Gender Identity: A Religious Belief Treated as Reality

Norway was the state that introduced “gender identity” to the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, calling on behalf of 54 states for its recognition and protection in law. Since then, our nation has embraced the Yogyakarta Principles (YP) to an extraordinary degree, treating them with religious reverence.

In Norway, children “decide” their legal sex from the age of six, with one parent in agreement, while parents risk up to six years’ imprisonment if they fail to comply with their child’s declared “gender identity”. Norway has also decided to remove sex markers from its national identity numbers from 2032 onwards, thereby implementing Yogyakarta Principle 31. In addition, sex-neutral national identity numbers make it possible for the state to create and legally recognize a “third” sex.

Norway, once regarded as a beacon of women’s liberation and a society committed to equality and transparency, has thus become a leader in what I argue is a totalitarian, rainbow-clad religion of “gender identity” worship, presented as a secular project of inclusion and diversity.

In this essay, I examine the mechanisms by which a state religion can masquerade as secular liberalism, using the drafting of Norway’s 2024 Extremism Commission report as a case study, with a brief look at the amendments to the Penal Code. The point of analyzing gender belief (belief in “gender identity”) as a religion is to provide scientific accuracy when meeting this phenomenon, and to point to a practical, humane, and imminent way out of the mess we’re in.

The Looking-Glass Society: State-Sanctioned Extremism

A state-imposed illusion surrounding sex and gender demands that everyone speak untruthfully — including the members of the Norwegian Extremism Commission. The Commission is itself subject to the belief imperative that sex is a magical property, determined and materialized by our own will. This is what I call state-sanctioned extremism. The Commission’s portrayal of women’s rights advocates as extremists is factually false and illegitimate and demonstrates that society has lost its way.

On 1 March 2024, the Norwegian Commission on Extremism presented its report, “A Joint Effort Against Extremism: Strengthening the Conditions for Preventive Work” (Official Norwegian Report (NOU) 2024:3). The report examines what constitutes extremism and radicalization in Norway today, and how these phenomena should be understood, addressed, and prevented.

The report is one of many examples of how the most fundamental classification of the human species—sex—is being replaced by a new, metaphysical category, “gender identity”, to which society is compelled to conform. In my book Gender Belief: The Battle over Reality, published in the autumn of 2023 (in Norwegian, currently under translation to English), I analyze how we arrived at this point, and argue that this religion-like phenomenon is best addressed by recognizing belief as precisely that—belief—deserving the protections afforded to matters of conscience and religion, but not recognition as fact.

In today’s climate, material reality must give way: a man is deemed to be a woman if he declares himself to be one. A matter of belief has been elevated to the status of truth. In this respect, this religion is more fundamentalist than any other religion in Norway today, because it dictates what counts as reality in law, leaving no one exempt. Rejecting its belief imperative is punishable. Replacing secular institutions and legal principles with a fundamentalist religious doctrine is, from a secular and humanist perspective, itself an expression of extremism. Declaring women’s rights advocates, who defend secular and humanist values, to be extremists crowns this inversion of fact and fiction.

Women Rejecting Gender Belief as Violent Extremists

My and other women’s rights campaigners’ position is that the law must be based on an objective understanding of sex, consistent with other categories recognised in the legal system. For a long time, certain groups have labelled this position as both extremist and hateful. Increasingly, public institutions have uncritically adopted their assessment, establishing it as accepted truth.

Trans activists, both men and women, have repeatedly sought to have us prosecuted for hate crimes simply because we point out that women possess sex-based rights grounded in material reality. In its report, the Extremism Commission allows such groups to designate women like us as violent extremists, without discussion or analysis (NOU 2024:3, p. 140). This becomes a true testimony against the wicked and the fallen who reject the gospel of “gender identity”. The year after the report was published, the two most prominent transactivists in Norway, a man who says he is a woman and a mother, and a woman who says she is a man (both on publicly funded salaries), each received half a million Norwegian kroner as price money. It was presented to them by the government’s minister on equality – for the activists’ work for freedom of speech and against disinformation.

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, maintains that biological sex—not “gender identity”—must form the basis for laws and policies wherever sex is relevant. Particularly pertinent to the work of the Extremism Commission is the Special Rapporteur’s condemnation of the demonization of women who reject “gender identity” belief. In a warning issued in May 2023, she described how women across the Global North are increasingly branded as extremists for speaking about the reality of biological sex and defending sex-based rights.

By branding women who object to “gender identity” belief as extremists, trans activists encourage one another to commit acts of physical violence against women, while also routinely using threats and intimidation to silence them. Unsurprisingly, this violence against women is perpetrated by men, many of whom identify as women, while female, fierce believers in “gender identity” tend to use social, psychological and political means to persecute non-believers. Special Rapporteur Alsalem calls on states, the media, and law enforcement authorities to recognize the branding of women as extremists for what it is: a serious attack on women’s rights to freedom of assembly and association, and a form of violence against women.

The Commission (led by a woman) declined to meet with us women’s rights activists, and did not consult a single women’s organization (something that was likewise not done during the legislative process leading to the Legal Gender Recognition Act in 2016). As a result, its report gives inadequate attention to the role that men’s violence against, and contempt for, women play in extremism. Instead, it warns of the exact opposite—and profoundly absurd—scenario: that women who reject “gender identity” belief are themselves extremists who pose a risk of violence.

Misogyny, Extremism, and Missed Opportunities

The Extremism Commission acknowledges that hostility to sex equality lies at the core of many men’s pathways into violent extremism, and that men overwhelmingly are those recruited into, and responsible for carrying out, acts of terrorism. Yet the Commission fails to recognize women as the largest group subjected to extremist terror in the form of men’s violence.

In this respect, the Commission follows the position of the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud (LDO) at the time, Hanne Bjurstrøm (a woman) and the police, who during the, consultation process on the Penal Code (2020-2021) argued that sex—and therefore women—should not be included in the amended provisions of the Penal Code concerning hate crime, discrimination, and protection of victims.

Their argument—that extending these protections to women would result in too many groups qualifying for protection under the Penal Code—stood in direct opposition to the expert recommendation. In his legal opinion, Professor of Law Kjetil M. Larsen (2016) concluded that women are subjected to violence and hate-motivated acts because they are women, and therefore constitute a vulnerable group entitled to specific legal protection.

Thus, criminal liability for hate speech (§ 185 of the Penal Code) and unlawful discrimination (§ 186) thus applies to “gender identity”, not to sex. Likewise, in cases involving aggravated threats (§ 264), particular weight is to be given to “gender identity,” but not to sex. The same applies to aggravated bodily assault (§ 272) and aggravated bodily harm (§ 274), where “gender identity”—but not sex—is explicitly singled out for special protection. Sex-based violence against women is therefore absent from the framework of Norwegian criminal law. Instead, it is the minority characteristic of “gender identity” that is protected, while the fact that women constitute a vulnerable group—the largest such group in the world—with regard to sex-based hatred and violence — disappears entirely.

The provision criminalizing female genital mutilation (§ 284), however, applies only to women, regardless of age or “gender identity.” Men and boys have no legal protection in Norway against being circumcised or subjected to genital mutilation. This is one of several areas in which the legal framework becomes internally inconsistent. When a trans-identifying man (”trans woman”) who is legally recognized as female requests the surgical removal of his penis, one might expect the prohibition on genital mutilation to apply, since legal sex is now treated as the relevant legal category. Yet it does not. Instead, the procedure is publicly funded as healthcare under the label of “gender-affirming treatment.”

The Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud (LDO) has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to prioritise men’s feelings over women’s sex-based rights, in keeping with a unified anti-discrimination framework in which cultural preferences predictably take precedence over women’s legal protections. This is particularly evident now that the new religion of “gender identity” has captured the entire political and institutional elite. Institutions tasked with protecting women from discrimination—as well as those responsible for defending rationality and science—must now begin doing the job they were created to do. We have been warning about this for years.

An Inverted Extremist Discourse

Chapter 9 of the Commission’s report is entitled “The Normalisation of Extremist Discourse.” Yet extremism that has been normalized is not the claim that men are women if they say they are; that there are multiple sexes; or that children and adolescents are encouraged to harm healthy bodies with medications with harmful substances, or to have healthy body parts surgically removed in order to become “who they really are.”

Instead, what is deemed extremist and hateful is to object to this belief-based takeover. The Commission frames such objections as “conspiracy narratives about vulnerable or marginalized groups or individuals” and calls for “democratic resilience among the population. The public must be alert to disinformation and misleading descriptions of reality that (...) undermine democracy” (NOU 2024:3, p. 125).

This is state-sanctioned extremism, in which rejecting “gender identity” belief has become impermissible and in which that belief forms the basis of laws defining what a human being is, who and what deserve protection, and that minors are capable of giving informed consent. Within this inverted worldview, insisting on objective reality is treated as misinformation and a threat to democracy.

The Extremism Commission’s designation of us as extremists is both factually unfounded and illegitimate. The beliefs in a metaphysical reality of human capacity to bend reality at will, and the pointing out of women who object as heretics and fallen ones following this, puts society at large in a trust and knowledge crisis, as well as a crisis of medical malpractice, child abuse, eroded women’s rights, and the collapse of language.

Legal reforms founded on gender identity” belief must be reversed, restoring a secular understanding of the reality that the law is intended to regulate. This can only be done by regulating phenomena according to their nature. The way out of the looking glass society, is to turn around, touch ground, and admit that we’ve been part of a religious revival presented as reality. Secular society is accustomed to regulating religion to safeguard children, adults, and everybody’s freedom of religion and thought. The lawmakers and their legal counsellors - and academia at large - failed us all, but we now expect them to do the right thing.  

Jennifer’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber

---

Anne Kalvig  is a former professor of religion at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She resigned in 2023 due to years of smear campaigns and bullying for saying men cannot be women, and that society should not replace reality with metaphysics and belief masked as reality in law. She now works as a gardener, janitor and cleaner. She published (in Norwegian) Gender Belief: The Battle over Reality in 2023. She has her own publishing house, Medvit forlag (Consciousness Publishing). She can be found on GBNews, Substack, Facebook, YouTube, Athena Forum, and her publishing house. 

---

Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist who has tracked the funding of the gender industry for over a decade. She is author of the The 11th Hour, a platform highlighting the connections between technology, transsexualism, and transhumanism. Her research into the philanthropic backers of the gender industry has been utilized for legal briefs, and platformed in myriad publications, films, and other media in the US and internationally. She has appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Steven Bannon’s War Room, and James Patrick’s Big Picture, and on various other platforms and podcasts. She has been featured in films such as No Way Back (2023), Gender Transformation (2023), and The Gender Delusion (2023). Her work has been published in numerous books and magazines, among which: First Things, Tablet, Human Events, The Spectator World, The Federalist, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour Now, also available in Portuguese