Beyond TERF Island: gender identity worldwide
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Beyond ‘TERF Island’, gender-identity ideology remains hardwired into policymaking across Europe. Only last year, Germany passed one of the broadest self-ID laws –opening up legal sex changes to children and imposing fines on anyone who publicly discloses someone’s transition. In France, a new mandatory sex-education curriculum will introduce teaching about gender identity in schools. In Spain, the self-ID law allows anyone over 16 to change legal sex without medical evaluation. In stark contrast, Hungary amended its constitution in 2025 to state explicitly that a person’s sex at birth is biological and either male or female.
When it comes to sexual politics, the EU machinery continues to embed gender-identity ideology into its strategies, recommendations, and funding schemes. Meanwhile, EU-funded NGOs denounce legal rulings and brand the UK Supreme Court decision on sex-based rights as ‘fascist’ and looked on in horror as the Trump 2.0 White House issued an Executive Order aimed at keeping men out of women’s sports.
Caught between authoritarian backlash and institutional capture, Europe is sleepwalking into a rights framework immune to challenge. While countries like the UK and US have begun to push back – despite the US Democratic Party showing few signs of relinquishing its full-throated embrace of gender-identity ideology – the rest of Europe remains locked in an opaque framework where dissent is defunded, delegitimised and increasingly criminalised.
Amidst a conundrum of contradictions, a broad alliance is mobilising across Europe to confront a narrowing space for democratic debate. Why has so little of this surfaced in public discourse? What happens when a rights framework becomes immune to democratic challenge? How do we begin to open up political space for public debate, critical analysis and sex-based perspectives across the continent?
