This week, Hadja Lahbib, a European Commissioner, announced the bloc’s LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy. She declared that it would be a “new phase in our efforts to promote equality for LGBTIQ+”, aimed “at protecting LGBTIQ+ people from harmful practices and hate-motivated offences, empowering LGBTIQ+ communities”.

Buried within the bureaucratic language is one of the most radical proposals in modern policymaking — and millions of Europeans will soon live under its shadow. Promising to “facilitate exchanges of best practices”, the Commission urges every EU country to develop legal gender recognition procedures based on self-determination which are “free from age restrictions”.

In plain English, Brussels is encouraging member states to let children change their legal sex — with no minimum age at all. At present, there is no medical or political consensus on how to treat minors who experience discomfort with their bodies. A widening gulf has emerged between lobby groups demanding “gender self-determination” from any age and clinicians and parents’ groups urging caution. In Germany, parents can alter the sex markers on their children’s documents from the age of five, while those aged 14 may do so with parental consent. Meanwhile in Ireland, which also has full “gender self-identification”, teenagers aged 16 and 17 can apply to change the sex recorded on their birth certificates.

The drive to normalise the idea of the “trans child” comes despite medical authorities across Europe sounding alarms. In 2022, France’s National Academy of Medicine warned that the rise in youth gender distress is often socially mediated; that hormonal and surgical interventions carry serious and irreversible risks; and that it is impossible to distinguish a lasting trans identity from a transient phase of adolescence. Sweden halted such treatments for minors in 2021, Finland now permits them only in exceptional cases, and Norway’s health investigation board has deemed them experimental. The UK has gone further still, banning puberty blockers for under-18s outside clinical trials.

So why is Brussels sprinting in the opposite direction? Partly because this is not just policy — it’s posturing. In the minds of Commission officials, to question gender ideology is to stray dangerously close to the populist bogeymen: Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin. In response, the EU has attempted to signal its progressiveness by elevating identity politics. The LGBTIQ+ Strategy is less about human rights than about branding, a way of announcing to the world that Brussels is everything Moscow and Budapest are not.

Yet despite this moral theatre, the strategy itself is profoundly regressive. The Commission has recommended a ban on “conversion therapy”, a measure that sounds humane but functions as a gag on clinical honesty. Bans will stop therapists from asking why a young person feels distress in their sexed body; professionals risk sanction simply for encouraging reflection rather than instant affirmation. Given that gender distress is disproportionately experienced by children who later grow up to be same-sex attracted, the result is a tragic irony: the very kids who might once have grown up gay or lesbian are now being funnelled into a lifetime of hormones, surgeries and medical dependency. This is the ultimate conversion therapy — one that turns LGB youth into heterosexual simulacrums.

The strategy also declares that “LGBTIQ+ youth often face multiple forms of discrimination, experience prejudice, hate crimes and are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse.” But the real dangers to children — from ideologues and predators alike — have been amplified, not reduced, by Brussels. Teenagers are frequently sucked into digital echo chambers where the ordinary discomforts of adolescence are rebranded as something braver and trendier: being “trans”. Instead of engaging with the grassroots parents’ and safeguarding groups trying to protect children from the notion that their bodies need “fixing”, the Commission has chosen to double down, pledging even more funding to found a new LGBTIQ+ Policy Forum.

These are the predators and pathologies from which children most need protection, not the policies of Orbán or Putin. Yet none of them merit a mention in the Commission’s grand plan. Instead, Brussels congratulates itself on its “inclusive ecosystems” and moral superiority, leaving distressed children across Europe stranded between medical reality and the political pride of the Eurocrats.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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