Bursting the Brussels gender bubble

Faika El Nagashi on the launch of Athena Forum EU

We’ll be speaking to Faika for our podcast but really wanted to write up our conversation with her ahead of recording. She’s so fascinating and impressive.

*************************************************************

Faika El Nagashi has created something remarkable - a team of specialists across Europe which seeks to confront the absolute capture of European institutions by gender identity activism. The challenge is, she says, almost beyond imagination.

The Athena Forum is a think tank focussed on safeguarding and progressing sex-based rights across law and policy - and, just as essentially, fighting their comprehensive misrepresentation in political and media discourse. It’s been welcomed by feminists and safeguarding professionals around the world. It feels like the last piece of a jigsaw.

‘We knew something was missing,’ says Faika. ‘There are some fantastic groups working in this area across Europe, but there were obstacles to addressing the supra-national element to policy-making. I thought - we have the expertise to fill that gap’.

Faika was a Green MP in Austria for ten years, but stepped away from the party in June this year over its treatment of her and a colleague for their sex-based campaigning. But she’s been an activist for three decades, and spent much of that time working with three of what she calls ‘the big five’ LGBTQ organisations that worked to embed gender identity into EU decision-making: ILGA-Europe, IGLYO and TGEU. So she has a unique insight into how policy positions are built, installed and shared down to national level, and how media narratives can circulate unchecked.

‘It’s always communicated in a way that implies there is a consensus, and as if policy updates are binding. There has never been a consensus and they aren’t binding. But these organisations have organisational credibility.

‘Brussels is a bubble. People move from NGO to NGO, to and from the commission and into the media. We want to bring transparency to the process. This is what drives us - to be transparent.’

Athena hopes to demystify the policy-making process and ensure EU citizens understand which laws actually exist, and which are simply an overreach by powerful lobby groups.

Not every country in the EU has adopted self-identification of sex. Those that have include Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, and Spain. But as in the UK, self-ID does not need legislative enactment before it can be written into the policies of private employers, public bodies and service providers.

There are dozens of feminist groups in Europe but Athena is not an umbrella organisation for them, structured around membership. Instead, it operates through a decentralised expert network - psychologists, researchers, lawyers, journalists and other professionals who are willing to take public, critical positions under its banner. That’s as hard in Europe as anywhere.

‘Everyone knows the repercussions are real,’ says Faika. ‘We have a strategic objective, and we approached a particular kind of high quality person for the team, but a number of people we spoke to said they were unable to go public at the moment even though they were supportive.

‘The money flows from Brussels. Your grants, your funding for research. If you speak up on sex and gender, you may risk losing the resources for your work even if it’s an unconnected project. The money can just stop’

Is it the same across the EU? What about countries that are less supportive of ‘LGBTQI’?

‘Even in Hungary [which this year passed a constitutional amendment which allows it to ban ‘LGBTQ’ events], it’s a precarious decision. And in Scandinavia, there is a professor who published a gender critical book and was harassed so badly, she was forced to resign. She now works as a janitor and a gardener.’

But the UK’s Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act has been very important, says Faika. ‘It is so motivational and relevant. Everybody is following what is happening in the UK, while at the same time we haven’t paid enough attention to what is happening in Europe’.

Could there be an ‘Isla Bryson’ moment for the EU - a scandal of such proportions it leads to permanent policy shifts?

‘It’s not possible. Different structures, different political constellations. These changes ripple differently across countries’. And there’s no unified media space conducive to balanced coverage.

“The UK is extraordinary, with journalists on all sides of the issue writing openly. There are many feminist voices on all sides, they’re given mainstream platforms and they’ve started to work with conservatives. It’s new.

‘We have Ursula Von Der Leyen [President of the European Commission] - she’s a conservative, she has a medical qualification and she has seven children. It makes sense on no level that she would go along with this.

‘But they’re lazy - the laziness starts when the complexity grows. First it’s LGB, then LGBTI, more and more letters and groups are added until you end up with just ‘Queer’, just to reduce the complexity. But no one knows what that really means.

‘Now, Europe is on a high-speed train and it’s impossible to get off. If you say yes to trans, you have to say yes to ‘non-binary’, and more. If you try to get off the train you step in a pit that says you’re transphobic, and queerphobic. That makes you ‘anti-EU’ and ‘anti-democrat’.

‘A great deal is simply performative. It’s about where the EU positions itself as a global project. For example, it’s part of what the EU does to separate itself from Trump politics.

‘Here, there’s a sense that conservatives actually want to look more liberal, they don’t want to make the mistake of the past of looking homophobic. They think sex and gender is a niche issue, they think it harms no one, and they often don’t listen to women anyway.

‘So much of it is posturing.’

Another challenge is linguistic. ‘In German for instance there’s no clear distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ - you often have to say ‘biological woman’ to be precise. There are similar problems in other European languages. And the policy documents get published in Brussels in English, then have to be translated across nations, it’s not just specific words but it’s very hard to translate the concepts involved.

‘We haven’t seen a strategy like that in the UK, where transgender campaigners went into big media organisations and persuaded them to adopt self-ID. It would be very difficult to trace that back. But these bodies like ILGA have very good funding. They have comms people, media teams. It’s definitely what will have been going on.

‘Still, I don’t blame the media alone - it is a weakness of progressives and intellectuals. Progressives in these outlets won’t take it up.’ Only her own media profile as a politician can get it traction. ‘It helps that I made a big fuss at the time. When I say something, the media is inclined to report it.’

Faika’s personal sacrifice in establishing Athena is immense. She walked away from a life in the corridors of European power to stand up for the rights of women and children. ‘I’m officially unemployed, and probably unemployable,’ she says. None of the expert network is being paid. The money it raises is spent on travelling to events, website work, and production of materials.

There are many outstanding feminists in Europe, she says. But none is as visible or has a platform anything like any of our UK feminists. She’s right - we are spoilt for choice - sex-based rights campaigners both on the right and left of the issue, grassroots and academic organisations, charities, unions and staff networks for sex-based rights, LGB organisations. In Europe, Athena is desperately needed, and Faika El Nagashi is assuming that mantle.

Look out for our pod which will be edited and published for next week!

Here is Faika’s Substack including the link to her speech: We Hardly Speak of Women Any More

Here is journalist Roisin Michaux (here on X) who has a catalogue of posts going back three years covering developments in Europe, everything you need to know

Faika is on a panel - Beyond TERF Island: Gender Identity Worldwide - at Battle of Ideas in London with Kara Dansky, Bev Jackson and Stella O’Malley on October 18.