March 19, 2025 - 10:00am
Shouting about “trans rights” isn’t just a pastime for students and fading celebs; it’s a booming, taxpayer-funded industry. A new report reveals that over €221 million in EU funds have been quietly funnelled into gender identity activism over the past decade, keeping a group of NGOs and policy wonks comfortably in business. The report, by sociologist Ashley Frawley, lays out how a handful of well-placed activist groups have embedded their agenda into EU policy.
People across the world have been left reeling by the speed at which single-sex spaces have vanished and institutions and governments have embraced gender self-identification.
The details highlighted by Frawley are eye-opening. In Switzerland, parents whose daughter began identifying as trans at 13 but who refused to support medical transition were separated from her and ordered to hand over her identity documents to state officials. Meanwhile, in Portuguese public schools, children are allowed to “socially transition” without requiring parental consent. The report notes these policies were introduced under the previous government led by António Costa, who now serves as President of the European Council.
According to the report, the EU has sidelined governments, instead relying on NGOs to shape its gender agenda. “The result is a policy framework that prioritises the demands of activists over the needs and values of ordinary citizens,” it says. “It is a deliberate attempt to weaponise civil society to punish member states who do not follow suit by funnelling millions into NGO budgets that align with its ideological priorities. These groups then lobby the EU for the need for their own continued existence in a never-ending self-referential feedback loop.”
It’s no surprise that citizens across Europe have been blind-sided by rapid changes within public institutions. ILGA-Europe (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association), one of the EU’s favourite lobby groups, has explicitly urged politicians to keep their activities “out of the public eye whenever necessary”. Conveniently, the group received €16 million in EU funding, while its international arm raked in a staggering €65 million.
Yet despite this hefty financial backing, EU-funded gender identity lobbyists have spent years portraying themselves as plucky underdogs fighting a sinister, well-funded opposition. The European Parliamentary Forum, a group of MEPs, has repeatedly pushed the idea that “anti-gender” movements are financed by shadowy networks of religious extremists from Russia and the US. A 2021 report by the group breathlessly warned that “private individuals linked to far-right and libertarian causes in the US” were seeking to “actively influence European institutions.”
This paranoid narrative was enthusiastically parroted by the likes of EU Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatović, who bitterly complained that “ultra-conservative” forces were threatening women’s rights. Ironically, this was the same time her colleagues were busy passing laws that forced women to accept men who identify as trans in their spaces in line with the demands of lobbyists like ILGA.
None of this was happening organically. The same groups lobbying for these changes were the ones pocketing millions in EU funding and enjoying cosy meetings with politicians in Brussels. And this is to say nothing of the now axed USAID arrangements. The report concludes that there is now a growing public backlash against the EU’s gender policies, reflecting a “broader crisis of legitimacy”. “By allowing a small group of well-funded NGOs to shape its agenda,” Frawley writes, “the EU has alienated large sections of its population and fuelled a growing sense of resentment and distrust.”
Having left the EU, the UK now has more freedom to resist the demands of gender identity lobbyists. But these groups are well aware that media scrutiny is a threat to their ambitions for mainland Europe. A 2019 lobbying document from IGLYO (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation) and supportive law firms admitted that the limitation of press coverage and exposure had been “used to great effect” in other countries to push gender self-ID policies. But in the UK, an uncooperative press has been a major obstacle to their plans.
Even so, the fight isn’t easy. The real grassroots movement — the one not bankrolled by the EU — is made up of ordinary people refusing to let gender ideology be imposed from above. Parents battling school policies, veteran gay rights activists returning to fight for the movement they once built, women refusing to surrender their spaces: this is what bottom-up activism looks like.
The difference? They don’t have €221 million in taxpayer cash behind them.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
jo_bartosch
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeChrist, how can I get on this lucrative EU slush fund gravy train? I’m obviously in the wrong job.
Does anyone have a list of the sort of activism that Brussels will pay out handsomely for, and do you know who to ask / apply to?
Unherd readers might consider starting a co-op to see how much we can screw out of them. Anyone interested?
All these campaigning NGOs seem to have become essentially a grift, even if they didn’t all start out that way
As with Stonewall, if they ever achieve their objectives they move on to the next campaign to ensure their highly paid insiders continue to have secure employment.
As Private Eye say, “ker-chingg!”
Damn right. I want my share.
These people are animals.
Illinois School Staff Watched To Ensure Girls Changed In Front Of Trans-Identifying Boy, Mom Says:.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/illinois-school-staff-watched-to-ensure-girls-changed-in-front-of-trans-identifying-boy-mom-says
“Why is the EU funding the gender lobby?”
Because anything that undermines the family and weakens social cohesion increases the power and influence of the government. In this case the abhorrent EU.
Where is the mother lode, or mother ship? I mean why would the EU (also Canada, Australia, NZ and to an extent the UK) be doing this – where is the ideological drive and organisation coming from? Is it China? Is it the UN? Is it the US?
The much maligned – by the MSM et al – DOGE has identified that agencies such as Antifa and Stonewall were receiving American tax payer funding.
Is this all part of what is referred to as hybrid warfare?
It is a terrible thing to no longer be able to trust governments to act in the best interests of citizens, or police to police with out fear or favour, for the Mainstream Media to report without flagrant bias.
That is the question.
Transgender nonsense along with stratospheric immigration levels is happening in a number of Western countries simultaneously.
Why?
I only know that in 2012, Peter Sutherland,Migration Chief for the UN, gave a talk in the House of Lords in which he stated that it was the job of all EU leaders to undermine national homogeneity in order to ensure the success of globalisation and dynamic economies. I believe at the time Cameron was talking about reducing net migration to the 10s of thousands. Reference to this speech can be found on the BBC news website for June of that year.
The EU is fake and gay.
The EU is a pestilence and a cancerous abomination.
So nothing new really. And people only complain when the funding shifts from their pet ideology to someone else’s.
Even from the article this funding seems to be going to support a wider range of causes than just gender identity lobbyists. Is the objection to the cash going to this specific cause, or that it is siphoned off to support a whole range of causes which frankly do not need it anymore.
Why can’t the objection be to both? It’s not the role of govt to be involved either way. I don’t hear about pro-family groups being on the dole but maybe some exist. That would also be wrong.
I think it should be. Does the author?
According to the linked report:
What on earth is that?
The EU probably failed to spot that it’s a piss-take. Well, it must be, surely!
The article appears to start by answering its own question. The EU has always regarded itself as being beyond the law, and this is how it is done
it’s a booming, taxpayer-funded industry. — Well, yes; this is the nature of activism. It begins with a cause, grows into a business, and degenerates into a racket. People can decide for themselves what state we’re in.
It’s pretty simple these activities are funded by the CCP for the purposes of weakening social cohesion and sowing division against potentially hostile powers.
It’s straight out of the KGB playbook from the 60s which includes the same thing.
I think you are on to something. I suspect that they are able to wash their influence via the UN – a supra-national organisation in which they wield a great deal of influence. Ditto the WHO.
Reading the UN Agendas 2030 and 2050 shows how Western politicians are fully signed up whether their voters like it or not.
The answer is doubtlessly population management with a low European birth rate supplemented by cheap labour from North Africa.
Meanwhile there are people starving in the world…..
How is this not a massive betrayal of the public trust, elites forcing a new and foreign ideology on an unwilling populace!
I’m bisexual and these organisations have absolutely nothing to do with me or any other bisexual person. For one thing most bi people just assume it’s our own private business whom we partner with.
How they came to lump us in with the loonies I’ve no idea.