The Conservative Party politicians Ingebjørg Storeide Folgerø and Cille Ihle deserve great thanks for criticising Norwegian legislation and women’s lack of legal protection as a result of gender-identity ideology. What they articulate in their opinion piece is in fact historic.
For the first time since the fiction of ‘gender identity’ was given specific protection against discrimination as fact in 2013, women on the right are speaking out and pointing out that this conflicts with women’s sex-based rights, with the rights of children and young people, and with rational and scientific thinking.
The newspaper RA Stavanger published this opinion piece in April 2026 for just over two hours before it was unpublished. The editor later wrote an editorial in which he explained that the opinion piece had been removed following ‘justified criticism’. The publication was nevertheless found to be in breach of press ethics on 23 September 2026, as reported by Document.
I am very pleased that it is wise and experienced women such as Folgerø and Ihle who are doing this. Their intervention will meet resistance, and they will be branded hateful and ‘transphobic’. Worst of all: The politically groundbreaking opinion piece will also be punished with resounding silence. That has been the gender activists’ modus operandi for several decades. Branding opponents as hateful, and then ‘no debate’ about what is the very subject of the debate: Can human beings declare what reality is, on the basis of notions and ideas about counterfactual circumstances (a man is a woman if he says so)? And is it wise to implement counterfactual claims as facts in our legislation itself, and thus legally abolish reality, and thereby women’s and children’s entitlement to protection?
Folgerø and Ihle appear to believe that this must be open to discussion, as I read them. That is welcome. The Conservative Party (Høyre) has been at the forefront of enshrining in law men’s feelings about themselves and their own as a new, magical reality. But they are not alone; there has long been cross-party consensus on this. The Christian Democratic Party (KrF), the Centre Party (Senterpartiet) and the Progress Party (FrP) have to some extent been dissenting voices. But no parties have yet promised to confront the collective madness and coercion to which we have all been subjected since 2013. ‘Gender identity’ must be removed from legislation as fact, and subjected to legal regulation as the belief that it is.
Karoline Skarstein, a man who says he is a woman, claims in RA on 29 April that Folgerø and Ihle are ‘transphobic’, that they are to blame for his not having sought medical help and that there are ‘vanishingly few’ ‘trans people’. None of this is true. The Conservative women do not display an irrational fear; they explain clearly what they stand for. Mental ill-health and uncertainty among people who say they are ‘trans’ are not caused by women reminding people of their sex-based rights and of the need to protect vulnerable children and young people from lies. The number who ‘change legal sex’ is entirely independent of how many claim that they are ‘trans’. No one needs a new national identity number to assert their right as the opposite sex or a fantasy sex – no one knows how many ‘identify’ as trans. The deregistered doctor Esben Benestad, for example, claims that he is a man and a woman on different days of the week, and has not ‘changed’ sex.
‘Trans’ is a growing trend, for men who become aroused by everyone being forced to take part in their fetish of dressing in women’s clothes in public and intruding into women’s spaces, for young women who flee the female body and want to appear different and interesting by declaring themselves ‘non-binary’, for young gay men and lesbians who have been told by their school that their interests and personality mean that they were born in the wrong body, and so on and so forth. It is delusions, mental ill-health, experiences of trauma, autism, men’s fetishes and pornography-inspired contempt for women mixed together in one large, financially lucrative stew: ‘trans’. It is the claim that human beings stand above nature and can dictate what reality is, and that the new reality can be bought for money (read: hormones, surgery, sexual services, surrogacy).
The warning from the Conservative women may herald a new era, with the restoration of rationality, scientific thinking, medical ethics, women’s protection against discrimination and the legal protection of children, young people and parents in legislation. But that requires more women and men in political parties, organisations, academia, the media and positions of power generally to speak out and say that enough is enough. Do you dare? Do you dare not to?
Anne Kalvig, author of ‘Kjønnstru: Kampen om røynda’ (2023) and deputy chair of WDI Norge
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The opinion piece to which Kalvig is responding:
Embarrassing transphobia from Stavanger Conservatives
By Karoline Skarstein
The fact that a handful of trans people have been allowed to change their legal sex has neither erased biology from society, nor sex as a field of medicine.
Cille Ihle and Ingebjørg Folgerø of Stavanger Høyre can rest entirely easy.
When Norway introduced the Act relating to change of legal sex (lov om endring av juridisk kjønn) in 2016, it did so because the previous practice of requiring sterilisation was a violation of human rights.
By 2023, seven years later, 2,000 people had made use of the opportunity. There are therefore limits to how enormous a societal change this has brought about.
Stavanger Høyre and scaremongering rhetoric
Ihle and Folgerø then attack Bufdir’s now much-discussed draft guidance for public-sector employees in their encounters with gender diversity. They highlight a number of frequently refuted claims about the draft and accuse it both of lacking a sound professional basis, of being at odds with reality and of potentially harming children and young people.
They also raise concerns about women’s needs in ‘protected spaces’, including in the health service. As though women are in danger merely because there is a microscopically small chance that they might end up sharing a room with a trans person in a hospital.
They have a greater chance of ending up in a room with men, because the alternative is to become a corridor patient. Without this appearing to concern the Conservative politicians to any significant degree.
The health service has, after all, managed to deal with this for at least ten years now, since the Act relating to change of legal sex was introduced. Without any significant problems having been reported. This is merely a repetition of old transphobic talking points intended to create fear, and an image of a tiny minority as dangerous to women and children.
Last autumn, former Minister of Health Bent Høie, who helped introduce the Act relating to change of legal sex, said that he believed it would have been impossible to get it passed today.
And he pointed out that both Russia and the United States use hatred of trans people to mobilise voters. He was concerned that this development had also spread to Norway. Unfortunately, it has also spread to parts of his own party.
The reality of trans people in Stavanger
But I am concerned that this kind of rhetoric also raises the threshold for many trans people precisely to seek help if they need it. Whether from hospitals, crisis centres or whatever else the ‘trans opponents’ tend to bring up.
It raised my threshold. For very many years, I ignored health problems that only became worse because I did not dare to ask for help. It ended with my being admitted as an emergency patient to Stavanger University Hospital (SUS) a few years ago. And I was terrified that I would become a problem. That merely my presence in one room or another there would make someone worried.
I was afraid that staff would feel uncomfortable helping me. I also tried to cancel necessary operations because I did not want to be in anyone’s way. That is how deep the shame and fear ran. After years of being filled with the kind of scaremongering that Ihle and Folgerø promote in their opinion piece. But what I encountered was, on the contrary, a sense of safety.
Understanding. Care. And warmth. Just as all patients should encounter. And a hospital that did what was best for me, and what was best for all the other patients around me. This can be done, this can be handled. No one was in danger.
Considering how vanishingly few we trans people actually are, we receive a frightening amount of negative attention in public debate. While our real lives. Our catastrophically poor living conditions are not taken seriously at all. Stavanger Høyre is welcome to call if they need tips on real things to care about.
When it comes to sex and gender diversity.
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Ihle and Folgerø’s opinion piece, to which Skarstein and Kalvig are responding:
Women need protected spaces in vulnerable situations
By Cille Ihle and Ingebjørg Folgerø, Stavanger Høyre, Stavanger
Are we to erase the distinction between identity and biology?
In 2016, Norway adopted a law making it possible to change legal sex without a medical assessment. For adults, it is a simple administrative process. Children as young as six can do the same, with parental consent – or with the County Governor (Statsforvalteren) as the deciding authority in the event of disagreement.
With this, sex has to a large extent been moved from the field of medicine to bureaucratic decision-making. This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental societal change.
Voted against in the city council
The advice from public authorities must therefore also be professionally sound, balanced and grounded in reality – not in one particular understanding of what sex ‘is’.
In the city council, the two of us recently voted against adopting guidance from Bufdir in this area. Among other things, the guidance recommends that school employees avoid words such as boy, girl, mother and father, and instead use sibling, parents and similar terms.
We did not vote against it because we lack respect for individuals, but because we question the evidential basis on which the advice rests.
When biological sex is played down in favour of perceived identity, there are consequences. This is not an academic discussion. It affects children, young people and society as a whole.
Children and young people need clear boundaries – not increased confusion. When schools convey unclear or contradictory messages about sex, we risk creating more uncertainty than security in an already vulnerable phase of life.
Women need protected spaces
At the same time, very concrete rights are being challenged. Women need protected spaces – in changing rooms, in the health service and in other vulnerable situations. When access to such spaces is based on self-perceived gender alone, the protection these arrangements are intended to provide is weakened. This is a real dilemma – not a hypothetical problem.
Equally serious is the guidance’s advice that teachers may withhold information from parents. Deliberately concealing the fact that a child expresses a different gender identity at school undermines trust between home and school. Parents have both the right and the responsibility to look after their own children. Without openness, both relationships and security are weakened.
We do not need less knowledge – we need more. Government guidance must be based on broad professional expertise, include biological perspectives and take seriously the long-term consequences of the policies being pursued.
This is not about being for or against people. It is about pursuing responsible policies. Respect for the individual is a matter of course. But precisely for that reason, the advice that is given must be trustworthy.
https://www.bufdir.no/fagstotte/produkter/kjonnsmangfold–faglige-rad-for-offentlig-ansatte/
