The Council of Europe might claim to be focussed on human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but lately the Strasbourg-based human rights organisation has been championing a new cause: the propagation of gender identity ideology. A paper released earlier this month by the Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights should ring alarm bells across the continent. Human Rights and Gender Identity and Expression pulls no punches. The key recommendations are alarming, for example:

Recognise the identity of trans school-age children and students in school settings, regardless of their legal gender/sex, including by allowing them to use their own names and pronouns, dress as they wish, and participate in sports and other activities according to their gender identity and expression.

The zealotry doesn’t stop with children. According to the commissioner, ‘national policies governing participation in sports should start from a position where trans people can participate according to their gender identity’. Meanwhile, we are told that everyone should be able to use ‘sanitation facilities’ according to their ‘gender identity’. The lunacy extends, of course, to prisons, where ‘unless they disagree, trans people should, in principle, be detained in accordance with their gender identity’.

Who else might get asked where they would like to be accommodated after being sentenced to a term of imprisonment? These are special rules for special people. The issue paper – all 122 pages of it – puts trans people on a pedestal and plays down the fact that an overreach of our rights impinges on the rights of other groups. After visiting the UK in 2022, the commissioner asserted that, ‘she is of the opinion that arguments framing the protection of trans people as undermining or as being irreconcilable with women’s rights and acquired benefits should be firmly rejected’.

Europe deserves far better than gender identity ideology

Of course there is a conflict, even over the meaning of the word ‘woman’. But, on that note, the commissioner has bought into the ideology hook line and sinker. She relegated women to a subclass when she wrote, ‘ensuring that trans women benefit from the same protection as all other women extends the reach of these protections and does not diminish them for cisgender women’.

So who is this commissioner and why should we in the UK pay any attention to her issue paper? Dunja Mijatović was elected Commissioner for Human Rights in 2018 by the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly. Before then, she had worked for the Communications Regulatory Agency in her native Bosnia and Herzegovina and then became the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) representative on freedom of the media. Her CV is impressive and her work for the Council of Europe has covered the challenges faced by women, children and vulnerable groups, particularly those affected by conflict and displacement, and on the human rights consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But, at the same time, she appears to have a total blind spot about two fundamental problems caused by this unfounded idea that human beings have some soul-like gender identity that trumps biological sex. Firstly, if women cannot defend the boundaries of their sex class, then some men will take advantage. Secondly, vulnerable children can too easily fall prey to social media influencers who peddle the nonsensical idea that they can choose to grow up to be men or women, or perhaps something else.

Thanks to campaigning groups and courageous politicians, there is a sense that we in the UK have seen through the falsehoods. Our society is beginning to push back against the dangers to uphold the rights of women and the safeguarding of children, while still protecting the legal rights of trans people – like me – from harassment and discrimination.

While the UK has left the European Union we are, however, still members of the Council of Europe. Issue papers, not to mention resolutions of PACE (the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) impact us directly. Back in 2016 when self-identification of legal gender – another Mijatović recommendation – first raised its head in a House of Commons debate, Maria Miller MP cited an earlier Council of Europe resolution to justify the demands that her women and equalities committee was making on the government.

More recently, in 2022, PACE put the UK on the naughty step along with Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey when it passed a resolution that protested ‘hate against LGBTI people in Europe’. The accompanying report gave the reason: ‘In the United Kingdom, anti-trans rhetoric, arguing that sex is immutable and gender identities not valid, has also been gaining baseless and concerning credibility’.

The truth might hurt but it cannot be denied

The fact that sex is immutable and gender identity is merely an unprovable and unfalsifiable idea would presumably be considered hateful. The truth might hurt but it cannot be denied.

The grand project is ongoing. Up for debate in Strasbourg on 16 April is PACE’s committee report, ‘Freedom of expression and assembly of LGBTI people in Europe’. It calls on member states to support the holding of Pride marches and run LGBTI rights and diversity awareness campaigns. Meanwhile, of course, there is war in Europe, and ongoing threats to our way of life.

The UK can simply ignore Council of Europe resolutions, but it does beg the question why we continue to maintain our membership of an organisation that seems to have its priorities upside down. It’s not just the membership fee – the UK contribution this year to the Council of Europe budget comes in at €45,475,779 (£38,986,157) – but the credibility that our presence gives to these issue papers, reports and resolutions.

There is a possibility of change within the organisation. Mijatović’s term of office as human rights commissioner is coming to an end. Her successor is Michael O’Flaherty, an Irish human rights lawyer, who takes up the reins on 1 April. O’Flaherty once held the positions of chair in Applied Human Rights and co-director of the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham, so it would seem that he knows the UK well.

Maybe O’Flaherty can learn from the return to reality that we have seen in the UK and knock some sense into the corridors of Strasbourg. Europe deserves far better than gender identity ideology. But if he is unwilling, or unable, to make a difference, then maybe the Council of Europe is another European institution that we should walk away from.