The Weekly Peak #14
Slavic sex blackmail, Belgian bordels, a captured EU court, and we need to talk about GAMPs
Queering the Balkans: geopolitics meets trans rights
Albanian minister falsely claims WPATH “affirming care” is prerequisite for EU membership
German boxing promoter murdered in Vienna, Chechen GAMP boyfriend caught on the run
Malta: closing in on who ordered TERF journalist’s murder
No charges made yet against Swedish trans paedophile suspect
Neo-Nazi: not woman enough for a woman’s prison
President of EU court, who presided over ideological capture of European case law, reelected
Belgium: after 19 months of prostitution contracts, what have we learned?
Beating back Pride bans: the new democratic frontier
Prominent Swedish LGBTIQ+ activist caught in a paedophile sting
EU staff getting warmed up to accept Islamic sex-segregation culture
Who can we thank? Frances Fitzgerald
In other news…
Queering the Balkans: geopolitics meets trans rights
It’s a very simple question: will Montenegro be allowed to join the EU if its government doesn’t pass the sex-self ID bill that has been sitting waiting to be passed since 2024?
The deadline for closing on all the reforms demanded by Brussels — which cover everything from judges to juvenile justice to sustainable seaport infrastructure — is fast approaching. Civil society NGOs, some of which are directly funded by the EU, insist that joining the bloc requires giving all Montenegrins the “fundamental right” to self-selected-sex-by-signature. The European Commission included the self-ID bill in its reforms checklist, and the text of the draft bill itself declares itself to be a requirement for EU membership.
And yet nobody wants to answer the question: is it a dealbreaker, or not?
All EU accession states (there are 10 in total) are under the same pressure, but Montenegro is next in the membership queue so they can’t escape the question for much longer.
The Irish government, by happenstance of history (and alphabetical order) is chairing the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, and end-stage negotiations with Montenegro were on the table as they took over the role from Cyprus on 1 July. Irish leaders have declared, repeatedly and enthusiastically, their intention to close the deal on Montenegrin membership, pre-announcing it as the signature achievement of their six-month tenure in the job.
And yet they won’t answer the question about sex self-ID, either.
The EU “enlargement” mission has kicked into high gear lately as a way to counter Russia’s advance into Europe (and also, I suspect, as a way to reverse demographic decline without having to replenish the aging workforce with men from the Kashmiri Kush and other cradles of misogyny).
The standoff over self-ID in Montenegro signals a broader impasse over LGBTIQ+ rights. Progressive politicians are full of enthusiasm for “legal gender recognition” as long as the details of what it entails are not revealed. At a certain point, however, the surface gets scratched, and when it does, very few people in the political class seem ready or willing to stand up and say: yep, queering the civil registry is a fundamental right.
The NGOs desperately want such a full-throated (public) defense from the Commission and the Irish leadership, but they are never going to get it because it is political poison. Reports suggest Montenegrin leaders who once commissioned and championed the bill have (probably) had to bargain it away with conservative members of their coalition behind closed doors. They have no intention of going to bat for such a turd of a law, which was an over-delivery of the EU acquis: the baseline requirement is legal gender recognition without surgery (not full self-ID).
What was once considered an easy, low-cost progressive win that would get all the kids on board and make Brussels bureaucrats and NGO brats happy, has become extremely politically volatile. It is terribly embarrassing that in the frenzied years of woke, so many Western governments submitted to the screeching queer activist elite demand to erase sex as a coherently-protected class in law, and even more embarrassing that they tied it to EU values and forced it down the throats of candidate countries.
If they all back down on self-ID now, the rainbow mafia (local and global) will be up their arses. If they don’t, all the rest of us will. Irish people can’t do much about de-queering our laws without an overhaul of our entire political class, but the Montenegrins (and the Albanians, and the North Macedonians, and the Ukrainians…) can still stop it.
I travelled to Montenegro and Albania last week (thanks for the donations) in order to ask people what they think about it all. It was a bit of a struggle. I realised quickly that there was a Goldilocks zone of people I should ask: if they were too low down on the class ladder (cleaning ladies, Roma) they didn’t speak English well enough (or at all) to understand the question, but if they were too high on the class ladder (NGO workers, anyone very-online) they were fully fluent in English but much more likely to be scared to voice opposition to anything EU-coded. For the latter group, full anonymity had to be guaranteed.
Everyone I spoke to had difficulty sussing me out: was I anti-EU, or pro-EU? It was very hard to explain the gender critical position, which has nothing to do with one’s views of the EU Single Market or geopolitics, and everything to do with the steadfast conviction that fetishistic transvestites are not women. Opposition to the self-ID law is very much tied to the conservative minority (someone from a Serb conservative group called it “freaky, perverted and insane”) and anyone who wants to make a good go of their prospects in shitlib euroland, has to be extremely careful not be be associated with a filthy TERF, or be caught on mic sharing unorthodoxies about sacred shitlibboleths.
In deciding who to approach to ask about it, I found a sweet spot: people working in service sector jobs that required them to be able to speak English, but not have a professional degree (none of the professionals in any kind of NGO wanted to speak to me once they figured out my deal). Nobody I spoke to, barring a couple of TERFs, had considered that sex self-ID undermines the rationale of all sex-based protections, as well as all the “empowerment” projects that governments love to brag about.
While transvestite males would have a hard time encroaching on women’s spaces and services, even in the capitals Tirana and Podgorica, there is a much more present danger: in places where being gender non-conforming is tough, the temptation to trans is strong, especially among butch lesbians who can easily get their hands on testosterone and become short-statured male-impersonators instead of failing to live up to the sexy skinny Slavic feminine ideal.
Montenegro has a native population of only 600,000 people. The “queer community” is very small. There are much more pressing issues about identity, far more pressing fights about flags and language to do with its recent unstable geopolitical arrangements. As we have learned in the rest of Europe, ignoring this issue is an easy way for politicians (and media) to avoid taking an unpopular stand on it. The Irish leader Michael Martin, who is about to take a lead role in deciding when Montenegro has done enough to demonstrate its progressive bona fides, has called the sex erasure project a “culture war” imported from over yonder in TRUMP’S AMERIKKKA (and JKKK Rowling’s TERF Island).
I predict that Montenegro will join without ever passing the self-ID bill, because Brussels needs enlargement more than it needs queer-addled gender delusions that will piss everyone off except a small niche of fluorescent extremists. And I think everyone currently refusing to say so knows it.
Albanian minister falsely claims WPATH “affirming care” is prerequisite for EU membership
There have been attempts to queer/genderfy/de-heteronormativise legislation in Albania as part of the same “reform” mission mentioned above. This has included attempts to expand the meaning of sex, and replace the words mother and father in gender equality law with the terms “parent one and parent two”. However these attempts failed because Albanians are more free than we are in Western Europe to call it out for the bullshit that it is (they don’t get called fascists and lose their jobs for straight-talking about the facts of life…yet!)
But one initiative did get through: in April this year the health ministry introduced WPATH-based guidelines for gender affirming care to the public health system (adults only).
In a demonstration of how the EU can be a useful alibi for unpopular topics, the Deputy Minister of Health and Social Protection, Eugena Tomini, explained the move by saying she was merely following orders from Brussels. Specifically, she said, making the (disgraced) WPATH protocol available to Albanians aligns the country with EU directives related to health. However, the EU does not have a mandate to issue directives on health, there is no binding law on the topic.
And yet despite this, the EU Commission progress report for Albania did mention their lack of healthcare for trans people.
Beyond the blame-Brussels dynamic (which all EU leaders do when it suits them), it also shows the power of soft law. Desperate to join the EU club, accession states are vulnerable to the wildest woke dreams of the EU elite.
German boxing promoter murdered in Vienna. Chechen GAMP boyfriend caught on the run.
The “trans murders” that we get repeatedly battered over the head are always a repeat of the same dynamic: a nominally heterosexual man having sex with a “trans woman” who ends up killing him in (probably) murderous self-disgust. The murder then gets blamed on lesbians angry they can no longer have meetups without autogynephiles.
It seems like a fairly regular occurrence in Europe. Here’s the most recent one: a 70-year-old German man, an activist and former boxing promoter who went by the name Etchika Pollex, invited a 27-year-old man from Chechnya to come and live with him in his apartment in Vienna. The Chechen man is presumably the person referred to as his “partner” in the video below (reports claim they were in a relationship). Shortly after this video was made, Pollex was stabbed to death in his home. Shortly after that, the Chechen “partner” was caught on the run in the French Riviera.
We need to get serious about who is doing the trans murders. We need to talk about GAMPs.
Malta: closing in on who ordered TERF journalist’s murder
Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown up by a car bomb in 2017 because she wouldn’t stop reporting on government corruption. In the years since, multiple people have been tried, convicted and/or imprisoned for the killing, including the planters of the bomb and the guy who paid them.
Ties to senior Labour figures have been alleged for years, and this week in court, the former economy minister and former chief of staff to the Prime Minister (Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri) were again singled out as the ultimate masterminds behind the plot.
Caruana Galizia was deliciously critical of all the cronies in the upper tiers of Maltese politics. Her last-ever post on her blogging site, Running Commentary (which is still up) is about one of the men who allegedly organised her killing.
She also generously mocked Malta’s clumsy attempts to burnish its progressive bona fides by introducing self-ID and conversion therapy laws before (almost) anyone else. She wasn’t taken in by the antics of the famous celebrity “transsexual” Joanne Cassar who kicked off the trans rights movement in the country. She was acutely critical of the woke cosplay of the utterly corrupt government who used LGBTIQ+ rights as a “smokescreen” for corruption and to appeal to Brussels/EU audiences.
She was a TERF before I even knew what a TERF was.
Her sons run a journalism foundation founded in her honour, but I couldn’t entice them to look into the role of particular Maltese activists in the millions of euro that the Commission started pumping into the trans project post 2014. The foundation gets its funding from the EU itself, so it’s perhaps not surprising.
No charges made yet against Swedish paedophile suspect
A few (entirely predictable) events happened in the past few months to make Swedish people question the wisdom of sex self-ID.
One of them involved a man called “Vilma” Andersen, a fetishistic transvestite who collected child sex abuse material, and who was recently released early from prison after serving time for trying to kidnap a little girl. After his release from prison, he started calling himself by a woman’s name and dressing in women’s clothes. Now he is the prime suspect in the murder and dismemberment of a young woman who was abducted on Christmas Day. Charges against him were due to be filed in mid June, but the investigation has not finished yet.
It is in this context that the people of Sweden have been asking: do we really have to call this scumbag “she”? and learning that according to the new rules, yes you do.
It is a sign of the deranged times that it is now taboo to say that there is a long-established pattern of paraphilic cross-dressing in males who commit sexual homicides. In February 2026, the actor who played Buffalo Bill, a crossdressing rapist/murderer in the film Silence of the Lambs, as well as the producer of the film, apologised for portraying this well-known trope.
Former cop and Twitter TERF Diane Alastair has written about the phenomenon extensively.
Neo-Nazi: not woman enough for a woman’s prison
Neo-Nazi transvestite “Marla”-Svenja Liebich was extradited back to Germany on Wednesday from Czechia, where he was on the run. Initially, he was transferred to the women’s prison, but the prison authorities quickly transferred him to the male estate.
Almost without exception, the media and regime activists are calling him “she” and yet none of them seem to be up in arms about the cruelty of putting “her” in a male detention centre. What gives? He’s woman enough for she/her, but not woman enough for a women’s prison? I smell inconsistency. Or perhaps this self-ID malarkey is not as watertight as we were made to believe?
President of EU court, who presided over ideological capture of European case law, reelected
Koen Lenaerts is a senior Belgian judge who has been on the bench since 2003, and has been president of the Court since 2015. As such, he as presided over the switcheroo from the trans medico-legal model to the anything-goes social justice model of trans. It’s on his watch that EU jurisprudence got infected with the terminology of the trans cult, which now includes such fantastical concepts as “non-binary” and “non-cisgender”.
And he has just been reelected for a new term to last until 2033.
Lenaerts didn’t introduce trans pseudoconcepts to the Court, of course. In 1996, long before he took up his post, a British man convinced the court that “gender reassignment,” counted as sex discrimination under EU equal treatment law. What’s changed under Lenaerts tenure is that ruling by ruling, “gender reassignment” has been quietly expanded and ultimately sidelined, with “gender identity” now a freestanding legal category that applies to “trans” cases.
Lenaerts was also the one who proudly announced the court’s innovative finding that Hungary’s anti-LGBTIQ+ legislation broke not just EU law but EU vibes. Failing to affirm gender identity is now treated as an assault on the Union’s identity itself. This was a first.
Lenaerts is an integrationist, meaning, anything that makes the union more unified, he’ll rule in favour of it. So we can expect the most progressive laws will become everyone’s laws, given enough time and strategic litigation.
Belgium: after 19 months of prostitution contracts, what have we learned?
Nearly two years after the Belgian law on employment contracts for sex work came into force, very few bordel licenses have been granted and very few prostitution contracts have been signed with “workers”.
In 2024 the government passed a law that allows you to pimp people out for sex for your own financial gain, as long as you get a license and meet certain compliance requirements. These requirements are intended to keep bad actors out of the business, and the “workers” safe and psychologically healthy and happy. This utopian ideal completely ignores the fact that only bad actors would be involved in such a business in the first place, and the psychological safety and happiness of the women who work for them is unlikely to be their animating motivation.
The result is that Belgium gets to brag about being super progressive and liberal, while in reality everyone continues to operate in the same sordid grey zone that they always operated in. So virtue. Much signalled.
Below is a shot of an ad for a job in the tiny Belgian town of Gembloux, which includes this sad detail: “After a video conference interview and acceptance of your application, we can pick you up personally and cover your plane ticket if necessary.”
There’s a point at which you have to wean yourself off libertarian bro-ishness and accept that some freedoms create terrible incentives that make the world a much worse place for young, vulnerable women and girls. If you could just put your dicks in a bowl of ice maybe?
Beating back Pride bans: democracy’s new frontier
A project called ReAssemble, which was funded to legally challenge Viktor Orban’s ban on Pride, has just started, even though Orban is gone, Pride Budapest went ahead this year, and the surveillance measures (intended to identify anyone who violated the Pride ban) were never used. But more pertinently, the Court of Justice of the EU has told the Hungarian government they have to repeal this Orban-era law , and it’s only a matter of time before Peter Magyar, the Golden Boy who will fulfill everyone’s libbest dreams, follows suit. In other words, the strategic litigation the ReAssemble project was conceived to fund has already been carried out, been successful, and its resulting ruling is about to be implemented.
And yet two Hungarian NGOs (the Háttér Society and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee) are still getting €115,000 for this phantom problem. When I asked the Commission and one of the NGOs about it, my email was forwarded to Head Prefect of the EU spokesperson’s service, Anna Gray, who said I wasn’t a real journalist (the EU press service refuse to grant me accreditation because I merely “post on social media”).
Meanwhile, ILGA-Europe, the gay rights organisation that ran out of road ages ago and now just scoops up random causes in order to keep their funding going, is calling for serious repercussions for any country (EU or not, the appeal is also addressed to the high representative for external affairs) that attempts to interfere with the weird kid-friendly fetish fest that is Pride, because Prides are the strongest sign of a healthy democracy, apparently.
Prominent Swedish LGBTIQ+ activist caught in a paedophile sting
Martin Johansson is a celebrated national LGBTIQ+ activist involved in RFSL (the Swedish Federation for LGBT Rights), having once sat on the organisation’s board at the regional level. He has won awards from RFSL for his activism.
Last week, Johansson was exposed by the vigilante group Dumpen, who caught him attempting to meet an online decoy he believed was a child. Johansson’ partner was also involved.
RFSL runs trans camps for children under 13 where they can explore their gender identity. They also push self-ID laws for minors, and fought to keep explicit books accessible to middle schoolers. Preschools hosted Pride parades for toddlers until it was ruled illegal by an ombudsman. Their “normkritik” projects train teachers in queer theory and gender fluidity from early school years.
If you think this is premature sexualisation of children, or that blokes like this are dodgy af for pushing it, you’ll get called mean names.
Notice the fun coloured badges he’s wearing during his “meeting” with a child he thinks he’s about to violate.
EU staff getting warmed up to accept Islamic sex-segregation culture
I was pleased to hear that the European Commission held a webinar on “freedom of belief” for staff soon after I was fired for my beliefs. I thought: well at least others will be free to say that men cannot be women no matter how horny it makes them. But then someone showed me the transcript of the webinar.
The presentations seemed to centre around the confrontation between Islamic modesty codes (and being weird about sex, generally) and women in the workplace. One speaker claimed that the COVID-era practice of social distancing was great for Muslim men because it meant that they didn’t have to shake women’s sexy hands. Another speaker said staff should get trained up on gulping down their discomfort about women who wear modesty garments.
I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.
Who can we thank?
Frances Fitzgerald is a veteran Irish politician who served as deputy PM, government minister, and member of the European Parliament. The political party to which she belongs, Fine Gael, boofed the gender koolaid to a horrific degree in the mid 2010s, and she was one of the sensible people who (to many people’s shock) went right along with her party’s gendershite reforms, the signature one being, of course, the Gender Recognition Act (2015).
One of her achievements while in government was a gender strategy released in 2017 that was “inclusive of individuals whose sex characteristics, gender identity or gender expression is female”. In the strategy section about challenging gender norms, however, she wanted people to know that they could change their gender if they didn’t like it (if you could opt out of being a woman, we probably wouldn’t need a strategy for women in the first place, I reckon).
During negotiations on the EU law on combatting violence against women, gender critical feminists contacted her and others on the gender committee to ask that single-sex shelters and specialist services for female victims be explicitly provided for in the directive. Leaving “woman” and “gender” undefined risked handing the interpretation to loopy gender ideologues in member states. This was an opportunity to make it clear that women’s crisis centres and shelters are for women only.
As the rapporteur on the bill, Fitzgerald had the lead role in putting together the compromise text. However, the final draft is full of nonsense that further muddies the meaning of woman in European law. It states that the directive is for “all persons, regardless of their gender” to combat “violence against women… regardless of their gender.” And of course the text is riddled with references to “intersectional discrimination”, which is sneaky code for men with genderfeelz, and is — without fail — interpreted as such in member countries.
Because of the intersectionality faff, I am of the opinion that it might have been better for European women’s right to sex-protected spaces if there had been no directive at all.
Every bend of the knee to trans ideology in legislation burrows the bullshit deeper into our lives. This directive not only implies the existence of endless genders and women-who-are-also-men, it even mentions “intersex” twice, even though intersex is not real and is merely queer activist language designed to confuse people into thinking sex is not binary. That’s significant in a law that is intended to protect one sex against violence committed by the other sex. Refusing to define sex (and implicitly nuking its widely-understood definition) in a sex-based law is stupid. Frances Fitzgerald played a big part in that stupidity.
Here she is. Say thanks to Frances.
In other news
The Irish government has given funding to two paraphiliac goons pretending to be intersex
Berlin clubs: they’re about to go all-topless or nobody-topless
Dutch town stops putting rainbow flag on municipality building, protest ensues
About time: Genspect profiles Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, unsung architect of the Dutch protocol
Ukraine’s military fund will be boosted by decriminalising porn
Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux
Do you think it matters that sex is being replaced by self-declaration of something called ‘gender identity’? I do, and I was fired for it. I made a bet that other people care about it too. So this newsletter is my new job. If you think my work is important, please take out a paid subscription.
“Murder of Irish woman by asylum seeker ex-partner has set off a firestorm over who’s killing whom in Ireland”
Jamey Carney was American
'It was very hard to explain the gender critical position, which has nothing to do with one’s views of the EU Single Market or geopolitics...'
Political tribalism at the upper echelons is what makes defeating trans ideology so difficult. Nobody believes anymore that one should oppose a bad idea for the sole reason that it is a bad idea. 'Cui bono?' is all that they really ask. Which is why, before sex realist women speak, they have to lay out their good lefty credentials. Every. Single. Time.
Thanks, Frances.