A new report has revealed that over €220 million in EU funds have been used to advance “a radical gender identity agenda” over the last decade, including support in the EU for adopting a strategy calling for gender self-ID for children.
The investigation by MCC Brussels, a Hungarian backed think tank, says that research funding is being ‘weaponised’, and that EU-funded research “is being used as an advocacy tool to justify policy changes rather than for neutral academic inquiry” – pointing to €2.4 million in funding for research “Challenging the gender binary”, and a €3 million “MEN4DEM” study which critics say “treats traditional masculinity as a threat to democracy”.
The report, “Mission Creeps: How EU Funding and Activist NGOs Captured the Gender Agenda,” was authored by sociologist Ashley Frawley, and MCC Brussels say it is the first comprehensive investigation into how a small but powerful network of NGOs has shaped EU gender policy under the radar of public scrutiny – and that the funding has been used to promote “controversial policies” that “undermine women’s rights, child safeguarding, and national sovereignty – all without meaningful democratic debate”.
The analysis found that at least €40 million had gone to projects involving the “most radical” transgender advocacy groups – categorised as meeting one or more of the following characteristics: “take for granted and/or promote notions of gender radically divorced from sex, endorse concepts like non-binary gender identity, support the demotion of the significance of sex in national accounting and statistics.”
Spokeswoman for the Irish campaign group, The Countess, Laoise De Brún, said “all roads lead back to Europe when it comes to the capture of our institutions and government departments.”
“Gender Self-ID and Hate Speech laws, anti-Conversion Therapy are all manufactured not to solve actual societal problems but to force our society in a certain direction. They do not do what they say on the tin,” she said.
“For two long, our craven politicians have behaved like foie gras geese, feet nailed to the floor ingesting an endless diet of increasingly unhinged EU legislation that bears no connection to what the people of Ireland need or want.”
“NGOs have the same stranglehold of Ministers in Ireland as they do at a European level and they are all pushing the same drug. A heady new facet of human rights or a new frontier of progressivism which politician drink up eager to burnish their credentials and march in step with the liberal ruling elite. In reality all of these laws are an attack on the family, on childhood, on women’s rights, on free speech and on state sovereignty. We need a DOGE of these NGOs and how they operate in the EU and at home. Before it’s too late.”
Frank Furedi, Executive Director of MCC Brussels, commenting on the new report, said, “What we’re seeing from our research is the corruption of political processes. There’s a two-way-process where civil society is systematically bought off to provide the EU with legitimacy, whilst the EU becomes increasingly radicalised by ideologues claiming to represent civil society. This is an increasingly secretive political process where power is rendered invisible to ordinary people.”
Hellbound and Down 