The extract below is from a report, launched today, exposing the often stealthy march of gender ideology through institutions of the European Union (EU). The report—“Beneath the surface: How gender identity is reshaping Europe”—is the work of a new Vienna-based think tank the Athena Forum, founded and directed by former Austrian MP Faika El-Nagashi, with support from the UK organisation Sex Matters.
In a foreword, Sex Matters chief executive Maya Forstater writes: “The report explains how activists have exploited the linguistic slippage between sex and gender to pull the foundation of material reality out from under the powerful institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg.
“The catalogue of harms is all too familiar to sex-realist campaigners in the UK: democratic accountability undermined; women’s rights discounted; free speech curtailed; children and adolescents harmed; the rights of gays and lesbians eroded; sporting fairness for women abandoned; and statistics distorted.”
In their authors’ note, El-Nagashi and feminist policy expert Anna Zobnina write: “For well over a decade, we’ve watched fundamental principles—clarity in law, the meaning of woman, the basis for sex-based rights—erode under the weight of ideological capture.
“The shift from sex to gender identity is not just a matter of language. It is a structural transformation, reshaping how institutions across Europe understand rights, build policy and allocate resources and power.
“We have written this report because too many in politics, civil society and the public sphere are navigating this shift in silence—unsure what has changed, how it has happened or what it means for democratic accountability.”
Report extract: Conversion therapy bans
A flagship objective of the LGBTIQ Equality Strategy, launched in 2020 by the European Commission, is the banning of so-called conversion therapy.
The practice has a dark and targeted history, aimed specifically at lesbians and gay men. Framed as a medical, psychological or moral intervention, doctors, psychiatrists, military institutions and religious authorities subjected same-sex attracted people to brutal procedures: lobotomies, electroshock, drug-induced aversion, chemical castration, rape and forced organ removal.
As homosexuality was declassified as a disorder in much of the West, these violent interventions dwindled, though certain conservative and religious groups continued to argue that sexual orientation could—and should—be changed, making it a key advocacy target for early LGB activists.
Today, however, conversion therapy has taken on a new meaning. Once used to describe coercive attempts to change sexual orientation, the term is now widely applied to any therapeutic, parental or educational approach that does not affirm a child’s self-declared gender identity.
With this expansion, a radically different framework emerged: rather than preventing coercive treatment, bans now often require professionals to affirm a person’s declared gender identity, especially in the case of children and adolescents. In many jurisdictions, bans focus primarily on minors. At the same time, mental health professionals continue to play a role in assessing and authorising individuals for legal or medical transition.
This places clinicians in a bind; under systemic pressure to affirm, they are stripped of the ability to exercise clinical judgment. The therapeutic process collapses into affirmation, with serious consequences for young people navigating complex emotional and developmental landscapes.
A growing body of evidence suggests that many trans-identified adolescents are gender-nonconforming youth, often same-sex attracted, who in earlier decades would likely have grown up to be lesbian or gay adults. What once amounted to attempts to “cure the gay” has, in some cases, become “transing the gay away”.
Several studies show that adolescents with gender dysphoria frequently experience psychiatric and neurodevelopmental comorbidities, such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. The pressure on therapists to affirm a youth’s self-diagnosis without thorough exploration can overshadow these complex needs and exclude parents from supportive dialogue.
Video: Faika El-Nagashi explains Europe’s uncritical embrace of “gender identity” at an event in March 2025 at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels
The affirmative edict
The shift in definition of conversion practices has profound implications. By mandating affirmative approaches to self-declared gender identity, these bans—
pressure all mental health professionals into affirmation-only care;
eliminate cautious, exploratory approaches like “watchful waiting”, in favour of automatic affirmation;
obscure the need to assess and treat comorbidities or pursue clinical diagnoses independent of what the patient self-reports;
narrow the training and guidance offered to professionals (including therapists, youth and social workers, and child welfare staff) by embedding affirmation-only models into professional standards and certification;
specifically affect lesbian and gay adolescents, who may struggle with internalised homophobia or hostile family and peer environments, leaving their needs unexamined and misdirecting them toward transition;
expose parents, teachers, educators and health professionals to potential criminal or administrative sanctions if they question immediate affirmation or seek a more comprehensive approach;
prohibit any direct or indirect public funding for services or organisations perceived to contradict affirmation-based models, even when these offer neutral, exploratory or therapeutic support.
Despite the complex adolescent presentations of gender dysphoria, European resolutions refer to conversion practices based not only on sexual orientation, but deliberately also on gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics, even though public awareness still largely understands such practices as attempts to suppress homosexuality. This expanded framing has been driven by transactivist lobbying and has rarely been subjected to open, critical debate.
The first EU member state to introduce a comprehensive nationwide ban was Malta (2016), followed by Germany (2020), France (2022), Greece (2022), Spain (2023), Belgium (2023), Cyprus (2023) and Portugal (2024). Proposals for similar legislation have been brought forward in Poland, Ireland, Austria and the Netherlands.
Many of these laws share near-identical structures, as transactivists and lawmakers have copied the Maltese model across jurisdictions, embedding expansive definitions and penalties into national frameworks. Several national human rights structures—such as ombudsman institutions, equality bodies and human rights institutes—are supporting this process by issuing guidance and framing it as a human rights obligation for governments.
At the European level, the push for such laws has gained steady momentum. The European Parliament first called for a ban in a 2018 resolution and has reiterated this demand in subsequent policy communications. In 2023, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, published a statement pushing for legal bans on conversion practices throughout Europe.
In 2024, the European Parliament called on the Commission to explore the EU legal framework and the possible avenues that could be followed to counter and ban conversion practices at EU level and push member states to ban conversion practices on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics (2023/2082(INI)).
In the same year, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tasked the incoming Equality Commissioner, Hadja Lahbib, with implementing this objective, solidifying conversion therapy bans as a top EU priority in the next LGBTIQ Equality Strategy.
BAD MEDICINE
Despite advances in Western medicine and the well-established criteria to ‘test’ new therapies for efficacy and safety the discipline continues to promote interventions that cause great harm. I reference three recent examples of the damage done when due diligence is ignored:.
1. The Intravaginal Sling (IVS)
Developed in Australia during the 80’s. The device was intended to treat pelvic floor dysfunction in women. Promoted by the AMA it was marketed globally. Over time severe irreversible complications began to emerge leading to a medical scandal and billions of dollars in legal settlements. The AMA apologised for their involvement.
2. The U.S. Opioid Epidemic
In the 1990s, Purdue Pharma in the US launched an aggressive campaign to market OxyContin, claiming that opioids could manage pain without addiction. Absurdly it was approved by the US FDA resulting in the death of an estimated 400,000 persons from addiction and overdose. Purdue was fined US $8 billion and declared bankrupt.
3. The Affirmative Model of Gender Care
Probably the most serious ongoing contemporary example of ‘Really Bad Medicine’ as It involves irreversible damage to vulnerable children. The "Affirmative" model is endorsed by the AMA (no lesson learned from their IVS debacle), prestigious Australian medical colleges including the RACP, our national paediatric hospitals and a multitude of medical practitioners.
Long-term studies of the ‘Affirmed’ cohort demonstrate elevated suicides, mental health comorbidities and early deaths.