$242 Million EU Funds Used to Advance ‘Radical’ Gender Identity Agenda: Report

The desires of the array of nongovernmental organizations receiving the funding align, influence EU policymaking, according to think tank.

European Union flags fly outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels on March 1, 2023. Johanna Geron/Reuters

More than 221 million euros ($242 million) in European Union funds have been used to advance a “radical” gender identity agenda, according to a report.

On March 17, the think tank MCC Brussels released a report that calculated that millions in EU funds have been given to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote gender identity ideology over the past decade.

Report author and sociologist Ashley Frawley said the findings show that activists have played a direct role in drafting EU policies.

Frawley said that the policies, originally designed to protect women and girls, have been reshaped to prioritize gender identity.

They have been made without “broader public consultation and with an air of disregard for the principle of subsidiarity and national sovereignty,” she said.

The conservative think tank has been critical of EU policies and has published reports by experts on free speech, digital laws, and net-zero requirements.

Gender ideology is a concept in which “gender identity” refers to the belief that a person may have been born in “the wrong body,” as opposed to the view that humans are either male or female and that biological sex is immutable.

However, numerous LGBT and women’s groups say gender self-identification is encroaching on the privacy and rights of women and same-sex attracted people.

Regarding the millions of euros spent on the gender identity agenda, the report stated, “This shift has been driven not by democratic debate or public demand, but by a powerful network of EU-funded NGOs that have embedded their priorities deep within EU policy making.”

The data was collected from the Financial Transparency System (FTS) for groups focused on or generally supportive of gender identity that received funding between 2014 and 2023.

The largest share, 64.95 million euros (about $71 million), was allocated solely to ILGA Worldwide, a leading gender identity advocacy group.

Other beneficiaries included ILGA Worldwide’s European arm, ILGA-Europe (16 million euros), the international LGBT organization IGLYO (6 million euros), Transgender Europe (4.6 million euros), the lesbian feminist and intersectional network (6.2 million euros), and Organisation Intersex International Europe (1.2 million euros).

“ILGA and ILGYO are just two examples of LGBT groups that have made transgender ideology central to their remit, but even they engage in important activities that improve the lives of many,” the report stated.

“However, while combatting discrimination against minority groups is important, the demands of these groups demonstrate considerable mission creep and encompass an injunction to accept a particular and controversial worldview.”

The report said that an additional 26 million euros (about $28 million) has been spent on activist-driven research promoting gender identity ideology.

Frawley told The Epoch Times that while it looks as if the money is going to a huge range of causes, what these organizations are doing is “radically” redefining gender.

“They’ve redefined gender to have a very tenuous relation with sex, and then they privilege gender over sex,” she said.

Self-Identification at Any Age

According to the report, the EU’s LGBT Equality strategy 2020–2025, while not legally binding, “enshrines one of the most radical demands of transgender activists”: the principle of self-identification at any age.

The strategy affirms that “the commission will foster best practice exchanges between member states on how to put in place accessible legal gender recognition legislation and procedures based on the principle of self-determination and without age restrictions.”

“A lot of these policies are essentially verbatim the desires of NGOs,” Frawley said.

“I don’t think we should necessarily blame the NGOs,” she said, noting that this is the nature of such organizations.

However, she accused the EU of “soft governing” as they’re “paying these groups to lobby themselves, to target countries whose values they don’t like.”

She said that activists have mainstreamed, for example, same-sex attraction to be “same-gender attraction.”

The EU-funded ILGA-Europe has created a “Rainbow Map” showing to what degree each country lives up to its ideals.

This, she said, feeds that all back into the EU to “shame” a variety of countries that are said to be lagging in terms of their preferred policies, that is, not including gender identity in sex education.

None of the organizations mentioned in the report responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

“One of the main instruments to protect and enshrine the rights and values in the Treaties is the CERV programme—the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme,” a spokesperson for the European Commission told The Epoch Times. “It was agreed by the Member states and the European Parliament and aims to promote equality and combat inequality and discrimination having strict evaluation procedures of the proposals made by independent experts.”

The spokesperson said that the funding is “provided in full transparency and in line with the Financial Regulation.”