, and member of the European Parliament. The political party to which she belongs, Fine Gael, boofed the gender koolaid to a horrific degree in the mid 2010s, and she was one of the sensible people who (to many people’s shock) went right along with her party’s gendershite reforms, the signature one being, of course, the Gender Recognition Act (2015).

One of her achievements while in government was a gender strategy released in 2017 that was “inclusive of individuals whose sex characteristics, gender identity or gender expression is female”. In the strategy section about challenging gender norms, however, she wanted people to know that they could change their gender if they didn’t like it (if you could opt out of being a woman, we probably wouldn’t need a strategy for women in the first place, I reckon).

During negotiations on the EU law on combatting violence against women, gender critical feminists contacted her and others on the gender committee to ask that single-sex shelters and specialist services for female victims be explicitly provided for in the directive. Leaving “woman” and “gender” undefined risked handing the interpretation to loopy gender ideologues in member states. This was an opportunity to make it clear that women’s crisis centres and shelters are for women only.

As the rapporteur on the bill, Fitzgerald had the lead role in putting together the compromise text. However, the final draft is full of nonsense that further muddies the meaning of woman in European law. It states that the directive is for “all persons, regardless of their gender” to combat “violence against women… regardless of their gender.” And of course the text is riddled with references to “intersectional discrimination”, which is sneaky code for men with genderfeelz, and is — without fail — interpreted as such in member countries.

Because of the intersectionality faff, I am of the opinion that it might have been better for European women’s right to sex-protected spaces if there had been no directive at all.

Every bend of the knee to trans ideology in legislation burrows the bullshit deeper into our lives. This directive not only implies the existence of endless genders and women-who-are-also-men, it even mentions “intersex” twice, even though intersex is not real and is merely queer activist language designed to confuse people into thinking sex is not binary. That’s significant in a law that is intended to protect one sex against violence committed by the other sex. Refusing to define sex (and implicitly nuking its widely-understood definition) in a sex-based law is stupid. Frances Fitzgerald played a big part in that stupidity.

Here she is. Say thanks to Frances.

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In other news

• The EU is about to introduce age verification for creating social media accounts. Jon Haidt attempts a defense from a conservative perspective

• The Irish government has given funding to two paraphiliac goons pretending to be intersex

• Berlin clubs: they’re about to go all-topless or nobody-topless

• Amnesty International messed with the wrong TERFs

• Murder of Irish woman by asylum seeker ex-partner has set off a firestorm over who’s killing whom in Ireland

• Clever stunt: Dutch dad churned out AI sites about trans that got picked up by media as “hateful”, introducing the country to vital resources

• Belgian Scouts have fallen to trans ideology: “menstruation of affected individuals” used in period guide instead of “girls”

• European Broadcasting Union issued guidelines on not-being-a-dirtbag when filming female athletes after women complained of crotch shots circulating online, which the Brussels Signal thinks is woke. The backlash is gonna be harsh, ladies.

• Fiertés Rurales (Rural Pride) advertised that gender-critical gay group LGB Alliance were included in their Pride party, got TOLDT by queer activists that LGB Alliance are Basically Hitler, and then had to grovel over their mistake

• Belfast city servants were forbidden from marching at Pride

• Dutch town stops putting rainbow flag on municipality building, protest ensues

• Meta caught running ads for child sex abuse material

• Riots in Dutch asylum centre: big spoilt AGP baby seems shocked to discover America isn’t actually all that bad

• German federal court upholds ban on child sex dolls

• About time: Genspect profiles Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, unsung architect of the Dutch protocol

• An Austrian woman bled to death after “violent sex”

• Ukraine’s military fund will be boosted by decriminalising porn
  

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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1. Female in Belfast, male in Birmingham

2. IKEA Spain leans into Blahaj shark as trans icon

3. A woman raped a teenage girl in Denmark. But guess what.

4. Young girl sexually assaulted at the pervert-picnic that is Dublin Pride

5. RULES

6. Swiss flasher on track to peak the nation

7. Look at this poster for a Pride event in Belgium

8. Polish NGO in desperate hunt to halt trans court cases

9. A Swedish woman shared a post about a paedophile caught in a sting. She was convicted for defamation

10. Who can we thank? Silvan Agius

11. In other news…

Female in Belfast, male in Birmingham

Women in Northern Ireland had hoped that once the UK Supreme Court had clarified that the words man, woman and sex have biological meanings for the purposes of interpreting UK equality law, their fight to protect women and girls’ services, space and sports against the tide of insane gender rubbish would be over. Not quite.

And Northern Ireland’s messy post-peace legal landscape is the reason why.

Guaranteeing equal treatment and non-discrimination for Catholic/Republican and Protestant/Unionist community groups was central to ending the Troubles; historical grievances meant that the Good Friday Agreement would only work if safeguards were put in place to make sure one community could not dominate another in work, access to services etc.

In the years after it was signed, a bumper procession of EU equality laws backed up and reinforced these anti-discrimination protections. But when Brexit loomed, there was a worry that a future UK government, free from obligations from Brussels, might get rid of (or water down) the guarantees that were so central to the signing of the peace deal.

The Republican side, in particular, said that Brexit meant that there was a real risk that this equal-treatment pillar of the peace agreement was about to get wobbly. So a deal was reached between the EU and the UK that Brexit would not result in any reduction of rights, and that six different EU equality-related laws would continue to be adhered to in Northern Ireland. And: they would have to keep up with any EU developments in this area thereafter.

Of course, the EU has been busy transvestising all its equality legislation via downlow strategic litigation, carried out by ILGA-Europe and Transgender Europe using EU funds dedicated to that exact mission. But even though EU case law is increasingly peppered with the ideological language of the trans cult, there’s nothing in CJEU case law that says having a gender recognition certificate automatically and always makes someone legally the opposite sex for every purpose.

So there is no “right” being infringed upon. And so when the For Women Scotland judgement was handed down, the body responsible for monitoring and enforcing the complicated equality arrangements in Northern Ireland, the Equality Commission of Northern Ireland (ECNI), should have recognised this (they have one job!) and just pulled on their big boy pantaloons and accepted that the law was clear.

But they didn’t do that. Instead they claimed that there was too much legal uncertainty, and passed the buck to the High Court to ask what they should do.

We will find out in December if the ECNI has “leave” for a judicial review, in the lingo. Meanwhile, the TERFs are organising the fight against this potential rollback of our actual sex-based rights to single-sex spaces, sports, services etc. It’s being led by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland and a number of “interveners”, while on the other side, carpetbagger Jolyon Maugham of the pretentiously (and inaccurately) named Good Law Project will be supporting a trans-friendly interpretation (hell hath no fury like a parent who transed their own children).

The “identity groups” whose rights everyone had in mind when the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated, of course, were Catholic/Republicans and Protestant/Unionists. It was not transvestite knickermen and the shouty roundwomen of the NGOcracy. It was about Catholics in the civil service, not crossdressers in your changing rooms.

The High Court may end up passing the problem back up to the UK Supreme Court, from whence the original decision that woman means woman came. The trans activist side will be making the case that in order to make sure the paramilitaries don’t take up arms again, the, uuuhhh, “right” of male transvestites to access spaces where women and girls get naked will have to be enforced. If they are successful, the upshot of that would be that while we would still be adult human females in Birmingham and Bradford, the word would be an open category in Belfast.

Northern Ireland is particularly captured by the reality-defying trans cult, and that has a lot to do with the modern era’s mortal enemy of democracy: the NGOs. Called “the charity sector” in the UK, the NGOcracy in Northern Ireland was pumped full of “peace money” after the end of the conflict, and a lot of that money has ended up fuelling the same flavour of BeKind wokery that has flooded the rest of the West (I interviewed local gal Sara Morisson about it recently, she’s another TERF who lost her job for refusing to drink the trans-women-are-women koolaid).

Because every topic inevitably gets filtered through political divisions, woke shit is Republican-coded while being reasonable on this topic has been attached to the Unionist side, who are generally more socially conservative. Or rather, Unionist parties are making political hay out of the left’s submission to trans insanity, whether they care about or even understand the issue or not. “They’re using us, and we’re using them,” a Belfast-based TERF told me.

I almost feel sorry for the Shinners being lumped with the blue-haired autists of the left elite. They’re supposed to be populists, and they have ended up flying the flag of the luxury gender project. The fluorescent quare women and their megaphones and keffieyhs are electoral poison but they are very LOUD and very EVERYWHERE.

Sinn Féin knows they’re doomed if they continue to side with the visibly insane troon platoon, but when they tried to sort it out internally through a top-secret conference on the topic, the youthful spergs and pervs in their membership wouldn’t allow them to back down. It’s the same problem for left parties everywhere: they can’t even make the low-bar concession on the very obvious issue of males in women’s sports without tacitly admitting that trans woman are men. That’s the nuclear core of the lie. So after the gender conference, Sinn Féin just sort of went aaaaah but shur look whatcanyedo. Also: the brother of the President of Sinn Féin is A Great Person.

I had a good laugh at this with some anon norniron TERFs: literal ex paramilitaries — big bad scary lads — have somehow ended up caping for knickermen, and their cowardly failure to tell the screamy kids of the wokestocracy to fuck off might doom their united Ireland project altogether. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

IKEA Spain leans into Blahaj shark as trans icon

This IKEA stuffed shark toy has long been a meme and companion to straight men in the “trans community”. Spanish IKEA has decided to produce an “empathy manual” that will come with every purchase of Blahaj, in honour of its extremely dedicated trans fanclub, because like trans people, sharks are always having to “swim against the tide”.

The manual includes passive-aggressive gems such as:

“We don’t use the correct name and pronouns only in front of the person, but also when they’re not there. Also when you talk with other people. Also once the interaction is over. We always keep respect and never reveal someone’s identity without their consent.”

Spain is probably the most gender-fucked of all the EU countries. A lost cause.

A woman raped a teenage girl in Denmark. But guess what.

If you guessed “it wasn’t a woman who raped the young girl, it was actually a man pretending (badly) to be a woman”, you would be correct. But as per the respectability script, everyone involved in this horrific story is forcing themselves to pretend that the man is actually a woman — from the journalists to the judges to the police. If it goes to court (which is likely, because the transvestite is denying the allegation), the young girl herself may be forced to call her rapist “she”.

What’s worse, she may even be a willing participant in the lie, because everyone under 25 has been fully lobotomised thanks to the transvestification of children’s education.

Rape-man will no doubt ask to be housed in a female prison (if he goes to prison at all), and all the women there will have to pretend he’s a woman, too. Because if you refuse to pretend trans women are women, their penises get extremely sad. And who would want to make a man’s penis sad? Certainly not teenage girls, the perfectly naive canvas for everyone’s weird world-building projects.

Young girl sexually assaulted at the pervert-picnic that is Dublin Pride

I’ve been told by anon Twitter accounts that this “didn’t happen”, but before you read it, just ask yourself: considering what Pride has become, isn’t it plausible?

I flew to Dublin for Pride and it was, as expected, gross and creepy. Even though, sure, there are gay people present, Pride has little to do with acceptance of gay people and everything to do with flaunting the political power of the church of woke, with its mouth-agape flock draped in rainbow merch and its aesthetic violation of public space. It’s an all-cause jamboree and it’s ugly as fuck.

At some point during the parade, I saw a young girl standing off to the side of the parade in floods of tears. She looked about 15-17 years old. She was standing with a group of teeny-bopper friends, all of whom were kitted in standard-issue queer regalia. And they were all visibly freaking out. I approached her to see what was wrong. She said a man had grabbed, molested, and forcibly kissed her. He was “brown with a Palestine hat”, she told me. A police squad car was passing at that moment (this is not a coincidence: I was trailing the “official” services taking part in the parade, fire service, police etc. — for the historical record).

The girl’s friend had run up to the squad car and was shouting through the window and pointing at her tearful friend. But the squad car kept moving. It was extremely noisy, with Lady Gaga and Kylie and all the other gay music from boomboxes mixing together. Nightmare. Now is not the time! I could see the ban-gharda’s face as she tried to deal with the freakout.

So I ran off looking for the molester because I understood from the girls that they were not the only ones he had targetted. I looked for him in the crowd, and I couldn’t find him. What I did find, however, was a Big Thick Cop (as my uncle calls them) on a bike, leaning his fat arse back on his saddle, arms folded, chatting away happily with some parade people. I interrupted his reverie to say a girl had been sexually assaulted. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t move a hair on his thick, immovable, lardy body. He kept his entire person focussed on his fun chat, turned his head only slightly in my direction and said “well shur if she comes up dis way I’ll have a word with her.” So I said it again, and he said that again. So I just walked away, looking for the groper.

I’ve started to think of the parade that day as Queeronymous Bosch. Picture this: men in PVC puppy bodysuits fondling each other’s nipples while “cool aunts” in polyamory t-shirts twerk in front of the appalled hired security, who are all some flavour of just-off-the-boat East African.

Everyone knows Pride is weird and creepy, but they cannot say it until someone respectable gives them permission to say it. So I’m not respectable, but I’m going to give you permission to say it anyway: Pride is fucking weird.

Check out the Ako Files interviews he did throughout the day:

RULES

Everyone attending Budapest Pride this year had to be warned to keep their genitals hidden away from view. The message was delivered in this cutesy-pastel cartoon form. It raises a lot of questions already sort of answered by the warning.

Swiss flasher on track to peak the nation

On 28 June, a man claiming to be a “transgender woman” was kicked out of a historical women’s nudist pool area in the Swiss city of Bern after some women who were just trying to enjoy a chill afternoon alerted staff that he was, well, male. One woman who was present described his appearance thus: “No breasts, very hairy all over, penis.”

He resisted being removed, others joined in the scrap, and he was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. It sounds like quite the scene. A female police officer was injured.

A debate about whether he’s a stunning-n-brave civil rights heroine or just a horny old goat has since got underway in the newspaper columns and the comment sections and many people seem to be arriving at the polite first stage in the TERF journey. They’re thinking, “surely if they get their nads removed, they can be considered women?” Yes Gertrude, why not — until you find out why they get their nads removed.

It’s prime peaking material, but also just stupidly predictable. Nobody knows that a big naked brute “thinks of himself as a woman” when he’s loping around naked, even if he’s put a little pink ribbon in his hair to announce his “gender”. You just see a man who is probably there to ogle women. It’s not complicated. No Judith Butler required.

After the incident, the city apologised to the man, if course, and trans activists had an impromptu solidarity march (for the flasher, not the women he indecently exposed himself to). Then the spoilt brats defaced the sign for the pool anyway even though they got the grovelling apology they wanted (never apologise to these people), crossing out the word “women” and replacing it with “TINFA” (Trans, Inter, Non-binary, Women, and Agender). They added, for good measure: “No place for transphobia, no place for queerphobia”.

The whole thing is pretty misogynistic, I would venture to say. Wouldn’t you?

Look at this poster for a Pride event in Belgium

This is an event for adults and it’s paid for with my tax money. That is all.

Polish NGO in desperate hunt to halt trans court cases

A few weeks ago I wrote about the case of a female minor (“trans boy”) who was challenging Poland’s legal gender recognition law, but I think I may have misinterpreted what was going on.

This is the background: “trans people” in Poland used to have to take a legal case against their parents in order to change their legal sex. That changed in 2025 after the Supreme Court ruling which led to a simplified procedure. However, that ruling is in question because the judges who decided it were what is known in Poland as “neo-judges” (judges appointed by the former ruling party PiS according to an allegedly dodgy process that is now said to be illegitimate). Their independence is now in question, and it’s thrown the whole judicial system into a state of chaos.

A girl challenged the (new, reformed) legal gender recognition law because she wants her birth cert to be rectified to claim that she has always been a boy.But because the judges who reformed the law were neo-judges, the Polish court has referred it to the EU court to ask what it should do.

I had assumed that this was strategic on the part of the girl/her family/her lawyers: get the law dismissed/overturned (based on dodgy judge appointments) and get a better one that will allow her to always have-been-male. The questions that have been asked of the CJEU certainly do look like they were devised by someone hoping to change the law in their favour.

But then I came across this alert on the website of Tranzycja, a Polish trans NGO, asking if anyone can help find the family at the centre of this case so that they can convince them to drop it (there’s also a second constitutional tribunal court case of another “trans boy” that they want to stop). The reason the want to find the child/the family is that other people’s gender changes are suspended now until the CJEU makes a decision (an outcome could take a long time) and also because there’s a risk that the outcome will not be in the trans activists’ favour.

Tranzycja has clearly decided that bottleneck is a bigger threat than any upside from a favourable ruling. The 2025 resolution gave them a workable status quo, and a live CJEU (or the other one, a Constitutional Tribunal case) risks unravelling it.

So the NGO wants the girls to withdraw, but they can’t find them. The fact that she is not on the activists’ radar suggests to me that her case may just be personal — she wants her birth cert falsified for herself personally, not as part of some grand scheme involving the usual cast of EU-funded legal characters; and the referral to the CJEU may have just been the judge wavering on the neo-judges question. But that’s probably the last time I try to do Polish legal analysis, I’m clearly out of my depth.

A Swedish woman shared a post about a paedophile caught in a sting. She was convicted for defamation.

Who can we thank?

I have to tread carefully writing about this dickhead because he’s extremely litigious. Silvan Agius is a Maltese Power Gay who was right at the centre of the stupid storm when gay rights began to morph into “LGBTIQ+ rights” in the late aughts. He was hired by ILGA-Europe around 2007ish, and later went back to work in the Maltese government’s human rights directorate under Helena Dalli, where he co-drafted the Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression Act, the first conversion-therapy ban in the EU. He then followed Dalli when she took up her European Commissioner "Equality Kween” role.

In 2022 a man called Matthew Grech, an “ex-gay” Christian and former X Factor Malta contestant, gave an interview on a YouTube channel in which he describing how he had ditched his gay identity thanks to his Christian faith. Agius and two others from the Maltese rainbow mafia filed a police report against Grech and the two journalists who interviewed him, accusing them of unlawfully "advertising" conversion practices.

Agius testified that the broadcast implied LGBTIQ identity was a "malady" and that Grech had appeared not merely to share a personal story but as a representative of conversion-practice-linked organisations. In January 2023, while the case was pending, the Maltese government amended the law to explicitly criminalise "advertising" conversion practices, allegedly to make the prosecution viable.

The case dragged on for three years and 17 court appearances, and Grech and the journalists were acquitted in March this year. Voluntary non-coercive talking therapy isn't covered by the ban, the ruling found, and sharing a personal experience isn't "advertising." All this landed just as an EU-wide conversion-practices ban was being heavily lobbied for in Brussels (it failed, because it’s all just very silly nonsense).

Agius tried to set up a new political party but the plan collapsed quietly, so instead he set up a new DEI consultancy, with “offices” in Brussels, Malta and Geneva, perfectly poised to scoop up some of that sweet sweet CERV/AGORA cash. He set up the venture with his buddy Cyrus Engerer, another Power Gay and former MEP on the women’s committee of the European Parliament (who played his own part in handing women’s rights to transvestites), who was found guilty of distributing revenge porn of his ex. So wholesome.

Here he is. Say thanks to Silvan (and Cyrus).

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In other news

• Right-wing journalists attacked in German city of Erfurt by ANTIFA

• Athena Forum: EU Pride Month: The institutional suspension of reality

• Chariots with kinksters and “rainbow families” and other floats attacked with pepper spray during Rome Pride (suspected to have been coordinated)

• France activist group ACT UP PARIS use shocking (but well known) trans women HIV stats in campaign for the first time, suggesting they are struggling after AIDS funding cuts but also: isn’t that sTiGmAtIsinG?

• Prostasia creep rebranded: from virtuous paedophiles to “digital freedom” fighter

• The absurd conclusion of the Dutch Health Council’s review of the Dutch protocol “Do the authors of the report expect us to take them seriously when they say, “Hormone treatments are physically effective”? What are they saying?” — Genspect

• Belgian doctors Isomer push back on op-ed from Liege gender clinic in La Libre

• This “inclusive sports” NGO keeps getting more money from the EU

• Helsinki Pride: trans activists carried banner telling researchers to "go to hell"

• Nothing threatens abortion access more than abortion maximalism: Ireland gets rid of the three-day reflection period, the kind of concession upon which abortion rights were largely won in the first place

• Malta summer ferry campaign: “What if Gender was Freedom, not a Script?”

• Alliance LGB has a new group in Brittany

• Turkey won’t let cruise ship with 2,000 gay men dock

• Regime feminists want to genderfy the development of LLMs so that you can never escape their hectoring

• This EU project looks suspiciously TERFy

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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This instinct is one of the most widespread and ancient social behaviors in the animal kingdom, and it has evolved across species for millions of years.

But when a woman in Sweden called Angeliqa posted in a closed social media group that a paedophile walked among them, she was criminalised by the state for damaging the paedophile’s good name.

Angeliqa had found out about the man via a paedo-hunter/vigilante website called Dumpen. He had engaged in explicit sexual chats and arranged a meeting with what he believed was a child (Julie Bindel wrote about it in detail for the Telegraph recently).

But the man faced no criminal conviction, because Swedish law requires a completed offense or an actual victim. Explicit sexual chats face no consequences, meaning if a man says he wants to abuse a child you have to wait for him to do it before the justice system will act. In other countries, by comparison, such chats/declarations of intent would likely have led to investigation and prosecution.

Angeliqa saw the Dumpen article, and shared it in a private group. She now has a criminal record for doing so. Should she not have said anything?

Swedish society is so enlightened that it prioritises a predator’s reputation over children’s safety. You can understand the underlying impulse: a person’s good name is a fundamental right that once damaged is very hard to repair. The state should not allow private individuals to act as judge, jury, and executioner through public shaming. But when clear predatory behavior toward children is involved, safety has to come first.

When institutions don’t do their job, you get vigilantes like Dumpen.

Should Angeliqa have tipped off the people she cares about? Or should she have kept it to herself as a show of respect for the rule of law? Whatever you think about due process and mob justice, I’m pretty sure the first thing you would do if Dumpen found such a person living in your entourage is to call the mothers in your friend group and tell them immediately.

We give the state the monopoly on justice, vengeance and violence, but the Swedish state is creating the conditions for vigilante justice by failing to keep their side of the bargain. Angeliqa was absolutely correct, in my view, for alerting families to the clear and present danger. And she should be commended for speaking out about her trial and conviction instead of slinking away in shame. However, her employer is not happy with her, and she’s been demoted. But many people agree with her in private, and we talked a lot about why people are reacting like this. It probably says quite a lot about conformity in Swedish society and an undying trust in the country’s institutions.

But the shame doesn’t belong to Angeliqa; it belongs with the Swedish justice system with its perverted priorities. We don’t do mob justice because we’re better than that. But when the alternative is putting children at serious risk, what exactly are we better than?

You’ll be happy to hear the law — Lex Dumpen — might be about to change. Angeliqa explained how that might happen. Enjoy.

Show notes (AI generated)

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with Angeliqa, a Swedish-American mother who was convicted of defamation after warning parents in her local community about a man exposed by the Swedish watchdog organization Dumpen.

The conversation explores Sweden’s defamation laws, freedom of expression, child protection, media responsibility, and the tension between protecting reputations and protecting children. Angeliqa recounts two incidents that shaped her decision to speak publicly, including an earlier case involving a suspected child predator near her child’s preschool and a later case that resulted in criminal prosecution after she shared information in local Facebook groups.

The discussion also examines Sweden’s migration policies, political culture, public attitudes toward controversial issues, the work of Dumpen, and the ongoing debate over whether Sweden’s legal framework adequately protects children from sexual predators.

Angeliqa’s Case

Angeliqa was convicted of defamation after sharing information in two private Facebook groups warning local parents about a man who had been exposed by Dumpen through online sting operations. Although the evidence presented by Dumpen included chat logs, phone calls and images, Swedish courts ruled that a private citizen could not redistribute that information.

Following her conviction, public fundraising rapidly covered her legal costs and her case became part of a wider national debate about Swedish defamation law, child protection, and freedom of speech.

Relevant Resources

SVT Interview
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/smabarnsmamman-angeliqa-atalas-for-fortal-viktigast-att-skydda-barnen

The Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/22/woman-taking-on-lax-swedish-paedophile-laws/

Dumpen

Official Website

https://dumpen.se

Dumpen is a Swedish investigative media organization founded in 2021 that conducts online sting operations targeting adults seeking sexual contact with minors. Investigators pose as children in online chat rooms, arrange meetings with suspects, confront them, and publish the evidence through their publishing platform.

Throughout the episode, Angeliqa credits Dumpen’s investigation with alerting local families to the man living in her neighbourhood and argues that their work exposed gaps in Sweden’s child protection system.

Related Resources

About Dumpen
https://dumpen.se/om-dumpen

Swedish Defamation Law

A central theme of the episode is Sweden’s longstanding defamation law (Förtal). Angeliqa argues that while the law was originally intended to protect innocent people from false accusations, it now discourages parents from warning others about individuals they believe pose a risk to children.

The conversation contrasts the legal protections afforded to media publishers such as Dumpen with the restrictions placed on private citizens who share the same information.

Official Resources

Swedish Parliament
https://www.riksdagen.se/en/

Government of Sweden

https://www.government.se/

Sweden’s Migration Debate

The discussion begins with Sweden’s political transformation following the 2015 migration crisis.

Angeliqa argues that Sweden admitted large numbers of asylum seekers without adequate planning for housing, employment or integration, while Róisín compares Sweden’s experience with developments in Ireland and Belgium.

The conversation also explores the rise of the Sweden Democrats and changing public attitudes toward migration.

Relevant Resources

Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/europe/refugee-consensus-crumbling-in-sweden-europes-most-generous-host-idUSKCN0SE1L3/

Swedish Migration Agency
https://www.migrationsverket.se/English.html

Fredrik Reinfeldt

Former Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is referenced during the discussion about Sweden’s response to the 2015 migration crisis, particularly his well-known appeal for Swedes to “Open your hearts” to refugees.

Relevant Resources

Biography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Reinfeldt

Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/europe/refugee-consensus-crumbling-in-sweden-europes-most-generous-host-idUSKCN0SE1L3/

Sweden Democrats

The Sweden Democrats are discussed in relation to Sweden’s migration policy and current proposals to strengthen child protection laws. Angeliqa argues that they have been one of the few political parties willing to engage publicly with Dumpen’s work and advocate legislative reform.

Official Website

https://sd.se

Host — Róisín Michaux

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https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

🔗 Apple Podcasts — Peaked

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Peaked

A newsletter about women, free speech, and institutional capture with a special focus on Europe.

By Róisín Michaux

1. Pride month can never be over because Pride is democracy itself

2. European Court of Human Rights: you are your child’s mother, whether you like it or not

3. Reem Alsalem viral UN video is disturbing

4. Paris Pride poster: criminal investigation underway

5. European Parliament has to be a safe space, staff offered weekly psych sessions in a “rainbow circle”

6. Inconvenient: encouraging kids to fixate on their sexual identity makes them targets for groomers online

7. Irish homopatriot parliamentarian declares: “This movement has been hijacked”

8. Luxembourg: warnings for people who “Liked” a Facebook post

9. EU funds paid for mural celebrating self-harm surgery in Dublin city

10. Who can we thank?

11. In other news…

Pride month can never be over because Pride is democracy itself

I took a hot Ryanair sky-tube to Ireland last week to attend Dublin Pride festival. The festival was a horrorshow — a cross between a kids’ birthday party and a fetish forum on the dark web (I’m writing about this gross and unnerving experience. The article will be out on Monday).

During the flight, I sat beside a woman who spent the entire trip slumped unenthusiastically over a printout of papers, and I accidentally caught sight of the title: “something something anti-gender something”.

That’s me. I’m anti-gender.

Looking closely, it turned out the document was from the UK government, and looking more closely still, I saw it was intended for diplomats. It was about anti-gender movement’s threat to UK security. This was the gist of it: baddies are using Pride/LGBTIQ+ stuff/wimmin’s issues (gender, for short) in order to stir trouble among people and destabilise the West, and it’s probably the Russians. Therefore: it is vital that Western countries festoon everything in rainbow crap, STAT.

Love the logical leap: tyrants hate rainbows, ergo rainbows must equal democracy. Real genius stuff right there.

Increasing parades increases pluralism. Trannies prevent tyranny. Leathermen licking each other in front of a crowd of toddlers? They’re simply demonstrating respect for the rule of law!

The premise is correct in the sense that geopolitical adversaries do tend to egg on each other’s existing societal implosions. It goes both ways. Young people in the ex-Soviet bloc want more freedom in the form of, ehh, sexuality flags (young people sure do love those flags!) so the EU heaps sex-flag money everywhere to excite the youngeens in the right political direction.

And it makes sense that Russia would try to make hay from the fact that European normies are simply not loving all this rainbow overreach. But while enemies of Gayropa might exploit public unease about Pride saturation, it doesn’t follow that it was planted there by bot farms in Belgrade. The increasing public presence of unhinged and sick-looking bipolar dungareeswomen screaming at your kids about their “unique sexualities” is doing a fine job of putting people off LGBTIQ+ mania all on their own. You could dissolve Russia in a vat of acid and people would still get the ick from fetishistic crossdressers. If the argument is that Putin is exploiting this ick, yes sure that makes sense. But the conclusion that more ick needs to be layered upon the existing ick in order to beat back the ick and thus authoritarianism? No.

It’s certainly not news to anyone who has been paying attention: for at least a year or so, LGBTIQ activist groups have been trying hard to force democracy and rainbowism together under the message: mess with our gender agenda and we’ll tell everyone you kissed Vladimir Putin behind the sheds. Everyone’s got the memo, and the messaging is only getting started. It’s going to be a long revolution.

Also: be careful with bringing sensitive documents on Ryanair, especially if you work in national security. Ryanair people are trash people and they will read your shit over your shoulder without a single scruple and then tell everyone about it on their Substack.

European Court of Human Rights: you are your child’s mother, whether you like it or not

A woman who removed her breasts and grew some facial hair wanted the dirty word “mother” removed from the birth cert of her child because that vocabulary doesn’t jibe with her self-image. She took her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, who declared her challenge inadmissible.

The words mother and mama, and all their derivatives, likely emerged because the M is the first and most basic mouth sound to come from a human infant’s underdeveloped facial muscles. All it requires is to combine the top lip with the bottom lip. Mama. Due to the reality (not the fantasy) of childbearing and rearing, this sound is almost universally been directed at the person who gestates the child within her own physical person, births it through days of pain, feeds it for months or years from her own body parts, and carts it around in her arms and on her back to the point of exhaustion.

Those things are not insignificant to the lives of the women who commit to them, and to think the courts will help you sever the most primal sound related to this role, our species’ first and most intimate relationship, is so egotistical, so beyond my capacity to understand, that I genuinely want to pump these people’s brains with purple dye and send them into an MRI machine for lengthy observation.

All these Noah’s and Neo’s, given that most of them are autistic and/or some kind of narcissist (any connection???), think the word “mother” is a bad fit for their gender brand. They would prefer to be called Dada, because they prefer short haircuts. This sound comes later to the mouths of babes, and the connection to the father is more abstract.

No father can be a mother, and by dint of biological reality, no mother can not be a mother, either.

If you don’t feel comfortable being a mother, then stop having babies. If it’s too late for that, then tough shit. Stop trying to distance humanity even further from its embodiment to satisfy your vain and spergy brain itch. Call yourself whatever you want, “Aidan”. But a mother is a person and you are it, little buddy. This is not a video game or a cosplay convention, and you are not the centre of the universe.

The woman, Freddy McConnell, has been fighting the UK courts over this for years, and it made it to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) but the judges in Strasbourg declared her appeal inadmissible. The thrust of the dismissal was this: other people exist. More specifically, her child exists, and he or she has the right to know their biological heritage more than their mother has a right to fulfill her personal identity vanity project.

You have to wonder to what extent the threats from the UK’s conservatives to ditch the ECtHR influenced the judges’ ruling.

As of writing, a week after this big WOMP WOMP, none of the queer NGOs have even mentioned it. The silence is weird, but they may just be licking their wounds and preparing a strongly-worded statement in which they will describe their SHOCK at this existential THREAT to democraccyyyyyyy.

Trans people: never beating the narcissism allegations.

Reem Alsalem viral UN video is disturbing

Reem Alsalem is a TERF legend for standing up to the nutters in the UN on behalf of real women and girls, even though it makes transvestites and the professional army of regime libfems big big mad. Her role is UN special rapporteur for women and girls, and she’s basically all we’ve got on our side (at least publicly) in the Gender Borg HQ in Geneva.

But since the Hamas/Gaza/Israel definitely-genocide/definitely-not-genocide, Alsalem, who is a Cairo-born Jordanian, has appeared to deny or downplay evidence of sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas. Her alibi is the lack of official engagement (that’s UN speak) from victims and the Israeli authorities, and she has also leaned heavily on the difficulty in independently verifying claims made on the Israeli side.

But a clip doing the rounds has turned a fight over “evidentiary standards” into a brutal spectacle: former Hamas hostage Ilana Gritzewsky confronted Alsalem in a UN session on 23 June and said "I am standing here today not as a report, not as a statistic. I am a woman who survived. I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas.” She quoted Alsalem’s denial of that violence, and asks: “Why are you silent? Look at me. Will you believe us now? Will you apologise?” But the special rapporteur looked stony-faced, even annoyed.

The video of distressed survivor begging an official for recognition while the official won’t even look at her may have been heavily edited (it was produced by UN Watch, so it’s hardly neutral) but the pain on Gritzewsky’s face is real.

The optics are terrible for Alsalem, and confusing for those of us who support her: Israel’s scorched earth military tactics don’t rule out Hamas rape. She might be right in saying that Israel uses the claims like Gritzewsky’s to garner sympathy and support, but that really doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t matter what side of a fight you’re on — women’s bodies have always been the spoils of war. Yes, even when it’s “your side”.

Paris Pride poster: criminal investigation underway

In June 2025, the French magazine L’Humanité published a Paris Pride poster on its cover titled “Queers of all countries, unite against the international reactionary”. It showed a bunch of colourful/diverse cartoon people choking/knocking out a grayscale/white cartoon man with a Celtic-looking tattoo (far-right dog whistle!)

In response, Valérie Pécresse, the president of the region in which Paris is located, withdrew the Pride organisation’s right to use the region’s logo, as well as subsidies worth around €50k, claiming the poster’s content incites violence. Corporate partners also pulled out. And this year, rather than restoring the funding as requested, the president of the organisation behind the poster was put under criminal investigation for publicly inciting violence against a person or group.

Last week, the Pride event got cancelled because of the heatwave (it was due to take place on Saturday 27 June) but lefties suspect the decision was not entirely due to the weather.

European Parliament is a “safe space”: staff offered weekly psych sessions in a “rainbow circle”

When you’re in a hole you need to stop digging. But the EU institutions are not there yet. I implore you to watch this video to get a flavour of insanity that has gripped the EU power centres. This video was made for staff in the EU Parliament and it features the following cast of characters: a politician from a centre-right party, a rep from the internal staff group Egalite (they helped get me fired from my job in March, as it happens) and a woman from the activist group ILGA-Europe. It’s all moderated by the head of personnel in the Parliament.

Some things to watch out for: mandatory training for new staff who are not “open”, and the cone-headed Marc Angel’s promise to “break up the binary system!” For EU watchers, there are some interesting hints at what’s going on behind the scenes on important legislative files.

A couple of years ago I snuck into some staff LGBTIQ+ thing for staff in the European Parliament and one of the proposals on the table was this: candidates for EU jobs could be “screened” for their attitudes to trans rights. Meaning, try to root out TERFs or gender critics at the early stages so they don’t advance through the application process. Nobody else in the room saw any problem with this.

Bref: The Borg has no plans on backing down.

Encouraging kids to fixate on sexuality makes them targets for groomers online

Nobody dares say it, but here it is in all its obviousness: combine an obsession with advertising your sexual identity, youthful naivety, and untrammelled access to internet forums, and what do you get?

Boomtime for child sexual predators.

One of the hallmarks of grooming is normalising talk about sex. A ten-year-old child on Roblox openly identifying as something fun like “pansexual” or “non-binary” or “gender fluid” offers an opener for creeps to rope her into sex talk, even if she doesn’t realise it. The labels mean the job is already half done. If you don’t believe me, create a pansexual Roblox avatar and go into an LGBTIQ+ safe space and see how long it takes for your pixelated self to get led into a conversation about this defining personality quirk by some creep.

This is not a comment on “the LGBTIQ+ community”, it is a comment on this novel vector for predators. The refusal to join the obvious dots is a deliberate choice. Nobody wants to fall afoul of the political consensus that everything queer is kosher and unquestionable by definition. Predators are always looking for access to their prey, and they are very enterprising. LGBTQI+ mania is so obviously a safeguarding risk — you only have to open Femboy Reddit to see them do their work in plain sight.

So it would be awesome if we stopped encouraging kids to present their sexual preferences as a defining part of who they are, and stop helping them advertise it everywhere, from badges to bios.

I recently noticed that the EU-funded NGO called Missing Children seems to have taken a tentative step toward naming this problem (see image). But of course, in the current climate, the only acceptable policy recommendation that would emerge from any study into this phenomenon would have to be politically correct to the point of uselessness. Allow me to guess what the conclusion will be: we need to all affirm children’s sexual identities without question because if we don’t, they’ll go seek that affirmation online instead, sending them into the arms of the abusers. Zoom in on the photo below and you’ll see the word INTERSECTIONALITY written across the top of a whiteboard. The photo contains another visual shortcut for gauging whether an organisation has been ideologically captured: an apple-shaped adult female with zany fluorescent hair. So don’t expect miracles.

The message should be: discourage children from obsessing over sex and gender identity labels and organising their lives around them because this is blood in the water for sex offenders. But the cult will never admit it’s part of the problem. Not even if admitting it would save children from being abused.

Irish MP: “This movement has been hijacked”

Gawan Ken O’Flynn.

Luxembourg public prosecutor sends out warning letter to people who “Liked” post

On 8 February 2025, a right-wing politician in Luxembourg, Tom Weidig, posted something on Facebook in praise of Donald Trump for protecting women’s sports from men pretending to be women. A commentor wrote in response: "We also have to fight here and wipe out LGBTIQ+."

Weidig liked the comment, prompting the LGBTIQ+ rights group Rosa Lëtzebuerg to file a complaint against both him and the comment’s author. On 17 June this year, the comment’s author was convicted of incitement to hatred and fined €1,500. That’s starting to be commonplace in Europe, but this is new, as far as I can tell: the Public Prosecutor’s Office also sent written warnings to everyone who had been identified as having liked the comment. I couldn’t find the details of what was in the warning: are they threatening that future Likers will be prosecuted?

EU funds paid for mural celebrating self-harm surgery in Dublin city

A mural appeared in central Dublin last week that celebrates the phenomenon of young women getting their secondary sex characteristics surgically altered in the pursuit of escaping their sex. It turns out the art work was paid for by an EU health-related fund intended to help Ukrainians refugees’ wellbeing. I have not been able to find the details of the grant agreement to understand the link between Ukrainian war refugees and trans activist self-harm art.

The message of the mural is not subtle: the woman in the image has been persecuted (arrows) and she is taking care of herself (pulling them out of her body). This is just more evidence of the vanity and narcissism of these women: reality will never stop reminding them of that fact that they were born female, so they get to be victims forever. They may be mentally ill but they are also entitled narcs. Boooooooooo.

Who can we thank?

Irena Moozová is a senior EU bureaucracy lifer and a committed operator behind the EU’s steady expansion of equality policy into the terrain of gender fantasy. A Czech citizen, she is regular friendly presence at NGO events and closely tied to “civil society” networks like ILGA. She’s steered both the soft stuff (funding, guidance, strategy) and the harder legislation. Before her current role as Deputy Director-General for the International Dimension of Justice Policies, Rule of Law, and Equality, Moozová was Director for Equality and Non-Discrimination, and before that she was Director for Equality and Union Citizenship.

Essentially she’s been at the beating heart of the Borg for years.

Gender identity is like a solvent: once it is written into equality law, it dissolves the meaning of sex-based protections by turning female-only rights into exceptions that women have now to fight for. Irena has been busy slathering EU law and policy with this solvent for yeeeeears, helping to set up a conflict of rights between women and transvestites in every EU country, without anyone even twigging it was going on.

Here she is. Say thanks to Irena.

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In other news

• Germany: the term “non-binary” is being used to expand public health insurance funding for experimental mix-and-match gender surgery procedures

• Germany: parents freaked out by fetish stuff at Munich Pride

• Switzerland: man in women’s nudist bathing area asked to leave, then city is forced to apologise because he pretends to be a woman

• Hungary: man who dumped progress pride flags in the Danube is allegedly under criminal investigation

• Kyrgyzstan is about to ban legal gender recognition aka legal sex falsification

• Everyone’s writing about the Citizen Vigilante film

• Is Russia Today operating an X account in Europe despite sanctions?

• Various Voices queer choir: after posters torn down, a number of participants were physically attacked in central Brussels

• Age verification for social media via government-issued ID is on its way in the EU

• Queer activists are starting to train people up on using the DSA to tackle wronghtink

• Adidas made “fan wear” for Saudi women.

• Why is the Court of Justice of the EU doing social media promo about its judicial activism on LGBTIQ+ issues, is this normal? Are these not contested issues?

• You old cunt you will be dead from aging soon so your opinion does not even matter, your skin and pussylips are dangling onto your body, shut up you old bat

• Woke Ireland at the helm of the Council of the EU for the next six months

Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux (but I got hacked so have no access for now)

Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.

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