By MG Paul E Vallely, US Army (Ret)
In mid-October, MPs from the broad left-wing bloc Nouveau Front Populaire tabled a proposal in the French Parliament to remove sex from national identity cards. They prefaced it with an explanation: having one’s sex recorded on identity documents, they claimed, is bad for equality, bad for women, and especially bad for those who identify as transgender. “It is common for an individual’s appearance not to correspond to the stereotypes associated with the sex recorded on their official papers,” they argued, followed by a non sequitur of the highest order: that sex itself is an outdated stereotype.
Feminist discussion groups exploded. One woman asked, “What happened to the French? Have they gone mad?” Truth be told, the same question could be asked of many nations today: have the Irish, Portuguese, Belgians, Germans, and others gone mad? And if they have not, what explains why legislators across so many states are suddenly deciding that biological sex — not only a basic fact of human reproduction but a cornerstone of equality and non-discrimination law — is a relic of the past to be discarded like phrenology or geocentrism?
The almost 70 left-wing MPs who backed the proposal in the French National Assembly also claimed that, unlike a person’s height — also recorded on ID cards — recording a person’s sex is not in line with international human rights standards set by the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union. Considering recent developments in these institutions, it seems, at least on the surface, difficult to argue against that claim.
Only a few weeks ago, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, made claims strikingly similar to those of the French politicians in a letter to the UK Parliament. O’Flaherty, who previously headed the EU Fundamental Rights Agency for ten years before assuming his current post, insists that the recent UK Supreme Court ruling may not only fall outside European law but will also cause terrible harm to those identifying as transgender. The ruling clarified that, under UK equality law, the words “women” and “men” must be understood in their ordinary meaning: females and males. O’Flaherty’s position stems from his long-standing advocacy to eliminate sex from law and practice, which culminated in his drafting of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, later updated in 2017 with an apparent demand: that states must cease registering sex on all legal documents, including birth certificates.
It is this demand, alongside other Council of Europe and EU references, that the French politicians cited in their proposal, concluding that “the inscription of sex on national identity cards is a form of discrimination.” A similar conclusion was reached by Finland’s Social Democratic government, which in its 2020–2023 Gender Equality Plan proposed removing the sex-based digits from national identity numbers. While this may sound absurd to most Europeans, few are aware of either its repercussions or its history.
Denial of sex … [is] treated by many political and institutional actors as an existential battle
The institutional machinery behind it remains invisible mainly — buried in EU, Council of Europe and UN reports, policies and rulings, where, shrouded in legal jargon and technocratic buzzwords, lies the central thesis of the trans movement: that sex is irrelevant and that recognizing its role in human society — from reproduction and the prevention of male violence to law, statistics and education — is itself harmful. For the same reason, few Europeans are aware of the European Commission’s newly published LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy, which promotes self-identification of sex without age restrictions across EU member states: an intermediate step toward the total abolition of sex envisioned in the Yogyakarta manifesto, crafted by O’Flaherty, supported by trans lobby groups and endorsed by UN, Council of Europe and EU institutions alike.
Today, denial of sex and the justification for its erasure from legal records are treated by many political and institutional actors as an existential battle, losing which would place one in the same camp as Putin and Orbán. But feminists — radical feminists in particular — have seen and documented this denial for decades. From Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1978), to Sheila Jeffreys’ Gender Hurts (2013), to Kara Dansky’s Abolition of Sex (2021), numerous women’s rights campaigners have warned media, politicians and the public about the impending erasure of sex that the transactivist movement has been manufacturing politically, legally and linguistically for over two decades. While many of these women were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or accused of hostility towards a supposedly harmless minority, the institutional capture they described has unfolded in the highest echelons of power.
As a result, the most implausible activist fantasies have now become reality in courts, parliaments and government institutions across Europe, with supranational structures playing a key role in their implementation. The question now is not whether Europe can afford to tell the truth about sex, but whether it can afford not to.
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