Professor Robert Wintemute, one of the world’s leading experts in human rights law at King’s College London, played a central role in drafting the historic Yogyakarta Principles in 2006. Today, he has undertaken a remarkable and far-reaching reversal.
Rising above ordinary politics, he now publicly warns that these principles laid the legal foundation for a situation in which the state today undermines biological realities, women’s safety, parental rights, and the basis of homosexual existence.
The fatal mistake: The merger of LGB and T.
Wintemute’s primary self-criticism is directed at the international human rights movement’s decision to merge the struggle for homosexual rights (LGB) with transgender ideology (T) under one and the same umbrella. He points out that these are two fundamentally contradictory projects:
– The homosexual rights movement (LGB) is rooted in biology:
Legal protection for homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual individuals requires biological sex to be a fixed and indisputable reality.
Sexual orientation is defined solely by whom one is attracted to on the basis of the partner’s biological sex.
– Transgender ideology (T) is rooted in psychology:
This philosophy, by contrast, holds that a person’s internal, subjective “gender identity” overrides the physical body, and that biological sex is merely a fluid social construct. This is the core of Queer Theory and the philosophical outlook that today forms the basis of radical gender ideology.
To explain this simply, it may be divided into two principal concepts:
1. Gender identity overrides the body (psychological reality).
In traditional science, it has been assumed that the body (anatomy, chromosomes, and biology) determines whether one is male or female.
This ideology turns that assumption entirely upside down.
It claims that the most authentic and true aspect of a human being is not the physical body, but the inner psychological sense of who one is (gender identity).
If a biological male (with male reproductive organs and XY chromosomes) has an inner sense of being a woman, this philosophy maintains that the inner feeling overrides biology.
Society, the legal system, and language must therefore treat that person as a woman. The body is reduced to a kind of outer shell, while the mind determines the actual truth.
2. Biological sex as a “social construct”.
This is the most radical point, and the one Robert Wintemute describes as a betrayal of biology.
A “social construct” means something that human beings have invented and agreed upon, rather than something that exists naturally.
The philosophy maintains that the idea that there are only two biological sexes (male and female) is something society has “made up” in order to maintain order or oppress people.
Its advocates argue that doctors who look at a newborn child and say “it’s a boy” are not observing a biological fact, but assigning or imposing a label on the child (so-called assigned at birth).
Because they regard sex as a social invention, they claim that sex is in reality a fluid spectrum.
Bodies, hormones, and chromosomes are so varied, they argue, that no clear biological boundary can be drawn between male and female.
For critics (and modern science), sex is not a social construct; it is an indisputable biological and reproductive fact. There are only two sexes because nature requires egg cells and sperm cells in order to perpetuate life.
When the state and the school system (through CSE programmes and Rosa kompetanse) adopt this philosophy, it means in practice that children are taught that biological facts are not true, and that their own changing feelings define objective reality.
By forcing these two together, Wintemute argues, a situation has been created in which the transgender lobby today accuses homosexual men and lesbians of “discrimination” if they establish biological boundaries for their own sexuality. This is also the direct reason why LHB Norge was founded – as a pure counter-reaction aimed at separating the homosexual rights movement from transgender ideology and thereby defending biological reality.
The consequences for women and the law:
Wintemute admits that the expert group in 2006 did not consider the consequences for women at all when drafting Principle 3, which requires the state to permit changes of legal sex on the basis of self-identification.
“We completely overlooked the fact that men with intact male anatomy would use this to demand legal and physical access to women’s private spaces.”
By allowing “gender identity” to take precedence in legislation, the principles laid the runway for the legal changes we have seen in Western countries (including Norway’s Act Relating to the Change of Legal Gender of 2016).
This has had dramatic consequences for women:
– The elimination of safe spaces:
Biological males have been granted statutory access to women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, shelters for women, and women’s sports.
– The destruction of equality mechanisms:
When the definition of a “woman” is reduced to a fluid feeling, the state loses the tools required to measure wage disparities, compile rape statistics, or enforce quotas for women.
Critics such as the sociologist Gabriele Kuby, organisations such as WDI (Women’s Declaration International), and LHB Norge argue that when biological reality is removed in favour of a purely psychological understanding of identity, the foundations of both women’s rights and humanity’s continued existence are shaken….
The radicalisation of 2017:
The goal of eradicating facts.
Wintemute did not participate when a hard core of transgender activists updated the document in Geneva in 2017 (YP+10).
He has stated in British media that he was deeply shocked when he read the new Principle 31.
Principle 31 explicitly demands that states cease all registration of a person’s sex in official identity documents, such as birth certificates.
It was here that Wintemute realised the movement had mutated.
It was no longer about human rights for a vulnerable minority, but about the complete legal eradication of biological facts.
The goal was for children to be born as sexless state objects, with biology erased from the law.
The Norwegian legislative machinery closes the circle (2016–2024):
What Wintemute describes as a supranational deconstruction of biology has in recent years been cemented in Norwegian legislation.
This has occurred through a coordinated legal and financial cycle.
The iron ring around the ideology:
– Change of legal gender in 2016, allowing children as young as six to change their legal sex.
– The hate-speech provision (1 January 2021).
In order to protect this new gender philosophy from public opposition, the Storting implemented a historic amendment to Section 185 of the Penal Code (hate speech).
The sociological umbrella term “gender identity or gender expression” was written directly into criminal law.
The legislative amendment came after massive international pressure from the same United Nations circles behind the Yogyakarta Principles.
Today the law is actively used as a rhetorical threat to create a chilling effect and silence legitimate biological objections from parents, teachers, and LHB Norge in children’s shared environments.
The financial connection:
– The EEA and Protocol 31 (Autumn 2021).
Only months after the legislative amendment (the hate-speech provision), the financial pipeline was channelled through Protocol 31 of the EEA Agreement in the autumn of 2021. Through this mechanism, Norway committed itself to the EU’s major Erasmus+ programme.
For Norwegian schools, kindergartens, and municipalities to gain access to the millions distributed through the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) and Bufdir, EU regulations require projects to align with the EU’s radical gender and diversity strategies.
Public educational institutions are thereby rewarded financially for implementing the programmes and teaching manuals (CSE) of Foreningen FRI and Rosa kompetanse.
Because this ideology is incorporated across all school subjects, parents have in practice lost the right to request exemptions for their children.
The final blow against parental rights:
– The conversion legislation (1 January 2024).
The circle was finally closed with the ban on conversion therapy (Section 270 of the Penal Code). By making precisely the same mistake Wintemute warned against – combining homosexuality and gender identity within the same criminal provision – the state has made it a criminal offence to help someone “change, deny, or suppress their gender identity”.
This has dramatic consequences in practice:
If a teacher, psychologist, or parent attempts to guide a confused young person towards finding peace with his or her biological body rather than embarking on a lifelong medical pathway, they risk between three and six years’ imprisonment.
The law states that minors cannot give consent.
Parents who refuse to use the new pronoun their child has learned at school, or who refuse to take the child for hormone treatment, may therefore be prosecuted for systematically “denying or suppressing” the child’s identity.
The beneficiaries behind the machinery:
Wintemute and independent analysts point out that this systematic deconstruction of biology is sustained by enormous power interests.
Whereas homosexuality does not involve medical treatment or healthcare services, transgender identity often presupposes lifelong treatment with pharmaceuticals and surgery, which also means an extensive and lifelong market for the medical industry. Behind the aggressive lobbying within the United Nations and the European Union stand billionaire philanthropists such as George Soros and Jon Stryker, who finance the organisations pressing these legislative changes upon member states.
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The recipient of this policy is therefore the medical-industrial complex.
By using schools to teach children that their bodies may be “wrong”, confused children and young people are transformed into lifelong medical consumers of puberty blockers, synthetic hormones, and plastic surgery.
Wintemute’s historic reversal today stands as the foremost evidence that those who built the legal foundation for this ideology realise that they created a monster that is now being used by the state to suppress science, women’s safety and rights, and parental rights.