Photo: Silar on Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
The European Commission has embarked on a phoney “consultation” for its LGBT strategy for 2026-2030. Under the guise of collecting evidence, the process more likely serves to rubber stamp predetermined outcomes.
In a less ideologically-orientated society, a consultation process would have indeed meant getting feedback from the populace on a controversial topic before a policy is drawn up, so that the politicians responsible would be able to carefully weigh the evidence and develop a strategy that addresses actual needs.
But this is not the case in the EU anno 2025. For its LGBT policy, the European Commission has opted for an ideology-based approach. The consultation starts from the premise that alternative sexual orientations are unfairly discriminated against, and asks for evidence to this effect. This used to be called circular reasoning, not conducive to a functioning democratic society or good government. It is, in fact, very similar in approach to the late Pope Francis’s synodal process that allegedly involved the view of the people, but only invited certain people to speak in support of a document prepared in advance, which was then only finetuned by the participants.
The result is predictable. In practice, the Commission calls on homosexuals and transgender people to confirm that they experience inequality. As all submissions that are approved are public, not many would dare offer evidence that is not called for, as it could unleash the wrath of pressure groups and could expose those who submitted it to harassment, as was the case with lesbian professor Kathleen Stock.
The way in which the European Commission frames the discourse on sexual orientation is as questionable as the consultation process itself. LGBTIQ is a social construct. It is neither an organisation nor a coherent category, but a neo-Marxist linguistic descprition of reality that wants us to believe that there exists such a clearly defined segment of society that presents itself as one. Also, it suggests that there is a physical basis for this ‘community’ and its orientation, even adding intersex to the mix, an extremely rare physical condition, which is totally unrelated to the other five, which are psychological and social perceptions of personal identity or sexual orientation.
That the EU Commission has opted for this sham consultation process to justify its policy is a sign of that latter’s vulnerability. If the normalisation of LGBT were desirable, wholesome, and based on facts, the European Commission should not be afraid to open up its consultation process for all evidence. The Commission also went well beyond its policy’s initial focus on hate-motivated harassment and violence, transforming it into an attempt to normalise LBGT and ban conversion practices. The question arises: why is there no intent to ban the most controversial conversion practice, transgender surgery, altogether within its borders? An expensive lifelong medical treatment with associated complications and the removal of healthy body parts, seems to be the most radical conversion therapy of all.
One could also ask: is such a strategy even necessary, considering that there are already existing laws in the member states that protect LGBT people: the need to have legal means to prevent the hate-motivated harassment and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people is something that all EU countries subscribe to. Why more bureaucracy and yet another expensive strategy?
The EU Commission would do well to have another look at the desirability of its premise that aims to normalise LGBT in countries of the European Union and abroad. The European Parliament has poured vast amounts of money into promoting the mainstreaming of LGBT through the political agenda of Sustainable Development Goals in many countries that are averse to this normalisation for cultural and religious reason.
The issue also arises whether normalising LGBT promotes medical health, prosperity and social cohesion. Let us, for a moment, put the ideology aside and consider the actual facts.
Research figures from many Western countries, take liberal Scotland as an example, show that the health status of LGBT people in general is considerably worse than that of non-LGBT individuals, and this is particularly true for those who consider themselves non-binary or transgender. There is mounting evidence that men with a ‘minority sexual orientation’ experience an elevated risk of premature death from multiple causes. For some time, it was thought that these health risks only applied to homosexual men and transgenders. Last year, however, extensive research among more than 100,000 nurses by Harvard University proved incontrovertibly that sexual minority women have a considerably lower life expectancy than women who live in a monogamous relationship with a man. The researchers found that bisexual women’s lifespan was 37% shorter, while that of lesbian women 20% shorter than heterosexual women’s in general.
This should not have come as a surprise. Already in 2017, the American Journal of Public Health published findings by the University of Washington. Using two-year survey data of 33,000 heterosexual and gay and bisexual (LGB) adults aged 50 and older from a probability-based study of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers reported noticeable health disparities between LGB and heterosexual adults. Lesbian and bisexual older women were more likely than heterosexual older women to suffer from chronic health conditions, experience sleep problems, and engage in behaviours like excesse drinking. In general, lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) older adults were found to be in poorer health than heterosexuals, specifically in terms of higher rates of cardiovascular disease, weakened immune systems, and low back or neck pain.
Even research by the Dutch Rutgers Institute, a government sponsored and ideologically aligned partner of the present European Commission, points to the difference in health outcomes for people with an alternative sexual orientation.
It would be ideological blindness if the European Commission rashly concluded that these poor health outcomes for LGBT individuals can be put down to illegal discrimination. Even more so, it is an illusion that these outcomes would change if only all Europeans adopted the EU Commission’s views on minority sexual orientations.
It should certainly not be the intent of the Commission to make EU citizens surrender their cultural traditions on the normativity of traditional marriage, or to dictate which of our religious values on sexuality are acceptable and which no longer are. The Commission should rather base its LGBT strategy (if it must have one) on the psychological, physical and social components inherent to a minority sexual orientation, rooted in biological reality.