Which way, euroterf? Dismantling sex fraud in the EU

Alessandra Asteriti is an Italian academic who got cancelled back when it really was a professional death sentence. She eventually ended up back home in Italy, where she has settled into a new teaching gig in Perugia (yes, that Perugia. The worst place in the world to be the closest witch at hand when everyone loses their collective marbles). Last week Alessandra spoke to me from her new life beyond the cancellation grave which, despite the unfair circumstances, seems like quite the heavenly upgrade, let’s be honest. Her witch-burning took place not in her native country, or even in TERF Island; she was hounded out of a university located up in the cold, dark north of Germany, where the weather, combined with the eternal diet of spuds n’ pork, are so depressing I can only imagine her new life is not the L her troon detractors had hoped it would be. You can read all about the saga below, which is similar to all terfcancellations — you just have to picture the dungareed, obese enbies and aggrieved AGPs with umlauts over their stupid fluorescent haircuts. Funnily enough, Alessandra’s dark past doesn’t come up in her new life because nobody bothered asking her why she left Germany. But the language difference has also helped in the effort to start over: it turns out that being multilingual is a great benefit when you’re a non-grata EU TERF, in that some of the nicest places to live have a pitifully low uptake of English, the vernacular of TERF Island and other anglospheric hotbeds of hatred. So please bear that in mind if you get cancelled, dear ëurotérven: you can start afresh in Lisbon, Seville, or Rome because your future employer won’t understand any of the results when they Google your name. I met Alessandra in real life once, at the Women’s Declaration International conference in a sweltering London July, where she delivered a rip-roaring presentation of her book on gender in international law, a fat and pricey academic tome that is apparently the only one of its kind in the world (buy it!)During our conversation, we spoke mostly about the legal shenanigans that got us here, and by “us” I mean 449.3 million EU citizens spread across 27 countries, all of which (except Hungary) are under one or another gender regime. Alessandra has famously disagreed with the approach of Sex Matters and others over which way is best to legally dismantle sex fraud, but happily, Europe’s 27 different legal setups regulating genderbollicks will allow us to test out everyone’s preferred strategy! Broadly speaking, though, it will have to be done one of two ways: legally or politically. Either we do what For Women Scotland did and take our tormentors to court (and hope the judges haven’t been afflicted by Non-Binary Niece Disorder, or enbicus niecocopathy), or we elect politicians who are ready to throw the whole sex falsification shitepile in the bin in one fell swoop (aka repeal). The latter sounds cheaper and more satisfying, and perhaps even more feasible than ever now that hardworking British gals and gays have laid the groundwork that make it possible to actually have conversations about this topic. Free movement of goods, capital, and autogynephilesGender recognition is not an EU competence but activists have been trying hard to twist it into one: a recent legal case called Mirin (which Alessandra wrote about, see below) successfully argued that self-ID is a right linked to free movement (free movement — of people, things and money — is the pillar of the whole EU project). I saw that the free movement framing was also recently used to claim that banning Pride marches in Hungary inhibits citizens’ ability to move freely around Europe because it’s discriminatory to be able to celebrate Pride in one place but not in another. According to some legal contortionist called Attila Szabó, “if a non-Hungarian EU citizen can enjoy the right to participate in an LGBTQ+ rights march in every EU country then she can not freely choose this given country” (scrape scrape). That’s a stretch, but Alessandra said that indeed, free movement is a slippery slope that could lead to all kinds of weird rights claims. For now, the Mirin judgement will be used by activists to fingerwag their governments but it probably won’t go much further than that. The EU has famously got its plate full with existential crises at the moment (even more than usual) and it seems like an inopportune moment to start bullying the Romanian government into mainstreaming perverts. Romania has an official pathway to legal gender change, but some countries are still operating according to the old informal nod-and-wink system. Some countries allow you to get your documents faked as long as you have undergone “sterilisation”, which was the way activists began to spin the “gender reassignment” requirement once they figured out its admittedly barbaric implications. Ireland is the only country, as far as I am aware, that has a system of gender recognition certificates similar to the UK, but it’s combined with de jure self-ID, which was won by stealth back in 2018. That Irish law is also called the Gender Recognition Act, which pisses me off anew every time I hear it because grá (sounds like graw) is the Irish word for “love”. It would obviously have been more practical to give the legislation a name different to the one in the neighbouring UK, as is usually done to avoid confusion, but the activists couldn’t pass up a chance to name their stupid legal subterfuge after such a nice word. Of course they did. It’s all word games, after all. There’s a whole ‘nother conversation I hope will one day be had about the way “gender” got translated, transliterated, or transposed into the legal texts of 23 different languages of the EU, and what it can tell us society’s understanding of the concept. Enjoy my conversation with Alessandra, and please share if you think it’s worth it. Paid subscriptions help keep me in Birkenstocks and Stella Artois. I deeply appreciate all of you disgraceful bigots who already pay for a subscription. Follow Alessandra on Twitter This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.peaked.news/subscribe