The EU’s Fanny Studies spending spree
Gender loons are trying to trans the new EU research budget
Italian researchers created a ‘gender ideology’ conspiracy scale
Did Nathan Cofnas break Belgian law?
Both Slovakia and Poland have now disobeyed the EU’s top court on gay marriage.
This Serbian surgeon is following his dream of creating a repository of penises that he can sew onto sad women
UK court is forced by Strasbourg to deal (again) with a deranged bald woman who wants an X on her passport
I did an interview with Stella O’Malley from Genspect about my gender clinic adventures with my imaginary daughter
FGM NGO issues clarification: gender affirming care is not the same as FGM
Fackparade apologise over pro-raver anti-Hamas remarks
French men are getting their Adams’ Apples shaved in a quest to not look like men, and now they can’t talk
Lesbian paradise holiday update: are they building a permanent centre on the island of Lesbos?
“They hadn’t read the room in Northern Ireland” - interview with Nora Calder
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.
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.
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).
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
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
Half of the immigrants in a Swedish Sweden 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”
German hospital porter charged with raping 6 dead women, one dead man
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
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
French police man (head of gay police NGO) violently attacked in Paris
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.
"(he would have had a much harder time getting away with it in the quantum mechanics department)"
I can easily see someone publishing a paper in a mainline physics journal titled, "The Socio-Sexual Implications of Top and Bottom Quarks."