After nearly 30 years of neglecting women’s health, the European Parliament is about to vote on a resolution that could finally address the chronic neglect of women’s specific health needs and persistent inequalities between women and men in healthcare.
The last time Parliament comprehensively addressed this topic was in 1999, when it adopted a resolution responding to a European Commission study on women’s health. For a brief moment, the issue became visible on the European agenda: the Commission produced research, Parliament debated it, and the Council issued recommendations. And then the subject disappeared.
In the following decades, Parliament addressed individual health issues affecting women, from breast cancer to cardiovascular disease, but women’s health as a distinct and comprehensive policy field largely disappeared from the European agenda. Where it did receive broader political attention, the focus increasingly shifted towards sexual and reproductive health and rights. One prominent example is the European Parliament’s June 2021 resolution on “the situation of sexual and reproductive health and rights in the EU, in the frame of women’s health” – a resolution on women’s health that nevertheless struggled to define its subject. The text described “transgender men and non-binary persons” as undergoing pregnancy, while failing to acknowledge that transgender men are female and that non-binary persons capable of becoming pregnant are likewise female, and therefore require female-specific reproductive healthcare. It also demanded that sex education curricula cover various gender identities and conflated the right to bodily integrity with the satisfaction of a desire to alter one’s body through cosmetic surgery.
So much for decades of proclamations about gender equality. For more than two decades, women’s health received no sustained, comprehensive attention as a policy field in its own right. Instead, the subject steadily narrowed. And today, when Parliament finally returns to it comprehensively, it does so under a different label: “Gender inequalities in health, specifically as regards gender-specific conditions.”
Parliament’s failed return to women’s health
The resolution, to be voted on 16 September, starts from a well-founded premise: medicine has long been male-centred, women have been under-represented in clinical trials, and conditions such as menopause have been under-diagnosed. It notes the low inclusion of pregnant and breastfeeding women in clinical trials, the years-long delay in diagnosing endometriosis, and the tiny proportion of global research funding directed towards women’s health. It refers to sex-specific diseases affecting women and differences in male and female anatomy; it speaks of women of reproductive age and identifies maternity, abortion and menopause as women-specific issues. It calls for sex-disaggregated data and greater recognition of sex differences in medical research, diagnosis and treatment. It also calls on the European Commission to develop a European Women’s Health Strategy with “clear, public, measurable and binding targets”.
However, instead of building a rigorous, evidence-based framework centred on women, the resolution is also permeated by scientifically unsubstantiated claims, demands that go far beyond health and medicine, and mutually exclusive terms and concepts that make its own recommendations impossible to implement.
While the resolution repeatedly acknowledges women as a sex and recognises crucial differences between the sexes, it simultaneously introduces an entirely different vocabulary, referring to “gender-diverse people”, the “menstruating population” and “pregnant and breastfeeding individuals”, while lamenting the lack of “non-binary people” in clinical trials. It repeatedly overlays sex with gender identity, including in its claim that obstetric and gynaecological violence disproportionately affects persons who identify as transgender. Most disturbingly, it treats what it refers to as “transition-related healthcare” as analogous to women’s reproductive healthcare.
The compromise wording of a “sex- and gender-informed perspective” does nothing to resolve the inherent contradiction between materially based and identity-based approaches to health embedded in the text.
The sex-specific medicine that the resolution demands requires healthcare and research to distinguish between females and males. Yet the framework based on gender identity and expression that the text also advocates introduces the opposite approach: an entirely different classification system based on subjective identity, thereby undermining the very possibility of consistent sex-based research, planning and interventions.
Requiring medical research, statistics and healthcare to apply both frameworks simultaneously makes the resolution unworkable. It is like asking an engineer to build a bridge using the laws of physics while also accounting for biblical miracles in the calculations.
The text of the proposed resolution – already adopted by the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee in June 2026 – originated in a draft report by Irish MEP Billy Kelleher of the liberal Renew group. Its own declaration of input provides insight into who helped shape it. Among the organisations from which the rapporteur received input were the trans advocacy organisations ILGA-Europe and TGEU. No comparable independent women’s rights organisations, or organisations advocating specifically for sex-based approaches to women’s health and medicine, appear in the declaration.
The draft was subsequently subjected to an extensive parliamentary negotiation process, with 516 amendments tabled by MEPs. More than 100 compromise amendments were negotiated between the political groups and incorporated into the text adopted by the committee. Amendments seeking greater terminological clarity and a separation of women’s health from transgender issues did not survive the process. At the same time, numerous amendments reinforcing the conflation of women’s health with transgender advocacy demands – and, in doing so, undermining women’s equal rights and non-discrimination in healthcare – became part of the proposed resolution.
The consequences could extend to clinical trials, diagnosis, screening, reproductive healthcare, drug research and the assessment of disease risk, with potentially harmful effects on everyone, including people who identify as transgender.
Dangerous to women, lesbians and gays, and vulnerable youth
Particular attention should be paid to a set of demands buried in this resolution on women’s health. The text calls on the Commission and Member States to ensure “trans-specific healthcare”, remove medical requirements hindering “access to legal recognition”, and facilitate “exchanges of best practices between the Member States” in this area under the LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030. It also condemns conversion practices in relation to gender identity and/or gender expression and urges the Commission to adopt a recommendation calling on Member States to ban them.
For vulnerable young people who believe themselves to have been “born in the wrong body” – including children who have experienced sexual violence and bodily dissociation, autistic children, and young lesbians and gays – this has serious implications. If questioning or exploring a child’s declared gender identity can be treated as conversion, while so-called gender affirmation and transition are treated as healthcare, young people who do not conform to sex stereotypes risk being directed towards transition, while exploration of their sexuality, distress or rejection of sexist norms becomes professionally or legally suspect.
While the proposed resolution is presented as a long-overdue intervention on health inequalities, it does not restore women to the centre of health policy. Instead, it takes a field in which women have been neglected for decades and repackages it through an identity-based framework in which the subject itself disappears.
If the report is meant to address women’s health inequalities arising from sex differences in symptoms, diagnosis and treatment response, then classifying women as one group within an open-ended set of “gender” categories makes the problem harder, not easier, to address. And if the aim is to rectify structural inequalities women face in healthcare because their health needs are viewed as less significant than men’s, the report makes that aim impossible to achieve by undermining the very basis on which those inequalities can be identified and addressed.
A women’s health resolution before EU decision-makers has thus been turned into a vehicle for advancing EU policy on “legal gender recognition”, “transition” and “conversion practices” in relation to gender identity, with consequences extending far beyond women’s health.
After twenty-seven years of waiting, this should have been a landmark moment for women’s health. Instead, a historic opportunity to correct decades of neglect risks producing the opposite result: a resolution which, though non-binding on EU Member States, could further undermine women’s health, distort medical research and ultimately cause harm.