BRUSSELS — One of the most toxic culture wars in the U.K. and U.S. is being brought to Brussels.
Rights groups argue that debates about gender issues are being imported from the anglophone world into EU politics, with right-wing groups choosing to stoke arguments about transgender people in hopes of dividing the left.
Conservative Christian organizations in the U.S. “saw that there was a fight happening there,” said Neil Datta, executive director and founder of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF). “A fight that could be useful to them.”
The EPF has been tracking the rise of what they call the “anti-gender” movement across Europe, and found that hundreds of groups targeting so-called gender ideology — including think tanks, church-run advocacy groups, political parties and media — had raised $1.18 billion between 2019 and 2023, up from $81 million between 2009 and 2018.
The groups cover a range of policies from abortion to sex education, with transgender rights making up a large part of the lobbying.
LGBTQ+ groups argue the mainstream politicization of such debates is part of a rolling back of fundamental rights, while gender-critical groups believe that recognizing transgender people’s identities undermines women.
“It’s one of those subjects that is easy politically to attack because we’re talking about a small community of people that are widely misunderstood,” said Cianán Russell, senior policy officer at ILGA-Europe, the European branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
“It absolutely is our perception that there are more anti-trans actors getting access to spaces in Brussels and that the types of spaces that they are able to access are more institutionalized,” said Russell, adding that at least five events have taken place in the European Parliament in the past year.
One of those included the “Seventh Transatlantic Summit,” a two-day event at the Parliament earlier this month that saw speakers “mock transgender people,” according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a U.S.-based NGO.
The summit organizers, Political Network for Values, told POLITICO’s EU Influence newsletter that it is “an international network that brings together politicians who share values.”
A spokesperson added: “Among those values is respect for the dignity of every human being. We would never intentionally mock a person, regardless of their condition. On the other hand, using objective data from science in relation to the issue of ‘transgenderism’ is in no way mockery.”
Speakers included Rodrigo Iván Cortés, founder of Mexico’s National Front for the Family, who has been convicted of gender-based political violence against a transgender U.S. representative.
Another was the British Catholic priest Benedict Kiely, who the Global Project said compared transgender identity to people identifying as animals. Kiely declined to comment.
Other events at EU institutions include a December visit by Chris Elston, also known as Billboard Chris, an Australian anti-trans influencer, who spoke at the Parliament after being invited by an Alternative for Germany lawmaker, Christine Anderson.
MCC Brussels, a prominent think tank linked to the Hungarian government, co-hosted a panel at the end of last year in the Parliament titled “The Trans Ideology Threat,” hosted by Fidesz lawmaker András László, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The MCC event accused the EU of being “addicted to gender ideology,” despite what the organizers describe as an “an enormous backlash” across the EU. “For European elites, trans ideology is a key ‘EU value’ which no one is allowed to question.”
MCC spokesperson John O’Brien said: “Far from it being that the right are stomping over trans rights, the truth is that the trans lobby train has been steamrolling over the rights of women and girls for years.”
From the US to Europe
The EPF’s Datta said the heated debate around trans issues has largely been imported to Brussels. “You find that this contestation takes place in certain ways in certain countries, like in the U.S or the U.K., where it’s become the most toxic. In Belgium, it’s not like that at all.”
Transgender peoples’ rights have been in the spotlight in the U.K. in recent months after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex — a key argument of the “gender-critical” movement.
The ILGA Rainbow Map, which monitors the legal and policy landscape for LGBTQ+ people across Europe, saw the U.K. drop from its highest spot in 2019 to 22 out of 49 countries in 2025.
In the U.S., the debate is driven mostly by the religious right, said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project.
“The American groups behind Project 2025 [a right-wing wishlist for the second Donald Trump term] and their allies are increasingly working with European political figures and think tanks to target and dehumanize the trans community,” she said.
“Cruelly stripping human rights protections from trans people is the first phase of their global imperative to erase the LGBTQ+ community entirely and take back the hard-won rights protections from women across the world,” Via said.
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a gender-critical activist who spoke at the Parliament in November as part of MCC’s event, told Influence at the time that transgender rights are “very much not a grassroots movement, but a top-down, well-funded movement.”
And she pushed back on the idea that a backlash against transgender rights is being deliberately pushed by conservative activists who see it as an opportunity to splinter the left. “I think it’s the other way around. I think it’s the arrogance of the left and the contempt that the left has for women that has enabled women to leave the left.”
Fight over trans rights comes to Brussels
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