When an institution designed to protect women’s rights redefines what a woman is, you are not watching progress. You are watching ideology consume the institution from within.
That is what happened this month in the European Union.
What Happened
In February 2026, the European Union officially stated that “trans women are women” in the context of women’s rights policy. This was not an offhand remark from a junior commissioner. It was not a tweet from an activist account. It was an institutional declaration — language embedded in the policy framework of a governing body that represents 27 nations and 450 million people.
This matters because of what it replaces. Women’s rights protections in international law were built on a biological reality: that women, as a sex class, face specific forms of discrimination, violence, and disadvantage because of their bodies. Maternity protections exist because women bear children. Domestic violence shelters exist because women are overwhelmingly the victims of intimate partner violence perpetrated by men. Sex-segregated spaces in prisons, hospitals, and sports exist because of measurable, immutable physical differences between male and female bodies.
The EU has now declared, at the policy level, that the category “woman” is no longer defined by biology. It is defined by self-identification.
That is not an expansion of rights. It is the demolition of the foundation on which those rights were built.
Why This Matters
This is not abstract philosophy. It is not a debate for academics. It has consequences that land on the bodies of real women.
Sports. When biological males compete in women’s categories, they carry physiological advantages — bone density, lung capacity, muscle fiber composition, cardiovascular output — that do not disappear with hormone therapy. The women who lose scholarships, medals, and opportunities because of this are not hypothetical. They have names.
Shelters. Women fleeing domestic violence — women who have been beaten, raped, terrorized by men — are now expected to share shelters with biological males who identify as women. The question is not whether trans-identifying people deserve safety. They do. The question is whether the safety of traumatized women can be sacrificed to prove a philosophical point. The answer should be obvious.
Prisons. Multiple countries have already documented cases of biological males, convicted of violent or sexual offenses, being housed in women’s prisons after declaring a female gender identity. The results have been predictable and devastating.
Medical care. When the word “woman” is redefined, sex-specific medical data becomes unreliable. Screening protocols, dosage calculations, and risk assessments built on biological sex lose their precision. This does not make medicine more inclusive. It makes medicine less accurate.
Data collection. If “woman” means anyone who identifies as a woman, then crime statistics, health data, employment figures, and demographic research all become corrupted. You cannot protect a category you have made meaningless.
The EU did not expand the definition of “woman.” It erased it. And the people who will pay the highest price are the women the institution was supposed to protect.
The Pattern
If you have been reading Savage Mercies, you have seen this pattern before.
In “How Gender Ideology Conquered the West,” we traced the intellectual pipeline — from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin clinic in 1919 to John Money’s fraudulent experiments to Judith Butler’s philosophical framework to your child’s classroom. The pipeline is now complete. The EU declaration is not a beginning. It is a destination.
In “The Oldest Heresy in New Clothes,” we named the deeper pattern: modern gender ideology is structurally identical to second-century Gnosticism. The ancient Gnostics taught that the body was a prison, the material world was a mistake, and the “real you” was a divine spark trapped inside flesh that had nothing to do with who you truly were.
The EU has just adopted this framework as policy.
The Gnostic says: the body does not reveal who you are. The EU now says: biology does not determine who is a woman. The Gnostic says: the inner self overrides the material self. The EU now says: gender identity overrides biological sex. The Gnostic says: external authority is oppression. The EU now says: the categories built on biological reality are barriers to be dismantled.
This is not a coincidence. It is a recurring pattern in human rebellion against created order. The body keeps being demoted. The self keeps being enthroned. And the institutions that were built to protect embodied people keep being hollowed out to serve disembodied ideology.
What Scripture Says
The Bible’s answer to this is not complicated. It is foundational.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
Male and female. Not a spectrum. Not a self-identification. A created reality, spoken into existence by the God who built galaxies and called it very good.
As we explored in “Male and Female He Created Them,” this verse establishes three things that matter for everything that follows. First, gender is embedded in the image of God — our maleness or femaleness is part of how we reflect Him. Second, this is a binary, structured in the same grammatical pattern as “light and darkness” and “heaven and earth.” Third, it is pre-Fall — gender distinction exists in paradise, before sin, before death, before anything went wrong.
When Jesus was asked about marriage, He went straight back to this verse:
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4)
“From the beginning.” Not from the culture. Not from the individual’s feelings. Not from the European Parliament. From the beginning.
The body is not an accident. It is not raw material to be overridden by subjective experience. It is the handiwork of a God who does not make mistakes:
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:13-14)
The verb is deliberate. He knitted. This implies craftsmanship, intention, design. Your biological sex is not a clerical error awaiting bureaucratic correction. It is a purposeful act of the Creator.
And this is the heart of it: Christianity insists that the body is not a problem to be solved. It is a temple to be honored.
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)
The Gnostic says: escape the body. The gender ideologue says: override the body. The Bible says: glorify God in the body. These are not three versions of the same idea. They are fundamentally different anthropologies. And only one of them was spoken by the God who became flesh.
What This Means
The institutional capture is accelerating.
This is no longer fringe activist rhetoric. It is the official position of a governing body that shapes law, trade policy, and international norms across an entire continent. What begins in EU policy language migrates into treaty obligations, corporate compliance frameworks, educational standards, and medical guidelines. It becomes the water that institutions swim in.
And it is happening even as the evidence base collapses beneath it. Europe’s own medical establishments are pulling back. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have all restricted pediatric gender interventions after reviewing the evidence. The Cass Review called the evidence base “weak.” The Tavistock clinic was shut down. NHS England issued zero new hormone prescriptions to minors in the year following the Cass Report.
The science is retreating. The ideology is advancing. The two have decoupled — and that tells you everything you need to know about what is driving this.
Christians need to do three things in response.
Think clearly. Understand what is happening and why. This is not a random cultural shift. It is the end stage of a philosophical revolution that has been building for a century. It has intellectual roots, institutional mechanisms, and theological implications. You cannot respond to what you do not understand.
Speak truthfully. The statement “trans women are women” is not true. It is a category error with real-world consequences for real women. Saying so is not hatred. It is honesty. And in an age of institutional dishonesty, honesty is an act of love — especially toward those who are being failed by the institutions that promised to protect them.
Treat everyone with the dignity of image-bearers. Every person caught in this ideological machinery — every person struggling with gender dysphoria, every person who has transitioned, every person who is confused — bears the image of God. They are not enemies to be defeated. They are people to be loved. The Christian is called to hold truth and compassion at the same time, without sacrificing either.
That is the narrow path. It is not the easy path. But it is the path of the One who became flesh, who called His creation very good, and who will one day redeem every body and answer every groan.
The EU can redefine its terms. It cannot redefine reality. That authority belongs to Someone else.
This article is part of the Savage Mercies gender ideology series. Related reading:
- “How Gender Ideology Conquered the West: From a Berlin Clinic to Your Child’s Classroom”
- “Male and Female He Created Them: What the Bible Says About Gender — And What Parents Need to Know”
- “The Oldest Heresy in New Clothes: How Gender Ideology Recycles Ancient Gnosticism”
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