The Haus is on Fÿre
Welcome to Peaked, a newsletter about Europe's capture by gender ideology and the people pushing back.
Won’t somebody think of the Europeans?
Yep, another newsletter. But there’s so much flying under the radar “on the continent” that I think it’s time to gather it all in one place. Tweets are fun but ephemeral. And though the gender-critical bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and newsletter merchants are all doing a great job, they’re very UK- and US-focused (which makes sense, as those countries are inordinately genderfucked).
So this is a rolling report on the news from TRANSinistria (Europe), especially those countries most deeply captured by gender ideology, like Ireland (where I’m from), Belgium (where I live), and Malta, a place you can’t get an abortion even if you’re dying.
I’ll be covering the EU institutions, of course. Cross your fingers that I don’t ditch the idea after one edition!
The Belgian version of Mermaids will set up across the street from a school in January 2023
“Trans Kids”, a non-profit, will be in a hot pink new office space in a centre called “sexy”.
Brussels: A Gen Z psychologist and a transhausen mother launched a non-profit called Trans Kids in 2019. Such is their success, they are expanding their team and moving into a new location right in front of a school.
The founder, whose other job involves psychotherapy for male prostitutes who identify as women (to be fair, a noble cause —but maybe not in combo with affirmation-first paediatric gender transition?) is part of an LGBTQIA+ inclusive centre that they have called C.E.C.S.I., which he told a TV show will be pronounced “sexy”. The interior is hot pink and can be seen from the kids’ classrooms.
He really wants to remove the burden of cisheteronormativity on gender non-conforming children, he says. His argument is that it’s the child’s body that is wrong and not society that is wrong for, for example, bullying a little boy who likes Elsa from Frozen, and who would turn out gay if they would just leave him alone.
The organisation once participated in a report that is so incriminating, I can’t believe it’s still online. At one point, the dad of a girl taking testosterone tells the interviewer that when she was about three years old, she objected to being dressed in “girl’s clothes”. He quotes this as the first evidence that the body she was born into was the incorrect one. A psychotherapist later told him his daughter is a boy.
Trans Kids focuses proudly, loudly, on affirmation. It’s all based on queer theory notions of absolutely nothing being in any way real. They won’t be giving out drugs, but like Mermaids, TENI etc, they will be able to “accompany” kids on their “journey”.
Perhaps most worryingly, the Trans Kids private Facebook group chat features parents requesting - and providing - the names of the doctors in Belgium who are likely to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids.
Trans activists gather in the European Parliament
A trans-rights contingent featuring WPATH, Transgender Europe (TGEU), a rep from the WHO and Malta’s equality minister were invited for an extremely sympathetic hearing in the European Parliament on 27 October and it was the usual chorus of petulant demands and suicide scaremongering. The MEPs in attendance were falling over themselves to get into Gen Z’s good graces, asking such probing questions like “What more can we do to help?” and “Where should we concentrate our efforts?” in response to the lobbyists’ pleas for complete “depathologisation” of trans healthcare.
“Given the political nature of the issue, interventions from the EUP and MEPs expressing support for depathologisation of TSHC (trans-specific health care) for transgender children and adults and self-determination of gender identity would be crucial and important signal against anti-rights groups,” they wrote in their prepared brief.
They want MEPs to support “the ability and rights of children to decide for themselves, with the necessary mental health support, on the kind of TSHC they need,” and to “repeat its call for ending pathologisation of gender identity in childhood in ICD-11” (referring to depathologisation in WHO guidelines.)
“Mental health support” doesn’t have the same meaning as “assessment”. But surely they are not suggesting that kids should be able to decide to undergo life-altering interventions? Three requests for clarification (and counting) have so far been fobbed off by TGEU’s media contact.
During the hearing, an MEP from the centre-right party delicately expressed concern about the wisdom of ignoring other possible causes of childhood gender distress, and a pol from the ultra-right Spanish Vox party asked if anyone had read the stories of detransitioners. Both were ignored.
The term “depathologisation” is presumably used in an effort to evoke memories of the gay civil rights cause among boomers, whose generation fought to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses. That’s not what’s going on here, however.
Nobody mentioned women.
EU agency dedicated to tracking equality between men and women is now fully captured
Yes, “evolution” means exactly what you think it means here.
Lithuania: I used to regularly check the website of the European Institute of Gender Equality to see if (and when) they would stop tracking male-female disparities and take on a more postmodern, and therefore useless, approach to data gathering. They recently revamped and relaunched their website and suddenly, instead of defining women as adult, and human, and female, this is how they see things:
"...the use and integration of the ‘gender’ concept should not be restricted to women, but intended as broadly relating to how gendered societies and related constructs and expectations can influence personal identities and social interactions"
Girl, bye.
French filmmaker takes on trans extremism à la française
Picking up on the alarming new trend, filmmaker Sophie Robert, who is known in certain circles for her documentary on autism in kids, has made a film on the basics of gender ideology and the transgender craze for a French-speaking audience. Essential and timely - though there will be little new for obsessives.
France’s medical establishment seems to be coming to the same conclusion as a handful of other EU countries, with its medicine regulating body recently warning that it is “not possible to distinguish a durable trans identity from a passing phase of an adolescent's development.” They warned against the rush to medicalise puberty but hélas, the medical experts say one thing while the educational establishment has its own agenda — backed up in France by a memo from a certain Mr. Blanquer.
Vienna: women in parks holding microphones
The second “Speakers’ Corner” in the Austrian capital
Donnasdottir, a well-known entity on the törf scene in Vienna, is a young mother who runs a popular YouTube channel. Borrowing the concept from Kellie Jay Keen’s Hyde Park events, Donna ran the first Speakers’ Corner Vienna in the summer, which attracted about 10 people. The second edition, which took place on 16 October, drew about 22 people, with lots more tourists stopping by to stare and scratch their heads. No activists turned up this time round, but it’s only a matter of time.
Next #LasstFrauenSprechen event will take place on 27 November. Location TBC when the police give the okay - check out her Twitter for updates.
Irish government’s quiet backtrack on maternity law is a classic of the genre
The words “woman” and “mother” were silently removed - and then silently added back in.
In early 2022, the Irish women’s advocacy group The Countess discovered that the country’s government was planning to remove all mention of the words “woman” and “mother” from maternity protection legislation.
It’s the same kind of stealth tactics that were used in 2015 when the gender recognition act passed by piggybacking on the highly popular marriage equality legislation. The Countess and others kicked up a fuss and launched a campaign to protest that “these words belong to us”. Volunteers showed up at a meeting of the National Women’s Council of Ireland to ask about the changes, but they were refused entry.
One of the volunteers managed to get invited onto a popular radio show where, for the first time, Irish people were given the chance to hear opinions on the scandal of creeping gender orthodoxy in Irish institutions. It sparked such a heated debate that the host decided to stay on the topic for three days in a row. Trans rights activists absolutely lost their minds.
Without fanfare, however, the plan was walked back in October.
Listen to Ireland’s three-day national trans meltdown.
“We have wise doctors and good medical guidelines, but captured progressive politicians."
If Finland is seeing sense on paediatric transition, why is the situation on the ground so bleak?
This comment, by a Finnish social scientist, helps explain why on the one hand, everyone points to the Finns having come to their senses on paediatric transition while on the other, the country seems increasingly institutionally captured.
“Around 2018 - 2019, the rainbow organisations were really pushing both the legal and medical objectives, including medical transition for children,” she told me “but doctors were alert and they asked for a review. The left parties came out against it. But after the review, and the new guidelines (that favoured exploratory therapy), it seems like in the medical side got left out of the advocacy, and they focused only on the self-ID bill, which is all about divorcing the medical and the legal sides.”
“The self-ID bill is only about legal sex,” she says, “so the politicians can always retreat to ‘this is not about medical interventions’.”
She adds that the trans rights advocates are “tiptoeing around” the medical issues. “But both the Finnish Greens and the Left Alliance have included puberty blockers in their political goals. They are also looking into the possibility of abolishing legal sex markers in the coming years . ”
“I think these smaller states like Finland, Ireland and Norway have been laboratories for trying to pass and implement self-ID.”
In the meantime, Finnish pharmacies are no longer taking GenderGP prescriptions.
TERF-themed academic journal issue in the works
Which of the three types of TERF is the one that is repulsed by prosthetic camel toes?
Mauro Cabral Grinspan, the trans-identifying executive director of the Arcus-funded GATE trans lobby, will guest-edit a 2023 TERF-themed issue of a gender studies academic journal. The journal, called DiGeSt is a product of Ghent University (why is there always a link to Ghent University?)
The call for papers says “a first comparative look at contemporary debates allows us to identify at least three different roads to TERFness (emphasis mine): anti-gender activism, radical feminism and radical lesbianism, and institutional feminism.”
Research into “anti-gender movements” seem to be picking up speed. Co-editor of the TERF issue, the Belgian social studies professor David Paternotte, has also just been granted a pot of cash to study the anti-gender movement in Belgium by the country’s gender minister, Sarah Schlitz.
Dutch protocol designer says depathologisation is bad, actually
As has been reported elsewhere, the designers of the infamous Dutch protocol have increasingly been voicing concern about the bastardisation of their research.
Thomas D. Steensma, a psychologist at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria in Amsterdam, recently told a newspaper that mental health evaluation is a necessary prerequisite for a successful transition.
“The right to self-determination is important, but the interventions and consequences are too great to let it go completely and leave everything to the client,” he told Nederlands Dagblad.
The reporter then asks about the high number of people who come for gender reassignment who have psychological problems.
“Yes, the question is always where those problems come from. In many cases, the problems are related to gender feelings, their social acceptance. The waiting lists are long, many difficult years have passed before someone is treated. But we also see that more people with autism are being registered. Here too, we examine how this is related to gender feelings, or what the possible consequences are for treatment.”
This sounds unaligned with the à la carte transition demands of the lobbyists, who unequivocally demand sex reassignment and all its accoutrements to be as accessible as ear-piercing.
Veteran Austrian gay rights blogger comes out in solidarity with Europe’s loneliest politician
Faika El-Nagashi is all alone. The Austrian green party rep is the only “out” gender critic in a left-wing party in the entire EU, as far as I can tell, and she gets an absolute hounding for it. She was recently barred from a lesbian conference for some very mild wrongthink in an Austrian newspaper.
But Kurt Krickler, pioneer of Austria’s lesbian and gay movement, recently came out in solidarity with El-Nagashi in an article on gender identity-related conflicts in the LGBTQI community. Among other things, Kurt is the co-founder of Austria’s oldest gay rights association, HOSI, and the Austrian AIDS organisation. He has also been active in ILGA-Europe.
In his Homopoliticus blog, he describes the “embarrassing” “psycho-terror” of the campaign against her and deplores “the dishonesty, brutality and almost religious fervour” with which the debate over self-ID is being conducted.
It’s only one article but it’s important: Krickler is a respected and accomplished voice. His support means that finally, someone other than El-Nagashi is speaking out publicly on the holes in self-identification legislation and its consequences.
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