Today’s global political elites look to gender identity and transgendrism as ideologies through which they might find institutional coherence and sense of purpose. Identity politics has become the vehicle through which institutions like the European Union seek legitimacy. However, this is having disastrous consequences for Europe, its Member States and citizens. The EU’s wholesale mainstreaming of gender identity has had a polarizing and divisive impact that undermines the legitimate cultural, political and national sovereignty of its Member States.
In November I was invited to Brussels by the thinktank MCC-Brussels to launch my report How Did LGBTQ Rights Take Over the EU? Commissioned by MCC-Brussels, the report offers a comprehensive historical analysis as to how supranationalist institutions like the EU have become so enamoured with gender identity and trans ideology, and how they use it to undermine the legitimate sovereignty of Member States. In particular the report focuses upon how this process has played a key role in the demonisation of the countries of Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War period.
Below is the transcript of my lecture launching the report. A full video recording of the event can be accessed here:
The key arguments are as follows:
That the mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights within the EU is part of an attempt to reconstruct an idea of a “European” identity.
That the determined focus by LGBTQ NGOs on Eastern Europe as a problem area for LGBTQ rights represents a post-Cold War recasting of Western Europe’s political elites’ historical antipathy towards Central and Eastern Europe.
That this reflects the EU’s antipathy to national sovereignty, using LGBTQ rights as a vehicle through which it attempts to undermine Member States’ democratic autonomy.
Through the politicisation of sexual identity, the EU has deliberately sought to disrupt and polarise the political and civil cultures of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The top-down and divisive character of this strategy undermines
the decision-making capacity of national institutions, thereby disenfranchising national electorates. This is now being extended to Europe more broadly.
In June 2021, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law which prohibits access to content that portrays ‘divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality’ for individuals under the age of 18.
Europe’s LGBTQ NGOs have interpreted the law as anti-LGBTQ discrimination and a breach of European Union fundamental rights and values. Europe’s leading LGBTQ NGO, ILGA- Europe (International Lesbian & Gay Association-Europe) has called upon the EU and its Member States to censure and punish Hungary by withholding funding that it is eligible for under the terms of its accession to the EU in 2004.
In July 2021 the European Commission began infringement proceedings against Hungary. Central and Eastern European countries have come under increasing criticism and scrutiny from the European and international political community over their resistance to EU law on sexual identity. In 2019 Poland was censured by the European Parliament for creating a national network of so-called LGBTQ-Free Zones. A subsequent European Parliament resolution called upon the European Commission and Council to ‘…ensure the full and proper application of Treaty [of Europe] principles and values,’ as anti-LGBTQ discrimination violates the core values of the European Union and the normative basis of European integration.
Over the past 20 years, sexual identity has become core to the way in which the European Union defines its sense of self and now frames both its internal and external relations. LGBTQ human rights are now the “litmus test” by which a country’s suitability for EU membership is measured. They have also become the touchstone of the EU’s “identity” or “sense of self”. They are ‘part of a symbolic set of values that now defines the idea of contemporary Europe’. LGBTQ equality ‘has functioned to foster a supranational identity for the EU’ and its associated institutions. And ‘if any “other” wants to be part of this “self” then it should adopt and practice this identity and socialise these norms’.
Within the evolving elision between LGBTQ equality and EU values, the member countries of Eastern and Central Europe are largely considered extreme “norm violators”. LGBTQ advocacy groups play a key role in prosecuting this notion.
Although they appear very recent, the conflicts between EU values and the governments of its Central and Eastern European Member States reflect long-standing anxieties about what it means to be European and what the EU itself stands for. These debates are expressions of a far deeper crisis of identity within the institutions of European integration that emerged in the post WW2 period.
The Cold War characterisation of Europe’s Eastern states as a Soviet “other” was integral to the way that Europe’s supranational elites tried to ensure ideological coherence and institutional unity. In the present moment, informed largely by the fragmentation of these Cold War certainties, a new “East-West divide” is being established, wherein long-standing Western antagonisms and prejudices towards Eastern Europe are re-articulated through a new progressive “Europeanness” signalled by a supposed LGBTQ friendliness.
However, this process has been both limiting and divisive. This report does not argue that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are somehow being wrongly accused and are in fact tolerant of non-normative identities and behaviours; in some cases, they appear not to be. Rather, the report suggests that the EU’s obsession with LGBTQ is not based on a concern for minorities. Instead, it presumes the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are incapable of building democratic societies for themselves.
Whilst ILGA-Europe is adamant that the Hungarian legislation ‘clearly violates the human rights of LGBTI people,’ particularly in terms of freedom of expression and education, they are less sure that Hungary has actually infringed EU rule of law, and in particular Article 2. As ILGA-Europe acknowledges, ‘the tricky issue with EU infringement is that you need to prove exactly how a law introduced by a Member State actually goes against EU legislation’. Unfortunately for ILGA-Europe and the EU, ‘the tricky issue’ of proof seems to suggest that Hungary’s laws are actually consistent with Article 2 of the EU Treaty, being as it is derived directly from Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Article 10 of the European Convention reads:
‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority…’.
However, the Article continues that these rights:
‘May be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others…’.
The rights outlined in Article 10 are in fact heavily qualified, so much so that it ‘anticipates a very wide set of circumstances in which freedom of speech can be lawfully interfered with under the convention’.75 The issue that seems to stick in ILGA-Europe’s craw is that the Hungarian legislation has sought, in accordance with the Article 10, to interpret the imposition of EU rule of law on sexual identity and gender identification in schools as a moral concern, and that the laws are designed to protect the health and wellbeing of Hungary’s young people.
The references within Article 10 to “democratic society” and the notion of “territorial integrity”, as conditional restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, are significant, particularly in reference to the accusation that Hungary has violated Article 2 of the Treaty of Europe. Whilst they may not be liberal, Hungary’s laws are democratic and are very much about defending the territorial integrity of its political institutions – as legitimately qualified in the Article.
There appears to be a stark contradiction or double standard in that some Member States, or communities, are seen as entitled to defend their “territorial integrity” and moral wellbeing, whilst others aren’t. This is reflected in the tellingly ambiguous response by critics of the Hungarian legislation who, without irony, don’t advance the same “freedom of expression” to the diverse voices with which they disagree.
This narrative depicts legitimate concerns about national democracy as an expression of gender discrimination and homophobia, or worse still transphobic – which has become the new fault line in the ongoing weaponisation of gender rights.
Since 2009 – 2010 the EU and the Council of Europe have largely begun to redefine the issue of gender equality through the prism of transgender ideology which attains a privileged position within the ever-expanding acronym of sexual identity. Moreover education policy has become a key area where this is being advanced through teaching methods and curriculum development. In 2020 the Council of Europe (not an EU institution but playing nonetheless a key role in European policymaking) issued a statement within which it emphasised that members were required to deliver ‘such education…that goes beyond biology and reproduction and truly equips children with knowledge about their bodies and their rights, and informs them about gender equality, sexual orientation and gender identity’.
In 2009 the then Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomass Hammarberg, published an issue paper on gender identity. The paper is important as it identifies transgender individuals as a ‘… particularly vulnerable group within LGBTQ people’.
Although the paper was not legally binding, it is widely recognised as defining the EU’s interpretation of gender issues. Indeed in 2008 at a ‘transgender expert meeting’ in Strasbourg, Hammarberg announced that, in matters of LGBTQ rights, as far as Europe was concerned it was now ‘time for the “T”.’ Successive commissioners have followed this lead and have overseen the expansion of transgender ideology within European institutions and given it a privileged position within LGBTQ policy.
However, as Europe’s supranationalist institutions pursue the issue of the Transgenderisation of education curricula this has not been without its problems, and such measures have faced notable opposition from parents and citizens opposed to the incorporation of transgenderism within school curricula.
The Council of Europe has drawn particular attention to the problem of parental opposition to these measures. In Member States such as Poland, Romania and former member the UK, parents’ groups have pressed local authorities and national governments to resist the overt sexualisation of children’s education. Indeed, in Scotland, where this issue has become increasingly embedded in the school curriculum, the government recently issued guidance that schools are under no obligation to inform parents if a pupil were to change their gender identity.
The increased tendency to privilege transgenderism within approaches to LGBTQ equality has not only become a point of division. It also illustrates how the “re-education” of Eastern Europe has become the basis on which Europe’s core Western states become subject to similar anti-democratic tendencies, through the institutionalisation of transgender ideology within national education systems.
There is little doubt that the overall intention is to undermine the role of parents and the influence of the family on the socialisation of school age children. It is in this wider context that the Hungarian government’s law prohibiting the distribution and availability of LGBTQ material to school children should be understood.
The apparent failure of the 2004 Enlargement to apparently ‘liberalise’ attitudes towards sexual minorities in Central and Eastern Europe is put down to the persistent hold that ideas of national identity and the shared experience of ‘culture and history’ have in these countries. These cultures are presented as insular and discriminatory, where values are grounded in outmoded ways of life. For example, the Eastern European family is readily demonised as a source of exclusionary and intolerant national sentiment. It is suggested that opposition to LGBTQ rights is in large part ‘maintained by means of the patriarchal family, underpinned by heteronormative and patriarchal concepts of masculinity and femininity’.
Observers have suggested that the accession process had very little impact upon public attitudes. This is not surprising, as there was little if any real provision for active civil society involvement in the enlargement processes, which were pursued in a very ‘technocratic top down’ way. Rather than enabling the liberalisation of Eastern societies, accession has been weaponised as a means to reinforce the difference between “European” values and the problematic East. This tendency informs the contemporary characterisation of the Central and Eastern Member States as LGBTQ “norm violators”. The apparatus of enlargement also disenfranchised national electorates, as it excluded them from the decision-making process.
EU sponsored advocacy in the area of sexual rights has also disempowered ordinary citizens. Given its antagonism to existing nationally based civil and civic institutions, EU enlargement became dependent upon forms of transnational activism that consciously disengaged from traditional structures of civil and political accountability within the candidate countries. Through pre-accession funding regimes such as the Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPA) and the European Institute for Democracy & Human Rights (EIDHR), LGBTQ NGOs have shifted their emphasis from public-based campaigning towards more elite political lobbying
In 2019 IGLYO, a Brussels-based and EU-funded international LGBTQI youth and student advocacy NGO, along with the global law firm Dentons and the Thompson Reuters Foundation, published ‘Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth’. The document establishes good practice for LGBTQ advocacy and activism – particularly in the area of legal gender recognition. Amongst the list of things deemed “good practice” are two telling campaign strategies that reveal the extent to which these groups, whilst they may appear mainstream – certainly in the way they are funded – are in fact hostile to any form of popular based support. Suggested strategies effectively eschew engagement with the wider public. For example, the document advocates that activists ‘tie [their] campaign to more popular reform’, and ‘avoid excessive press coverage and exposure’. Using Ireland as an exemplar, the report notes that advocating for changes to the law on legal gender recognition, ‘at the same time as other more popular reform’ such as the same sex marriage equality Referendum in 2015, provided a “veil of protection” for trans activists, particularly when ‘marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for’.
The EU’s attempt to use the accession of Central and Eastern European states to ‘expedite the socialising’ of its norms has been a polarising rather than a unifying process.100 Informed more by its own crisis of meaning, enlargement served as a vehicle through which to recast the states of Eastern Europe as “problem countries” – intolerant, bigoted and ultimately “un- European”. Furthermore, this process has established a policy template through which the EU and other supranational institutions such as the Council of Europe can discipline and undermine the democratic sovereignty of its Member States. The proximity of the geopolitical destabilisation caused by the end of the Cold War, and the EU’s increasing valorisation of sexual rights as the measure of “Europeanness” created a perfect storm, the effects of which still rage today.
The 2004 accession of the Central and Eastern European states replaced democratic accountability with a non-negotiable framework of rights and entitlements that still serves to intensify hostility rather than create the conditions for further liberalisation.
By robbing national citizens of their ability to invest, deliberate upon and take responsibility for the social and cultural development of their own societies, the EU’s conscious attempt to deactivate the civil societies of the accession countries undermines the
very precondition for meaningful social change – an actively-engaged population.
The EU’s “socialisation by design”, although predicated upon a narrative of rights and entitlements, consciously seeks to bypass the link between national populations and political accountability.
cjbrick 