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

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Peaked

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

By Róisín Michaux

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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

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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

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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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Listening back (don’t ever listen back) I can hear my brain desperately trying to connect synapses and failing, and I speak far too fast, so I apologise for all the brainfarts (especially to all the non-English speakers trying to keep up with me). Ashley is so interesting that all the questions I ever had came tumbling out all at once. An awesome woman.

Enjoy.

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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)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with sociologist, writer, and editor Ashley Frawley about therapeutic culture, social conformity, identity politics, family life, citizenship, and the social dynamics underlying contemporary gender ideology.

Drawing on her work in sociology, social problems theory, and the medicalisation of social life, Frawley examines how particular ideas become dominant within institutions and public culture, how social movements emerge and evolve, and why certain forms of identity and vulnerability have become culturally privileged in contemporary Western societies.

The conversation explores the “Brussels consensus” inside European institutions, the changing relationship between capitalism and family life, therapeutic models of citizenship, historical moral panics, social contagion, the rise of gender identity ideology, and the social conditions that make particular belief systems culturally persuasive.

Throughout the discussion, Frawley argues that contemporary social conflicts cannot be understood purely through biology or psychology, but must also be understood as products of wider historical, cultural, political, and institutional processes.

Ashley Frawley

Twitter

🔗https://x.com/AshleyAFrawley

Patreon

🔗 https://www.patreon.com/AshleyAFrawley

🔗 Compact Magazine
https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/ashley-frawley/

Frawley serves as Senior Editor at Compact, a publication focused on politics, culture, economics, and contemporary social debates.

🔗 Bloomsbury Author Page
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/author/ashley-frawley/

Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age

🔗 Bloomsbury
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/significant-emotions-9781350026810/

🔗 Google Scholar
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1q-G24wAAAAJ

Ashley Frawley is a sociologist, author, and editor whose work focuses on social problems, therapeutic culture, wellbeing discourse, family policy, emotions, and contemporary political culture.

She is Senior Editor at Compact Magazine, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Kent, and Visiting Research Fellow at MCC Brussels.

Organizations & Institutions

MCC Brussels

🔗 Official Website https://brussels.mcc.hu/

Jonathan Haidt

🔗 Official Website

https://jonathanhaidt.com/

Referenced during a discussion about social science, moral psychology, and the replication crisis.

Daniel Kahneman

🔗 Nobel Prize Biography
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2002/kahneman/facts/

Referenced in relation to behavioural science and contemporary psychology.

🔗 Michelle Remembers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
https://www.amazon.com/Michelle-Remembers-Smith/dp/0722179588

The Replication Crisis

🔗 Nature Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

The discussion examines methodological and reproducibility problems affecting psychology and related social sciences.

The Communist Manifesto

🔗 Full Text
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Referenced during discussions about family structures, labour mobility, and capitalism.

David Goodhart — The Road to Somewhere

🔗 Publisher Page
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-road-to-somewhere/

Referenced during discussion of “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”, mobility, local attachment, and identity.

John Stuart Mill — The Subjection of Women

🔗 Full Text
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27083

Referenced during discussion of women’s citizenship, reason, education, and public life.

Historical Parallels & Social Contagion

The Satanic Panic

🔗 Encyclopaedia Britannica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

🔗 Repressed Memory
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8935987/

Ian Hacking

🔗 Encyclopaedia Britannica

Gender, Citizenship & Vulnerability

How Society Got a Sex Change

🔗 Compact Magazine
https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-society-got-a-sex-change/

Frawley references her essay examining changing social ideals surrounding sex, gender, citizenship, and identity.

Topics discussed include:

• stereotypical femininity
• vulnerability as a social ideal
• masculinity and socialization
• changing gender norms
• citizenship and identity

The “Women Are Wonderful” Effect

🔗 APA Record
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1994-33384-001

Discussed in relation to cultural expectations surrounding femininity, morality, accommodation, and vulnerability.

Host

Róisín Michaux

🔗 X (Twitter)
https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

🔗 Apple Podcasts — Peaked

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

🔗

Peaked

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

By Róisín Michaux

1. Tradwife activist convicted for saying black and Arabic immigrant men are a threat to French women

2. Norway gender doctors gross misconduct story is not what it seems

3. Belgian doctor is lying, says mother, about what happens to kids in his gender clinic

4. France wonders out loud: should men have jobs that involve children?

5. Me on WDI talking about my dismissal for TERFing

6. Rainbow waistcoat of transvestite paedophile was exhibited at a Pride expo

7. UK women may turn out not to be women in Northern Ireland

8. Money still going to fight Budapest Pride ban even though Pride is no longer banned

9. Women on Boards law: it’s been quite the gender journey

10. Gay Games takes a chance on male-on-female violence, but inserts insurance clauses

11. Who can we thank?

12. In other news…

Tradwife activist convicted for saying black and Arabic immigrant men are a threat to French women

“Thaïs d’Escufon” is the nom d’influenceuse of Anne-Thaïs du Tertre d’Escoeuffant, a young French femonationalist of aristocratic extraction who has been active on the identarian anti-immigration activist scene since she was a teenager. She was the articulate and pretty TV-ready youth spokeswoman for the group Génération Identitaire until the French state dissolved it in 2021 for its militia-like tactics and promotion of anti-immigration-flavoured hate.

In 2023 she was invited on TV to weigh in on a rape case involving a man who was under a deportation order. Rather than just condemn the man, she condemned French immigration policy and singled out black and Arab immigrant men as the principal perpetrators of sex crimes against women. Yikes.

“The primary danger for women in France,” she said, “is immigration and its disastrous consequences.” A journalist on the panel pushed back: “The main danger for women is men.” D’Escufon agreed, but added: “It’s men — Black African and Arab immigrants.”

This statement is likely based largely on intuition and personal experience because France doesn’t record ethnicity data, and what exists to serve as evidence for her statement is quite old, and predates more recent waves of inward migration). In that sense the journalist sparring with D’Escufon was correct to call her out on it. But quand même, d’Escufon was pointing to a very real, very obvious, very hush-hush phenomenon that has been shown to be true in many other EU countries.

Her haters in the general gauchosphere are correct in saying that most violence against women is committed by men they know, in their own home. But regime feminists overly obsess over this point in order to avoid addressing another much more inconvenient source of sexual violence, which is the statistical phenomenon that d’Escufon was pointing out. French-on-French domestic violence notwithstanding, unmoored gentlemen from cultures that teach boys that unveiled, bare-shouldered girlbosses are whores for the taking — are overrepresented in the sexual crime stats in Europe.

Two things can be true at once.

These men arrive in a Europe where they are bottom of the barrel, status-wise, and to see all us women lord it over them in any way must drive them bananas. This has nothing at all to do with “race” and everything to do with culture and circumstance. Bettina Arndt wrote about it here, calling it the Clash of sexual civilisations.

According to data, what d’Escufon said is directionally correct, at least according to hard data from other EU countries (it’s particularly robust from Sweden) even if it could do with some caveats. Here are some figures: of 97 rapes recorded in public spaces in Paris in 2023, fewer than a third were solved, and of the 36 perpetrators arrested, 28 were of foreign nationality — that’s 77%. In Germany in 2023, foreigners were 41.2% of suspects in violent crimes, and around a third of all suspects in rape and sexual offences, despite making up only around 15% of the population. Of the 3,039 individuals convicted of rape against a woman in Sweden between 2000 and 2015, 59.2% had an immigrant background, with 47.7% born outside Sweden. That is an extraordinary figure given that the foreign-born population is roughly 20% of Sweden's total.

Non-Western immigrant men — including those of North African and sub-Saharan African origin — are substantially overrepresented in sexual crime statistics and convictions across multiple Western European countries, and this overrepresentation persists after controlling for the demographic and socioeconomic factors most commonly cited to explain it away. (I’ve put all the relevant links at the bottom of this article).

D’Escufon was convicted this week for “injure publique” (public injury, like slander). She was not convicted for lying, she was convicted because she stigmatised a group based on “l’origine, l’ethnie, la nation ou la race”. The judge did not dispute the statistical basis, but French law does not require the statement to be false for it to be illegal (it would be funny, indeed, if the transcript of the judgement reveals that the judge agreed her comments were based on data — because then that judge might find him or herself on the wrong side of the same law d’Escufon was convicted of).

The prosecutor had called for an unsuspended prison sentence, but d’Escufon got away with a fine. The same thing happened to Belgian far-right personality Dries Van Langenhove recently, who presented Belgian ethnic crime stats based on ethnicity at a university lecture.

The judge in that case said "Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law."

d’Escufon’s conviction is also worth comparing with the clownish condemnation of Dora Moutot who was found guilty of public insult for saying “As women we are obliged to be wary of people with penises”. The prosecutor wanted Moutot charged with public insult against all men, but in the end she was punished for insults against transvestites, who also have penises. Dora was represented by the Charlie Hebdo lawyers who have had to defend some seriously heinous shit down through the years, and she still lost. The case is being appealed.

The French love scrapping over politics, especially around the dinner table but especially-especially on TV (they all talk over each other like a tree full of parakeets, it’s hilarious), and I wonder what kind of effect this will have on their ability to continue enjoying this noisy national pastime. Anyone at any time can get accused of saying something that’s provably true but inconvenient for social harmony, or hurty to knicker adventurers who wish we would all pretend they are gals like me and you.

Regime feminists continue to blame a nebulous, just-out-of-frame, all-enveloping mist of cishet colonial white patriarchy for all their woes. The roving gangs of aimless and horny men who are raised on the mantra “a woman without a veil is like an unwrapped lollipop that attracts flies” — they cannot be blamed because gender professionals have sunk too much cost into postmodern identity politics. These women are on the dark side of the moon right now. It’s “the system”, it’s the lack of youth centres, it’s the welfare cuts, it’s climate change, it’s deforestation, it’s cis white gays, it’s the TERFs, it’s Israel and so on. Forget the data. The data is extreme right.

Norway gender doctors gross misconduct story is not what it seems

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten is reporting that three gender doctors linked to the national gender service have been found guilty of gross misconduct by an ethics committee after they used patient data without ethical clearance. Because these are “affirming” doctors, it might seem as though the finding was a condemnation of the gender-affirming care model (that’s certainly what’s been circulating on social media). But that’s not quite what happened.

What happened is that these three researchers had tried to get permission to use patient data from a gender clinic in order to track trajectories and outcomes of the young people under their care. They didn’t get permission, but they used the anonymised data anyway. And what the data showed, and what they published in four separate papers, suggests that the ethics complaint against them was just as likely to have been triggered by angry trans activists as by those on the other side of the gender debate. Indeed, it turns out that among the whistleblowers was PKI, a trans-patient advocacy group

Their findings confirmed what has been found already elsewhere: a huge increase in females claiming to be trans starting around 2014, and an extremely high level of mental illnesses and self-harm among them, all of which, they caution, necessitate much more careful evaluation of each individual patient. The affirmation-only activists did not like this.

The story is instructive in the sense that it sheds light on a group of middle-grounders in the gender medicine debate who don’t often get talked about. They can be placed somewhere along the spectrum between raging TERFs and raging trans activists. These are professional doctors who adhere to what Stella O’Malley of Genspect has termed “Tiny Numbers Theory”. They don’t tend to believe that anyone is really trans. However, they do believe that there is, out there, a tiny number of people who would truly benefit from social and medical transition to ease their distress. They see it as their job to properly screen for, and select, these people.

They, too, are alarmed at the affirmation-only, ideology-driven turn in “gender care” in the past decade and a half. But they don’t seem to realise that it’s this belief in the perfect transable subject that started — and perpetuates — all this nonsense in the first place. As long as it’s believed that some people should trans, the clinics will exist. As long as clinics exist, all kinds of malcontents will be queuing up outside it.

These people are direct descendants of the much hated “medical gatekeepers” of yore, the kind of doctors who haunted the dreams of transvestites before the age of affirmation (they did not haunt the dreams of autistic teenage tomboys, because that cohort had not yet been infected with the idea that their discomfort was due to being in the wrong body).

Quite a number of clinicians in the gender field adhere to Tiny Number Theory, and their commitment to this belief may doom the entire project to last forever.

Belgian doctor is lying, claims mother, about what happens to kids in his gender clinic

The newspaper La Libre is the most read respectable newspaper in Belgium, and they have published cartes blanche (opinion pieces) that question trans mania occasionally. Some of these opinion pieces were co-authored by me and my TERF friends but they cut us off like drunken punters recently, saying that until they get more input from the other side they would no longer publish our pieces

A couple of days ago, they seemed to have found someone, publishing a contribution by one Professor Alain Malchair, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Liège, who argued for a careful, ethically grounded clinical approach to young people experiencing gender identity distress.

In the piece, he rejects both the dismissive “just a trend” framing as well as its opposite: the uncritical affirmation approach. Instead he calls for a prolonged, multidisciplinary accompaniment of the young person and their family aimed at deepening and authenticating the request before any medical intervention

He wrote that the modification of a healthy body, which flies in the face of Do No Harm can only be navigated on a case-by-case basis. Parental involvement essential, as is moderating the influence of social media. Sounds great, except I was contacted by an infuriated family who read Malchair’s wonderful words and as a result, put their trust in his clinic, only to have their very distressed daughter fast-tracked to hormones.

Here’s the account from the parents in question: “What he describes bears absolutely no resemblance to what happened to us. When our daughter announced the "news" to us a few years ago, I was lost, and I tried to understand and find help. I read Malchair’s description about the Liège gender identity centre — including all his talk about young people and approaching the problem holistically with a child psychiatrist, etc. It was the most reassuring thing I’d been able to find as a resource in Belgium. So I made an appointment. Here’s how it went:

One interview with my daughter alone with the crazy, gung-ho affirmation psychologist. We were allowed to join for 20 minutes at the end, where all our questions were minimised. (The doctor) managed to make us feel she was teaching us how to be parents, and that our daughter was far from having the serious psychiatric problems we thought she had. Ready-made pro-trans, soothing script — with lies. Then what followed: two more appointments for our daughter with her alone, then straight to the endocrinologist. When I expressed surprise that she wasn’t seeing a child psychiatrist or any psychiatrist, there was no explanation.”

Read the full article: An ethical stance on the suffering of young people questioning their identity (La Libre, 22 June 2026)

France wonders out loud: should men have jobs that involve children?

France is in the grip of an extremely gnarly and large-scale childcare abuse scandal, and it has people wondering: should men be allowed to supervise children, unsupervised?

According to a report in Marianne:

“We’ve reached such a level of tension in Paris, with these allegations of sexual assault, that next year, it’s clear: the city will no longer place any men in preschool classes,” a union representative for after-school activity leaders told Marianne. According to him, the allegations of assault at school most often concern the youngest children, aged 3 to 5.”

Since 2023, over 100 allegations have emerged from dozens of Parisian maternelles (kindergarten), primary schools, and daycare centres and 78 monitors have been suspended, 31 of them for suspected sexual abuse. As I was writing this, another man was arrested on suspicion of raping a four-year-old in his care at the school he was working at. Parents are raging. The mayor of Paris called it a systemic problem and has announced he is throwing €20 million at it.

Adding to the feeling that this is a systemic problem in France is the fact that the main suspect in the kidnap and murder of a little girl called Lyhanna had at least five complaints or reports filed against him, including rape allegations backed by forensic evidence, none of which led to charges or conviction. This has been described as a compounding cascade of procedural failures.

Some commentators have begun asking, with a fair bit of throat-clearing, whether men should work in early childcare at all. Not all abusers are male, they disclaim, and children benefit from male caregivers, sure sure sure.

But still. Publicly most people endorse the view that this would be silly and discriminatory, counterproductive, and retrograde. But when it comes to their own kids, they might privately breathe a sigh of relief upon reading all these stories knowing that the people who take care of their very vulnerable little ones are female. I would love a world where men aren’t prone to this, but that’s not the one we live in. Still, I don’t know what to think of these proposals. And how would it even work in a country where women can’t even state statistical likelihoods without getting dragged through the courts for years?

Me on WDI talking about my dismissal for TERFing

I was invited by the radfems of Woman’s Declaration International (sign it!!) to explain how and why I got the sack from the European Commission’s Directorate for the Single Market on 9 March 2026. The TLDR is: because I’m a TERF. I had a lawyer who was looking into getting cold, cold revenge on my behalf but he unceremoniously dumped me last week (perhaps also because I’m a TERF, but who knows).

The end?

Christian groups have made noises that suggest they may want to represent me in an unfair dismissal/freedom of belief-type claim. The Christians care a lot about free speech and I used to think it had something to do with praying outside abortion clinics or something, but I belatedly realised it’s actually probably this: most of their core beliefs have been reclassified as “hate speech” in the past decade so they’re fyyyyumin. Marriage is between a man and a woman = hate. You’re not a women trapped in a man’s body, you’re a sinner with a weird sexual compulsion = hate.

Christian beliefs were very commonly-held not so long ago, and still are in a large part of the world, so it’s no surprise the Christians are angry and willing to support heathens like myself to get some of these tyrannical dictates overturned.

I’d just like to point out that it feels extremely weird to be supported by fundamental Christians on one side and radical feminists on the other, while everyone in the middle treats you like you murdered their dog — even though they keep whispering at you that they agree with everything you say. I don’t really know how to interpret that. I don’t know what it says about the state of the world.

Rainbow waistcoat of transvestite paedophile was exhibited at a Pride expo

After this Belfast transvestite died, all the stories about him being a child sex abuser emerged. I guess people were triggered by all the praise that was heaped on him, knowing that he used to enjoy flashing his dick at children.

But even after all the (evidenced) allegations, a Northern Ireland art centre still decided to show off his gay waistcoat at a Pride expo, referring to him a “dyke”, just like he would have wanted (lots of fetishistic transvestites want you to pretend they are lesbians).

Northern Ireland Substacker/commentator Jenny Holland put it best when she said: “JUST LOOK AT HIM. He is quite literally a demon.”

UK women may turn out not to be women in Northern Ireland

Yesterday, 23 June 2026, was the ten-year anniversary of the Brexit vote.

If it were not for Brexit, there is quite a high chance that the For Women Scotland case (the one that reestablished some reality in the interpretation of equality law) would have ended up being referred to the utterly captured Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and an equally high chance that the CJEU would have ruled in a more “trans-inclusive” way. The UK Supreme Court was able to TERF out and hew to biological reality because the UK is no longer bound by Brussels (or in the case of the CJEU, Luxembourg).

Here’s why: the question about the meaning of “woman” might have had to be settled in Europe because the relevant law (the Equality Act) is based on an EU-law (the Equal Treatment Directive).

Back in 1996, the word “sex” was expanded to include “gender reassignment” in discrimination after a case called P v S and Cornwall County Council, in which a transvestite claimed sex-based discrimination after he got the sack from his job after he started dressing as a woman at work. The case went to Europe and the judgement ended up expanded the meaning of “sex” to cover people like him in discrimination cases.

The UK Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland did consider P v S and Cornwall County Council, but decided it was not decisive for the definition of “sex” or “woman” in UK law. The wokesters at the CJEU show no similar signs of reasonableness on this topic. What’s more: if FWS had been referred to Luxembourg, the outcome would not only have shafted women and reality-enjoyers in the UK, it could have set the precedent for shafting all European Union member states.

I asked Anya Palmer, feminist lawyer and Forstater brain trust what she thinks of this and she agreed that it’s a possibility. But we’re not out of the woods yet, she added: “There may still be an EU angle, as the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland considers that EU law may still be relevant in Northern Ireland, and has asked the High Court in Belfast for permission to bring a judicial review on this. It's a very odd thing to do, to ask the court to declare in the abstract what the law is. Not how UK courts normally work!”

To be continued. But anyway, Happy Brexit anniversary, TERF Island.

Money still going to fight Budapest Pride ban even though Pride is no longer banned

There’s an EU project due to start next week that intends to fight Viktor Orban’s ban on Pride. Here are its objectives: to document and expose restrictive legislation and practice; to encourage challenging restrictions in European courts through strategic litigation; to empower stakeholders to resist the chilling effect.

But, I hear you object, Viktor Orban is gone, and Budapest is newly and enthusedly festooned with rainbows and the pink and blue of the paedophile/castration cult (though a line of Progress Pride flags lining a bridge on the Danube were torn down and dumped in the river almost immediately after they were put up). Surely the project which has not yet started, can be called off now that the problem it sought to fix has been fixed?

Apparently not? he Budapest-based NGO Háttér Társaság and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee will still pocket €113, 000 in public money to solve this phantom problem. Of course I contacted them to ask what they plan to do with the money, and of course they ignored me. Of course I contacted the European Commission and of course they ignored me.

As an aside, I wrote to a Brussels-based NGO called “Follow The Money” to tip them off as to the obviously scammy nature of the EU queer industry (we’re getting another EU-funded NGO for bisexual people!) but as soon the woman in charge twigged it was about This Topic she cooled on an initial offer of collaboration. She asked for evidence for my allegations that, uh, there’s something mighty weird about the reams of cash going to this ever-expanding roster of NGOs.

Rainbows are taking over our lives, nobody seems to want it, and yet the budget for it gets higher every year.

The question is not whether there is any evidence it’s happening. The question is do you think it’s an extremely odd that it’s clearly happening, and worth investigating who the hell is letting it happen. What can you do to get people to pay attention to LGTBIQ’s capture of our institutions? Same thing as you could do to get Jimmy Savile investigated, or a priest condemned for abusing children, or concerns raised about the pain pill mill at the height of the Oxycontin scandal, or the alarm raised about the subprime mortgage house of cards that ultimately led to the global financial crash….Absolutely fucking nothing.

Like the LGBTIQ stuff, these were all open secrets, propped up by money and/or individuals’ need to maintain their social and professional reputations. Everyone knows something is up, but nobody says anything.

I’ll keep emailing everyone and they’ll keep ignoring me. But I’ve got all the receipts.

Women on Boards law: it’s been quite the gender journey

This law has been gestating for a decade: proposed in 2012, it finally passed in 2022, but a decade is a long time in genderfaff. While the original 2012 draft was clear (there are too few women on corporate boards, here is a quota to fix it), what it means after a decade of transing and genderfying everything is much more open to interpretation. The very concepts it was once based on have become legally warped.

This will likely create conundrums for companies: the law doesn’t say if the 40% quota of women on corporate boards is based on biological sex or gender identity. And the introduction by some member states of a legal category of something called non-binary, makes the mathematics of “underrepresented sex” entertainingly unstable. The 40% math just isn’t mathing when there are three variables. Austria, Germany, Iceland and Malta already recognise non-binary gender on identity documents and Belgium just joined them in April.

For a multinational listed across several EU member states, it could be a compliance headache. The deadline to turn it into binding law is 30 June in 27 different legal systems with different ideas about how many sexes there are (there are two. Two sexes.)

Fun trivia: the For Women Scotland case was about a corporate boards quota, as it happens.

Gay Games takes a chance on male-on-female violence, but inserts insurance clauses

There’s a Facebook page that I enjoy called “Warnings and disclaimers that were clearly the result of a lawsuit” and it’s people posting notices that were necessitated by, well, some kind of unfortunate shenanigans. Here’s that but trans-related:

The following statement appeared on the website of the Gay Games recently :

“The competition categories used for the Wrestling and Grappling events have now been altered to correct an error which does not align with the values and needs of our community, specifically related to trans and non-binary identities.”

The “error” that has now been corrected can be understood from the new rule: male and female categories in wrestling and grappling are from now on to be based on preferred gender, and legal documents to prove your actual sex will no longer be required. Athletes can now compete in whichever category fits their inner gender vibes.

You can just imagine how it unfolded: pissed off queerists complained that recognising the strength and size differentials between men and women, and making policy choices based on the acute relevance of that differential in combat sports, is DiScRimInAtorY.

While I was trying to figure out who exactly had had led the call-out campaign that forced the policy change, I stumbled upon an internal Google doc about it (in which some doofus had neglected to remove the track changes). The text says that nobody is required to get a license from their governing body this year, and licenses usually cover insurance and eligibility. So it’s a free-for-all. I wonder if the organisers are nervous? The emphasis on athletes getting their own insurance might be illustrative (it’s not a general condition for participation in the Gay Games).

Anyway, everyone knows who the men are and everyone knows who the women are, at the end of the day. May the best man win.

Who can we thank? Helena Dalli

Helena Dalli was Miss Malta and a bit-part actress before she pivoted to politics to work on a bunch of equality-flavored portfolios. She managed to ram through wins on civil unions, same-sex marriage, transgender self-ID laws, and anti-discrimination expansions that made Malta look very progressive on paper. For her efforts, she was awarded the first ever Equality portfolio by Ursula von der Leyen in the European Commission, a gig invented out of the froth of the Summer of Floyd when everyone was trying to be extra pious. This job let her faff around with strategies, guidelines, and moral lectures, and while it was mostly just performative sludge, it veered into weirdo gender ideology territory with the LGBTIQ Strategy and Gender Equality Strategy, which accelerated self-ID expansions and advanced the idea that male and female are social constructs, much to the disadvantage to women who depend on single-sex spaces and services.

She’s the one who came up with “inclusive communication” guidelines urging EU staff to swap “Christmas” for generic “holiday season,” ditch “ladies and gentlemen” for the sterile “Dear All,” and to use exotic names in official comms like Malika and Julio instead of boring European ones. A low-stakes role that typified elite disconnect.

Here she is. Say thanks to Helena.

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In other news…

• Rebel Girls by Sybilla Claus is now available in English. Launch event tomorrow 25/06/2025 (you have to register)

• EU is transing everything while pretending to be transing nothing, a small selection: Transing Irish healthcare, transing sport, Forcing everyone to pretend non-binary is real, looking for hate speech incidents in public and private spheres and recording them

• On 23 June the European Parliament stopped short of calling for trans healthcare in a women’s health initiative. They still got transgender in there as though it’s a real thing, but no call for “affirming care”. I consider it a minor victory and I’m taking partial credit for cyberbullying everyone about it for the past few months.

• Irish lunatic calls for non-binary and intersex recognition like it’s 2020

• Ukraine: will probably have to start over with their civil code if they want to advance on EU accession negotiations

• Someone examined the proposal to include gender data as well as sex in biological research and laid out very patiently why stereotypes are not a useful metric

• Even the far right in Italy is leaning into gender identity?

• Woman takes on Sweden’s lax paedophile laws, by Julie Bindel

• “Don’t be Hitler” is Europeans’ moral operating system: Great episode of Louise Perry’s Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast that articulates how Hitler became our moral North Star after the collapse of the church. Instead of What would Jesus do, we’ve got What would Hitler not do?

• New Zealand TERFs are working on a definition-of-sex legal bill. Hopefully it will offer some lessons for European countries to follow

• We are wholly unprepared for the disability civil rights era. It’s getting added to political priorities, and funding pots are getting filled

• Looksmaxxing self-proclaimed misogynist Clavicular looked very silly in Paris in a livestream where he failed to find any women who know him, ever mind go weak at the knees in his presence. “Few of the women he approached seemed to know who he was and even fewer cared to find out.” His explanation is that they are all lesbians.

• Homophobic attacks in Dutch asylum centre. LGBTIQ asylum seekers got their own wing, but for some reason they let a straight guy in and he tried to seemed to want to kill gay people

• A complaint for transphobic discrimination has been filed against the American consulate in Paris because the Americans won’t recognise “non-binary” Roblox-inspired identity fantasies of weirdos with fluorescent hair as a real thing that exists. The complaints targets unnamed individuals working in the embassy.

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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References for sex crime stats

Germany

BKA 2023 annual crime statistics (via European Conservative summary):
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-violent-crime-climbs-to-historic-highs/

NZZ analysis of BKA 2024 data on foreign national overrepresentation:
https://www.nzz.ch/english/germanys-muddled-response-to-crimes-involving-foreign-nationals-ld.1879233

BKA/Federal Police 2024 report on newly arrived migrants (Syrian/Afghan rates per 100,000) via Chronicle AI summary:
https://chronicleai.org/article/germany-grapples-with-complexities-of-migrant-crime-statistics-amidst-shifting-demographic-landscape

Wikipedia summary of BKA data on North African overrepresentation vs other groups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime_in_Germany

Euronews on 2025 BKA figures (35.5% foreign suspects, sexual offences rising):
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/20/crime-rates-in-germany-are-falling-but-sexual-offences-are-significantly-on-the-rise

Sweden

Lund University / Khoshnood et al. 2026 peer-reviewed study (21-year follow-up, PMC):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12662818/

Same study on ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387761806_Immigrant_Background_and_Rape_Conviction_A_21-Year_Follow-Up_Study_in_Sweden

2021 peer-reviewed study (2000–2015 convictions, 59.2% immigrant background):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8330751/

SVT/Wikipedia summary of 2018 investigation (58% foreign background, 40% Middle East and Africa, stranger rape 75% born outside Europe):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden

France

INSEE/SSMSI official data on foreign suspects by region of origin (2019, Sécurité et société):
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5763585?sommaire=5763633

INSEE/SSMSI on public transport violence — North Africans 19% of foreign suspects for violence including sexual violence (via Remix News citing INSEE):
https://rmx.news/article/france-64-of-robberies-physical-attacks-and-sexual-assaults-on-public-transport-in-paris-are-committed-by-foreigners-43-from-north-african-countries/

Senate response confirming SSMSI 13% figure for sexual violence and breakdown methodology:
https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2024/qSEQ241000829.htm

Assemblée nationale response confirming SSMSI publishes Maghreb-disaggregated data:
https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q17/17-9474QE.htm

Huerre gang rape study and CNRS Grenoble data (cited via Le Salon Beige aggregation — note this is a right-leaning site, so you would want to go to the primary sources it cites):
https://lesalonbeige.fr/lien-entre-immigration-et-delinquance-les-10-preuves-scientifiques-et-sourcees/

Prison population breakdown (54% Africa and Maghreb) via Senate debate:
https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2022/qSEQ22100233S.html

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Interestingly, her condemnation revealed not just that the Paris judiciary …

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Contents:

1. €2.4 million in EU money to “end the categorisation of humans into men and women and the gendered social order”

2. Netherlands becomes the 10th EU country to adopt a conversion therapy ban

3. It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the identity of gaybashers

4. German neo-Nazi is not really a fake woman, insist trans activists. He’s a fake fake woman

5. Vienna: protestors shout at British diplomats over their government’s defense of women-only spaces

6. Child Focus is warning sex buyers not to pay for sex with children

7. Latest podcast: A project proposal failed the experts’ evaluation. The EU funded it anyway.

8. Who can we thank? Lina Gálvez Muñoz

9. In other news

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€2.4 million in EU money to “end the categorisation of humans into men and women and the gendered social order”

The European taxpayer is funding a research project that will help create a world in which sex is considered irrelevant outside narrow applications relating to reproduction, and where we no longer give credence to the words and concepts “man” and “woman”, “boy” and “girl”. The ultimate objective of the project, for which we’ve forked out 2.4 eye-watering millions, is to banish gender — the sometimes oppressive and often inaccurate traits we associate with the two sexes. And then we can all live happily ever after.

Unlike trans activists, the brains behind the project, Daphna Joel, doesn’t make the batshit claim that sex doesn’t matter ever. She’s TERFy in the sense that she acknowledges that biological sex is real, does matter sometimes, and is relevant in reproductive medicine (the bar is so low.)

But she thinks that our practice of separating men and women conceptually, outside of this narrow field of medicine, is not just pointless, but that it is causing harm. She asks: if men and women (specifically, men and women’s brains) are so similar in so many ways, and so many individuals don’t match the stereotypes projected upon them by the labels “man” and “woman”, then what’s the point of giving these labels any weight in our culture? There is, she says, nothing that can be accurately called a “male brain” or a “female brain”, because the brains of the two sexes overlap so much as to make the distinction useless.

As if humans — a species that reproduces by seeking out the opposite sex and fucking it — could possibly wean itself off noticing who is male and who is female just by stopping using certain words. Beyond vocabulary, how would we phase out our conception of male and female? Even if it is laudable to train ourselves to be critical of broad and not-very-useful associations (like: all men are brutes who want sports cars, and all women are small-brained yoghurt obsessives), average traits and behaviours do exist, in our current human configuration, and they would take millions of years to change.

It’s an interesting idea to think about, however, and Joel’s research presents some fun thought exercises. The over-emphasis of sex leads to an over-emphasis of stereotypes, which are often not accurate, and they can be very limiting on individuals (think of the fate of the poor wimpy lads in macho cultures. Leave the gay spergs alone!)

But then the theory goes off the rails. First of all, to take a random example, male violence is not simply the result of social conditioning. The uneven statistics on sexual offences are not caused by observing this violence as having been committed by males, which is the gist of her argument. Of course, a cultural expectation to be violent will result in more violence. But the statistics are universal: from Norway to Chad, meaning from the most “gender equal” utopias to the most patriarchal shitholes, it’s men doing the violence and the rapes; only the volume differs. Men are great but they are also the ones who have bizarre violent sex fetishes. Sorry, and thank you, lads, for all the bridges, the internet etc. But it’s true. Women don’t rape babies and pretending we sometimes do in your quest to even out some score in your theory-melted head is unlikely to entice us into doing so.

Secondly, and this really gets on my tits, I suspect that Joel, like many people — both on the political left and right — associate being physically smaller with being inferior, being more physically vulnerable with being inferior, being more people-oriented with being inferior, and even being less rape-y with being inferior. This is real lizard-brain stuff. They make a value judgement on innate characteristics like having the physical girth to wrestle someone to death. Yes, that can be very useful. We can all agree. Why have you decided that it is better than not being able — or inclined— to do so? That’s all on you.

Lots of women who want to deny the differences between men and women do so because underneath it all they think women ain’t shit, and the things that we are on average innately prone to do, or to like, ain’t shit, either. I reject this.

To want to rid oneself of any indication that one is a woman is actually a desire to stop being considered less-than. This may be the Freudism lurking underneath the trans masc social contagion. I, for one, think women’s innate, on-average traits are actually good-to-neutral. You can thank your on-average personable, nesty, catty, gossipy, caring, but also — and this is important — largely non-violent — female ancestors for doing such a good job at staying alive. I’m shit at parallel parking, and what’s worse, I have no interest in getting better at it, and even less interest in one day becoming the best parallel parker in the world. I will not lean in.

This is a weird, twistedly anti-woman non-science larping as liberatory. If you watch this conference video, you may notice how Joel, a smart person, exhibits what looks like a nervous twitch when her theory hits a bump in the road. That flick of the hair may be a tell. I think she knows she’s trying to spoof her way out of a hard reality.

Anyway, the EU has dedicated €2.4 fucking million in public money so that this zany scheme can be spread to the masses. The project BeyondGenderBinary has been going since 2022 and still has two years left. The money might ironically be worth it in the sense that it helps us get inside the brains of those bewildering souls who make it their life’s work to promote sex denialism to the detriment of everyone around them. Joel articulates well what many people think: that when a midwife announces to the room “It’s a boy!” what she is really saying is “This baby will play Xbox, have no interest in clothes, and fail to enjoy long phone conversations with his best friend!” thus imposing limitations on the poor baby just as he takes his first breath.

This is how these people think. It’s good to be aware of it.

So we should be thankful to the European Research Council for beclowning its own illustrious name by backing this project. We just have to hope that dimwits don’t get hoodwinked into thinking it’s the emancipatory solution to gender angst that Joel wants them to think it is.

Netherlands becomes the 10th EU country to adopt a conversion therapy ban

Yesterday the Dutch senate adopted a “conversion therapy” ban which will make it a criminal offence to attempt to talk a child — even your own child — out of their mental distress related to disassociation from their sex.

The bill punishes any “systematic and intrusive attempt to change or suppress sexual orientation or gender identity to conform to the prevailing norm”.

This will put parents as well as therapists at risk of prison if they try to deal with the socially-mediated wrong-sex psychological delusions of kids in any way that is not “affirming”. This is an absolute horrorshow. Imagine your anxious teenager “discovers” on an endometriosis subreddit that she’s “actually a boy” inside. You can’t tell her she’s not.

Advertising a service that claims to help sufferers down from this dangerously delusional ledge is also going to be being criminalised. It’s all wrapped up in the language of anti-gay torture tropes, so nobody really gets that it’s criminalising non-belief in transgender ideology.

57 members of the Dutch senate voted in favor of the bill, while 15 members voted against. A motion from the conservatives to request more information and advice from the Council of State (some kind of high-level advisory institution) was rejected. The people who supported the bill believe that it was necessary even though the individual actions like coercion and abuse are already illegal, and even though it denies fundamental right to freedom of religious belief and most importantly, parents’ right to deal with their children’s depersonalisation crises in a way they think is best, even if the enbies on Reddit don’t agree.

Finland is likely to be next on the list, then Ireland, as their governments have promised to go ahead with bans. I can’t see Irish TERFs taking this lying down, and I’m almost looking forward to the scrap.

Here the senators are, having a bit of craic after the vote:

It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the identity of gaybashers

There are more and more reports in European countries of violent homophobic attacks against gay men, but LGBTIQ+ NGOs, politicians and the media have been reluctant to draw attention to a defining feature of the phenomenon: the attacks are very often (though not always) committed by men of Muslim/North African background.

Rather, the far-right is much more likely to be blamed for “rising homophobia”, despite the overwhelming evidence that violence from this group is a less common occurrence. Islamist ideology explicitly condemns homosexuality, often with extreme penalties. Meanwhile, a lot of people who would be called fash in the current political climate (basically, 2008 liberals) are gay af.

This reluctance to stigmatise Muslims has led to some extremely wishy-washy and practically unactionable reporting of a type that echoes the UK authorities’ shyness about mentioning the demographics of the people carrying out the mass rape of young girls in the “grooming gangs” scandal.

It’s not a new story, but the anecdotes are piling up and it’s beginning to look a lot like data. Whether they’re getting lured by fake Grindr profiles and then being attacked (or even killed), or just getting assaulted (and even killed) while walking down the street, not making a point of the pattern may well be getting in the way of doing something about it.

“Homophobic attacks on the rise”, you’ll read in the news and annual reports, with little or no qualifying information. Who is doing the attacking, where, and why? You’re much more likely to hear about violent misgenderings than stories of gangs of Maghrebians hunting down gay guys. But just because it’s not getting reported in the media or via the publicly-funded NGOs who purport to protect the rights of the “LGBTIQ+ community’“, doesn’t mean gay men are not well aware of it. Homonationalism, of the kind typified by my fave Gaystapo operative, Sean Atkinson, is on the rise.

To stray from the mainstream narrative would be to betray woke orthodoxy. Some violent attackers are eternally-blameless victims of colonialism or something, and so they have little or no personal agency to not gaybash (sounds pretty racist!).

Woke ideology is predicated on accumulating fake spiritual purity points by finding ever-more deplorable categories of people you can pretend are hapless victims of The System. Then you lift these gross scumbags up like Simba, and someone gives you a colourful lanyard so everyone knows you’re a faithful adherent. It’s very churchy, and this may just be what happens when you take organised religion away from gormless retards.

Here’s the problem in all its glory, laid out by Green party gay, Bruno De Lille, after a spate of such attacks back in 2020: “I see no reason why I should mind a slap from a Moroccan citizen of Brussels any less than a slap from a citizen of Brussels with Flemish or Walloon roots.”

Sure. A slap is a slap. A stab is a stab. But perhaps the slaps and stabs could be prevented by naming the people who are administering them? On French Twitter there’s a meme, accompanied by the cartoon character Bouli. “Tout le monde sait” or just “TLMS” and all its memefied variations.

“Everybody knows”.

German neo-Nazi is not really a fake woman, insist trans activists. He’s a fake fake woman

Sven Liebich is a German neo-Nazi who has been having some fun with gender. In 2023, after being convicted of incitement to racial hatred and defamation, he changed his legal sex to female (and his name to Marla). Then he failed to show up to a women’s prison where he was to be placed, and instead went on the run in the Czech Republic. He got caught and was extradited back to Germany a couple of weeks ago. And now everyone is waiting to see if he will be granted his wish to be placed in the female estate.

He’s obviously not a woman, but neither are any of the other transvestites. Yes, even the ones who claim to be very very sad.

His trollish shenanigans have highlighted the silliness of Germany’s sex self-ID law which was introduced in 2024. Trans activists have accused him of deliberately abusing the process to mock the law and/or to avoid male prison. At the same time, they use his new name, Marla-Svenja Liebich, and female pronouns while referring to him, which is very odd.

But how do they know he doesn’t think he is a woman? Going through his social media accounts, I couldn’t find any outward indication that he is any different from the hundreds of thousands of other German males who now claim to be women, whether they proclaim it at the town hall or keep it on fetish sites.

How can anyone tell that he doesn’t have this deep conviction?

The incident has prompted justice ministers to entertain the idea of weakening the self-ID law to address “obvious cases of abuse” and some authorities are trying to reverse Liebich’s sex change entry through the courts. They say it is fraudulent. (How do they knowwwww????) Queer groups, meanwhile, have warned that this would place transgender people under suspicion and undermine the law’s purpose. My heart bleeds.

I personally have always been “convinced that the sex mentioned on my birth certificate does not correspond to my intimately experienced gender identity”, as the Belgian declaration to change your legal sex puts it. I have never felt very girly. In that way, my sex and my “gender identity” do not match. So like Sven, I have started the process to correct this error, filling in the declaration and sending it off to my local council so that I can turn into a man. I will keep you posted.

Liebich is apparently still posting on his Twitter account (@MarlaSvenjaL), and I noticed he was following me, so I followed him back and DM’d him asking for an interview. To be continued.

Vienna: protestors shout at British diplomats over their government’s defense of women-only spaces

A group of activists in Austria made a big banner expressing their displeasure that the UK Supreme Court, and the UK government, because they made the bigotted clarification that when you come across the word “sex” in UK law, you have to interpret it in the biological sense. This infuriated Austrian activists (and activists all around the world, d’ailleurs) who see it as an affront to people who are sad they are the sex that they are and not the sex that they are not.

This was posted on Reddit. Apparently, they tried the same stunt last year but got manhandled out of the parade by bouncers. This year, they managed to walk near a “rainbow-coloured Union Jack” that was part of the “Diplomats for Equality marchers. I’ve written about this group before. They are a vital cog in the global LGBTIQ+ machine and the pressure to put on a good show was on this year after the devastating effects of the Trump de-gayifying of American foreign policy became clear.

In fact, a woman from the Dutch wealth fund, DreiLinden, revealed on a podcast last week that the US State Department was paying for 70% of global LGBTIQ+ advocacy and campaigning, which is just incredible. She also said the region most affected by this is Central Asia, and the identity group most harmed is — surprise! — trans and intersex people. Now that the Americans have abandoned the globohomo project, it’s European taxpayers who have to step up and pay the PrEP bill for all those Uzbeki femboys.

Child Focus is using pimping sites to warn sex buyers not to pay for sex with children

I was checking out the huge, bulging, ever-growing number of Latin American transsexual prostitutes being pimped in Belgium on the website RedLights.be when a popup from Child Focus came up that tested me, a punter, on my ability to identify a child when I see one (as if the problem of child sex trafficking is caused by men who don’t know what a child is).

The phenomenon known as loverboy pimping (Romeo-pimping) is the term used in Belgium and the Netherlands to refer to the phenomenon more commonly known in the UK as grooming à la grooming gangs, though the scale of the networks is much smaller. The core tactic is the same: boy meets girl, girl thinks she’s in a romantic relationship, boy pimps out girl, at first in a close circle and eventually to a wider network. Sometimes, they end up on site like RedLights.

In Belgium, the entire industry operates openly and legally because the government went along with the campaigners’ (including Amnesty) argument that criminalising prostitution drives it underground, making it harder for women and girls to report that they are being exploited (for fear of being prosecuted themselves). So instead, Belgium has driven the whole thing overground, and there’s nothing to hide, nothing to monitor, and nothing to investigate. You can’t tell what’s consensual and what’s coerced because it’s all supposed to operate as an industry like any other. Women are not applying for employment contracts, and pimps are not registering their brothels, as the utopians pretended to believe would happen. Read Julie Bindel’s investigation about it here.

You could argue — and I do! — that this has made it easier to hide the exploitation of women and children.

In case you’re wondering: I check these websites on a regular basis because I suspect that the demand for shemales is driving the supply of shemales. Muh economics.

Why I care enough about this to spend my time cruising for big-boobied Brazilian boys with boners: one of the drivers of transgender mania is the apparent very popular preference for gynandromorphs — essentially, pornified men with breasts. And you can’t ever get a man to admit that he’s into this, so you have to glean whatever information you can from the supply side. You can also tell a lot from what these men advertise in their service menus.

Anyway, it’s all so incredibly wholesome.

Latest podcast: A project proposal failed the experts’ evaluation. The EU funded it anyway.

Who can we thank?

Lina Gálvez Muñoz really doesn’t get enough credit. She’s a Spanish socialist who has been the chair (and rapporteur) of the committee on women’s rights and gender equality in the European Parliament since 2024. These are very influential positions.

When she got the job, TERFs were excited because her party had just announced at a congress that they would return their focus to the material realities of women and girls and stop huffing the gender nitrate. Specifically, her party said they would ditch the Q in LGBTIQ, and they would reserve women’s sport for women. However, the backlash must have been severe, because we never heard much about it after that and Gálvez, a big fan of “the gender lens” as they call it in academia, has never publicly defended women as a real material thing that exists, as opposed to some wankfest in a transvestite’s head.

Au contraire. Gálvez, a self-styled champion for feminist policies, has supported resolutions and reports that prioritise gender identity alongside/over biological sex in access to single-sex spaces, shelters, sports, and services. Under her watch, biological males have been included in women’s protections and equality measures, essentially helping to erode female-only provisions. She frames any opposition to these changes as a right-wing backlash, rather than legitimate concern linked to material reality.

She knows what’s going on. TERFs have told her. And yet the day the European Parliament passed a resolution that asserted that “trans women are women”, she could be seen squirming in her seat with utter glee. She reportedly recently said that left can’t be seen to be infighting (over trans nonsense) or the right-wing will use it to their advantage. She might lose her very important job. The thought!

Here she is. Say thanks to Lina.

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In other news…

• This UK judge certainly seems like a cunt

• Czech Republic is planning a strict trans bill but activists claim it’s largely for show

• FLINTA is getting cancelled! This weird Germanophone acronym (Frauen, Lesben, Intergeschlechtliche, Nicht-binäre, Trans, Agender) was supposed to include everyone except “cis men” but it’s not pure enough. Nothing is ever pure enough

• Berlin Pride lost two-thirds of its funding (€200k) when sponsors pulled out after Trump spooked them over DEI. I once went to Berlin Pride and there was a big group of adult men in nappies and they had an adult-sized nappy changing table

• Right-wing protests at Pride parades in both Romania and Bulgaria Pride marches. In Bucharest they called it the “March for Normality” lol.

• Finland’s big LGBTIQ lobby organisation, SETA, is at risk of losing its funding. The minister for social affairs and health is targetting organisations whose activities are focused on a single identity group

• LGB International are doing an Explain the Plus campaign. I like this.

• I interviewed Paddy O’Gorman about AIDS statistics and all kinds of other stuff

• French agency tells transvestite men to take legal action against doctors who refuse to pretend they have PMS

• Ireland: transvestite loses discrimination case against creche

• IGLYO breaks Belgian employment law by advertising for LGBTIQ people for board chair job

• Billboard Chris arrested in Madrid

• Conservatives in the US try to foil the nomination of Michelle Bachelet for UN secretary general job over abortion

• WPATH is getting sued!

• Musk takes legal action against German paper over Belfast riot comments

• The Gay Games had to walk back its policy on sex categories in wrestling and grappling after backlash

• EU “Women on boards” law: 30 June is the deadline for transposing into national law. This is what feminists championed while handing our single-sex spaces to crossdressers

• EU “equality bodies” transposition deadline this Friday — another potential nightmare for the rights of women/reality that nobody saw coming until it was too late

• Trusted flaggers public consultation (part of DSA) open until 10 July

• Fetish Pride Amsterdam: under 16s are allowed in with an adult. The Netherlands is so fucking weird man.

• Brussels: homophobic hooligans tear down 15 big posters for LGBTIQ choir

• Film in Madrid this Saturday: being a woman is not a feeling

• Son of Norway’s crown princess convicted of rape and sentenced to four years in prison

• Police Pride 2026 Amsterdam: two full days on LGBT+ issues in police work. “This is an important event for those working within law enforcement who are committed to advancing equality, inclusion”. The agenda is not available online.

• Special offer: if you take out a paid subscription to my newsletter, you get added to the official “Anti-Gender Movement” and I’ll send you an official “Anti-Gender Actor” badge.

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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He began to believe he was unwittingly taking part in an elaborate “circus” when he noticed that a project he had evaluated as unworthy of an EU grant received almost €2 million anyway. He confronted the Commission repeatedly to find out if they had involved him in a fraud, and to ask if the decisions about funding projects are ultimately made by nameless bureaucrats despite the hired experts’ opinion.

The evaluation process, he told me, is long and expensive and involves many different experts from all around the continent. Is it all a sham?

The project in question involved a municipality of a major European city, so perhaps there were some political favours being granted. Whatever the case, Romeo, who is from Albania, did not sign up for this. His name is ultimately attached to that particular project grant, and the Commission will not let him see the final report in order to verify if, or in what way, his evaluation was altered to make the proposal “pass” the threshold to make it eligible for the money.

Who really makes the decisions? To what extent is the EU funding evaluation process an elaborate facade?

One of the ways the gender machine has been kept tanked up on cash is via funding for LGBTIQ+ organisations and projects, from multi-million euro annual grants to NGOs, to smaller grants to individual projects that help seep gender nonsense into every facet of European life. If you take a look at the NGO landscape in the EU, you may notice that there is an inordinate number of non-profits dedicated explicitly to promoting various flavours of sexual identity labels. Why? Perhaps it’s because the people who run the NGOs and the people who sign off on their grants are buddies. They don’t even hide it. The LGBTIQ+ staff committee inside the Brussels bureaucracy proudly advertises its membership of ILGA-Europe, the very same organisation that lobbies the very same staff for money.

It’s not a good look, but these grifters fear nobody and nothing.

Disheartened with the whole process, and angry that he got roped into this complicated and expensive legitimacy-theatre, Romeo belatedly followed in his father’s footsteps and now drives a bus for a living. In our conversation we also talked about postmodernism and Brussels’ cultural imperialism, among other stuff.

Enjoy.

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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)

Guest: Romeo Kodra

The conversation began after Róisín came across Romeo’s LinkedIn article describing his experience as an EU expert evaluator.

🔗 LinkedIn Article
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anyone-considering-working-eu-expert-european-commission-romeo-kodra-zqsef

🔗 LinkedIn Profile
https://www.linkedin.com/in/romeo-kodra/

European Creative Rooftop Network

The project at the centre of Romeo’s concerns.

“It’s the project number 616805.”

🔗 Creative Europe Project Results
🔗 ecrn.city

The Transparent Elephant Rule

Romeo repeatedly refers to an unpublished book project that grew out of his investigation.

“It will be about a book called... The Transparent Elephant Rule.”

No public manuscript or publication could be located.

European Ombudsman

Romeo describes escalating his concerns through the Ombudsman’s office.

🔗 European Ombudsman

https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/

🔗 Emily O’Reilly
https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/emily-oreilly

European Court of Auditors

Referenced by Romeo as part of his efforts to seek accountability.

🔗 https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/office/staff/en/50733

OLAF

The European Anti-Fraud Office.

🔗

https://anti-fraud.ec.europa.eu/

European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO)

Referenced during discussion of prosecutors and referrals.

🔗

https://www.eppo.europa.eu/

Franz Kafka

🔗 Franz Kafka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

🔗 The Trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

Jacques Derrida

Referenced during discussion of culture, power, and colonisation.

🔗 All Culture Is Originally Colonial: Derrida, Algeria and the Latin Empire
https://mideast.wisc.edu/event/all-culture-is-originally-colonial-derrida-algeria-and-the-latin-empire/

Paolo Virno

🔗 Paolo Virno
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/V/P/au26274433.html

Peaked

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

By Róisín Michaux

And why is the Irish government (as in, the Irish public) paying for young women’s trans self-harm adventures abroad?

Myself and veteran journalist Paddy O’Gorman touch on our era’s most untouchable media taboos. Plus: prisons, perverts, and general institutional capture.

Enjoy.

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Show notes (AI generated)

Host: Róisín Michaux
Guest: Paddy O’Gorman

Episode Overview

In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with veteran Irish journalist and podcaster Paddy O’Gorman about journalism, Irish gender medicine, trans medical tourism, HIV/AIDS history, public health messaging, institutional incentives, and the role of international organisations in shaping domestic policy.

Rather than serving as a fact-check, these notes function as a forensic reference guide to the people, reports, court cases, studies, speeches, and media coverage directly referenced throughout the discussion.

Paddy O’Gorman

Former RTÉ journalist with approximately 40 years of experience.

Current affiliations:

🔗 Paddy’s Podcast

https://paddyspodcast.ie/

🔗 GRIPT

https://gript.ie/

🔗 Genspect

https://genspect.org/

Paddy’s reporting philosophy:

“Stand at a place. And listen.”

Journalism, Courts & Vulnerable Services

Shauna Kavanagh (Limerick Prison / Rathmines Refuge)

Referenced during discussions about domestic violence refuges and safeguarding.

Rathmines Refuge Assault

🔗 Irish Examiner
No jail for hairdresser who pulled clumps of hair in attack on homeless woman
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41222173.html

Previous Assault Conviction

🔗 Irish Times
Woman jailed for assaulting a family friend who was trying to break up a fight
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/criminal-court/woman-jailed-for-assaulting-a-family-friend-who-was-trying-to-break-up-a-fight-1.4498193

Barbie Kardashian

Referenced as another example of controversy involving placement, violence, and media reporting.

Threats to Kill Sentence

🔗 Irish Times
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/03/16/barbie-kardashian-jailed-for-five-and-a-half-years-for-threats-to-kill-mother/

Acquittal

🔗 RTÉ
https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2024/1025/1477497-barbie-kardashian-verdict/

Commentary Referenced

🔗 Genspect
https://genspect.org/barbie-kardashian-and-the-gaslighting-of-the-irish-public/

Graham Linehan

Referenced in relation to Irish media framing.

Sophia Brooks Incident

🔗 BBC
Father Ted creator denies harassing trans woman
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx2vk4zx3xo

🔗 Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/1f00e523d76c4ca3b54d0b5908c2d693

Irish Trans Medical Tourism

Kenneth O’Flynn

Independent Ireland TD Kenneth O’Flynn submitted parliamentary questions examining public expenditure on overseas gender procedures.

🔗 Oireachtas Parliamentary Question (7 May 2026)
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-05-07/510/

Treatment Abroad Scheme

🔗 HSE
https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/1/schemes/treatment-abroad-scheme/

EU Cross-Border Healthcare Directive

🔗 Directive 2011/24/EU
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011L0024

Mary Butler

Referenced extensively due to the contrast Paddy draws between youth body modification policies.

Under-18 Tattoo Bill

🔗 Oireachtas Bill
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2018/125/

🔗 Irish Times
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/ban-on-tattoos-and-intimate-body-piercings-for-under-18s-proposed-in-new-bill-1.3699118

🔗 The Journal
https://www.thejournal.ie/tattoo-piercing-ban-under-18-4342497-Nov2018/

“Behind the Scenes” Comments

🔗 Fianna Fáil Video
https://www.facebook.com/fiannafail/videos/all-theyre-looking-for-is-respect-and-support-and-theyre-not-harming-anyoneas-a-/1529474904915445/

Mary Lou McDonald

Referenced during discussions around lived experience and Sinn Féin’s evolving position.

Supporting Her Trans Sibling

🔗 GCN
https://gcn.ie/mary-lou-mcdonald-support-trans-sibling/

Late Late Show Discussion

🔗 The Journal
https://www.thejournal.ie/sinn-fein-trans-healthcare-trans-policy-6687580-Apr2025/

“People Need to Cop On”

🔗 The Times
https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/mary-lou-mcdonald-interview-trans-rights-sinn-fein-policy-ffxvf2666

Dr Sidhbh Gallagher

Irish plastic surgeon practising in Miami.

Irish Times Profile Criticised by Paddy

🔗 Irish Times
Meet the Irish surgeon changing lives for transgender Americans
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/working-abroad/meet-the-irish-surgeon-changing-lives-for-transgender-americans-1.3561668

Response Referenced

🔗 GRIPT
https://gript.ie/what-the-irish-times-didnt-tell-you-about-dr-sidhbh-gallagher/

Simon Harris Connection

The GRIPT article notes Gallagher’s previous engagement with Simon Harris regarding trans healthcare discussions.

Cass Review

Referenced as a major international reassessment.

🔗 Cass Review

https://cass.independent-review.uk/

HIV / AIDS History

UNAIDS Global Report 2012

One of the central reports repeatedly referenced.

🔗 PDF
https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/20121120_UNAIDS_Global_Report_2012_with_annexes_en_1.pdf

Key themes:

• concentrated epidemics
• generalised epidemics
• key populations

PrEP

🔗 Sexual Wellbeing Ireland
https://www.sexualwellbeing.ie/sexual-health/prep/

HPSC

🔗 Health Protection Surveillance Centre

https://www.hpsc.ie/

HIV Criminalisation

🔗 UNAIDS Factsheet
https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/documents/2024/01-hiv-human-rights-factsheet-criminalization

Drug Decriminalisation

🔗 UNAIDS
https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/documents/2026/20260310_Decriminalization-drug-use-HIV

Sex Work Guidance

🔗 UNAIDS PDF
https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/JC2306_UNAIDS-guidance-note-HIV-sex-work_en_0.pdf

MSM & Key Populations

🔗 WHO
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241500129

🔗 UNAIDS
https://www.unaids.org/en/topic/key-populations

Southeast Asia HIV Study

Referenced when discussing transmission patterns.

🔗 PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23260128/

🔗 Full Text
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3956879/

Important correction:

The study reported approximately 49 times higher odds, not 49%.

Bridge Populations

🔗 PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11287870/

Ryan White

Referenced as an example of public perception and stigma during the AIDS epidemic.

🔗 Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program

https://ryanwhite.hrsa.gov/

Peter Piot

Likely the “Ebola Peter” referenced.

Belgian microbiologist involved in the discovery of Ebola and later Executive Director of UNAIDS.

🔗 Stanford
https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/news/virus-hunter-peter-piot-how-chance-encounter-sparked-his-life-mission

🔗 Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/25/peter-piot-scientist-ebola-congo

🔗 Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Piot

Thabo Mbeki

Referenced during broader discussions of AIDS policy controversies.

🔗 Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thabo-Mbeki

Róisín Murphy

Referenced as an example of backlash following comments on puberty blockers.

🔗 Pitchfork
https://pitchfork.com/news/roisin-murphy-shares-statement-after-inflammatory-comment-on-trans-rights

🔗 Entertainment Weekly
https://ew.com/celebrity/roisin-murphy-apology-fire-brimstone-trans-rights-comments/

Maya Forstater

Referenced by Róisín.

Let Toys Be Toys

🔗 Hiyamaya
https://hiyamaya.net/2012/12/05/let-toys-be-toys/?ref=forstater.com

Patrick Kavanagh

Referenced quotation:

“Because the wise men have not spoken, I speak as a fool.”

🔗 Poetry Foundation
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/patrick-kavanagh

Pádraig Pearse

🔗 Oration at the Graveside of O’Donovan Rossa
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Oration_at_the_Graveside_of_O%27Donovan_Rossa

UNICEF / Liam Neeson

Referenced during discussions around messaging.

🔗 UNICEF Appeal
https://help.unicef.org/en/special-appeal-from-Liam-Neeson

Host

Róisín Michaux

🔗 X
https://x.com/RoisinMichaux

🔗 Peaked Substack

Peaked

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

By Róisín Michaux

🔗 Apple Podcasts

Guest

Paddy O’Gorman

🔗 Paddy’s Podcast

https://paddyspodcast.ie/

🔗 GRIPT

https://gript.ie/

🔗 Genspect
https://genspect.org/paddy-ogormans-letter-from-ireland/

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Peaked is available on Substack and major podcast platforms.

🔗

Peaked

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

By Róisín Michaux

Trans activists ask politicians to defend toxic trans laws

Advancements in “trans rights” were, by necessity, planned in secret meetings, smothered in obfuscating vagueries, forced through the courts on the downlow, and protected from scrutiny by a strictly enforced No Debate media strategy.

However, with legal victories piling up, trans activists are ready for their friends in the legislature to be a bit more frank about what they have achieved together.

Earlier this year, the trans activist lobby group, ILGA-Europe, sent a memo to members of the European Parliament (see screenshots above) urging them to fight back against the shock and disgust circulating in the Parliament, the international press, and on social media about the European Commission’s stated support for legal sex changes for children. The outrage followed the publication of an EU strategy document that stated the following:

“The Commission will facilitate exchanges of best practices among Member States to support the development of legal gender recognition procedures based on self-determination that are free from age restrictions.”

This dickish doublespeak is par for the course in trans land. The text makes very clear the legal direction of travel the member states are expected to follow, while embedding enough plausible deniability that the Commission can keep its hands clean of the whole thing. The wording allowed Anna Gray, Commission spokesperson, to respond to the online frenzy in this way, without actually lying: “To suggest that the Commission would impose such measures on member states is simply false.”

She’s not wrong. The Commission cannot currently impose such a thing via the regular channels. But they are imposing it via a longer, round-about route: beyond just passing the buck to the wokest (and most obedient) member states to “share best practices”, as outlined in the paragraph above, they have also been paying ILGA-Europe (and others) to seek out and support legal cases that will force sex self-ID on EU countries by manipulating freedom of movement rights and GDPR rights.

ILGA-Europe and its satellite of funded activists all over the continent (many or most of whom are also funded by the EU) have been extremely successful in this regard. And while there has not yet been a Court of Justice case that explicitly instructs member states to provide for sex self-ID for minors, recent freedom of movement-based “mutual recognition of documents” rulings mean that as long as a kid can falsify his or her sex in one country, it can be argued that he or she should have the right to falsify it anywhere in the EU.

Anna Gray is unlikely to tell you any of this. And if you write to her to ask her: is the EU funding court cases to erase sex in law? Or: is the EU funding a gazillion trans rights NGOs all over the EU (and beyond) to create the illusion of popular support for sex erasure? she’ll move your email to the trash bin and pretend she never saw it. Or, she’ll answer something like: “The EU fosters the facilitation of empowering marginalised communities by engaging in human rights-aligned best practices and international standards.” Okaaaaaayyyyyy.

On paper, member states have sovereignty over delicate issues relating to family and national identity. But the Commission is currently challenging Slovakia for cheekily declaring its intention to maintain this right. ILGA-Europe called this “a constitutional coup”.

What’s interesting about the memo above is that it wouldn’t have been advisable ten years ago to advertise openly any of the specifics of “trans rights” blather. The need for secrecy when dealing with trans bullshit was made abundantly clear to members of the EP before they even got elected: Remember when ILGA-Europe asked candidates to pledge to keep quiet about their work whenever necessary? Now that it’s too late to stop it, and trans kids are a legal reality in multiple European countries, ILGA-Europe would like officials to show a bit more pride in these achievements.

The memo has a list of ready-made, full-throated defenses of trans insanity that ILGA-Europe would love to see circulate in the press. They want their allies to tell journalists that it’s totally good and super normal and also excellent that kids can pretend to be the opposite sex, and that it’s mega awesome that civil registries now have to record this lie as fact. They’d love statements from their backroom buddies openly declaring that social and legal transition doesn’t fuck up a child psychologically (it does), and that puberty blockers are really really cool and reversible (they are not).

But that defense is not coming. Not now, and probably not ever. The strategy of No Debate was necessary precisely because this trans bullshit is an impossible sell. No politician, no matter how hard they worked to get ILGA’s hush-hush legal wish list over the line, seems willing to stand up and admit it.

Once the flattening language of “human rights for all” is removed, and everyone learns the details, nobody wants their name attached to it.

What they’ve pushed through looks barbaric to anyone who isn’t caught up in the mass psychogenic illness that is the sex-erasure project. Even MEP Marc Angel, the biggest ally of the queer project in Brussels, gave this extremely lukewarm defense during the brouhaha over the trans kids thing: “This is a recommendation whose aim is to encourage member states to exchange information on their practices and legislation with the idea of ​​advancing the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.”

This blaah is not quite a ringing endorsement, is it? He did not say, to the chagrin of his ILGA buddies: “Changing sex is a great thing for kids to do, and stopping their natural development by castrating them chemically is a wonderful plan that I am happy to contribute to.” He and other turbo gender loons like MEP Kim van Sparrentak know they would nuke their political prospects by taking responsibility for this dangerous elitist nonsense.

If anything, trans superfans are getting even more vague. “LGBTIQ+ rights” has now to be further obscured under the label of, simply, “democracy”, such is its plummet in popularity. This moves the discussion even further away from the important specifics of this deranged political movement.

But somebody, some day, is going to have to take responsibility for the specifics, in all its plain-spoken glory. Who will it be?

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World Health Organisation group squabbles over evidence versus “experience” in design of gender-affirming care guidelines

I spoke to someone involved in drafting the WHO’s much-anticipated guidelines on transgender-affirming care. The Guideline Development Group (GDG) is due to release the results of its work by the end of this month, according to this anonymous source who is close to the discussions.

The GDG, which is made up of public health experts and activists, is set to recommend that governments mainstream gender-affirming hormone therapy access in the public health system, and set up centres of excellence and/or knowledge hubs to provide the required training of medical staff. Just like regular primary care practitioners can learn to handle the diagnosis, screening and monitoring of diabetes, they can take on the same tasks for patients who wish to change their secondary sex characteristics by taking cross-sex hormones, the source explained.

The development of the guidelines has not been easy, I was told. While the clinicians and public health professionals have been carrying out systematic reviews and data analysis to support their decisions, activist members of the group have been frustrated, as they insist that the guidelines should reflect the personal preferences of “the community”.

A significant proportion of the clinicians involved in the process work in the HIV/AIDS field. Providing gender affirming care to male transvestite prostitutes as an incentive to engage with the health system is considered essential to ending the AIDS epidemic, as the rates of HIV infection in this group are staggeringly high. In some countries, up to 30% of all transgender-identifying males have HIV.

The overall objective of the different factions that make up the GDG — clinicians in the HIV or public health fields, or the ideology-driven “rights” activists— may appear to be the same on the surface, but they don’t all really want the same thing. One group wants hormones on demand as a fundamental human right. That is the endpoint. The only “evidence base” they consider relevant is: “I want it”.

The other group wants to end the AIDS epidemic, and one of the ways they think that can be done is by offering hormones to “key populations” on demand. Improvements in quality of life, overall health, and ultimately, lower HIV numbers via higher PrEP uptake are relevant endpoints in this context.

The guidelines are intended to cover all transgender-identifying people (male and female), but clinicians will have to make sure that whatever they produce will lead to increased access to HIV/STI services, uptake, adherence, and retention in HIV care for “trans women” in prostitution.

The activists want to put the system in place and use it to collect the data. More sensible heads want the data first. So far, the systematic reviews conducted by members of the GDG on the ability of gender affirming care to improve quality of life have shown that the evidence is weak at best.

This was part of what has been holding up the guidelines, if my source is to be believed.

It’s worth pointing out that if trans women were not so susceptible to HIV infection, there is little chance that the WHO would care about meeting the aesthetic desires of trans mascs and autogynephiles from the Global North. If AIDS disappeared tomorrow, institutional support for “trans rights” would likely disappear with it.

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Belgian trans clinic: extreme mental illness, even self-cutting, no reason not to transition kids

Ever since the UK’s notorious Tavistock clinic stopped offering gender services to children after the Cass review, neighbouring Ireland has had nowhere to send kids who believe they have wrong-sex souls.

As a stopgap solution, the Irish Health Service Executive has been sending kids to a Belgian clinic. I happen to live here, so in February 2025, I put my name down on the waiting list to be seen by their gender team. I presented myself as the mother of a sad autistic daughter who insists she is a boy.

Last week, my fake (14-year-old) daughter’s turn finally came round, so I went to the clinic to ask about getting her doped up on testosterone so she could “turn into” the boy she believes herself to be. I told the gender clinic nurse at the intake meeting, which my daughter was far too anxious to attend herself, that she is bedroom-bound, barely talks, has mostly quit school, hates herself so much she has showers in the dark, is deeply depressed, cuts herself, and is autistic and probably a lesbian. She has intense social anxiety, barely any friends, and had a very traumatic incident in her youth.

The nurse told me that none of this would prevent her from transitioning into her true self. In order to beat back some of that dysphoria, the first thing we could consider is puberty blockers which would be prescribed after she had seen a psychologist. But don’t worry, the psychologist just wants to get to know her “trans story”. We don’t deal in rejection, he told me.

More on this story coming soon.

Child sex abuse material: which platforms are the most popular in your country?

The US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has an open data website listing the stats for child exploitation found and flagged on social media platforms and websites, broken down by country.

A note on these stats: some countries flag way more incidences of CSAM than others, but higher numbers don’t necessarily mean more CSAM is uploaded in that country. It could just mean that the flagging system is better, the rules are stricter, or some other reason. What can be gleaned from the data, however, is which social media platform(s) predators tend to gravitate towards in different countries. For example, Irish paedos love TikTok, while Belgian sickos seem to prefer Snapchat.

I was shocked to see the number of reports for child sex abuse material on TikTok, so I went on the platform and typed in “little girl dancing” and found very disturbing content within seconds. Roblox, to my extreme surprise, was very low down on the list for the number of reports. This could be because the company has had to clamp down after negative attention. Or perhaps, the company and its users are simply not alerting the authorities of the images and videos of CSAM that they come across. Either way, keep your kids off these apps. Nightmare juice.

Albania has two legal gender recognition court challenges ongoing. This matters for EU accession

Luana Myrto is an Albanian man who claims to be a woman. In 2025, he caused drama when he went on TV and alleged that he had been taken into care as a minor by LGBT support groups and shelters (including the EU-funded Aleanca LGBT), who then manipulated and pressured him into hormone therapy and transition. He also said that he was made promises of educational support that were not kept, and that the activists isolated him from his family.

This kicked off a storm, with LGBTIQ support groups denying his claims. Conservative groups saw him as a kind of whistleblower, revealing the sneaky tactics of the rainbow lobby.

However, Myrto still insists he is a trans woman (though he does not deny his biological reality) and is currently taking legal action against the Albanian civil registry for legal gender recognition. He is being supported by the (EU-funded) Helsinki Committee.

Simultaneously, Aleanca LGBTI started their own strategic litigation case seeking legal recognition of a trans woman’s gender identity before in a court in Tirana.

The lack of any kind of legal gender recognition in Albania has been highlighted as a potential blocker for EU accession negotiations. A positive outcome in either of these strategic cases will advance the country’s EU membership ambitions, which are under pressure to succeed thanks to the EU's current, ahem, geopolitical concerns.

Who can we thank?

This is a new feature in which I put a face and a name to the faceless nameless people responsible for removing women and girls’ sex-based rights in Europe, and/or for advancing the destruction of gay and lesbians’ rights (and bodies, and mental health) and everyone’s ability to speak freely about how dumb and dangerous it all is.

First up is Susanne Knoefel, head of unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers, JUST D.1. This is the unit responsible for non-discrimination, LGBTIQ+, age, and “horizontal matters”. During her tenure, Knoefel has overseen the production of several extremely damaging and anti-woman, anti-gay initiatives, including the LGBTIQ Equality Strategies of 2020-2025 and 2026-2030, various publications monitoring trans mania implementation across member states, the transing of national equality bodies, and lots of intersectional nonsense. She’s a close buddy of the folx over at ILGA-Europe, to the point where she doesn’t even list all their little get-togethers, soirees, chit-chats and chummy chinwags.

What’s a transparency register between friends!

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In other news…

• No jail for rapists (France)

• No jail for rapists (Belgium)

• No jail for rapists (Belgium again)

• No jail for rapist (Germany)

• Irish government wants to help get rainbow families bill over the line during Council presidency

• German court currently considering whether calling a man a man is a civil rights violation

• Massive PR push for gender affirming medicine services in the Germanosphere (Germany, Switzerland, Austria). From Faika El-Nagashi’s Substack

• Italy just passed a law requiring parental consent for sex education in schools, with stronger restrictions in early education

• You cannot convince me the Belgian kit for the World Cup is not a sneaky trans promo

• Another sex clown likes collecting, watching child rape (Germany)

• TGEU locked down another €1 million per year (for 3 years) from the European Commission, in order to torment us and terrorise us with their bullshit

• Bulgarian woman challenges “gender-based” domestic violence law that excludes lesbian couples

• NGOs grab more power in Brussels: they already have a huge permanent and useless entity called EESC, now they’re getting another dedicated platform

• French study: men with HIV who pretend to be women in order to make money as prostitutes are depressed because of transphobia, not because of any of that other stuff

• Gayropa diplomats did a thing in China for Pride

• Trans-identifying man kills man in Marseilles

• Man in woman’s eSports (Germany)

• Finnish teacher got “gender-affirming” mastectomy but didn’t get sick leave covered, appealed and won

• Belgium is considering putting abortion in the constitution after the EU-level My Voice My Choice effort failed

• Euractiv asks: are EU’s Citizens’ Initiatives a crock of shit? (spoiler: yeah)

• Homophobic ambush perpetrators go on trial in Avignon

• Rome Pride bans Jewish groups for not distancing themselves from

• Croatia Pride featured anti-gay protests

• Criminal charges against Budapest mayor for organising Pride events have been dropped

• A law blog is claiming that the Slovakian government told the EU to “piss off” (paraphrasing) interfering with national identity issues including sex self-ID

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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German ministers want to get rid of separate toilets for women at public events

A ministerial body of the German federal government is about to vote on an amendment to a building regulation that would remove the requirement for separately-sexed toilets in buildings intended for large events. The change would apply to new constructions intended to be used as concert halls, stadiums, theatres, festivals, or any building designed to host large public events. In practical terms, it means no more women-only toilets for German women, girls, and little kids, which many people consider to be necessary for safety, privacy and dignity.

The women’s rights organisation, Was ist eine Frau, said that such a move would be “devastating”.

Ironically, psychotically, it is being pitched as a ‘gender equality’ initiative: the ministers are reacting to complaints that there are never enough toilets for women. Venues tend to have equal number of toilets for both sexes, even though we take longer in cubicles — not because we’re having a good time in there, but because we have to get half naked in order to pee. We also spend a substantial part of our lives bleeding out of our vaginas, and we need to make very sure there are never ever any outward signs of that fact, otherwise everyone freaks the fuck out. But rather than give us more cubicles, we just have to bunk in with the men. All together like one big sexless family.

For this great plan to work out well, men would have to no longer present a statistically significant predatory threat to women and children in confined and isolated spaces (and given this particular context, likely drunk). That’s not the reality currently, but civil servants and gender studies “graduates” seem to perhaps think they can engineer that utopian outcome.

This move is an escalation of woke Europeans’ mission to de-sex all hitherto-sexed facilities, a plan that has mostly only concerned schools so far (see a good recent example in Luxembourg and another one in Ireland) as well as individual hospitality establishments whose cool clients love all that gender shit. Germany is engaging in a bit of “norm entrepreneurship” by expanding the idea outside of schools and woke coffeeshops.

Suffice it to say, the building ministers and their policy assistants don’t spend much time around the kind of men who follow you into a bathroom and masturbate while listening to you pee, or place a camera under a toilet seat and stream the footage to millions. That world still exists for German women and kids, but bureaucrats never encounter it, unfortunately. Their favourite funky brunch place in Neukölln has mixed sex toilets, and like, the non-binary baristas use it, so what’s the big deal?

They either don’t know about the extremes of male sexuality, or worse, they think they can tame the latent (sometimes blatant) savage out of male mammals, even the ultra low-IQ ones, by getting some 23-year-old gender urchin to design a cartoon world in Canva where sex doesn’t matter.

The vote for this elite betrayal of women and children will soon get underway. Was ist eine Frau is urging citizens to write to their building ministers.

No more women’s restrooms at events? Let’s stop this!

Single-sex services for women are disappearing in Europe

There are two main ways via which single-sex spaces and services are slowly going extinct in Europe. The first one is, obviously, by allowing anyone to identify as the opposite sex. Once a male person is in a female-only space, let’s say a youth hostel dorm room for example, it is no longer a women-only dorm room. It is a mixed-sex dorm room. He may have had his nads removed, or he may even be wearing a dress covered in flowers. It is a mixed-sex dorm room once both males and females are allowed to sleep in it.

If you tried to get such a man out of the room, and return it to its status as a women-only space, you would be accused of discrimination against him on the basis of his gender identity (though depending on your legal jurisdiction, which in turn depends on the speed at which your country’s equality legislation is being transed, this may still be called discrimination on the basis of “gender” or even sex-via-gender reassignment, even if the “reassignment” involves nothing more than the flowery dress).

If a company, or service of any kind, tries to maintain a single-sex policy, they will likely have to battle it out in court as soon as a disgruntled transvestite sniffs out their heresy. And so in order to avoid being dragged to court by such men (and such women), companies and services are pre-empting legal action by just making everything mixed-sex, like the Germans are planning above. Problem solved.

And while the end of women-only yoga classes might not bother you that much, there are some services that really (really really) need to remain sex-based, and they are underpinned by the same equality laws that are currently under threat.

First a little background: equal treatment laws are mandatory in EU countries. I can’t refuse to sell a man an ice cream from my ice cream van, just because he’s a man. You can’t refuse to polish a woman’s Fabergé egg because you only polish men’s Fabergé eggs.

Except, and this is crucial, sometimes you can discriminate on the basis of someone’s sex. And I bet you can guess what those circumstances are. It must be, as the TERF Islanders put it: “a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim”. This teeny tiny caveat, variously worded, carries the weight of women’s safety and dignity in public spaces and services in European countries. You can deny a man access to a women’s prison or rape crisis centre, and you can refuse to hire a man for a job in (for example) a residential care home if that job involves washing the intimate parts of delirious old ladies or intellectually disabled children (whose families can request female-only intimate care).

Do you know why a family of an old checked-out woman might wish for their mother’s genitals be tended to by someone female? You bet you do. Not All Men yadda yadda yadda. Save it for yer wife. Enough men are #LikeThat that even gender-equal Scandinavian utopias can legally advertise for those jobs for women only. And men also have the right, for privacy reasons, to wish only to have men tend to their bits. And that’s utterly reasonable.

But by expanding equality protections to include men masquerading as women and vice-versa, the burden is on the management of such facilities to justify why they are excluding variously-identified people. The only country that has gone to court to establish in law that sex refers to biology, not identity, is the UK, but service providers eager to please noisy activists are ignoring it, leading to a bit of a crisis. Oh you’ve not read about this major policy issue in the newspaper, or seen a debate about it on the news? That’s not an accident.

Men stayed out of women’s spaces because both society and the law punished them if they did not. That norm is disappearing, and the law is disappearing — or being tortuously reinterpreted into nothingness — along with it.

‘Anti-gender’ is being fashioned into something akin to ‘racist’

The EU is about to pump about €11 billion into woke media and NGOs and there’s not a single thing we can do to stop it. The final text of the new programme, called AgoraEU, is currently being negotiated, and it can only get worse. For example, when it went to the European Parliament, it was amended to make sure that some of that huge money pot goes to media organisations to detect, analyse, combat, and tackle “anti-gender narratives”.

The same amendments were added to the part on civil society funding.

Journalists and editors whose employment depends on the continued receipt of AgoraEU money would — at the very least — be cautious about covering the de-sexing of society, even in a neutral way, because talking about it (thus raising awareness that it is happening) is treated as a hostile act by rainbow activists. Editors would have to present “anti-gender actors” in the same way they present people who burn down asylum hotels, lest they get accused of platforming or legitimising Nazis (Nazis like me. I hate gender. I would burn it down if it was a hotel).

The media in Europe, with very few exceptions, are allowed to say about four or five things about “trans people” and all of them are very super good. It gets pretty boring, but it keeps the access and the funding flowing. If passed, this amendment would make that dynamic even worse.

Beyond a chilling effect, the anti-gender monstering would explicitly set the media and the public money griftosphere like a pack of dogs on anyone who doesn’t think that biological sex should play second fiddle to “inner gender identity” in the organisation of public life. This is extremely worrying. I don’t think I have to point out that it’s anti-democratic to frame something so contested as medicalised gender feelings as a universal, unquestionable good.

Beloved old Swedish hag sparks debate about trans extremism

Agnes Wold is a much-loved public intellectual in Sweden who is known for her feminism, her level-headed response to the COVID lockdown hysteria (she’s a bacteriologist), and, more recently, for refusing to go along with the transgender dogma that has gripped Swedish bureaucratic, activist, media and political elites.

On 20 May, the Swedish parliament approved an amendment to the law that criminalises “psychological violence” and “coercion”. The preparatory texts explaining the intent of the law covered “gender identity or gender expression (such as conversion practices)” as relevant contexts. It is widely understood to be Sweden’s version of a conversion therapy ban (a more explicit law is likely if the left coalition gets into power in September).

Speaking on a radio programme recently, Wold told the host that she would take 4 years in prison— the penalty for trying to prevent someone from leaning into their opposite-sex, delusion — before she would allow the gender transition of a grandchild (hard agree).

This comment set off major drama, with one famous gay media guy calling her the Swedish equivalent to “old hag” or “old crone”. Specifically, he said “get rid of the old hag. It is unethical of Sveriges Radio to give her access to a microphone,” which is a way of saying she should be fired from her public radio job.

Many, many people have called for Agnes Wold to be fired throughout the trans-mania era, and a lot of them seemed to be hoping that this comment would be the final nail in her coffin. But the remarks seem to have the opposite effect. Not only did Swedish people get very offended by this little shithead calling their beloved based radio-granny an old hag, they started to ask questions about the law that she was criticising.

And that, boys and girls, is how the omerta on the trans mass derangement got partially lifted in Sweden, and suddenly everyone started to ask: wait, what? Some kids think they’re in the wrong body and you can go to jail for telling them to snap out of it? Yes, dear Swedes, that’s what’s happening. Welcome to the conversation. We’ve been expecting you.

As of writing, Wold still has not yet been fired.

The EU gave €340, 000 to Save The Children to queer children’s rights

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long been a prize target for queer activism, because if you can legitimise the idea of a “queer child” or “trans child”, then it’s easier to explain trans adults.

Activists have been careful to take things slowly, however, approaching the queering-kids mission via “anti-bullying” programmes in schools, as well as making teacher training more “inclusive” and trooning the sexuality education curriculum.

But with all the legal victories and advocacy milestones met, it looks like they may be ready to make a move on children more explicitly. Tomorrow there will be an event in the European Parliament hosted by a young “queer” MEP from Germany called Lukas Sieper on the topic of “children’s LGBTIQ rights”. One of the highlights of the event will be a presentation of a tool created by Save The Children Sweden, who got €340,000 from the EU Commission to map children’s rights instruments (UN treaties etc.) onto LGBTIQ instruments. What this means in practice is that they are creating a pile of evidence showing all the ways kids being queer (and thus in need of puberty blockers etc.) is already provided for in various international treaties. This is how the advocacy sausage is made.

The right to identity originated from the plight of children stolen from their families during Argentina’s junta (Dirty War) years. Activists fought for their right to know who they are. But this is interpreted by queer activists to mean that kids have the right to change into the opposite sex, and to take wrong-sex hormones to manifest that impossible delusion concretely. That particular “right to identity” was pivotal in the framing of Argentina’s self ID law, the first in the world (rolled back in 2025 by Javier Milei), a framing to which citizens in that country were particularly sensitive. Trans activists twisted the plight of stolen children to suit their own weird fantasy adventures.

Polish woman wants court to pretend she has always been male

The legal cases that codified born-in-the-wrong-bodyism in law in your country likely passed under the radar until it was far too late. Well here’s one in Poland that’s just getting off the ground.

The interesting thing about this case is that it reflects activists’ evolving strategy of framing LGBTIQ+ extremism as a rule-of-law issue. This woman wants her birth cert to reflect the fiction that she has *always* been male, which is not unusual, but here’s the novelty of this case: her legal defense is related it to Poland’s justice system, and not free movement like the Romanian woman in the Mirin case and not GDPR like the psychos in the Mousse case. This one is about a previous ruling made by allegedly “biased” judges. Ultimately, the aim is to make legal gender recognition easier in Poland but I think the strategy reflects a shift in the movement.

You can see ILGA-Europe’s swivel-eyed advocacy goblin, Katrin Hugendubel demonstrate their organisation’s rule-of-law pivot in the video below, in which she calls Slovakia’s sex-realist legal amendments a “constitutional coup'“.

Read the tweet explaining the details of the case.

Will Ireland get Montenegro’s sex falsification law over the line?

Ireland is taking over the presidency of the Council of the EU in a few weeks, and that means that Irish leaders and civil servants will have a big role in many big and small meetings for the next 6 months.

Irish minister for European Affairs and Defence, Thomas Byrne, has been telling journalists about Ireland’s ambitions for this 6-month term, and one of them is to make progress on accession talks for EU candidate countries. In particular, Byrne said he is hoping to make progress with Montenegro, the most advanced country on the list in terms of meeting the obligations for joining. However, one of the obligations that Montenegro still has to fulfill is introducing sex self-ID (legal sex falsification). A draft bill has been ready since 2024 but opposition has kept it from being passed. I have asked the Commission if they consider this a dealbreaker, or if there is any chance Montenegro can get away with not doing the trans thing. I’ll update when I get an answer.

One thing we do know, however, is that Ireland is a hopelessly gender-trooned country that has never refused the demands of a rainbow NGO. My country might be the one to help Montenegro get its utterly backwards sex falsification law over the line. What a proud legacy that would be.

Trump’s USAID cuts hit ILGA really hard

The annual reports of rainbow activists for 2025 are coming out and you can see how badly Trump’s decision to halt Globohomo has affected their revenue streams. In terms of actual figures, they don’t tend to talk about those. But ILGA-World has butt-hurtedly lamented the cuts over and over in their official communications, including in their 2025 annual activity roundup.

The big job of the rainbow mafia over the past year has been is to find a way to replace the USAID money. The begging bowl is out, and some corporates are filling some of the gap. But to keep these nutters in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, this requires bigger budgets than even Primark or Google can provide. On 26 May, speaking in the context of global aid, Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is now “the leading humanitarian donor worldwide”. You can take that to mean that your tax money, both from the EU pot and your country’s domestic budget, will end up being spent on drag queen toddler sex changes in Belize or whatever.

In other news…

• Spain wants to make its conversion therapy ban harsher by making it a criminal offense (with prison time). It passed the lower house in 2025

• German man claiming to be non-binary sued a company because they put out a job ad without a non-binary designation in the description. He lost

• The legal dispute between Sabine Maur and Rona Duwe is moving to the next stage, and Rona needs support

• More and more town halls are refusing to hang the Pride flag, and/or cancelling Pride marches

• Extremely harsh criticism of Dutch protocol in this research paper, “Three decades of ‘Dutch Protocol’ research has not produced reliable evidence”

• About 50 protestors stormed a training day for psychiatry professionals in Barcelona because one of the attendees present criticised the medical transing of minors

• Austrian, German, Icelandic, and Maltese laws all pretend non-binary is a real thing

• Disneyland Paris no longer transphobic, say these nutcase trans people

• German non-binary woman sues (and wins) because she wasn’t allowed to go into a swimming pool with her tiddies out

• Swiss trans activists protested a free speech event in Zurich because it was about trans extremism. The best bit was when they started beating a pinata-effigy of a loudspeaker

• See also: free speech organisation says Switzerland has a problem with LGBTIQ+ ideology and everyone should finally talk about it

• Also Switzerland: 281 Phantom Crimes: How Activists have Declare Switzerland a Hate Hell by Turning Banale Verbal Crudities into Criminal Acts

• Belgian far left party flipped out at a provincial meeting because the region of Brabant-Wallon posted a Facebook message supporting their homegirl, Alyssa, in the Eurovision

• ISIS bride is up in front of a judge in Dusseldorf

• Swiss bishops back ban on LGBT conversion measures, cite ‘spiritual abuse’ risk

• 16-year-old Irish boy was allowed to do a drag queen photo shoot in his Cork school

• A report about my report on gender-affirming butchery in Spain was published in Spanish by The Objective. Please share

• The Dutch senate debated the proposed conversion therapy ban yesterday. The final vote is due on 9 June. Follow this guy to keep up to date

• 17 parliamentary question have been asked in the Netherlands about the Dutch Protocol following devastating report that shows the whole thing is crock of pure shite

• Triple threat: people who identify as LGBTIQ+ can become leaders in Italy’s Catholic Scouts. I’m not saying “LGTBTI+ people” are paedos, I’m just pointing out that anyone labelled as such is considered beyond reproach. LGBTIQ+ “community leaders” are our era’s untouchable priests

• UN trans advocacy week in Geneva starts on 13 June

• US citizens who claim to be “non-binary” refused asylum in Sweden. What are they seeking asylum from, reality?

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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