When almost 70 left-wing French MPs recently proposed removing biological sex from national identity cards, they claimed to be advancing equality. In reality, they were advancing an anti-human ideology—the same ideology that has spread across the EU and now infects its highest institutions.
As Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina explain in The Critic (Europe Must Not Erase Sex), this latest move is not an isolated gesture but part of a coordinated push rooted in the European Commission’s newly published LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy. Ostensibly, this effort aims to protect LGBTIQ+ individuals from discrimination and social exclusion, but in practice it extends far beyond that limited goal. That strategy, as they observe, promotes self-identification of sex without age restrictions across member states—an intermediate step toward the total abolition of sex envisioned in the Yogyakarta manifesto drafted by Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
This direct institutional alignment shows how activist philosophy has been absorbed into the machinery of governance. O’Flaherty, as the author of the Yogyakarta Principles, embodies this bureaucratic radicalism: he is the face of a movement that trades truth for theory and biology for ideology, converting the abstract ideals of postmodern “liberation” into binding European policy.
O’Flaherty’s position stems from his long-standing advocacy to eliminate sex from law and practice, which culminated in his drafting of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, later updated in 2017 with a clear demand: that states must cease registering sex on all legal documents, including birth certificates.
Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina
It is this demand, alongside other Council of Europe and EU references, that the French politicians cited in their proposal, concluding that “the inscription of sex on national identity cards is a form of discrimination.” A similar conclusion was reached by Finland’s Social Democratic government, which in its 2020–2023 Gender Equality Plan proposed removing the sex-based digits from national identity numbers. While this may sound absurd to most Europeans, few are aware of either its repercussions or its history.
Europe Must Not Erase Sex
This kind of thinking is not uniquely Irish or European—it is quintessentially French. The same intellectual impulse that gave us Michel Foucault’s “liberation of desire” has now metastasized into EU policy. What began as abstract deconstruction of “power and knowledge” has become a practical project to dismantle every category by which human beings understand themselves—male and female, husband and wife, father and mother. In the name of equality and freedom, it seeks to dissolve the very foundation of society.
The Assault on the Family
The logic of sexual “liberation,” as articulated by its most candid theorists, leaves no room for the family as a stable or normative institution. Its advocates have been forthright about this. The philosophical roots lie not in grassroots activism but in a deeper intellectual rebellion—one that sees moral order and family structure as mechanisms of control. French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose ideas remain foundational for today’s gender theorists, framed the matter bluntly:
“Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized. They are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them. Controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.”
—M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 151, quoted sympathetically in R. Goss, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto, p. 62.
Foucault’s project, spelled out further in The History of Sexuality, was nothing less than the subversion of the moral universe that Western civilization inherited:
“If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required.” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 5)
In other words, liberation requires not reform but revolt—an overthrow of what Foucault called “the rules.” And what institution embodies those rules more clearly than the natural family, with its inherent moral and generative order? To challenge the family, then, is to challenge the very structure of reality as given.
Foucault’s disciples have carried that revolt from the lecture hall to the culture at large. As one of the more extreme voices put it, the family must be eradicated altogether. Michael Swift declared without apology that “the family unit—spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and violence—will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated.” (After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, p. 361.)
These are not isolated voices on the fringe. They articulate the philosophical engine behind the broader sexual revolution—an assault on the givenness of the human person and the stability of human relations. What was once academic radicalism now guides public policy, from the French Parliament to Brussels. The rhetoric may have softened into the bureaucratic language of “rights” and “equality,” but the underlying goal remains: to dismantle the traditional family, erase natural distinctions, and replace them with a new social order shaped by the will to power rather than the wisdom of creation.
The Biological Foundation of the Family
At the heart of this struggle lies a deeper truth that El-Nagashi and Zobnina rightly defend: the family cannot be understood apart from the biological reality of man and woman. Our complementary male and female existence is not a social construct to be reprogrammed—it is the very architecture of life, the biological building block upon which human society stands. From this complementarity comes new life, and with it, the moral and social bonds that form the family. To erase sex, as the French proposal and O’Flaherty’s activism would have it, is to erase the foundation of both human identity and civilization itself.
The authors of The Critic article warn that this ideological erasure masquerades as compassion but is in fact a profound act of cultural suicide. Europe’s lawmakers, seduced by Foucault’s logic of perpetual rebellion, now seek to “liberate” humanity from the very structure that makes it possible to exist. To defend the truth about sex, therefore, is not reactionary—it is an act of preservation, an affirmation of reality against the fantasies of power. The future of Europe depends on recovering that truth.
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