How Europe Lost the Plot on Women’s Rights

[IwantToRetire]

If you live in Europe, your country is likely a member of the Council of Europe, a 46-member body founded in 1949 that ostensibly promotes democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. The council has had a profound impact on international law through frameworks including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, which are now embedded in the laws of European states.

The council’s laws, unlike those promulgated by the better-known European Union, are optional, but they are nonetheless sweeping in their cultural influence. Member states can sign on (and most do), but there is no mechanism to enforce compliance, which makes the council’s influence easily overlooked by the public. But it is closely watched by lobbyists who know that what fails at the national level can often be pushed from the top down by international institutions.

One of the council’s latest initiatives, the Gender Equality Strategy 2024-2029, should have been a clear roadmap for women’s rights. Instead, it is a fog of ideological confusion, where the meaning of “gender” drifts between reality and ideology, leaving women’s rights at the mercy of wordplay. ...

Article in full at https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-europe-lost-the-plot-on-womens-rights/

I’m intrigued - could you expand on that?
I agree with what you’ve said, but I’m also concerned about where Europe is headed.

I find it quite depressing that many people seem to think women have to choose between sex based rights and protections and rights such as abortions and female healthcare.

Btw, in the European country I live they spend more on innovations in trans healthcare than innovations for female healthcare. Says it all really....

Maddy lives in Spain, I believe . Where straight men confess to claim to be ‘trans’ in order to attain preferential treatment intended to benefit women.

Here is a related article by Kathleen Stock to the point I posted above; that academics from the US are now moving abroad and this might influence the debate on TR.

https://unherd.com/2025/04/the-invasion-of-americas-cringe-academics/

I don't know all of the academics mentioned (saw some of the names in another thread but don't know their work). At one point Doc Stock seems to say that this is now the reverse of what GC academics like her experienced, and they did not all leave the country, even if they had to leave their institutions.

"Or, slightly less portentously, it’s just business as usual for the relationship between government and universities, except this time with overlords who don’t force you to list your pronouns but punish you for doing it instead. What a truly independent, politically diverse intelligentsia might look like is as much of an irrelevant mystery as it ever was; for what would the point be in funding that?"

And then she criticizes that there are not enough academics who work on their concepts regardless of which political wind is the mainstream.

I'm not sure that this works, because the motivation behind the state-led changes to academic work in the US is now part of a bigger, even more sinister concept of politics.
On the other hand, as I read in the FWR forum, the politics behind the TRA movement is also much more influential and bigger than it seems in the first place, with the Denton playbook and all.

The EU is probably the safest place to be a woman, with all of its downsides

This looks like it is related:

LGB Rights in Europe. What's gone wrong?
LGB Alliance Co-founder Bev Jackson talks with former member of the Austrian Parliament, Faika El-Nagashi, about her politics, activism and what is happening to LGB Rights in Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/@LGBAlliance

A depressingly low bar.