The EU refuses to change course on gender

You just don't hear that much about it. That's by design.

The new EU commissioner for equality, Hadja Lahbib, at her confirmation hearing in November 2024. Photo: Aurore Martignoni/EC audiovisual service.

This article appeared in the Critic on 15 January 2025. Co-authored by Róisín Michaux, Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina.

When the EU’s equality portfolio got downgraded last year, one of Italy’s most strident LGBTQ activists, Alessandro Zan, expressed anger at Ursula von der Leyen. “What do equality and earthquakes have to do with each other?” he asked of the EU’s chief lawmaker in a radio interview.

Zan was referring to the fact that LGBTQ rights, which once enjoyed pride of place in a dedicated equality mandate, has been folded in with a bunch of other unrelated themes, including pandemic preparedness and natural disasters.

But the weakening of the equality portfolio seems to be the only outward sign that the EU is scaling back on LGBTIQ issues. Perhaps it’s just a question of too many crises, not enough commissioners?

Indeed, the person now responsible for this controversial topic, Hadja Lahbib, reassured progressive politicians in December that she had no intention of making any changes to the EU’s current course.

Besides, sexual orientation has been part and parcel of EU anti-discrimination law since 1999. Why would the EU change its mind now?

The scale-back is not just a sign that conservative states are balking at Brussels’ meddling in cultural affairs — though there’s definitely plenty of that. The bigger issue is the queering of gay rights — particularly the addition of the controversial pseudoscientific gender identity belief system that is now a central focus of official LGBTIQ policy. It has provoked not just resistance but rage in even the most progressive European states, as citizens have come to realise that transgenderism is not just another live-and-let-live “type of gay”.

The debates have taken place publicly and explosively in EU capitals, and they have not gone unnoticed at the top.

Gender identity ideology requires the erasure of sex as a basis for hard-won legal protections, the nullification of female sports categories, and even the rendering senseless of that old EU favourite: “women on boards” sex-based quotas. But perhaps most importantly, European parents have come to learn that the ideology dictates that childhood gender distress is a permanent characteristic that requires surgery and a lifetime of drugs.

You can upset the farmers, and the traffic stops for a day. Mess with people’s kids and all bets are off. But cementing this belief system in law and policy has remained a mission of EU bureaucrats and their relentless activist collaborators for at least a decade, particularly via an NGO called ILGA-Europe. You just don’t hear that much about it.

This secrecy is by design — it’s also why the mission is likely to succeed.

Indeed, the centrepiece of ILGA’s campaign for EU parliament elections last year was a pledge asking candidates to agree to keep their work on LGBTIQ issues secret. More than a thousand potential candidates signed, a scandalous revelation that was ignored by the Brussels political press.

ILGA-Europe have plenty of money for such slick advocacy campaigning; the organisation has received at least €21 million since 2014 from the EU itself, while its sister association, the Geneva-based ILGA-World, received a whopping €68 million from the EU budget in the same period.

(All figures available via the EU budget transparency database).

Here’s how they are doing it

There are a number of ways in which the EU spreads gender identity ideology. One of the most successful methods will be familiar to anyone on the gender beat: changing the meaning of words.

“Gender” is a word that feminists borrowed to describe the differences in social roles, and dynamics, between the two sexes. But verbal chicanery eventually rendered it a polite synonym for “sex”, before a later iteration added “gender identity”.

You can pick up three different official EU documents, and find different and incompatible definitions of “gender” in each. This has had real-world effects: EU bosses have long claimed that combatting violence against women is a priority. But the world has changed since the first promises to legislate against it, and the result was last year’s law against “gender-based violence”.

GBV is a very broad term, as it “affects people of all genders”. In other words, gender-based violence can be committed by anyone against anyone, and unless specified, says nothing about who the victim is. In short, it has nothing to do with women (though that doesn’t stop legislators using it to brag about their feminist bona fides).

It’s the same reason why a 2021 call from the European Parliament to add violence against women to the list of EU crimes in the EU’s foundational legal text is now a poison pill. It would further legitimise and entrench gender identity — adherence to sex stereotypes — as a real thing that takes precedence over biological sex in some very relevant areas of life.

Non-binding, but still powerful

This semantic drift — reflected now across almost all EU entities and agencies — is the same reason to be worried about not just the LGBTIQ strategy but also the gender equality strategy, both of which are currently being prepared, and both of which are under the purview of the new equalities-and-earthquakes commissioner Lahbib.

The most contentious demand in the current strategy, which entered into effect in 2020, was the call for legal gender recognition by self-determination, in other words: self-ID. The latest iteration, the Commission president has instructed, should include bans on “conversion therapy”.

Conversion therapy seems, on the surface, like an easy one. Who wouldn’t want to ban pray-away-the-gay torture? Again, language trickery is at play. Trying to weed out the reasons why a teenage girl might want a surgeon to remove her breasts, still less suggesting that it’s a symptom of anything other than being in the wrong body, would be criminalised by such a law.

Such explorative talk therapy is refashioned as conversion of someone on the basis of gender identity. It would mean that young gay people, distressed or confused about their sexuality, have no guard rails against the wrong body myth, as therapists will fear exploring their feelings in anything but an affirming way. Indeed, a Belgian therapist was summoned by the police last year after a report was lodged against her for this very reason (the investigation is ongoing so no more details can be shared at the moment).

Ultimately, there are two outcomes to conversion therapy: therapists will avoid taking gender-distressed people as patients, or worse, other therapists will actually trans away the gay.

A strategy is not a law, so you might rightly wonder what would compel EU countries to obey it. Often, it just comes down to political pressure or simply shaming. Such cajoling might work a charm in Dublin and Lisbon, while falling on deaf ears in Budapest and Warsaw, of course. In short, whether these strategies are obeyed comes down to the political will of whoever is in power. And that just means the activists have to bide their time for new elections, all while using it to make conservatives in power look bad, and beating the progressive opposition over the head with it until they adopt it in their own platform.

With all that cash and bureaucrat backing, they can afford to play the long game.

There are other more discrete ways that the policy and legal work of the EU is being “queered”, from “mainstreaming” of LGBTIQ policies in unrelated work streams, to the staff association bragging about their membership of the same activist NGO that lobbies them. Some ILGA activists even bag top cabinet positions.

But to grasp how thoroughly the machinery of the EU is captured, one need only look at the funding. It’s not only ILGA and its offshoots that are getting annual “operational grants” from their faceless friends across various directorates; others include Transgender Europe (€4.5 million since 2014), the EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Community (€10 million) (the asterisk indicates that men are included in the definition of “lesbian”), and more recently, OII – Intersex Europe (€1.2 million). All receive money for operational costs and salaries.

And that’s before you take into account funding allocated for specific projects. Take for example the €272,000 EUR a Romanian LGBTIQ NGO received for “strategic litigation”. While this money can’t be used to directly fund legal cases, it is intended to train up activists on how to use EU law to force legal change in their home countries.

The training has paid off: in 2024, a young Romanian female who was legally recognised as male in the UK won a case in the EU courts based on her “free movement” rights. Now activists can pressure their government to introduce legislation allowing for legal sex falsification for anyone who wants it. It may take years to materialise, but again: the infrastructure is there to allow activists to play the long game.

The sheer amount of cash promised for projects to promote gender identity ideology is mind boggling — and always wrapped up in noble and vague human rights language. As of last year, the EU has even begun to fund projects that will explicitly counter any opposition. The “anti-gender movement”, which once referred to anti-abortion, anti-feminist (often religious) crusaders, now counts as enemies anyone who opposes gender identity theory. You can see this in projects RESIST (€2.4 million) or PushBackLash (€2.2 million) that single out “TERFs” as incompatible with EU values.

The EU has even funded drag workshops for children, and a Slovakian reporter alleged that one 17-year-old participant performed topless at a bar in a Barcelona nightclub as part of the final show. The comms surrounding the 2024 event (which was advertised for children as young as 14) advised participants on the need for secrecy of the final show, due to the “political climate”.

No saviour for women’s sports

In Ursula von der Leyen’s new Commission, an obedient Maltese ideologue called Glenn Micallef will oversee the EU’s sports strategy and funding. There are already a number of ongoing projects that are queering sports at grassroots level across Europe, and in his hearing as a commissioner-delegate, Micallef made clear that he would honour the independence of sports federations to make their own rules about males in women’s sports. However, he later pledged to use the full force of influence of the EU to force the same federations to change their policies on an entirely different topic. In other words, he made clear he can safeguard women’s sports, but he has decided not to.

But surely once the EU realises that most people don’t agree with the wildest claims of the gender identitarians, will they back down? The activists will make sure that doesn’t happen. EU-funded projects can function as data gathering exercises and fonctionnaires will use incredibly biased reports of hateful “anti-gender” activity as justification for adding hate speech to the EU treaty. It’s all been lined up: take a look at the multiple millions earmarked in the current calls for projects for tracking hate-related incidents.

All this is in comparison with zero money on the “other side”, the side that cares for the privacy, safety and dignity of women and children, and the right of gays and lesbians to grow up whole.

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