The Yogyakarta Principles

Aka One Reason Why Sex is Being Abolished Globally

October 30, 2025

Yesterday, I published a long post titled “Will Blue States Defy a Favorable SCOTUS Outcome in the Upcoming Sports Cases?” Above the paywall, I provided a link to an article in The Critic titled “Europe must not erase sex: We must resist the imposition of activist fantasies.”

That article refers to something called The Yogyakarta Principles:

Only a few weeks ago, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, made claims strikingly similar to those of the French politicians in a letter to the UK Parliament. O’Flaherty, who previously headed the EU Fundamental Rights Agency for ten years before assuming his current post, insists that the recent UK Supreme Court ruling may not only fall outside European law but will also cause terrible harm to those identifying as transgender. The ruling clarified that, under UK equality law, the words “women” and “men” must be understood in their ordinary meaning: females and males. 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.

…

The institutional machinery behind it remains largely invisible — buried in EU, Council of Europe and UN reports, policies and rulings, where, shrouded in legal jargon and technocratic buzzwords, lies the central thesis of the trans movement: that sex is irrelevant and that recognising its role in human society — from reproduction and the prevention of male violence to law, statistics and education — is itself harmful. For the same reason, few Europeans are aware of the European Commission’s newly published LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy, which promotes self-identification of sex without age restrictions across EU member states: an intermediate step toward the total abolition of sex envisioned in the Yogyakarta manifesto, crafted by O’Flaherty, supported by trans lobby groups and endorsed by UN, Council of Europe and EU institutions alike.

This reminded me that I should probably write something about the Yogyakarta Principles. I have written about them before, and mention them in my books, but it has been a while, and most people probably don’t know about them.

Essentially, a bunch of people got together in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2006 and decided to shred women’s rights and the material reality of sex, all over the world, and for all purposes. They got together again, ten years later, and thought up a few other ways of shredding women’s rights and the material reality of sex (the Yogyakarta Principles + 10). Later, they got the principles to be taken up by the UN.

Or, to have them tell the story on their website:

In 2006, in response to well-documented patterns of abuse, a distinguished group of international human rights experts met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. The result was the Yogyakarta Principles: a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply. They promise a different future where all people born free and equal in dignity and rights can fulfil that precious birthright.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? In fact, no State is actually required to comply (by “State,” they mean what Americans would think of as “nation” or “country”; they don’t mean a state like Florida or Montana). However, plenty do comply. Nations comply by elevating “gender identity” over sex.

Read on to learn more about why the authors of the Yogyakarta Principles think people’s “gender identities” are more important than the material reality of sex and how the UN got involved.

Paid-only content follows. A paid subscription gets you regular access to much more content and the ability to comment and engage in conversation with other thoughtful people.