Europe gender ideology update
The Finns school the Floridians, Belgian conversion law threatens therapy, and Irish plans to ban blasphemy.
Finnish expert helps convince Florida to put brakes on hormones and surgeries for gender-distressed kids
Riittakerttu Kaltiala is the head of adolescent psychiatry at Tampere University in Finland, a country that has famously reversed course on its policy of prescribing hormones and gender surgeries to kids. On October 28, she told a public panel hosted by two Florida medical boards about the concerns that led to Finland’s medical authorities restricting treatment for gender dysphoria except in exceptional circumstances.
The medical boards ultimately approved draft rules to ban puberty blockers, hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
Watch Dr Kaltiala’s testimony below.
Unclear whether Belgium’s new conversion therapy law outlaws exploratory therapy
The Belgian government okayed a law on 28 October that makes it a crime to try to “to change or suppress the gender identity of LGBTQ+ people”. Do so and you could face up to two years in prison. The law also states that the power dynamic between the converter and the convertee will be taken into account, and that’s scary because it describes the relationship between parent and child, or therapist and child patient.
If parents don’t immediately affirm a child’s gender identity or gender expression, or if they refuse to use new pronouns or new names, will they be at risk? Likewise, would therapy that explores the reasons for a child’s gender distress (and that attempts to paint a realistic picture of the limits of surgeries and hormone regimes), also know as “exploratory” therapy, be in targetted by the new rule?
I’ve sent an email to the Secretary for equal opportunities Sarah Schlitz (Greens), who initiated the ban. I’ll update if I hear back.
Conversion therapy laws are already in force in Germany, France, Malta and some parts of Spain. But where did they come from all of a sudden? Before January 2015, conversion therapy exclusively referred to attempts by religious fundamentalists to “turn” gay people straight via coercion or even torture. That changed abruptly when when an American teenager, Leah Alcorn, committed suicide because his religious parents wouldn’t recognise his chosen gender identity. A petition gathered steam in early 2015, and a political pronouncement by the Obama administration let to momentum for a new law outlawing the practice in the context of gender identities, which then spread around the world. It was the push advocates of the Yogykarta Principles needed to approach lawmakers about implementing principle number 10.
What happens to quotas if trans advocates succeed in ending the collection of sex data in public records?
On November 22, the European Parliament adopted a new EU law that obliges big publicly-listed companies to increase the number of women on their boards. By July 2026, there will be legal minimums for the number of board members from “the under-represented sex,” as it is described in the legal text.
The text is explicit about sex, not gender, using the words “women” and “men” and “male” and “female”, suggesting it will be based on biology and not gender identity or expression.
However, the gender self-ID law in Ireland, for example, is effectively a sex self-ID law, as it allows anyone over 16 to change their sex as listed on their birth certificate. That means that men who identify as women will be eligible to be counted as women. No surprises there.
But it doesn’t take into account people who call themselves non-binary. The legal status of non-binary, an inexplicable thing that seems to have germinated on the teenage meme platform Tumblr about a decade ago, is under discussion in a number of EU countries. It’s already possible for intersex people to get an X designation on their documents in Germany.
Nor does the new EU corporate quota provide for the eventuality that no gender/sex markers will be recorded at all. This is a real political objective of trans lobby groups. The powerful, EU-funded Transgender Europe (TGEU), for example, endorses the call for the abolition of all gender markers on official identity documents, and the curtailing of collection of gender and sex information in public records.
Don’t think that just because it’s crazy it won’t happen.
Get gender ideology out of schools before it’s too late
That was the warning from Helen Joyce at a packed event in Dublin organised by Women’s Space Ireland on 12 November. As she wrote afterwards:
“I billed my talk as a message from the future—ie, the UK, where schools have been indoctrinating children, and creating and promoting gender distress, for close to ten years. The result is visible in a veritable epidemic of trans identification among young people. This is what’s in store for Ireland, I said, unless it stops schools from adopting a similar ideological approach.”
Joyce spoke at the “Women’s Space to Speak” event alongside Christina Ellingsen, who is facing a possible prison sentence in her home country of Norway for saying a man can never be a woman, girl, mother, or lesbian. Iseult White warned of the dangers of the hate speech bill under proposal in Ireland also and Anya Palmer explained how EU law was the basis of Maya Forstater’s work tribunal victory in the UK. Read the summary of the event from the Law Society Gazette. Footage of the event will soon be available on the organiser’s website.
Read: The Forstater verdict has wider reach than you think on 4W.pub
Genspect expands network of parents to Poland, Denmark, Iceland
Genspect is an alliance of people critical of the role of transactivism in healthcare and they are growing their ranks, having recently connected with parent groups in Poland, Denmark and Iceland. Polish detransitioners have been offered the opportunity to take part in their Beyond Transition initiative, a set of free therapy services and hangouts for detransitioners who have difficulty finding support services for their particular set of needs.
Read about Beyond Transitions’ free services for detransitioners
Man changes legal sex after attack on girlfriend, avoids gender-based violence charge
Here’s the story of Esther (name changed) who was beaten by her boyfriend, but who couldn’t press charges of “gender-based violence” because he had switched legal gender identity from male to female after he was arrested.
According to the story in eltaquigrafo.com, when Esther reported the serious physical assault to the police, she learned that sex would not be considered an aggravating factor because the man had changed his sex and his name in the official registry, something that Esther was completely unaware of.
On 8 March, the European Commission proposed a new law on combatting violence against women and domestic violence. Voices from gender critical women have so far been absent from the debate over the new law, due to a lack of advocacy groups working on an EU level.
Paris, Lille events cancelled: psychiatrist who wrote about trans social contagion shut down by activists
Child psychiatrist Caroline Eliacheff was due to speak at a conference in Lille on Thursday, November 17, but was prevented from doing so by obnoxious, noisy LGBT activists. A conference where she was due to participate on 20 November in Paris was also called off.
Dr Eliacheff is a member of @OSirene, a French and Belgian collective of concerned professionals whose position on paediatric transition mirrors that of France’s national academy of medicine. She co-authored a book noting with alarm the increase in cases of children wanting to change gender in France. Warning of "social contagion", she wrote that she believes that no treatment or intervention should be allowed before the age of 18.
A Twitter account with only 120 followers denounced the mayor of Paris for allowing its premises to be used to host the event where Eliacheff was due to speak. The mayor’s office replied directly to the anonymous poster that it would cancel immediately because it is committed against "transphobia." The mayor of Lille, to be fair, didn’t heed the call from protestors to cancel the event. But the protestors made so much noise, nobody could talk and the event was called off anyway.
Ireland’s (new) blasphemy law
Women’s rights campaigners are worried that sounding off about gender critical beliefs in any public capacity might get them arrested under Ireland’s proposed new hate-speech law, which the government apparently wants to push through before Christmas.
According to the bill, it will be an illegal to communicate or behave in a way that incites violence against someone with a protected characteristic, including gender expression, seemingly the most protected characteristic of our age. This also applies to “being reckless” about inciting violence against a protected group, meaning you can be guilty of inciting someone else to violence even if you didn’t mean to or want to. You’re also guilty if you merely have materials in your possession that could provoke someone to commit a violent act.
Twitter user Gerard Casey broke down the reasons why the law is so problematic:
Greek man gets suspended prison sentence for “transphobic” 2017 Facebook post
In 2017, just before Greece passed self-ID for anyone aged 15+, a former football star called Vasilis Tsiartas posted on Facebook that he hoped “the first sex changes are carried out on the children of those who ratified this abomination.”
“Legitimize pedophiles, too, to complete the crimes,” he also posted, and later: “God created Adam and Eve.”
On 5 November this year, Tsiartas was sentenced by an Athens court to 10 months in prison and a €5k suspended fine for the “transphobic” post. According to the Greek Reporter, the country’s Transgender Support Association described the conviction, the first for public incitement to violence or hatred for reasons of gender identity, as “particularly important for the transgender community.”
In the same ruling, another person was sentenced to seven months in prison with suspension for transphobic posts related to those made by Tsiartas. Tsiartas has said on Twitter that he will appeal.
What will Sidhbh Gallagher do next?
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It looks like Irish plastic surgeon Sidhbh Gallagher has lost a chunk of her market. Known for advertising surgical procedures on TikTok, she has not said anything publicly about the news that she can now no longer carry out such procedures on minors in the state of Florida, where she is based. In the days since the ruling, she has posted almost daily mini vids explaining the different grisly aspects of removing and reconstructing body parts.
She sometimes posts videos about the administrative procedures and political debates around “affirming” care, so it’s surprising that she has not yet commented. I have reached out to her to see if she has anything to say for herself.
She will still have adults coming in for body modification procedures, of course, so she will probably be fine. In the meantime, a deeply disturbing Twitter thread about her services started doing the rounds, where a young mastectomy patient describes how she was left infected and disfigured from an apparently botched surgery. It was then revealed that Gallagher never signed up for medical malpractice insurance, which apparently means she can’t be sued.
People are learning online how to do DIY transitions
People all over Europe are sharing information online on how to buy and take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Long wait times, age limits and “gatekeeping” mental health requirements have seen adults and children go it alone, using platforms like Reddit, Facebook and Discord to share information on where to buy, and how to take, hormones.
For example, the Reddit group called r/TransNord helps people in Scandinavian countries share information about how to circumvent the rules in their respective countries, which seem to change all the time. (In February this year the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare published new guidelines regarding hormone treatment of young people under the age of 18 with gender dysphoria. Likewise, Finland has scaled back access to hormones and surgeries for young people.)
GenderGP prescriptions, rerouted through different EU countries to evade the authorities, are a common topic of discussion, as are the names pharmacies that will accept which types of documents, and the names of surgeons in other EU countries that will take people on the young side, or without approval letters. You can easily find the list of online pharmacies that will ship you hormones apparently legally, but I’m not posting them here, for obvious reasons.
Terrifying!
City of Geneva can’t stop hosting queer events for kids
A kids’ theatre in the Swiss town of Geneva is putting on a three-day “intergenerational agora” for kids and adults to celebrate genderfluidity and genders “outside any binary”. It includes a documentary on transgender kids, a participative session on inclusive language, and a session on gender-bending plush toys. There will also be a conversation with a queer theorist.
But it’s not the only public event that exposes the glittery world of postmodern gender identity theory and transgenderism to a young audience. Twitter user @Janedoeordont spotted a drag queen exhibition and series of storytelling events for kids taking place in the museum of ethnography, sponsored by the city of Geneva.
“Switzerland has become Queerzerland,” she said. “We are in the eye of the cyclone,” adding she wonders if it is at all linked to the influence of the UN and big pharma in Switzerland.
The Netherlands: opponents of self-ID win more time to debate
The Dutch house of representatives’ debate on the new self-ID law has been postponed again , this time to February 6, 2023. “This is good news,” said Twitter user @Passie_Kracht. “I think the proponents never expected such a debate. Similar laws have been proposed (and passed) in other countries and the same strategy is always followed: no debate. This has not worked in the Netherlands thanks to the infatigable work of feminists and other activists who have been brave enough to speak out.”
Follow the work of Voorzij to keep up to speed on developments in the Netherlands
Head of psychiatry at Spanish hospital raises alarm over boom in gender cases
The head of psychiatry at Burgos University Hospital in northern Spain has said that the boom in cases in the hospital’s gender identity unit is due to the “fashionability” of transgenderism, telling a local newspaper that "80% are not trans, they are young people with difficulties who need our help."
García Mellado is very critical of Spain’s proposed self-ID law, which would replace the 2007 law that required a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and hormonal treatment before legal gender change.
Also critical of the self-ID law for the effect it will have on children? Spain’s Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Stick their statement into a translating tool and see why.
Academic courses at the France’s Sciences Po have to comply with gender ideology or risk cancellation
Sciences Po is one of France’s competitive grands écoles, meaning it’s very hard to get into, and its students tend to end up part of the country’s political elite. Spread across seven campuses all over France, it specialises in social and political sciences.
A scandal involving a professor earlier this year called Leonardo Orlando drew attention to the fact that any course content related to gender or biology taught at Sciences Po must be certified by a group of gender scholars called PRESAGE. Orlando’s courses were cancelled earlier this year when the content was considered by the group not to comply with gender ideology. PRESAGE allow students who take these courses to obtain a gender certificate, a policy that applies to all campuses, and all majors.
Sciences Po’s programme offers over 80 courses on gender, all of which are in contradiction with biology and evolution, up from 40 only four years ago. Orlando told L’Express newspaper in September that the gender studies are “a sectarian movement masquerading as an academic discipline.”
Amazing collection of info! Thank you
Thanks for the invaluable info! I’m still amazed when I speak to people about this and am told that “it’s not that big a deal and it’s not REALLY happening...” FYI, I took a look at Dr. Gallagher’s latest TikToks and she’s warning against the dangers of vaping but mutilating your young healthy body is fine!!!