About Beyond Gender European Evidence
European evidence, country by country
This site records what European health authorities, courts and legislatures have decided about gender medicine and sex-based rights, one country at a time, with dates and sources.
Purpose
Europe is where the evidence base for youth gender medicine was built and where it was first re-examined. Finland's COHERE council, Sweden's Karolinska hospital and SBU agency, Norway's UKOM investigation board, the Dutch Amsterdam clinic and the French, German and Danish bodies that followed have each produced documents that are cited everywhere and read rarely. This site catalogues them.
How it is organised
Country dossiers each cover one national system: what it did, what it reviewed, what it changed and when. Cross-cutting dossiers cover the Dutch protocol, the systematic reviews and the European courts. The European timeline places every decision in order. The sources page collects the reviews, guidelines and judgments, with links to the originals in their own languages where available and to English translations where they exist.
Standards
Facts and dates first. Interpretation is marked as interpretation. National documents are preferred to press summaries. Corrections are welcome with a link to the original.
Point of view and publisher
The site is gender-critical. It regards the Nordic systematic reviews as the best evidence available and the Dutch protocol as an experiment whose own follow-up data did not support its export. It is published by Genspect, the international organisation founded in Ireland in 2021 with chapters across Europe, whose founder Stella O'Malley hosts the Beyond Gender podcast with Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman.
Dossiers on institutions and culture
Finland: COHERE and the 2020 recommendation
Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care, known in Finnish as PALKO and in English as COHERE Finland, operates in connection with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. Its role is to recommend which treatments belong within publicly funded healthcare. Its recommendation, Medical treatment methods for dysphoria associated with variations in gender identity in minors , was adopted on 11 June 2020 and published in summary form five days later (COHERE Finland, 2020).
The European Court of Human Rights and gender identity
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has developed a significant body of case-law on legal gender recognition. Its rulings are often invoked in political debate as if they required every Council of Europe state to adopt self-declaration systems or to treat legal sex as irrelevant in all areas of law. That is not what the judgments say. The Court has recognised a protected private-life interest in legal recognition for transgender people, prohibited compulsory sterilisation as a condition of recognition, and required workable procedures. It has also repeatedly left substantial quest