In the latest episode of on the record, we speak with Anne Kalvig - Norwegian scholar of religion and former Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Stavanger - about her experiences of challenging prevailing ideas on gender identity in academia and why she ultimately decided to leave her professorship.

We also explore:

• Why Norway became an early adopter of gender identity policies.

• Whether small countries are more likely to embrace new social movements.

• Anne’s analysis of gender identity belief through the lens of the academic study of religion, including parallels with new religious and New Age movements.

• The importance of free academic debate and open inquiry.

Subscribe now

About our guest

Anne Kalvig is a Norwegian scholar of religion and former Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research has focused on contemporary spirituality, new religious movements, vernacular religion, religion and popular culture, gender, and the intersections between religion and society. She has long campaigned for the rights of women and girls and was previously a politician on the left. Today, she works independently outside academia, political parties and traditional women’s organisations, which she sees as having abandoned sex-based rights. She is a member of Women’s Declaration International (WDI) Norway and a member of Athena Forum’s expert network.

Anne’s book, which we discussed: Kjønnstru – Kampen om røynda “Gender belief - the struggle for reality” examines contemporary ideas about sex and gender through the lenses of religious studies, feminism, and public policy. Anne argues that the concept of gender identity has come to function as a belief system detached from biological sex, and she explores the implications she believes this has for science, law, education, women’s rights, and democratic debate.

Another book from Anne’s own publishing house Medvit Forlag is: Kjerringer mot strømmen “Women Against the Current: For Science, Democracy and Freedom of Expression.” An anthology of essays and personal reflections by nine Norwegian women, including Anne, who describe themselves as speaking against prevailing views on sex, gender, and identity.

About on the record

On the Record features interviews with people across Europe whose lives have become entangled in the politics of sex and gender. Journalists, academics, feminists, parents and others who have the courage to speak on the record, despite the personal and professional consequences they may face for doing so.

The host is Annette Pacey, a member of Athena Forum.

About Athena Forum

Athena Forum was founded in 2025 by Faika El-Nagashi, a former member of parliament in Austria for the Greens and a lifelong advocate for women’s rights and lesbian and gay rights. For an in-depth account of the issues we are addressing in Europe, read our report Beneath the Surface.

All of our work is produced by a small team of dedicated volunteers. We have no institutional funding and no wealthy backers, just a growing number of regular supporters who believe in what we do. If you are able to join them by making a donation, you can do so here. We really appreciate your support.

“Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/matt-stewart-evans/final-waltz License code: Y3NB7NYOWOKOWG7D”

The European Commission recently consulted stakeholders on draft Guidelines for Trusted Flaggers under Article 22 of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Trusted flaggers are organisations designated by national authorities whose reports of allegedly illegal online content receive priority treatment by online platforms. While they do not determine whether content is illegal, their privileged status gives them considerable influence over moderation decisions and, ultimately, over what remains visible in the digital public square.

For this reason, the safeguards governing their designation and operation matter greatly.

We have submitted a detailed response to the consultation, focusing on an issue that has received too little attention: the implications of trusted flagger systems for sex-based rights, freedom of expression and democratic debate.

Subscribe now

Across Europe, those defending women’s sex-based rights, single-sex spaces and services, the safeguarding of children, and the rights of lesbians and gay men have found their speech characterised as “hateful”, “extremist” or “transphobic”. At the same time, organisations advocating gender-identity policies are involved in reporting, monitoring and responding to online speech. This raises questions about independence, objectivity and the distinction between illegal content and lawful political expression.

Our submission argues that the Guidelines should provide stronger safeguards against advocacy capture, require greater scrutiny of trusted flagger applicants and their track records, reinforce the obligation of platforms to make an independent assessment of legality, and ensure that contested political concepts are not transformed into de facto legal standards through content moderation practices. We also argue that implementation of the Guidelines should remain firmly grounded in existing EU law, including the Union’s Treaty obligations to promote equality between women and men and the EU equality framework recognising lawful sex-based distinctions, including in the provision of single-sex spaces and services.

The consultation is an important opportunity to help shape how the DSA will be implemented in practice. Although Article 22 concerns procedural rules, its application will have significant implications for sex-based rights, freedom of expression and democratic debate, including the ability of citizens to advocate lawfully online for women’s rights, the safeguarding of children, and the rights of lesbians and gay men.

Read, download and share our full submission to the European Commission’s consultation on the draft DSA Trusted Flagger Guidelines on the Athena Forum website.

Subscribe now

This article originally appeared on the Athena Forum website here.

At Helsinki Pride in Finland in June 2026, a block of radical transactivists carried a shocking message: “Trans hate out, down with Kaltiala”. And: “Tuisku, Kettula, Ruuska and Heino must go to hell”. An image of the banner appeared in an otherwise upbeat and cheerful report on the march in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest newspaper. A door at Helsinki University Hospital was also vandalised with the slogan “Down with trans hate”.

The people targeted by name with such hostility are medical doctors and researchers. What have they done to be subject to such an aggressive display of political emotion?

Subscribe now

Inconvenient findings, aggressive responses

Transactivism in Finland has not been as aggressive in its public displays as in some other countries, such as the United Kingdom or Germany. In both countries, academic and professional conferences have been harassed and threatened, sometimes with violent demonstrations: An event of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG) in 2024 in London faced a violent demonstration outside the venue and activists tried to break in. And in 2025 in Berlin, the conference of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) faced violent threats and the public targeting of participating scientists, as reported in German media. And just this weekend, a joint CAN-SG and SEGM conference in London, was again met by transactivist protesters outside the venue, amid reports of aggressive confrontations.

In Finland, transactivists have organised street protests outside meetings of COHERE (Council for Choices in Health Care in Finland). Slogans such as “Down with Kaltiala” are not new, and demonstrators have gone as far as directly linking suicide to a lack of medical trans treatments. After such events, images of these messages are circulated online by influencers and NGOs, including organisations receiving public funding, where they feed wider narratives that increase pressure on researchers and seek to silence dissent. At the very least, such campaigns inflict reputational damage; at their most menacing, they can be read as threats of further attacks.

COHERE is a government-appointed expert body tasked with issuing evidence-based recommendations on services included in Finland’s public healthcare system. In 2020, Finland became an international frontrunner when COHERE issued guidelines on the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors based on a systematic review of the evidence. These guidelines have since become internationally known as an early move towards a more cautious, evidence-based approach to medical interventions in young people. It shifted the centre of gravity back towards comprehensive assessment, psychiatric care and caution about medical intervention. Unlike the Dutch Protocol, which established a staged pathway from puberty suppression to cross-sex hormones, the Finnish guidelines place psychosocial support and the treatment of co-occurring psychiatric problems first.

The Finnish researchers under attack

Riittakerttu Kaltiala is Professor of Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Tampere and is globally known for having carried out and led influential research on gender dysphoria in young people. The other names are less widely known medical doctors and researchers who have published research articles in psychiatry together with Kaltiala. Some of them have worked hard to establish respectful dialogue with their critics.

Psychiatrist Dr Katinka Tuisku has been working as Deputy Chief Physician at the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa region for over 15 years. Psychiatrist Kaisa Kettula worked as Assistant Chief of the Gender Identity Clinic at the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) from 2021–2026, but now works in a different hospital district in Finland that does not have a gender identity clinic. Finland has only two of them, in Helsinki and Tampere. Together with colleagues, Kettula and Tuisku have authored an article on nine Finnish cases of detransition. The article highlights traumatic experiences and psychiatric illness as recurring themes in narratives of detransition.

Sami-Matti Ruuska works as a clinical instructor of adolescent psychiatry at the University of Eastern Finland, as a specialist medical doctor at Kuopio University Hospital, and is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Tampere. Ruuska has been the first author of two peer-reviewed articles that have made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. The first, in 2024, was a register study on the thankfully low suicide mortality of young people in contact with gender identity clinics in Finland. The second, in 2026, likewise on register data, dealt with psychiatric illness in adolescents and young adults seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. As he is pursuing a doctorate, there are more articles, a doctoral defence, and hopefully future post-doctoral research to look forward to.

Elias Heino works as a general practitioner in private healthcare. He completed a doctorate in medicine on gender dysphoria in young people a couple of years ago. SSome of its findings, such as young people with non-binary identities being involved in bullying and not merely being subject to it, may be difficult for transactivists to process.

Who takes responsibility for aggression and intimidation?

A common defence of the banners naming specific researchers is that, as an event and a demonstration in public space, Helsinki Pride is open to everyone. Anyone can turn up with banners saying almost anything. On the other hand, Helsinki Pride has been strict in setting the parameters for which organisations and groups are accepted as partners and supporters of the event. In 2023, right after the Finnish Parliament approved the new law on legal sex self-ID, Helsinki Pride declined partnerships with the Centre Party and the National Coalition Party (Finnish Conservatives) due to some of their Members of Parliament voting against self-ID.

After the march, a prominent organiser and activist associated with the transactivist block defended the decision to single out the researchers by name. On social media, the activist argued that the doctors had been targeted because of their alleged involvement with what they called “anti-trans hate groups”, including SEGM and Genspect: “All doctors named on the banner act in antitrans hate groups, with their own names and faces. Those who don’t are not named. We didn’t choose the names at random.”

The public naming of individual researchers was not incidental. It was deliberate, and justified by portraying their engagement with organisations that challenge activist claims about gender medicine as participation in “hate groups”.

Helsinki Pride Community, the NGO managing Helsinki Pride, has recently been the subject of media reporting due to alleged inappropriate management and behaviour in the workplace. It has also been in the news for proposing strict non-disclosure agreements for its paid staff, going well beyond the confidentiality obligations normally recognised under Finnish employment law, with heavy fines for potential breaches.

Just days after the Pride march, the Finnish Medical Association, the trade union representing medical doctors, issued a statement on its social media channels defending the maligned doctors and stating that it had contacted Helsinki Pride Community about the matter. If Helsinki Pride were concerned about what the wider public think of its level of professionalism and adherence to evidence-based healthcare for young people with gender dysphoria, it could model and facilitate respectful dialogue between transactivist groups and healthcare professionals.

In recent years, Helsinki Pride and its umbrella organisation have rejected the evidence base concerning treatments for gender dysphoria in young people with the same rejection as large and small LGBT organisations across Europe and the wider Western world. Thus, it can be expected that this angry messaging will continue to be given space for the foreseeable future. Yet malicious and aggressive attacks on serious researchers do more than poison an already fraught debate: they create a climate of intimidation and pose a genuine threat to those whose work produces inconvenient findings. At the same time, they make increasingly visible to the wider public that this brand of transactivism has little interest in engaging with evidence or argument, preferring instead to shout down, malign, and intimidate those who refuse to fall into line. Few things are more likely to pique people’s curiosity than being told that a subject must not be questioned, discussed, or even thought about.

This article originally appeared on the Athena Forum website here.

Zsófi Balogh is a feminist podcaster and editor at Partizán, an independent media platform in Hungary known for its in-depth political journalism and social commentary. She has worked extensively on violence against women (VAW) and was previously active in several of Hungary’s leading women’s rights NGOs.

In this conversation we talk about the momentous political changes in Hungary and what they mean for women’s rights and for lesbian and gay rights in the country. We discuss tensions within the LGBT movement, Zsófi’s criticisms of the direction taken by Budapest Pride and the lonely position of radical feminists. And we speculate about the approach the new prime minister Péter Magyar will take towards the protection of women's sex-based rights in law and policy, bearing in mind competing demands from civil society organisations within Hungary and the EU's policy priorities.

Watch Zsófi’s interview with Athena Forum director Faika El-Nagashi here.

About on the record

On the Record features interviews with people across Europe whose lives have become entangled in the politics of sex and gender. Journalists, academics, feminists, and parents - what they have in common is the courage to speak on the record, despite the personal and professional consequences they may face for doing so.

The host is Annette Pacey, a member of Athena Forum.

About Athena Forum

Athena Forum was founded in 2025 by Faika El-Nagashi, a former member of parliament in Austria for the Greens and a lifelong advocate for women’s rights and lesbian and gay rights. For an in-depth account of the issues we are addressing in Europe, read our report Beneath the Surface.

All of our work is produced by a small team of dedicated volunteers. We have no institutional funding and no wealthy backers, just a growing group of regular supporters who believe in what we do. If you are able to join them by making a donation, you can do so here. We really appreciate your support.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/matt-stewart-evans/final-waltz License code: PYGDSNVGUOKI889J

On 15 May 2026, shortly after taking office in Hungary, the newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar began dismantling the political machinery built during the long rule of Viktor Orbán. Fences were taken down literally and metaphorically; public institutions came under scrutiny with images emerging showing political propaganda leaflets stacked inside public bodies expected to remain neutral and independent. Institutions funded by taxpayers and entrusted with public authority had become extensions of Orbán’s ideological control over the Hungarian people.

The long-awaited political change in Hungary was welcomed enthusiastically across European institutions. For years, Brussels criticised Orbán’s system as a warning tale of democratic erosion: the merging of state ideology, public administration, media and judiciary into one political apparatus. European officials repeatedly described Hungary as an example of a political system that undermined EU founding values: democracy, pluralism and rule of law.

Undermining the core principles of the EU was a bad look for the “elective autocracy” of Orbán who did not particularly care about his image in the eyes of EU technocrats. It is however a much worse look for the EU technocrats themselves who now explicitly, regularly and unapologetically use their institutional power to promote ideas and concepts that not only lack a legal basis and have never been scrutinised by EU legislators for their impact on EU citizens, but also appear to lack broad public support.

As this year’s Pride Month approached, IDAHOBIT Day on 17 May was marketed as a particularly grotesque opening ceremony for an entire month of institutionalised ideological campaigning. The official social media accounts of the EU, the Council of Europe and the UN descended into a deluge of activist slogans, emotional affirmations and dogmatic messaging entirely detached from the legal language, institutional mandates and democratic obligations these bodies are supposed to uphold.

Subscribe now

The Council of the European Union declared that “every colour shines” and “all rights matter”, including, apparently, rights that have never been codified in EU law. Its Presidency State, Cyprus, dropped all legalities altogether and simply announced that it “stands with love, today and every day”. The European Commission turned to the therapeutic importance of being “seen”, its Directorate for Justice channelled Lord Byron with “love never meant to be muted”, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen joined the chorus with an appeal to everyone to be their “authentic self”, presumably aimed in particular at stereotype-non-conforming youth, for whom the path to “authenticity” involves cosmetic surgeries, synthetic hormones and irreversible health consequences.

The European Parliament reminded everyone of its inability to distinguish between one’s sexual orientation and one’s confusion about their sex by reiterating its uninterrogated focus on banning “conversion practices”, while its Socialist and Democrats political family celebrated “sexual and gender diversity”- a phrasing more appropriate to a field guide to the reproductive strategies of tropical fish.

The icing on the IDAHO cake was served by the European Court of Justice that weighed in with a legal illiteracy video explainer that calls sex – a major non-discrimination ground in EU law – gender, while treating it as gender identity. That gender identity itself, much like the mysterious “+” at the end of LGBT that the EU court proclaims to defend, has never been defined in EU law appears to present no issue for the highest judiciary body of the EU – an unsurprising detail considering its recent ruling on Hungary that introduced non-legal terms such as “cis-gender” in the jurisprudence of the court.

It is difficult to say with certainty whether this choreographed digital messaging was the result of a top-down coordinated campaign. We can, however, be certain that such an orchestration of collective reverence towards the demands of a small minority of gender identity lobbyists is neither a coincidence nor an expression of genuine concern for the rights of lesbians and gays, many of whom can no longer associate with the meaningless – and often destructive – slogans of the perpetually expanding LGBTQI+ umbrella family.

When EU institutions produce such synchronised display of virtue, it is safe to assume that it was not only approved at a high institutional level, but that the institutions giving that approval – the same bodies supposed to uphold the rule of law, promote pluralism and safeguard the principles of non-discrimination – have become deeply entangled with a highly influential network of activists who operate both within and outside these institutions.

The official theme of IDAHOBIT 2026 was “At the heart of democracy”. This title, engineered by the international IDAHOBIT campaign that includes major LGBTIQ+ activist organisations (ILGA, EL*C, GATE etc.), was transmitted across EU institutions, including its directorates, diplomatic missions and agencies, as well as national authorities, corporations and civil society. And just as “anti-gender” has become a catch-all denunciation of gender heretics – critical academics, gays and lesbians and feminists – the 2026 IDAHOBIT theme, LGBTIQ+ At the Heart of Democracy, has become a timely article of faith in the cathechism complete with rainbow iconography and ritual declarations, and as far removed from actual democracy as liturgy is from legislation.

The crypto-religiosity of IDAHOBIT would not be so farcical if it were a one-off performance after which the EU officials would get on with their actual jobs: assessing how the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework will affect different populations, examining the impact of merged funding streams on sex-based protections for women and girls, grappling with the legal and policy implications of conflating homosexuality with gender identity, or addressing the everyday material concerns that shape citizens’ lives.

Yet expecting European institutions to return to the business of governance may already be asking too much. IDAHOBIT merely served as the opening act of Pride Month, during which Progress Pride flags replace the European flag on institutional buildings, social media accounts become campaign platforms and transactivist slogans are amplified for weeks on end.

This institutional activism is the product of years of sustained lobbying within European legislative and policy structures, strategic placement of personnel within EU decision-making bodies and the creation of intra-institutional networks and coalitions tasked with promoting gender identity. While many EU officials are concerned by the extent to which advocacy groups have embedded themselves into these structures, most remain silent rather than risking the consequences faced by Roisin Michaux, who lost her job in the Commission after expressing gender-critical views.

The result is the degradation of democratic principles within institutions charged with protecting them, and an environment in which access, influence, legitimacy and power are afforded to a small circle of well-connected advocacy actors operating without any consultation, let alone agreement, with those they proclaim to represent. Whatever else this may be, it bears little resemblance to the “heart of democracy”. Indeed, for institutions that increasingly place democracy at the centre of their messaging, it is difficult to imagine a more undemocratic way of engaging with the public.

European officials spent years warning Viktor Orbán about the fusion of ideology and public administration. Citizens across Europe now have every reason to ask whether Brussels has moved closer to that model than it cares to admit. While the coming years will show whether Péter Magyar delivers on his promise to open institutions to greater scrutiny and public accountability, this challenge extends far beyond Hungary.

This article was first published the Athena Forum website here.

On 9 May, Europe Day, institutions across Brussels celebrated the European Union as a project built on democracy, pluralism, human rights and the rule of law. These values are repeatedly invoked as Europe’s defining moral and political foundation, but they only matter if political questions can actually be debated, if policymakers understand the laws they are shaping, and if citizens are able to challenge harmful proposals without fear of reputational destruction.

Last week, we travelled to Brussels for a series of advocacy meetings with Members of the European Parliament across political groups, alongside discussions with civil society actors and women’s organisations, including the European Women’s Lobby.

The purpose of the visit was to bring a set of concerns into institutional discussions that have, for too long, been treated not as legitimate political questions but as subjects to be avoided altogether. During our meetings, we sought to draw attention to three key issues:

the erasure of sex from law and policy, and its replacement with gender identity and expression through self-identification frameworks;

the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity in legislation and public discourse, particularly through recently proposed conversion therapy bans;

the increasing use of hate speech and hate crime frameworks to shut down democratic disagreement around contested concepts.

Political paralysis with costs for EU citizens

What emerged from our meetings with MEPs was revealing. Across political groups, most parliamentarians acknowledged that these issues are deeply contested. Many recognised that the current climate inside the European Parliament, including in the Committee on Women’s Rights (FEMM), has become so polarised around questions of sex, gender identity and related concepts such as gender mainstreaming that meaningful debate is all but impossible.

Our discussions also made clear that too many lack the knowledge expected of European lawmakers, not only on the subject matter itself, but also on the views of stakeholders whose lives are directly affected by these debates, including feminist organisations, lesbian and gay activists, parents and health experts.

However, this lack of understanding was ultimately overshadowed by one dominant theme: fear.

Fear of public association with the “far right.” Fear of reputational attacks. Fear of losing political alliances. Fear of becoming the next target of intra-parliamentary investigations for allegedly violating house rules or hate speech regulations, with the risk of sanctions, limitations on one’s mandate and institutional exclusion.

As a result, many MEPs who may privately hold concerns, or even opposing views, remain publicly silent. Their political positioning becomes reactive, shaped less by what they believe than by what they wish not to be seen as or associated with. In practice, this means that European Parliament voting on important legislative instruments is driven not by engagement with their substance, but by the distance MEPs believe they must maintain from certain political groups.

Consequently, legislation touching on gender identity-related issues is rarely debated on its merits, but instead as part of a wider symbolic struggle against perceived political opponents.

The implications of such an approach to law-making are clear: where EU citizens would expect the greatest scrutiny from their MEPs, laws, regulations and resolutions are often passed with the least inquiry and the most performance. In one recent example of such performative policy-making, during the plenary debate on a “conversion therapy ban”, prompted by a European Citizens’ Initiative, MEP Irmhild Boßdorf (ESN) is now being subjected to a hate speech investigation after questioning the role of lobby groups in promoting the gender identity agenda within the Parliament. This followed an intervention by German MEP Lukas Sieper (Renew), who called on the President of the Parliament to intervene under the rules on hate speech, referring to her remarks as crossing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

European Parliament, Plenary Session 25.03.2026: MEP Lukas Sieper (Renew) calls on the President of the Parliament to intervene on the basis of the rules on hate speech, referring to remarks made by MEP Boßdorf (ESN) which he frames as crossing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

Conformity vs extremism

When decision-making within the EU’s only directly elected legislative body is driven by fear and a lack of evidence, it reflects neither a healthy democratic culture nor serious policymaking.

European law has historically been built around the clear protected characteristics of sex and sexual orientation. In recent years, however, terms such as “queer”, “gender expression” and (LGBTIQ) “plus” have entered key areas of EU policy, with far-reaching and often damaging effects across a range of human rights. This includes the rights of those these terms claim to represent, namely lesbians and gay men, as well as individuals experiencing discomfort with or dissociation from their biological sex.

The uncritical acceptance of this terminology has become possible for several reasons, not least due to the prominence of the European Parliament’s so-called LGBTIQ+ Intergroup — the largest and most influential cross-party grouping of MEPs, spanning nearly all political families, including the conservative and centre-right EPP (European People’s Party).

This acceptance has also been enabled by the vacuum created through the deliberate exclusion of progressive actors with the knowledge, expertise and willingness to scrutinise both the meaning and the impact of these terms.

Instead, organisations such as the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) — an NGO that presents itself as a high-level political stakeholder and enjoys extensive access to MEPs and their assistants, and which has in the past been chaired by a well-known Belgian trans-identified politician — have come to dominate the parliamentary landscape. They provide guidance to MEPs who can hardly distinguish between sexual orientation and gender identity.

As a result, in the absence of visible civil society organisations within EU institutional spaces that critically engage with terms and policies aggressively advanced by gender identity lobby groups, the only politically “safe” position for many MEPs has become the full acceptance of an entire set of demands.

This means accepting the replacement of sex with gender identity in law and policy; accepting the erosion of women-only spaces and sex-based exemptions; accepting the weakening of safeguarding frameworks around children; and accepting the redefinition of sexual orientation through a gender identity lens.

Any attempt to question even part of this agenda risks immediate reputational consequences which, ironically, within the European Parliament, appear to affect not only the Left and Liberals, but also the Right. Whereas the former risk being accused of aligning with the Right, the latter are accused of extremism. In other words, when it comes to sex and gender, across the political spectrum there is always something worse to fear being portrayed as.

This tactic of silencing debate is reported to be effective: some MEPs would walk out of the chamber during voting, others abstain, and some feel compelled to support formulations and texts which, in a serious legislative context, would not withstand even superficial scrutiny.

A path to political courage and legal clarity

Our meetings with MEPs confirmed what we had already observed: gender identity lobby groups have dominated the European Parliament over several recent terms, resulting in a proliferation of legally incoherent texts. On the one hand, the Parliament calls for the collection of sex-disaggregated data; on the other, it repeatedly invokes the Yogyakarta +10 principles, which call for the elimination of such data altogether.

What was particularly revealing in our discussions with MEPs was their limited awareness of the range of actors — including specialists in women’s rights, LGB issues, as well as the education and health sectors — who not only question the wholesale acceptance of harmful transactivist demands in key areas of EU fundamental rights, such as human dignity, privacy, freedom of association and expression, equality and non-discrimination, but whose objections are grounded in substantial research, evidence, decades of analysis and practical experience.

That such actors exist across most EU Member States, and continue their work in often hostile environments without backing from corporate or state donors, is well known to anyone engaged in the so-called “gender wars” on either side. It is recognised by gender-critical feminists and lesbian and gay activists, and equally by those lobbyists who prefer to deny the existence of such opposition within civil society or, when it cannot be ignored, to attribute it to the influence of evangelical funders.

For several MEPs, meeting Athena Forum appeared to be both surprising and, at times, disarming. Many seemed genuinely unaccustomed to encountering these arguments outside the dominant institutional narratives through which gender identity policies are typically presented and accepted. Our discussions offered moments of reflection, not only on the substance of the issues themselves, but also on the tactics used against organisations raising critical concerns, including smear campaigns conducted through activist research and advocacy funded by European institutions and programmes.

The road ahead is undoubtedly long, and change within European institutions rarely comes quickly. But every political shift begins with a first breach in enforced consensus, and this is what Athena’s visit to the European Parliament helped to achieve. Once debate re-enters the room, facts, material reality and both the intended and unintended consequences of law and policy will, in time, assert themselves in public view, however long they may be suppressed or concealed. We are determined to play a leading role in this process.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

In its recent judgment of 21 April 2026 (C-769/22 Commission v Hungary), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that Hungary’s Act LXXIX of 2021 (“on taking stricter action against paedophile offenders and on amending certain laws for the protection of children”) was in breach of EU law, in particular the Union’s foundational values under Article 2 TEU and a range of Charter rights, including non-discrimination and freedom of expression. The ruling brings into focus both the political, legal and moral project embodied in the law under Viktor Orbán, and the imprecise and ideological communication of the Court itself, as it engages with the effects and conceptual structure of a bad law.

A high-visibility move to corner the opposition

The 2021 Hungarian “child protection” law did not emerge in a vacuum. It was a political instrument deployed in a highly polarised domestic context. In the run-up to the 2022 elections, Hungary’s fragmented opposition was attempting to unite, bringing together actors from across a broad and often conflicting political spectrum. By combining measures on paedophilia with restrictions on the “portrayal or promotion” of homosexuality and gender identity, the government effectively narrowed the available political space. The opposition faced a constrained set of choices: support risked alienating liberal and international allies, while opposition opened the way to accusations of indifference to child protection. This dynamic strengthened Orbán’s position and allowed disagreement to be portrayed as complicity or weakness.

Criminal law, child protection and content regulation

The Act was not a single, self-contained law but a composite legislative package: it introduced new criminal-law provisions targeting paedophile offences while simultaneously amending a range of existing statutes, including the Child Protection Act, the Media Act, the Public Education Act and the Advertising Act. Into these frameworks, it inserted restrictions on content accessible to minors that “portrays or promotes” homosexuality (homoszexualitás), sex change (a nem megváltoztatása) and a gender identity different from one’s birth sex (születési nemtől eltérő nemi identitás), on the grounds that such content is detrimental to the physical, mental and moral development of minors and may therefore be limited or prohibited.

The conflation of homosexuality and gender identity in the law mirrors the “LGBTIQ+” framing employed across the debate – whether by Orbán or the CJEU, and more generally by European institutional actors and transactivist civil society organisations. On both sides, distinctions that are legally, socially and politically significant become blurred and increasingly difficult to disentangle. Despite ongoing efforts by advocacy groups such as LGB Alliance and others to highlight the internal contradictions and the harms of gender identity dogma to lesbians and gays within this “queer” umbrella, the categories are continuously treated as connected and interchangeable, leaving little room to distinguish between the irreversible harms of medical transition in youth and the experience of homosexual teenagers coming out and forming relationships.

A moral claim against core democratic freedoms

Hungary already had a comparatively robust framework for the protection of minors in place prior to the contested law, operating across several levels of regulation. The 1997 Child Protection Act provided a comprehensive basis for safeguarding children, including mechanisms for intervention where their welfare was at risk. This was complemented by media regulations and classification systems, comparable to age-rating regimes in other EU Member States, under which the national media authority was already empowered to sanction content deemed harmful to minors. In addition, the Criminal Code had long provided strict penalties for offences against the sexual integrity of minors. Child protection was neither unregulated nor neglected, raising questions about the necessity and added value of the 2021 legislative intervention.

What it did introduce, however, were new measures on the registration and handling of data of sexual offenders against minors, creating a more extensive system of record-keeping and setting out rules on who may access such data, including beyond law enforcement authorities. While these provisions fall within a more conventional understanding of child protection, they were not entirely uncontroversial. The CJEU did not challenge the objective of strengthening monitoring as such, but it did raise concerns about the design of the data regime, particularly its compatibility with EU data protection law under the relevant framework (including principles of necessity, proportionality and purpose limitation). The Court questioned whether the scope of access to and disclosure of personal data went beyond what is strictly required for the protection of minors, thereby bringing even these ostensibly protective elements within the ambit of fundamental rights scrutiny.

But the central problem with the 2021 Act lies in its ideological overreach. By extending the language of child protection, and bundling these provisions into a framework addressing sexual offences against children, to cover the “portrayal or promotion” of homosexuality (and gender identity), the law moves beyond the protection of minors in any conventional sense and into the shaping of the public sphere.

Key terms such as “portrayal” or “promotion” were left undefined, creating a climate of legal uncertainty for those operating across a wide range of societal sectors. Media outlets, publishers, educators, advertisers, event organisers and advocacy groups are left to anticipate what might fall within the scope of restriction, encouraging caution and, in some cases, self-censorship. The potential reach of the law extends into multiple domains: media and content creation, the arts, cultural or public events, and the activities of civil society organisations. In practice, this can include booksellers becoming reluctant to display classics of world literature, Pride marches being banned, or support for lesbian and gay adolescents coming out being restricted. At this point, the law intersects directly with core democratic freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the freedom to form associations.

It also raises a question of legislative necessity. Similar measures could have been introduced through technical regulation or administrative guidance. The choice of a high-profile legislative vehicle ensured maximum visibility and, being a parliamentary act, compelled reaction. In this sense, the law also functioned as a provocation, inviting external criticism that could then be recast domestically as an attack on Hungarian values and sovereignty.

Prohibiting “promotion”

The Hungarian approach has clear precedents. In Russia, the 2013 federal law banning so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors was upheld domestically and later challenged before the European Court of Human Rights, which in Bayev and Others v. Russia (ECtHR, 20 June 2017) found it to violate freedom of expression and to be discriminatory. Despite this judgment, the law remained in force and was subsequently expanded in 2022 to cover all age groups, contributing to a significantly more restrictive environment for public expression and organisation. In Lithuania, provisions in the Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information were challenged in Macatė v. Lithuania (ECtHR, 23 January 2023), where the Court held that restricting a children’s book depicting same-sex relationships violated Article 10 ECHR (freedom of expression).

Similar approaches can also be found in earlier European contexts. In the United Kingdom, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 prohibited local authorities from the “promotion of homosexuality”, particularly in educational settings; it was repealed in 2003 (and earlier in Scotland in 2000). In Austria, provisions of the Criminal Code such as § 220, prohibiting the “promotion of homosexuality”, and § 221, restricting the public association and organisation of homosexual groups, remained in force until they were repealed in 1997. The use of law to regulate the public presence of homosexuality is neither new nor unique, even if its contemporary forms differ in structure and justification.

In the case of Hungary, the result is a law whose design makes sober debate difficult from the outset, and a judgment that, in responding to it, raises its own questions about the boundaries between legal reasoning and ideological framing.

This becomes particularly apparent in the Court’s language and conceptual approach. By relying on Article 2 TEU as a broad, value-based standard, the CJEU risks turning the Union’s foundational principles into an open-ended basis for intervention in areas that remain primarily within Member State competence, such as education or aspects of family law. This raises concerns about the limits of judicial authority. At the same time, grounding the reasoning in expansive and contested value concepts risks eroding the perception of the Court as a neutral arbiter, and instead casts it as an actor advancing a particular normative direction.

More significantly, however, a judicial body – particularly one at the level of the CJEU – risks weakening the perception of its neutrality when it adopts terminology closely associated with a specific, in this case transactivist, socio-political current, such as “non-cisgender persons” or “the right of a person to gender identity”. This can, and likely will, affect how the reasoning is received. The increasing use of concepts that do not originate in established legal doctrine but in more recent academic or activist discourse can carry a strong signalling effect. By incorporating such terminology into its official reasoning, the Court may be seen as implicitly endorsing a particular conceptual framework, thereby pre-empting debates that remain unsettled across Member States. The choice of language itself becomes part of the controversy, shaping the broader perception of judicial authority. The Court’s criticism of Hungary for poor legislative technique, while itself relying on expansive and contested terminology, leads to a remarkable symmetry and to a dispute that looks less like a legal clarification than a broader cultural conflict carried into the courtroom.

Restoring clarity – both in legislative drafting and in judicial communication – becomes essential to maintaining trust in the legal process.

Whether the CJEU’s judgment will have any practical effect remains to be seen – whether the new Hungarian government under Péter Magyar, due to take office in May 2026, will repeal the law, and whether the European Commission will take enforcement action against Hungary. Until then, much water may flow down the Tisza.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

Last week, on 20 March 2026, Athena Forum attended the “Feminist Futures Workshop: Feminist Responses to Anti-Democratic Politics” in Budapest. The event formed part of the Horizon Europe project CCINDLE (with a budget of over €2.5 million), which examines what it defines as “anti-gender mobilisations” in Europe.

The choice of Budapest, according to the organisers, was symbolic, coming ahead of Hungary’s upcoming elections. The venue, the Central European University (CEU), also carries particular significance in the region. Founded in the early 1990s with funding from George Soros, it was established as a flagship liberal academic institution in post-socialist Eastern Europe, positioning itself as a centre for critical thought, democracy, and open society values. Over the years, it has produced a generation of scholars, many of whom have moved into politics, including national parliaments and European institutions.

Over time, the CEU has become strongly associated with a particular strand of liberal thought, most visibly in gender studies, which has shifted away from the analysis of material realities towards post-material theories increasingly detached from them. This approach was clearly reflected in the event itself, as well as in the broader CCINDLE project.

Following legislative changes introduced by the Hungarian government in 2017 targeting foreign-accredited universities, the CEU was effectively forced to relocate most of its operations to Vienna by 2019, while maintaining a limited presence in Budapest. Today, its Vienna campus reflects its continued status as a well-funded international institution, both physically and intellectually removed from the national context in which it was originally established.

The event itself brought together primarily the project’s academic partners, alongside a number of politicians and activists, all drawn from broadly the same political spectrum (Left/Greens) and firmly positioned on the same side of the debate, resulting in a strikingly homogeneous perspective.

The ‘anti-gender’ as a tool to silence feminists

During the event, a sense of alarm around “anti-gender” as a major threat to democracy dominated the presentations. Originally emerging from religious opposition, the term has since been taken up wholesale by “progressive” academics and expanded to encompass anyone critical of how “gender” is currently used in policy and law.

According to the project’s rationale, “anti-gender politics” constitutes a core component of contemporary autocratisation projects. As a result, anyone questioning “gender” is amalgamated into a single, supposedly well-funded “anti-gender” movement. Any actor whatsoever, be it the Trump administration in the United States, the Vatican’s anti-abortion positions, a gender-critical anti-fascist feminist imprisoned under Franco in Spain or a young lesbian regretting her “gender transition”, is brought under this label and presented as part of a powerful political force eager to strip European citizens of their democratic liberties.

Other loaded and never properly defined or examined terms, including “fascism”, “hatred” and “denial of the right to exist” were thrown around by presenters as rhetorical props to amplify the dramatic effect of “anti-gender”. After all, dramatic effect is what the event required to compensate for its remarkably shallow presentations that neither provided any concrete evidence, nor attempted to disaggregate or analyse the actors lumped together as the “anti-gender” movement.

In this constellation of supposed “anti-democratic” forces, women’s rights defenders were the ones most clearly silenced. Once the defence of sex-based rights is placed under the same label as extremism, it is dismissed before it is even heard, and this dismissal is not only apparent in the materials delivered by the project — mappings, reports and academic articles that the project has produced in abundance — but it was palpable in the room.

Despite taking place in Hungary, not a single Hungarian women’s rights organisation was invited to speak. The project presents itself as “co-creation” — the very meaning of the “CC” in its acronym — yet Hungarian feminists with decades of grassroots experience in women’s rights were present only as objects of research, not as co-creators. Their role was reduced to being studied, categorised and displayed, producing a familiar transactivist dynamic: a patronising, top-down approach that speaks about women, on behalf of women, while keeping them out of the conversation, using the label of “anti-gender” as a tool to do so.

The few opportunities offered to Hungarian women’s rights organisations, such as displaying materials in the hall, felt more like decoration than participation. Other women’s rights organisations, including the Swedish Women’s Lobby, were mentioned dismissively by presenters as holding an “anti-trans” position, without any explanation as to how the defence of women’s rights constitutes being “anti” to anything.

The ‘right’ type of feminism

As a result, feminist activists who rely on long-established legal and policy frameworks — sex-based protections, single-sex spaces clearly permitted under EU law, and measures to address structural inequality between women and men — were not only entirely absent from the discussion, but were recast as opposing democracy and human rights.

Instead, the audience was presented with a dogmatic worldview, according to which the only “right” type of feminism is one that opens the legal category of “woman” to any man who identifies as such, erases lesbians out of legal existence, and allows for unrestricted self-ID for all. This stands in direct contradiction to EU legal standards, where sex remains a core protected category underpinning equality law and policy.

Yet this contradiction did not present a moral, intellectual or legal dilemma for the speakers. Academic analysis — and perhaps even the reading of EU legal instruments — did not appear to be conceived by the project leaders as an essential task of researchers under a Horizon project, funded by EU taxpayers and aimed at informing EU policymakers.

This extraordinarily poor-quality approach to research, in which some of the deliverables appear to have been written by ChatGPT, resulting in the mischaracterisation, misnaming and even mis-sexing of those accused of “anti-gender” positions, is what informed the presenters’ “analysis” of feminism and its supposed “strategies” to resist whatever it is the project authors believe feminists should resist.

Among those to be resisted is a significant part of the feminist movement itself — namely those not prepared to sacrifice women’s rights at the altar of postmodernist theories that seek to do away with the basis of discrimination against women through linguistic acrobatics that redefine the material reality in which women and girls suffer the material consequences of this discrimination.

Instead of documenting what is by now a vast track record of intimidation, harassment, censorship and actual violence directed at so-called gender-critical feminists across multiple locations in Europe, the presenters not only failed to acknowledge that such violence exists, but instead positioned the women resisting it as an ultimate threat to democracy. Rather than recognising these feminists as targets of anti-democratic extremist activists, who will go to great lengths to silence and smear women’s rights defenders in order to protect their worldview, in which self-declared identities obliterate others’ lived realities, the speakers maintained that the clash of rights between those individuals who identify as transgender and the female sex is a conspiracy theory fabricated in the dark corridors of religious fundamentalism.

“Intersectionality” and “inclusion” were presented as viable solutions to a conflict that, according to the presenters, does not exist in the first place, while “care” was framed as a strategy for women to cope with the hostilities they face.

In other words, once again, a group of elite academics from Western Europe, disconnected from the realities of most people not only across Europe but globally, told women to “be nice” — or be labelled fascist-adjacent.

The end of ‘no-debate’ in EU-funded projects

Despite the event being remarkably unimpressive, both in content and format, it was an important opportunity for Athena to attend. Through several interventions from the floor, we made our presence and our positions known, which, despite the uncomfortable silence from the panellists, led to productive exchanges with many attendees who were genuinely interested in the perspective so markedly suppressed in the presenters’ speeches.

Hungarian feminists also challenged the room directly, raising important questions about how the organisers define “progress”, when legislative proposals hailed as “progressive” — from legalising pimping in Romania to egg donation in Hungary — have harmful consequences for women and girls.

The question of clarity in language, policy and law, which did not receive an answer from the panellists beyond defining progress as the inclusion of all in everything, was left hanging in the air as the event came to a close. What became apparent by the end of the conference was that those in receipt of substantial EU funding, expected to meet high standards of rigorous research, impartiality and compliance with the EU’s foundational value of non-discrimination on the basis of sex, are, at best unfamiliar with the fundamentals of European law and policy, and at worst, unwilling to carry out their academic responsibilities.

In either case, the implicit “no-debate” policy taken for granted by the researchers of the CCINDLE project was, if only momentarily, broken — a democratic principle that Horizon-funded academics may find uncomfortable, but are ultimately bound by law to respect.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

In a few months, on July 1st, Ireland will take over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, also referred to as the presidency of the EU. This last happened 13 and a half years ago and will happen again in roughly that time. The presidency lasts for six months.

During that time you can expect a lot of very important high-level meetings, very busy side events and a very enthusiastic celebration of European values and democracy – which will include “efforts to promote and protect LGBTIQ+ rights”.

I am not saying this based on my assumptions, but on the National LGBTIQ+ Inclusion Strategy II – Action Plan 2025–2026 of the Government of Ireland.

One of its strategic objectives, placed under Pillar 4 (Equality and Non-Discrimination), is to advance the protection and promotion of LGBTIQ+ rights at an international level. This includes the UN, the EU, the Council of Europe, the OECD and the OSCE; embassy networks, outreach and funding initiatives, and specifically: the EU’s LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy, and the Irish EU presidency.

You can also find this in Ireland’s Programme for Government, with the explicit commitment to “engage in discussions at key international forums, including the EU and the UN, to uphold the universal nature of human rights, ensuring that these rights apply equally to all individuals, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic”.

The Irish LGBTIQ+ agenda is not only an expanding one, but also a pioneering one.

In recent years we have seen the development of a coordinated European agenda in which Ireland plays a leading role and helps shape and export policies across European institutions. Irish politicians, activists and activist-politicians have been instrumental in pushing for transactivist policies in international institutions, and in driving the shift towards a gender identity focus within the EU. From Mary Robinson to Michael O’Flaherty, Maria Walsh to Leo Varadkar.

At the recent European Parliament vote, 12 of the 14 Irish MEPs supported the call to emphasise the importance of the recognition of trans identified men as women. This included Irish members of the European political groups of the Left, the Socialists and Democrats, and the Liberals, as well as the biggest and most influential group in the European Parliament: the European People’s Party and Christian Democrats, or EPP, a group “driven by a centre-right political vision”, of which Fine Gael is a founding member.

When it comes to gender identity, the EPP has become an immovable object. If anything, it is turning into an unstoppable force.

Last year, the LGBTIQ+ network within the EPP changed its name to EPPride. It is an associated entity within the EPP, with Fine Gael as one of its ten members. EPPride participated in the creation of the EPP election manifesto, cooperates with the EPP’s think tank, and gives workshops on “Strengthening the LGBT+ voice as part of the centre-right narrative”.

Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil, part of the European liberal Renew group, contributes its part; and both parties join forces in their relentless push to make Ireland best in class and to ease the burden of the collective failings of the past.

They talk to EU commissioners, lobby the committees and the European Parliament, and have repeatedly made their priorities clear:

• expansion of self-ID regulations to include minors and to create a legal non-binary category

• comprehensive bans on conversion therapy: a proposal from 2018 in Ireland went so far as to include a global jurisdiction clause concerning Irish citizens abroad

• “the need to ensure equal recognition for families under Irish law”, which is code for surrogacy legalisation nationally and internationally

• and hate speech and hate crime laws.

All of this comes with continued “international advocacy”, which is now aided by former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who holds a position as Senior Fellow in the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program at Harvard Kennedy School, leading a project titled „The Future of LGBTQI+ Rights in the European Union“.

Here, the transactivist demands transform into policy language and emerge shapeshifted as equality, citizenship, democracy, the rule of law, non-discrimination, inclusion and values. For this, Varadkar will devise “a baseline of rights and protections that every EU member state should aspire to” and will be meeting stakeholders across Europe – equipped with connections, influence, reputation and resources.

In this framing, there are three aspects to particularly look out for:

• burying women’s rights and violence against women in a linguistic and conceptual fog of gender and gender-based violence

• a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights as a policy field, advancing the interests of a male sexual rights movement that disguises the exploitation of women through surrogacy as “equality for rainbow families”

• centring the debate around values and human dignity, using this framing to mobilise programmes, campaigns and resources, while expanding the scope of regulation into areas of justice and rule of law, shifting the issue away from women’s rights and presenting it instead as a priority concern of democracy

Under the banner of “human rights”, high-profile and heavily resourced stakeholders are advancing the interests of a sexual rights industry that profits from the sexual and reproductive exploitation of women while erasing women as a political and legal category altogether.

Ireland wants the driver’s seat when it comes to shaping this future of human rights. In August 2028, Europe will “follow the Rainbow” to Ireland for EuroPride.

This may all look grim. And it is. But it is important to understand what we are up against, and to know when, where and why we draw a line.

This article was originally delivered by our director Faika El-Nagashi during the opening session of the conference Gender Recognition Act 2015: Law, Rights and Safeguarding (7 March 2026, Dublin), organised by Wicklow Women for Women. It is also published on the Athena Forum website here.

Subscribe now

On 12 February 2026, the European Parliament (EP) voted in favour of a recommendation to the Council of the EU on priorities for the 70th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which will take place in New York in early March 2026. Such votes often pass unnoticed, but this one drew consternation and some confusion on social media, largely because paragraph (y) called on the Council to “emphasise the importance of the full recognition of trans women as women”.

To understand how this came about and what consequences it may have requires some context.

The Commission on the Status of Women and its “conclusions”

The CSW is composed of 45 UN Member States, but its annual session is attended by all 193 Member States of the United Nations, as well as UN agencies and accredited civil society organisations. The main function of the CSW is to measure the advancement of women’s rights globally.

Each annual session of the CSW, which lasts for two weeks, concludes with the adoption of a non-binding document called the “CSW conclusions”, negotiated by all UN Member States. This document outlines collectively agreed commitments on a priority theme relating to women’s rights, with the 2026 priority theme being women’s access to justice.

Before the agreed conclusions take their final shape, a draft of the document is prepared by UN Women, which acts as the secretariat of the CSW. This draft is circulated to all UN Member States, including all EU Member States as well as the EU’s official delegation to the UN, well in advance of the Commission’s session in New York. At this point, Member States begin preparing their positions, formulated as amendments, revisions, proposals and similar contributions to the draft.

It is this position of the European Union that the European Parliament’s recommendation to the EU Council concerns.

The European Parliament’s recommendations

Neither binding on the EU Council as a co-legislating body of the EU, nor binding on individual EU Member States, the document adopted by the European Parliament is, at best, a wish list and, at worst, an instrument of political pressure. Simply put, the EU Council is under no obligation to follow it. Considering the current constellation of conservative states within the UN, as well as the fact that the CSW conclusions have no binding force, one could argue that the European Parliament’s recommendation is simply irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.

However, ignoring European Parliament recommendations would be precisely the kind of oversight that has led to policy capture by gender identity advocates and, eventually, to the deep crisis of democracy we are witnessing in the EU today.

The EU’s position at the CSW carries significant weight, given the financial and political power it wields globally. At the CSW, the EU usually acts as a bloc, and should the European Parliament’s recommendations be taken seriously by the EU Council, this could mean that during the forthcoming negotiations in New York the EU may attempt to advance its “trans women are women” position at the global level.

The EU on the global stage

Instrumental in this process is the EU diplomatic service, the European External Action Service (EEAS), whose ideological capture we covered in our report Beneath the Surface. Well known for its concerted promotion of gender identity on the global stage, the EEAS plays an important role in shaping and facilitating the EU’s position at the CSW. Another actor in this process is the presidency of the EU Council, a role held by Cyprus from January 2026. Civil society actors with access to EU Member States’ governments and diplomatic missions in New York may also play a role in influencing the EU’s final position.

Through complex, behind closed doors negotiations between EU Member States, this position is currently being consolidated. Once a consensus is reached, the EU will have a document containing amendments and proposals to the so-called “CSW zero draft conclusions” that it received from the UN some time ago.

Based on the version of the conclusions seen by Athena Forum two weeks ago, the document had been drafted in typical UN jargon, peppered with phrases incomprehensible to ordinary people and saturated with references to “gender”, such as gender transformative, gender sensitive and gender focused. However, nowhere in the document were the extremist views expressed that the European Parliament recommends.

It is worth remembering that an initial draft of the conclusions may change significantly by the end of the intergovernmental negotiations. The direction of those changes will largely depend on individual UN Member States’ priorities, the pressure exerted by other states, and the cost-benefit analysis each state undertakes during the negotiations.

In practice, this means that states less inclined to become entangled in the political controversy created by gender identity may yield under pressure from states promoting the erasure of sex. It may also mean that the EU’s consensus position, facilitated by Cyprus, will not include any references to “trans women”. What it does not mean is that activists who lobbied European Parliamentarians to include these references in the recommendation to the Council will refrain from using the document to misinform UN Member States, civil society and philanthropists by claiming that this is, in fact, the agreed position of the EU. That is where the main danger of the European Parliament’s recommendation lies.

Political expediency and the cost for women

What transpired in the European Parliament vote on the recommendation was not, in most cases, driven by explicit hostility to women’s rights. There is a broadly shared conviction among many Members of the European Parliament that the Commission on the Status of Women is important and that the European Union should arrive in New York with a strong and visible position. At the level of political messaging and public relations, “doing something for women” commands near-universal support.

The problem is that good intentions fall short when confusion, legal illiteracy and political fear produce deeply flawed outcomes.

As seen elsewhere, including in the recent PACE vote on “conversion practices”, many parliamentarians do not attend the debates and do not read documents attentively. When they do, they often lack a clear understanding of the legal implications and complexities involved. Most troublingly, voting increasingly reflects political expediency, not a desire to defend a specific position, but a desire to avoid being associated with something deemed unacceptable, in this case “fascism”. When powerful transactivist lobbying groups readily deploy such accusations, MEPs vote defensively, making women and children collateral damage in the process.

As often happens with unpopular and controversial clauses in legal documents, the “trans women are women” clause was introduced through an amendment to the original draft of the recommendation. It is entirely plausible that some members of the FEMM Committee that produced the initial draft of the recommendation, including its Spanish socialist chair Lina Gálvez, did not set out with the intention of inserting language that erases women into a document linked to global women’s rights negotiations.

Yet the amendment was accepted by most voting MEPs in the plenary, not only from the socialist S&D and liberal Renew groups, but also from the conservative EPP, whose members either voted in favour or abstained. This demonstrates the rift within the conservatives seen elsewhere in Europe, as many of their members are wary of being associated with positions labelled as far right.

It is also worth remembering that the “trans women” amendment was introduced by Renew MEPs Raquel García Hermida-Van Der Walle (Netherlands) and Lucia Yar (Slovakia). This is the same political family that, during the previous parliamentary term, spearheaded efforts that resulted in the removal of rape- and prostitution-related provisions from the final text of the Directive on combating violence against women. Those who resisted women’s right to protection from sexual violence and exploitation now advance language that risks erasing the legal category of sex on which those rights depend.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

In their first session of 2026, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) debated and adopted a resolution on banning so-called “conversion practices” – the newer, broader term for conversion therapy – proposed by UK Labour MP Kate Osborne. PACE resolutions are formally non-binding, but they carry significant normative and political weight. They are routinely cited by governments, courts, international organisations and advocacy groups as evidence of a “European consensus”.

Subscribe now

A manufactured consensus

The debate was marked by chronically low attendance. Less than one third of 306 PACE members (national MPs from the Council of Europe‘s 46 member countries) were present, many of them substitutes rather than full members.

This level of attendance reflects both the ongoing institutional dysfunction of the Assembly, where debates are routinely conducted before nearly empty chambers, and strategic avoidance of a politically contentious subject with foreseeable legal and social consequences.

This absence reflected particularly badly on members of the conservative group of the European People’s Party and Christian Democrats (EPP/CD), who claim to stand for the “European values” of subsidiarity, pluralism and the rule of law. These concepts carry little weight when those who claim to defend them do not attend a debate concerning a resolution with wide-ranging implications at national level.

The debate itself was driven by a very small group of British Labour MPs, already known in the UK for their support of policies that erase sex and undermine the rights of lesbians and gays, which, ironically, many of the UK speakers identified as.

Moral Panic in place of evidence

The debate relied heavily, on one side, on hyperbolic claims from activist MPs asserting that “one in three LGBTIQ persons” in Europe are subjected to conversion practices amounting to torture, with the most affected being “transgender individuals.” This contention is derived from a methodologically bankrupt report from the FRA, the European Union‘s Agency for Fundamental Rights, where “gender identity” is indistinguishable from sexual orientation. The report lumps together fundamentally different phenomena – violent crimes, including sexual and domestic violence, family conflict, religious disagreement and legitimate healthcare – and counts them as “conversion practices,” artificially inflating prevalence figures and distorting the issue.

On the other side, the debate was marked by deferential acceptance of these claims, as well as public expressions of allegiance by most political groups across the Assembly, including self-proclaimed conservatives the EPP/CD who cravenly thanked the rapporteur for agreeing to their token amendment which did nothing to ameliorate the harms contained in the resolution. Only one EPP/CD member spoke against the resolution along with members of the right wing European Conservatives, Patriots & Affiliates group (ECPA).

To no one’s surprise, the keynote defence of the resolution was delivered by Helena Dalli, former EU Commissioner for Equality, best remembered in the EU institutions for her attempt, in 2021, to “cancel Christmas” through her later withdrawn guidance on “inclusive language”. Prior to that, Ms Dalli oversaw the dismantling of sex-based protection of women in Malta, the removal of references to mothers and fathers from birth certificates, and the introduction of gender identity into the Maltese constitution. In the PACE hemicycle, she delivered a passionate and defensive intervention, centred on the claim that transgender children urgently require protection from malicious actors who could in any way doubt these children are, in fact, of the opposite sex.

Human dignity as a shield

A recurring thread throughout the debate was the invocation of human dignity – a concept that occupies a specific place in international law: it functions as the foundational source of human rights, an inherent and inviolable attribute that cannot be impinged upon, open to limitations, or overridden by other rights. Whereas other rights can be balanced, human dignity cannot.

Once contested, unverifiable and politically polarising concepts of gender identity and gender expression are placed under the umbrella of human dignity, they become legally insulated. By framing claims around gender identity and conversion practices as matters of human dignity – reinforced by repeated references to torture which sits squarely within the human dignity framework – the activists in the Assembly attempted to construct a legally sealed argument, thus pre-empting potential scrutiny across other domains: therapeutic practice, freedom of expression, parental responsibility, professional autonomy and safeguarding, among others.

This strategy proved effective: most potential opposition, particularly among conservatives, was neutralised at the outset. They did not question the resolution. They affirmed it.

The fiction of intent

Another core argument in the debate concerned intent. In response to criticism that the proposed ban would restrict exploratory therapy, activists in the chamber argued that the prohibition would apply only where there was an intent to cause harm. Naturally, once gender identity had already been inscribed as an inviolable aspect of human dignity, intent to harm became inherent. As long as, in the words of the resolution, there was an attempt to change a person’s gender identity, intent was presumed. Questioning, exploration or professional assessment became sufficient to establish it.

If the resolution already appeared beyond repair, the EPP/CD group nonetheless succeeded in making it worse. In a naïve attempt to mitigate the ban’s impact on the independence of healthcare professionals and the role that parents play in supporting children, the group negotiated with the rapporteur an amendment that was ultimately adopted. That amendment embedded into the resolution the formulation that interventions are permissible “so long as they do not attempt to change, repress or suppress” [a person’s gender identity] – thereby reinforcing, rather than limiting, the original prohibition.

The reasoning behind the EPP/CD leadership’s decision is unclear. Did they believe that activist MPs who had been pushing for this resolution for two years had actually conceded a substantive point? Or do they agree that a child’s self-declared gender identity is an unquestionable truth? It’s reasonable to suppose that the rationale was largely strategic; negotiating a token amendment which could be held up to their conservative constituents as having put up a fight, while, at the same time, avoiding uncomfortable accusations of transphobia from activists. Engaging in a meaningful debate with their Socialist opponents, let alone leading one, proved beyond them.

All other amendments that sought to substantively reformulate the text – by separating sexual orientation from gender identity, narrowing the scope of prohibited interventions, or clarifying the definition of conversion practices – were enthusiastically rejected by some 70 of the mere 99 MPs present in the chamber, confirming their allegiance to the new doctrine of gender identity rather than to sex-based protection of rights, legal reasoning, scientific evidence, or rule of law.

Defaming the opposition

Alongside the arguments above ran a familiar strategy of delegitimising opposition. Any criticism of the ban was described by intervening MPs as “misinformation” and as a coordinated attack. Lesbian, gay and feminist activists, child-rights experts and clinicians opposing the resolution were collectively dismissed as well-funded reactionary forces, folded into a single boogeyman of homophobic and transphobic actors poised to harm an imagined, ever-expanding “LGBTQI community”.

The vote did not deliver the outcome we sought, but it was the outcome we anticipated. The campaign undertaken by Athena Forum – run entirely by volunteers on a shoestring – was taken up by grassroots initiatives across Europe who translated our brief and emailed their own national MPs, with the result that more than 15,000 emails were sent to PACE members. The effort devoted to dismissing and discrediting any opposition to this resolution during the debate suggests the message was heard.

No time for complacency

The debate in the PACE hemicycle offered a revealing glimpse into the current condition of European and international institutions. Low attendance, weak scrutiny, legal illiteracy, fear-driven voting, and the ease with which ideological assertions override reasoning characterised the proceedings. For many years, supranational fora like the Council of Europe have been used to advance gender identity-related agendas. Many of these policies have not been democratically debated or even sufficiently supported, yet ultimately undermine the rights of women, lesbians and gays and vulnerable children.

What unfolded in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was history repeated. Unless our MPs treat international fora with the seriousness and competence they deserve, we will continue to witness the same mistakes. The next step we can already anticipate will not be a non-binding resolution, but the inscription of a conversion practices ban into the EU constitution – a demand currently on the table at the European Commission.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

Subscribe now

The German women’s rights initiative Was ist eine Frau? (“What is a Woman?”) has drawn public attention to a proposed bill by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia that would use gender identity as a basis for prisoner placement — raising the alarm about the risks to women’s safety and rights.

Prison policy in Germany is determined at the state level, and North Rhine-Westphalia argues that the national self-identification law passed in 2024 should be reflected in its own prison regulations.

German prisons are officially sex-separated, yet there have already been several cases of trans-identified men being transferred into women’s facilities. Was ist eine Frau? cites at least one documented case of a trans-identified man committing assault in a women’s prison in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2024.

If passed, the proposed law would effectively abolish sex-separated prison placement in the state, significantly lowering the threshold for male prisoners to be transferred into women’s prisons by simply declaring a female gender identity.

Housing women with male prisoners – who commit the vast majority of violent and sexual crimes – is extremely dangerous. Many incarcerated women are themselves survivors of male violence. Some may be pregnant or accompanied by small children in prison, adding further layers of vulnerability, including for unborn babies and infants.

International conventions, such as the United Nations’ Bangkok Rules (Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders), explicitly require states to implement sex-specific protections for incarcerated women. Maintaining sex-separated prison facilities is named as a key element of such protections. A policy that facilitates the transfer of male prisoners into women’s institutions constitutes a violation of international human rights standards.

North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany’s most populous federal state, with 18 million residents, housing around 9,300 male prisoners and 647 female prisoners. This represents approximately 25% of the male and 30% of the female prison population in the country. A change in prison policy here would not only affect a significant number of female inmates but could also set a precedent for other German states.

The draft law explicitly refers to the national self-ID law as its legal basis. This politically motivated shift aligns with a broader trend at the European level, where gender identity policies are being advanced through the European Commission’s LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy, undermining sex-based protections in prisons and beyond.

Take action: Share information about what is happening – and, if you are in Germany, support the campaign by Was ist eine Frau? by sending a protest letter (in German) to the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia.

This article was originally publish on the Athena Forum website here.

Subscribe now

In 1948, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted, its original title was the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was only after intervention from women delegates — notably Hansa Mehta of India and Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic — that the final title became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Over seven decades later, that original impulse — to frame human rights around the priorities and interests of men — has re-emerged under a different name: sexual rights.

Nowhere in Europe is this more apparent than in Belgium. In 2024, under the banner of “modernisation” and the “decriminalisation of sex work”, the Belgian government effectively legalised the commercial management of prostitution. Though widely praised by international media as a progressive “world first”, the reforms in fact entrench male sexual access to women while empowering those who profit from their exploitation. Prostitution was never criminalised in Belgium; it was tolerated. What has changed is the legal status of those who organise, manage and monetise it.

In March 2022, Belgium reformed its Criminal Code in a way that legalised pimping. The reform did not decriminalise prostitution — it had never been criminalised — but it removed most third-party offences and redefined exploitation as simply the making of an “abnormal profit”, a term that remains undefined in law. In practice, this means that those who organise and profit from prostitution — commonly referred to as pimps — can now operate legally, provided their activities are formalised through contracts and presented as standard business arrangements. While countries such as Germany and the Netherlands maintain licensing systems for brothels, Belgium went further by removing restrictions on third-party profiteering altogether.

In 2024, Belgium expanded this framework by adopting a new law that formalised prostitution as a recognised form of employment under the labour code. Individuals in prostitution can now be hired through standard work contracts. Though presented as a protective measure, the law institutionalises pimping as legitimate employment and integrates the exploitation of prostitution — a practice prohibited under international law — into the formal economy.

To call prostitution “work” is to erase the inequality and violence that define it. In Belgium, as across Europe, the overwhelming majority of prostituted persons are migrant women — many undocumented or living in poverty — while buyers are almost exclusively men. Under the guise of protection, the new Belgian law normalises male sexual entitlement and transforms prostitution into a legitimate business.

This shift stands in direct contradiction to binding international standards.

• CEDAW (Article 6) obliges states to suppress the exploitation of the prostitution of women — in other words, pimping.

• The 1949 UN Convention recognises prostitution as incompatible with human dignity.

• The European Parliament has repeatedly identified prostitution as a form of violence against women and an obstacle to equality between women and men (2014 and 2023 Resolutions).

• UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem has documented prostitution as a grave violation of women’s human rights.

The European Court of Human Rights recently affirmed that France’s Equality Model — which criminalises pimps and buyers while decriminalising prostituted persons — fully aligns with human rights obligations.

In response, nine feminist organisations in Belgium have brought a constitutional challenge against the law. These women’s rights groups argue that the “Law on Sex Work” violates core constitutional and human rights principles, including:

• Human dignity, by commodifying women’s bodies and reducing them to objects of sexual consumption.

• Equality between women and men, as prostitution both reflects and reinforces structural power imbalances between the sexes.

• Protection from violence and organised crime, given that prostitution fuels trafficking networks and exposes women to disproportionate levels of violence.

• Employment and labour law standards, by redefining sexual access to women as a form of contractual labour and legitimising third-party control over that transaction.

Following the submission of arguments by both parties, including the Belgian government’s defence, the court is expected to deliver its ruling in the coming months, a decision that will touch directly on the fundamental question of women’s human rights.

On the opposing side, several powerful, corporate-style NGOs — including ILGA-Europe, Transgender Europe (TGEU), Médecins du Monde and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), among others — have intervened in support of the Belgian government. These organisations operate within a broader framework of ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ which — despite its stated support for women’s autonomy — has come to represent a shared political agenda: the legalisation of prostitution, the promotion of surrogacy, and the erasure of women as a sex-based class.

Within this framework, three well-funded lobbying interests converge: the transgender, prostitution and surrogacy lobbies. All three deny the material reality of sex and the structural nature of gender as a hierarchy of male dominance over women. Instead, they reframe systems of male power as matters of identity, expression or personal choice. In practice, this alliance legitimises male access to women’s bodies under the guise of “human rights”.

The case reveals a stark divide. On one side are feminist and frontline organisations providing daily support to women subjected to male violence, including those in prostitution and those trafficked for sexual exploitation. On the other stand influential, donor-fuelled NGOs united by an agenda that seeks to normalise male sexual entitlement — and to repackage it as progressive policy.

These organisations operate as part of a broader advocacy bloc that includes major international actors such as Amnesty International, which since 2015 has openly supported the legalisation of pimping. More recently, Amnesty has joined groups like the Centre for Reproductive Rights, IPPF, ILGA World and AWID in advocating for the regulation of women’s reproductive exploitation through surrogacy.

ILGA-Europe and Transgender Europe (TGEU) have promoted the same agenda, calling for the decriminalisation of third-party profiteering. All these organisations support the erasure of women in law and policy by replacing sex with stereotypes of gender and gender identity.

IPPF and ILGA recently attacked UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, claiming that “the notion of binary sex stems from Western colonial patriarchy.” In contrast, over 500 women’s organisations issued a joint letter defending Alsalem and her work documenting sex-based violence against women and girls.
Their intervention exposed a broader truth: under the banner of “human rights”, a network of high-profile and heavily resourced NGOs is advancing the interests of those who profit from the sexual and reproductive exploitation of women. What presents itself as progressivism is the consolidation of an industry — one that merges the prostitution lobby, the surrogacy market and the gender-identity movement into a single political force and a unified system of exploitation.
At its core is the belief that women’s bodies — sexually and reproductively — should be available for commercial use. What emerges is a global sexual-rights industry that rebrands male dominance as equality and exploitation as empowerment, while erasing women as a political and legal category altogether.
What Belgium now presents as progress is the return of an old pattern: the rights of men reasserted as universal.

In the same country where individuals can change legal sex through self-declaration — or remove it from legal documents altogether — and where sex-disaggregated data, including statistics on violence, have been erased, women as a political and legal class are vanishing. Crimes once recognised as male violence against women are now recorded based on self-declared “gender identity” rather than sex, erasing both male perpetrators and female victims from official records.

Under the banner of “human rights”, states and powerful NGOs are defending the sexual rights of men: the right to buy women, to rent women, to redefine women out of existence — and to call it equality and choice. Women fought to be recognised as human beings in 1948. In 2025, that struggle is far from over.

The feminist petitioners are: Isala, Le Monde selon les femmes, Observatoire féministe des violences faites aux femmes, Maison de la Famille, Synergie Wallonie pour l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes, Mouvement pour l’Égalité entre les Femmes et les Hommes, Fondation Anne-Marie Lizin, European Network of Migrant Women, La Voix des Femmes.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

Subscribe now

Tensions around the meaning of “gender” in official documents and funding plans have already sparked protests at COP30, the UN Climate Change Conference, which began a few days ago in Belém, Brazil. The debate is being framed as a clash between “progressive gender-rights advocates”, including several Western governments, and a bloc of “hardline conservative” governments accused of trying to turn back the clock. But behind the labels lies a more basic dispute: several states want UN climate texts to retain the categories of male and female, while UN agencies and NGOs push to expand “gender” to include a range of self-proclaimed identities. What is portrayed as an attack on women’s rights is, in reality, a battle over whether climate policy and funding should be based on an analysis of how men and women access resources, information and decision-making processes — the factors on which vulnerability and resource allocation depend — or whether they should be reshaped around ‘’gender identities’’.

This struggle is an insight into the wider pressures now reshaping the international development sector, where ideological conformity on “gender identity” is increasingly treated as a pre-condition for doing work in women’s name.

From international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) that portray the sex binary as a product of colonialism and white supremacy to donors funding initiatives that undermine sex-based rights in law, gender identity frameworks have long captured the international development sector. But how far can this go in replacing the foundational human rights frameworks fought for by previous generations before the sector completely loses its credibility?

Since the Yogyakarta Principles introduced “gender identity”, INGOs, NGOs, multilaterals, donors and many global women’s rights organisations — originally established to protect and advance women’s rights in the Global South — have incorporated this new category into their missions, research, strategies, policies, calls for proposals, programmes, job descriptions and consulting terms of reference. Within fifteen years, international development organisations have moved away from CEDAW and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, embracing instead the Yogyakarta Principles and the idea that sex is not a material reality.

Activists have embedded within organisational policy a definition of feminism that treats a woman as anyone who identifies as one. International development organisations have increasingly conflated sex, gender and gender identity in their programming, data collection and context analyses — generating confusion and weakening accountability to the communities they claim to serve.

Take, for example, AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development). Founded in the 1980s, its early work centred on women’s participation in development. By the 1990s and 2000s, AWID had broadened its agenda to women’s human rights. Yet by the mid-2010s, it began to adopt gender identity norms, shifting its focus from women’s rights to “gender justice” and redefining its constituency from women and girls to “all people affected by patriarchal and systemic oppression”.

Ultimately, AWID’s transformation from a women-in-development organisation into a gender-identity-organisation reflects a wider shift across global human rights and development advocacy. While women’s rights organisations continue to struggle for funding — increasingly so in recent years — AWID’s own report Where Is the Money? An Evidence-Driven Call to Resource Feminist Organizing, which one might reasonably assume was intended to track funding for women’s rights groups, instead surveyed “feminist, women’s rights, LBTQI+ and allied organisations”, collectively labelled as “feminist and women’s rights organisations”. This lack of clarity in terminology, research and constituencies — often encompassing groups with conflicting agendas — has ultimately contributed to the rolling back of women’s rights as articulated in CEDAW, ratified by 189 countries.

AWID supports self-identification (self-ID) and, in 2023, published a letter titled There Is No Place for Anti-Trans Agendas in the UN in an attempt to discredit Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on ending violence against women and girls, for defending the right of women and girls to single-sex spaces where these are essential for their safety, privacy and dignity. AWID’s statement effectively conveyed the idea that “feminist” advocacy must include men who identify as women and that women and girls do not have the right to boundaries.

We now also have the male “allies” working as partners within the international development sector — such as Equimundo (formerly Promundo), the Centre for Masculinities and Social Justice. Equimundo, whose stated purpose is to challenge the social norms that perpetuate violence against women and girls, lists among its core beliefs that “patriarchy creates and sustains power inequalities collectively among men over women (including cis and trans women), as well as gender-nonconforming individuals”.

While the dismantling of sex in law and policy is largely an elite project — driven by corporate funding and filtered into cultural norms — taxpayers are also footing the bill through institutional funding, including from the EU, the world’s largest institutional donor. Over the past decade, the EU has positioned itself as a leading global advocate of gender identity — a legacy of the Yogyakarta Principles, which the EU embraced despite their non-binding nature and their inconsistencies with EU legislation on equality between men and women.

EU efforts to promote gender identity frameworks are supported by funding of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), the EEAS Diversity & Inclusion Agenda and the Gender Equality Action Plan (GAP III). Ultimately, the adoption of gender identity doctrines by major donors and agencies has occurred without any real debate about the implications for women’s rights, local culture and context, child safeguarding or LGB rights — already highly sensitive subjects in many regions of the Global South.

On the ground, women’s organisations that have long worked to reduce child and maternal mortality and prevent violence against women and children are now suffering the dire consequences of funding cuts — compounded by the excesses of critical social justice and the luxury beliefs of an entitled class who never face the consequences of their own decisions.

International development organisations are now largely staffed by people who either promote gender identity or remain silent for fear of losing their livelihoods. This is particularly true in a time of structural budget cuts and growing uncertainty within the sector. Of course, there are exceptions — people of integrity and political courage who continue to defend sex-based rights and democratic values despite the pressure to conform. However, many organisations now function on two contradictory levels, upholding conflicting policy frameworks (Yogyakarta and CEDAW) that ultimately undermine their mission and credibility.

It is time for people within the sector — and for taxpayers — to hold donors such as the EU to account. Activists promoting gender identity can no longer hide behind rhetorical shields. While it has been convenient for them to deflect criticism by pointing to the “anti gender” movement or the rhetoric of ultra-conservative groups that oppose self-ID, sexual and reproductive health and rights and blame feminism and gay rights for the breakdown of society, people are increasingly realising that defending sex-based rights has nothing to do with this backlash. It is, rather, the effort of ordinary citizens from all walks of life coming together to protect everyone’s rights, freedom of expression and evidence-based policymaking.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.

Subscribe now

On 30 October 2025, Latvia’s parliament voted to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention – the Council of Europe’s treaty on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence – only a year after ratifying it. The decision, pending the President’s signature, marks a serious setback for women’s rights. It also exposes a deeper problem: when international instruments adopt vague or activist-driven terminology, the protection of women and girls becomes hostage to ideological disputes.

When the Istanbul Convention was drafted, feminist experts and women’s organisations worked to build a robust legal framework to prevent and prosecute violence against women. Yet during the negotiations, ILGA-Europe entered the process as an observer and successfully lobbied for the inclusion of “gender identity” in the Convention’s non-discrimination clause – a term without clear definition or agreed legal status. Silvan Agius, then ILGA-Europe’s Policy Director, and Nigel Warner, ILGA-Europe Council of Europe Adviser, represented the organisation in the official CAHVIO meetings that drafted the text.

This addition – seemingly technical at the time – has had lasting consequences. The concept of gender identity entered international law without definition or consensus. Fifteen years later, opponents of the Convention exploit this ambiguity to claim that it promotes “gender ideology”, obscuring its intended purpose: obliging states to prevent, protect and prosecute male violence against women. Latvia’s withdrawal is a direct consequence of that confusion, turning a life-saving convention into a political battleground.

Other states have followed similar paths. In Bulgaria, the Constitutional Court ruled in 2018 that the Convention was unconstitutional because of its indeterminate terminology. In Slovakia, parliament rejected ratification in 2020 on the same grounds. In Hungary, lawmakers blocked ratification the same year for identical reasons. These developments are not confined to Europe: in 2016, Colombia’s entire peace agreement was voted down due to the inclusion of gender identity in the text.

These developments reveal how strategic institutional lobbying by a small group of bad actors – and negligence by decision-makers – carry real political costs. Feminists have long argued that gender in law must describe stereotypes, social hierarchies and sex-based power, not inner identity. By ignoring that warning, negotiators left the door open to ideological exploitation – turning an instrument for women’s safety into a source of division and eroding the sex-based rights of women. Every time a ratification stalls or is withdrawn, it is women and girls who lose legal protection, shelter access and justice mechanisms.

It is time to re-examine how women’s human rights frameworks are negotiated, whose interests shape them, and how to ensure that no political ideology – however well-intentioned – undermines the safety and dignity of all women and girls.

This article was originally published on the Athena Forum website here.