The Weekly Peak #5
An unhappy HIV anniversary, EU staff censored, Irish toilet trouble, and Albania says sure, trans rights 4ever wink wink
It’s been 17 years since the Global Fund birthed the modern trans activist movement
It’s May, and that means that gaudy rainbow junk is about to appear everywhere, but it also marks an anniversary: the May 2009 strategic decision by Bill Gates-aligned Global Fund (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), that supercharged the mission to replace sex with ‘gender identity’ in law around the world.
Prior to the 2000s, the movement we know as ‘trans’ bore no resemblance to its current manifestation. It was largely driven by fetishistic straight men who kept a safe strategic distance from the gays. While European and US transsexuals took legal cases that led to court rulings in their favour, they had little popular support, and very few organisations to represent them.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, what we now refer to as ‘trans’ has always meant this: way-too-feminine gay men who are allowed to live as a ‘type of woman’ in their cultures. They usually sell sex to straight men (you browser history refers to them as ‘shemales’) and they had (and have) nothing in common with the fetishistic western transsexuals.
But these hijras, faʻafāfine, waria, muxe, bardache etc. are extremely susceptible to HIV infection, for reasons I wrote about here. They are also a very important bridge population because their clients have wives and children. And for a long time, they were lumped in the category MSM (men who have sex with men) in global AIDS work. However, in the mid-2000s, research began to reveal something important: gay men who ‘live as women’ are very different, in terms of behaviour and thus epidemiology, to other gay men. Therefore it became urgent to differentiate the groups in order to make sure that the Global Fund was reaching the right ‘key population’.
These gay men go by various names in their different cultural contexts, but donors needed to conceptually unite them in order to target them. A change of strategic direction, decided in May 2009, meant that all 140+ countries on the receiving end of Global Fund cash had to start differentiating these men from each other, and incorporating ‘transgender women’ as a unique group and unique needs, into their outreach and activism. From 2013, it became mandatory. At that time, some of these newly christened ‘transgender women’ had to be coaxed into the label (they had to get rid of their false consciousness, as someone from the Open Society Foundations said about men known as bakla in the Philippines, see article linked above). Once it became clear that money was on the table, this was easy. The rest is history.
This is all very taboo but it’s true: NGOs, HIV researchers and AIDS funders made this group of men coherent and legible for funding and policy reasons, and that’s how and why the movement eventually went professional and trickled up to the rest of us. Here’s a man who identifies as trans describing how it all went down in Eastern European and Central Asia.
What, you thought all this was organic?
Some sources: Most impacted, least served (2015), Transgender erasure is a crisis for HIV science (2025), Press conference: High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS (2008)
Albania: another legal battle pits EU membership against ‘traditional values’
Grading countries on their fitness to join the EU basically consists of checking whether or not they have a Pride parade. Toning down elite corruption is important, too. But mostly it’s about the Pride parade.
I’m being facetious, but only a bit. A big gay rainbow party in your capital city is a major signal to EU bureaucrats (and Canada, who are inordinately invested in the LGBTIQ stuff in Eastern Europe, for some reason) that you have shed your savagery. It doesn’t seem to matter that such events are not hugely popular in places like Tirana, regardless of what the Brussels-friendly admin pretend, or that it’s inauspicious for the EU project as a whole to impose such an obnoxious, alien institution, pertaining to such a culturally sensitive and loaded issue on people who don’t necessarily want it. (Not that being a gay is alien or obnoxious, of course, but this very Nordic-coded, loud, corporate-sponsored street party nightmare is fucking trash. The optics are awful.)
But if all you’ve got is identity politics as a way to measure social progress — and you can’t talk about race in the Balkans because, you know, lots of stuff happened there — the only way to make sure a country is no longer feral is by checking whether they allow leathermen to gyrate in a cage on their picturesque medieval town square once a year.
I’m guessing that’s why Viktor Orban banned these parades. I think it was a populist thing, not necessarily an anti-gay thing. Not to absolve Orban (come back my sweet prince) (I’m joking!) but gayropa-inspired gender shit just doesn’t transpose well outside our bubble. It’s very neocolonial.
Anyway, another way to show how progressive you are is to introduce the concept of ‘gender identity’ into your national laws, despite the fierce backlash it will inevitably stir. Albania obediently introduced discrimination protections on the basis of ‘gender identity’ in an updated gender equality law introduced in November 2025, proving their woke bona fides to the checklist chuds in Brussels. But the country’s conservatives (including Muslim associations) immediately took a repeal case to the constitutional court, and though this month a judge refused to suspend the law, a review is ongoing. To be continued.
Ukraine: civil code defines marriage the old way
Ukraine upset the NGOcracy by tabling a civil code that would effectively ban same-sex marriage or even civil partnerships, despite signs that it was headed in a more progressive direction (and despite the relatively positive view of the electorate on LGBTIQ+ issues).
The proposed civil code, which passed the first reading, says marriage is between a man and a woman, which activists say contradicts the country’s EU accession efforts. But I’m guessing the EU really, really, really wants Ukraine to join as a member right now, and they’re probably ready to lower their expectations. Or as the Commission would probably put it: there may be a strategic realignment of priorities. The NGOs are fyuuuuumin.
Slovakia gets funds despite going rogue on sex and gender
Last September, Slovakia did something similar to Hungary in that they changed their constitution to define men and women. They even went so far as to say that Slovakian people will not accept any outside interference on such delicate matters pertaining to family identity. But whereas Hungary had access to EU funds blocked for years for being sex realists (among other LGBTIQ+-related issues), Slovakia has continued to get big fat cash installments from Brussels. While activists like Amnesty and the Dutch government have urged that Bratislava get the same punishment Budapest got, and the Commission has indeed opened an infringement procedure against the country, it’s all being kept on the downlow. The Commission won’t comment on the consequences, if any, of this egregious TERFy constitutional amendment, and the Slovak leader, Robert Fico shows absolutely no signs of backing down. I suspect the EU has no appetite for another Hungary-esque showdown over queer values. In this economy???
Belgian woman put on leave for objecting to queer sex education curriculum
A Belgian woman has been put on leave, she claims, for criticising the Belgian comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) school programme. The woman, whose name and communications have been shared with me, says the trouble started when she remarked to colleagues that she was happy that a drag event for kids, planned to take place at the school, had not gone ahead. She then shared in a work WhatsApp group an invitation to an event that criticised the CSE programme (which is called EVRAS in Belgium). She was reprimanded and put on leave, and she is consulting a lawyer. Criticising EVRAS is coded lower-class and far-right, so people keep quiet about it, which is terrible because the Belgian version is among the most extreme in terms of gender identity content. The big exception is, of course, among our Muslim sisters who, at least in my case, have acted as a very welcome and vocal firewall against it. The European schools, the ones that teach the children of eurocrats, with their low to non-existent Muslim populations, have not been so lucky. I have some stories coming out about that soon.
Poland: Donald Tusk orders recognition of same-sex marriages conducted outside of Poland
Here’s a funny quirk of EU free movement rules: ‘mobile citizens’ (people who live or lived in another EU country) can end up with more rights than people who stayed put. If you want to get gay-married in Poland, you can’t. But Poland, as part of the EU, is legally obliged to at least recognise the administrative decisions of other EU countries. So if your marriage was recorded in the Netherlands, Poland must consider you married, even if gay marriage is illegal in Poland. This is not automatic, and has required court cases. Poland’s Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, announced this week that the legal gears are being put into action to guarantee recognition of marriages from outside the country to align with EU law. He drew the line at same-sex adoption, however.
This legal setup essentially means, as gender law expert Alessandra Asteriti described to me once, that the law always goes in the direction of most progressive, and never the other way around. That’s why every country will eventually have to replace sex (real, important) with ‘gender identity’ (clothes and hair length, often a fetish) in their laws.
The ILGA-Europe annual country ranking report is out and journalists are on it, Sir yes Sir!
It’s that time of year again: ILGA-Europe produces a country ranking of best- and worst-in-class for LGBTIQ+ faff, and European media outlets reprint it and go oooooh and aaaaaaah and booooooo in all the right places. But what does it really mean to say that Spain is top of the ranking this year? It’s because of their great trans health care access, says ILGA-Europe. Indeed: I just booked a mastectomy for my 15-year-old daughter in a clinic in Madrid. No diagnosis, no referral, and, I told the clinic worker, her psychiatrist refused to provide a letter attesting to her multiple mental illnesses and giving the OK for the surgery (I wrote about this for Genspect and the article will be out next week). Meanwhile, the UK loses points for having laws that guarantee single-sex spaces for the safety of women. Just bear all that in mind when you read the gasping headlines this week.
European Parliament health committee calls women ‘lactating individuals’
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a proposal winding its way through the European Parliament that promises to improve the health of women. Unfortunately, it’s got provisions in it that will allow the destruction of the health of untold numbers of European women and girls. Having spent the last few years lurking in “trans masc” online communities, the idea that adding the barbarically euphemistic “gender-affirming care” to an initiative to do something positive for women’s heath seems like a cruel joke.
The Parliament, and member Billy Kelleher specifically, wants to codify the notion that girls and young women who hate their bodies can iatrogenically mutilate themselves better. Gender-affirming care for women includes having your reproductive organs removed and your vagina and vulva sewn shut, for no reason other than your ‘gender identity’ feelings, and all the lifetime of issues that entails. That’s what gender-affirming care means. Stop with the silly language.
Kelleher’s report just passed through the health committee, and came out the other side with the bizarre and dehumanising term ‘breastfeeding individuals’ in place of ‘breastefeeding women’ This wording is the hallmark of some woke committee member (either a young stupid woman or some tryhard gay guy, always) who will no doubt brag about it in his/her next ILGA-Europe party (taking place 3 June in Brussels. I’m usually barred from all these things but somebody should and let me know which Commission officials you spot there).
What’s bizarre is that they only changed the language in relation to breastfeeding. The word “woman” is not erased elsewhere in the very long document. Why are we not called '“ovarian-cancer people”, or “people-who-experience-menopause”? It’s very inconsistent, but it matches what the European Medicines Agency is doing, which I wrote about here.
EU staff told: liking and retweeting critical social media posts? We’ll find you
Someone sent me some extraordinary screenshots of an internal webinar held in the European Commission last week. Staff were invited to a training session, hosted by one of the staff unions and the head of DEI, on what they can and cannot say in their private life. My favourite: “we will hunt you and we will find you” (paraphrasing).
They didn’t have the balls to put the really controversial “G” word in the announcement for the webinar. The title contained UKRAINE-GAZA-IRAN-VACCINES-POLITICS, as touchy subjects, but they didn’t dare mention gender, even though it is by far the most toxic topic inside the EU bureaucracy. Here’s some proof: at the exact same moment that the webinar was ongoing, there was a street protest by EU staff against Commission’s policy towards Gaza and Israel, on Place du Luxembourg in Brussels. I happened to walk past it, and I approached the protestors to ask if they knew they were probably breaking some rules. They said that they hadn’t heard that there was any interdiction on their very loud, very critical, very regular, and very EU-branded protests (and bake sales, and marathon participation, and so on…)
The Commission tried to ban all internal talk of gender a couple of years ago, and eventually fired me a few weeks ago for it. There is nothing in this world more sensitive among the elites than the sex-erasure issue. Not even Israel-Gaza. Incredible.
In other news…
Every single bathroom in Irish schools to be mixed sex, and nobody will admit to the decision. Same thing happened in Luxembourg. More on this next week.
I’m interviewing this guy today about his experience of fraud in the EU agency that gives the NGO grants. The interview will be online next week.
Catholics get elected to women’s board position in Council of Europe committee. An oddity. Speaking to them this week.
Beneluxers: Sign up for this Belgian/Dutch event on trans pseudoscience, taking place in Leuven on 29 May
Wild levels of pro-surrogacy propaganda in the Irish state-funded and state-favourd media at the moment
Belgian drag queen story hour draws protest online: Oh people don’t like grotesque sex clowns in their local kids’ library section? A petition to cancel it got 500 signatures, but the drag event organisers think the plebs are just ignorant about how wonderful genderfuck can be
Molly O’Mahony just put a new album out. Activists tried to destroy her career last year for some TERFy comments.
Irish religious fundie family of Enoch Burke protest education event, leading to hijinks
Eurovision semi-final family voting results: Poland get all our points. Belgium was good but her outfit was ugly. Serbia was so awful the dog left the room. The Greek Roblox-themed song was groomy af. Second semi-final taking place tomorrow (Thursday 14 May at 9pm CET) sqweeeeeee!
Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux
Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.
That should say “lactating individuals”
Your anger and disdain come through so clearly in your writing and I have to say I find reading it cathartic, someone else is as pissed off as I am.