Rights in Retrograde? The Legal Codification of Gender Panic

As 2025 begins, Europe — often seen as a champion of LGBTIQ people’s human rights —  faces a series of reactionary anti-LGBTIQ laws that masquerade as safeguarding children, while in reality fostering discrimination. Its regional institutions tend to promote justice and equality and curb anti-gender extremism. Yet the sheer volume of regressive policies signals a dangerous shift. If left unchallenged, or if European courts crumble in the face of “shock doctrine” tactics in which they are bombarded by unprecedented levels of attacks on rights, decades of progress in LGBTIQ protections across the region risk unraveling.

In our previous “Rights in Retrograde” edition, we documented efforts to erode European rights protections through anti-LGBTQ laws in Slovakia, Georgia, and Belarus. The assault continues. In March 2025, the Hungarian Parliament fast-tracked a law banning Pride celebrations across the country. The law, like most anti-LGBTIQ laws across Europe, predictably hinges on protecting children without demonstrating any real nexus to child protection. The Pride ban was presented as an effort to reinforce Hungary’s 2021 Russian-influenced “propaganda law,” which prohibits the “depiction and promotion” of “diverse gender identities and sexual orientations’ in any content that might reach children under 18. That 2021 law is currently the subject of an open case referred by the European Commission to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

The CJEU challenge against Hungary does not appear to have deterred other members of the European Union. Reclaim, a European human rights organization, called for EU infringement proceedings in Bulgaria after far-right parties proposed two new anti-LGBTIQ bills. One proposal, according to Reclaim, would “ban the display of LGBTQI+ content in public spaces accessible to children” and “criminalize medical professionals who provide gender-affirming care to trans teenagers” — care that is sometimes life-saving. The second bill aims to amend the Personal Documents Act to statutorily prohibit access to legal gender recognition. This bill aims to codify a regressive 2023 ruling by the civil college of Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation that declared that the domestic legal framework does not enable the courts to change data on the civil status register regarding the sex, name, and personal identification number of transgender people. These bills follow the August 2024 passage of a law that prohibits “propaganda” about “nontraditional homosexual orientation and/or determination of gender identity other than the biological.” 

In March 2025,  the government of Slovakia, also an EU member, unveiled plans to amend the constitution, including by enshrining the recognition of only two genders — male and female — and a ban on adoption by same-sex couples. The draft amendments also explicitly push back on European institutions, preventing “EU legal acts from taking precedence over the constitution.” They reference sovereignty, “traditional values,” and “cultural heritage,” familiar anti-LGBTIQ dog whistles, and codify parental control over children's education on sexuality and gender. Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia acknowledged inspiration from U.S. President Trump in proposing the anti-gender amendment. 

In Georgia  — which is not an EU member, but is a member of the Council of Europe and party to the European Convention on Human Rights — members of Parliament introduced legislation that would remove “gender” and “gender identity” from national law and dissolve Parliament’s Gender Equality Council. The bill’s explanatory note cited renewed debate about the term “gender” since Trump’s inauguration. Shameless in its cut-and-paste approach to lawmaking, the ruling Georgian Dream party also proposed a “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” which it said mirrored the US Foreign Agents Registration Act in a direct Georgian translation.

So far, the European Union’s rights framework has steadfastly held to producing progressive jurisprudence and protections through its courts, though the process can be lengthy. In March, the CJEU issued a historic ruling in case C-247/23, setting a key precedent in protecting trans people’s rights across Europe. As mentioned above, in a case involving Hungary, the Court invoked the General Data Protection Regulation, an EU law, in finding that conditioning gender identity recognition on surgical procedures constitutes an unjustifiable restriction on fundamental rights. The ruling reinforces the principle that trans people can determine who they are, and that legal recognition must not come at the expense of bodily autonomy or human dignity.

The wave of anti-LGBTIQ laws that European parliaments continue to pass in efforts to harness populist sentiments and queerphobic nationalism, now emboldened by the Trump administration, are emerging as the true litmus test of European institutions and their ability to protect people from severe human rights violations.