This article by our expert network member Anne Kalvig was originally published in the Norwegian cultural and opinion magazine Subjekt on 9 February 2026. Photo: Anne Kalvig/Morten Kvanvik Rønne
On January 29, the Council of Europe voted in favor of a ban on “conversion therapy” by an overwhelming majority. However, fewer than one third of the elected delegates to the Council were present and cast their votes. When only a minority of the 306 parliamentarians from the Council’s 46 member states prioritize fulfilling the mandate to which they were elected, questions must be raised about the legitimacy of the Council of Europe’s resolution.
Athena Forum is a European think tank established in the autumn of 2025 to safeguard and promote sex-based rights in legislation, policy and society, and to counter the misrepresentation of such rights in public debate. The indoctrination of the political elite regarding gender has been massive over several decades. Athena Forum has nevertheless demonstrated that mobilization is effective in a Europe that must rediscover legitimacy and public support for political decisions. We have only just begun, and a central concern is to strip the concept of “gender identity” of its aura of factuality and piety.
A fundamental problem in the case of conversion therapy is that the vast majority of Council delegates do not know the difference between, nor can they explain, “gender identity” versus sexual orientation, both of which are included in the recently adopted resolution. This also reflects the Norwegian situation: legislation adopted concerning “gender identity” lacks an objective definition, delimitation, legitimacy and grounding, simply because politicians have been content to accept that a fiction (the claim to be something one is not) should receive the same protection as facts, such as when someone falls in love with a person of the same sex.
This fact–fiction inversion paradigm has been prepared over decades through “soft power” mechanisms. Lobbying by powerful NGOs has masked claims and principles as human rights. The Yogyakarta Principles are among the most decisive in this regard. Large sums of money and reprogramming initiatives have functioned as a gigantic machinery directed at supranational as well as national political assemblies: falsehoods have been presented as truth, until the social consequences, and the lack of intellectual capacity and willingness among politicians and others, have removed all obstacles to the introduction of a new world order in which fictions and notions are adopted as truth.
“Gender identity” as one’s “true” sex is one such core fiction. Men with a fetish for women’s clothing were and remain the pioneers here, and through soft power mechanisms gained an army of willing helpers. “Gender identity” carries with it misogyny and homophobia. The fiction that reality can be changed through counterfactual declarations (“I am a woman”) breaks with established legal principles in Norway, as well as with reason and scientific thinking. Norway’s supreme legislative body, the Storting, may not enact laws based on incorrect or misleading information presented to the Storting or its bodies (Constitution § 84).
“Gender identity” is therefore incorrect and misleading information, because it has been presented and handled as fact, as something other than what it is – namely a fiction, a subjective notion and belief in something that is not true. It is not possible to literally feel like something one is not, nor can feelings replace established material reality and the categories that describe it. Sexual attraction is a verifiable feeling with consequences for those concerned, a minority entitled to protection against discrimination.
“Gender identity,” protected as fact in the Anti-Discrimination Act in 2013 rather than as belief, is however a category error that it has since become a “sin” to point out. “Gender identity” as a claim collapses into circular reasoning when defined and requires that society abandon established understandings of reality and the laws of physics. Nevertheless, soft power networks have managed to implement this – a declaration of bankruptcy for women’s sex-based rights, for same-sex attracted individuals, for the protection of children and young people, for medical practice and for scientific reasoning.
Resolutions adopted by the Council of Europe are used as guidelines for legislation in European countries. Now it is expected that more and more countries will criminalize parents and therapists who object to the fiction of “gender identity.” Criminalization is recommended by the Council of Europe as the response if delusions about being born in the wrong body (having received a gendered soul that the body must be adapted to) are not immediately affirmed and supported by one’s surroundings. In Norway, as is well known, parents and others face up to six years’ imprisonment if they do not affirm children’s and young people’s beliefs about this, which they are, among other things, indoctrinated with in public schools.
Athena Forum has produced several fact-based reports, analyses, statements and campaigns concerning sex-based rights in relation to European policy and legislation. This is work for an understanding of rights grounded in material reality, where facts are distinguished from fiction and belief – crucial to upholding modern legal principles and democratic values.
Ideas about and belief in being a sex one is not must be protected under freedom of religion or belief, and not as alternative facts that nullify established facts. Men are not women, regardless of what they say, imagine, or believe, and consequently cannot override women’s rights to freedom from discrimination as a sex by invading women’s language, spaces and rights.
Norway has the world’s most radical and reality-detached legislation in the field of sex, and an extreme absence of open public discourse on the subject. Dissenting voices who remind society of women’s and children’s rights and needs are ridiculed, demonized, labeled fascist and Nazi, with loss of position, networks, income and employment as consequences for individuals. For society, the loss is more extensive: a continued dismantling of institutions, freedom of expression and democracy.
Professor Benedikte Moltumyr Høgberg recently argued in Subjekt that politicians in positions of power – such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs – must not declare their own population as enemies, as this violates the Constitution. The inclusion of “gender identity” in the Anti-Discrimination Act in 2013, as the basis for the 2016 law on change of legal gender, as a key element in the 2023 law against conversion therapy, and now in a resolution from the Council of Europe, is likewise in conflict with the Constitution – both because the laws are drafted on a counterfactual basis and because critical voices are branded as enemies and extremists.
When reality itself is labeled hateful and fascist, we understand that we have a long way to go before disinformation and polarization can be reduced rather than increased. Because sex is the most fundamental building block of human existence, it is imperative to return to reality in the description and handling of sex. One place to begin is to require that politicians distinguish sex from “gender identity,” and facts from fictions.