An urgent message from Athena Forum

[Justme56]

Write to your PACE delegates to clarify misconceptions about conversion therapy bans and urge them to vote NO on the upcoming resolution to criminalise non-affirmative care.
In December 2025, the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination of the PACE unanimously adopted a draft resolution calling for a Europe-wide ban on “conversion practices” — aimed at changing, repressing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
The resolution was tabled by Kate Osborne, a UK Labour MP and member of the Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group.

• The framing of the resolution intentionally conflates sexual orientation with gender identity and gender expression. They are completely different, and arguably incompatible, concepts. Gender identity and gender expression are highly contested ideological beliefs that deny biological reality and claim that children can be born in the wrong body.
• The resolution calls for criminal sanctions, national legislation, monitoring mechanisms and coordination with civil society organisations to enforce this framework — effectively criminalising mental‑health professionals, educators, parents and social workers who do not affirm a child’s self-declared trans identity.
• It proposes mandatory training and public awareness campaigns across a wide range of institutions — including healthcare services, social work, education, religious institutions, law enforcement, the judiciary and prosecutors — embedding this belief system into state-funded services, professional standards and school curricula.

Read our comprehensive briefing on the transactivist push to extend “conversion therapy” bans to gender identity and gender expression here. This ideological overreach must be removed. Ahead of the vote on 29 January 2026, MPs in the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) need to hear from you.

Just adding this here.

https://x.com/athenaforumeu/status/2010635632456896930?s=46&t=ZX_bLozRqm8etdGICMcAvA

Just been looking at the official results. Very poor attendance of less than one third of members and of the ones actually there ONE IN TEN were from UK, all but one voting in favour of the resolution. 😡

I am just a woman with a search engine so claim no expertise, but I don't think that this is a Council of Europe decision as such. For that it would have to go forward to the Council of Ministers as a recommendation. It is a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly.

The Assembly adopts three types of texts: Recommendations (to the Committee of Ministers), Resolutions (which express its own viewpoint) and Opinions (on membership applications, draft treaties and other texts submitted by the Committee of Ministers).

Yes, the Tory (Sir Christopher Chope) was the one who voted against. The amendments were voted down except, it seems, for amendment 2 which I think is:

In the draft resolution, after paragraph 7, insert the following paragraph: "The Assembly affirms that a conversion practices ban should not limit supportive interventions by parents or by qualified clinicians providing healthcare services to adults, young people and/or children, nor limit the independence of those interventions, so long as the interventions do not attempt to change, repress, or suppress people."

There is also an Oral sub-amendment 2 which passed, but I don't know what that is and my schoolgirl french wasn't good enough to work it out from the live feed!

https://pace.coe.int/pdf/ea14b9f3eae8469f52283f42402a08b385677722901a4e95524b678e9192c841/doc.%2016315%3A%20compendium%20of%20written%20amendments%20(revised%20version).pdf

Unfortunately, I see that as the most likely outcome too. The fact that the PIE affair was a lesson not learnt (and worth remembering that we're not talking about the so-called 'far Left' of the party by any means there) is a worrying sign. But more positively, I don't think the back-burner is going to work for them. Women will not shut up about this.

Can we try to remember that the Right were in power for the 14 crucial years in which Gender Identitarianism took root & blossomed, largely by lying?
This is not a Left/ Right issue, it's much, much worse than that, it's a willfully blind & misogynistic sentimentalism on the part of politicians of every stripe.

Edited for dyslexia, some may remain.

Without making any assertion about Chope's motives for blocking that particular Friday bill, the outcome was that the Govt of the day adopted it and shepherded it through Parliament, ensuring that it was properly drafted and scrutinised.

Again, without making any assertion about Chope's motives, the eventual outcome was better for women.

I'm not going to disagree with that. However, the issues are in the open now; both sides have been informed about the dangers to women and children. The right has chosen to backtrack and the left has chosen to double down.

Some of the Right. A large swathe of it has no settled position & it is to that inchoate all-things-to-all-men (term used advisedly) blob that Kemi Badenoch's rats are jumping.

If anyone imagines that women's rights or safeguarding are even secondary priorities for Tice & Farage, I can only assume that they're in the market for bridges.

They don't need to prioritise women's rights or safeguarding at all. They just need to sit back with a pint and a cigar and watch the left dismantle them.

[Cough] 2010 to 2024? What Kate Osborne has just achieved at the CoE was Conservative policy for years. Remember Caroline Nokes? Maria Miller? Theresa May? Ben Everitt? Crispin Blunt? Nicola Richards? Even Boris Johnson after so tardily (2022) scenting the winds of public opinion re conversion therapy & female sports, still extended his support to Jamie "Arrest-Onset Transgender Identity" Wallis.

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this issue is Left/ Right we will lose. It is far more insidious than that.

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this issue is Left/ Right we will lose. It is far more insidious than that.

This. The Telegraph, which generally has been pretty decent on the topic, of course wants to present gender as a 'Leftie' idea. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But it's a half-truth at best, as we've all seen that the Tories can contain plenty of gender fans too. But the old Left v Right labels don't really work any more; the days when Labour supported the workers, and the Tories supported the 'boss class' have largely gone. Just ask Sandie Peggie. So now it seems to come down, let's not pre-judge people as Left or Right, putting people in boxes is what caused half this problem. People like Joanna Cherry and Neal Hanvey (both, tellingly, no longer in office) who have stood up for what's right, deserve support.

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this issue is Left/ Right we will lose. It is far more insidious than that.

Again I don't disagree with this, but I have literally just watched Labour and Liberal parties vote for this resolution and the Tory party vote against. And we all know which way the Green party would have voted

I don't disagree with you either, @FallenSloppyDead2 , but I wouldn't be surprised if half of those MPs didn't really know or understand what they were voting on anyway, judging by the level of understanding we tend to see from politicians.

Thing is, there's a tranche in the PLP that isn't at all on board with Osborne et al but so long as the media's more concerned with Starmer's leadership, & now Sideshow Burnham (all those journos prattling about Burnham's massive % of the vote should drill down to see just how few people in all of Greater M'cr ever voted for him) they go on privileging Party unity over all else.

BTW, I don't count the hyper-individualists of the LDs & Greens as Left Parties at all.

I imagine that is true, despite Athena's valiant efforts. However, the voting went almost exclusively along political grouping lines so it has been orchestrated at a higher level.

How MPs come to be voting reps at the CoE is an interesting question. Are they nominated by the Party Leader? By the govt? Do MPs elect them? Do they volunteer? Is there some other mechanism?

Sadly I think this is true.

I honestly think many of them still think this is a fringe issue, and just used to quote what the TRA lobby within whichever party said.

Although it doesn't explain how so many "grown ups" were suddenly able to say publicly that a man could be a woman.

More and more I think how parties themselves work, rather than the party system is the problem.

Made worse by the fact that the MSM reports what should be about issues about the UK, just another personality infight.

I suppose we are partly to blame because we then repeat the psycho dramas as though these are political differences, rather than infighting.