Just as I sat down to watch the Friday evening news last week, I received a distress call. On the phone was a man I had never met. He was desperately searching for a venue for a lesbian, gay and bisexual organisation wishing to hold a one-day seminar taking place the next day.
This was at the height of Iceland´s annual pride week and the organisation had arranged to hold their conference at an auditorium rented out by the National Museum of Iceland. A few days earlier the museum had suddenly cancelled the event following complaints by activists, who objected to their views on trans rights.
How did we get to a point where public institutions and political parties are threatened for hosting a meeting to discuss human rights issues?
A frantic search for a new venue yielded results and shortly before the distress signal was sent out the organisation’s volunteers had been busy setting up at an equestrian centre on the outskirts of Reykjavik. Just as everything was falling into place, they received word that they would need to evacuate the premises and could not hold their conference there either.
Foreign lecturers had arrived (including a professor of human rights law at King’s College London) the second location had been advertised, catering arranged. Now the organisation was desperately searching for a place to meet the following morning.
My political party, the Centre party, has a hall which it sometimes hires out and although I usually don’t handle such things I told the beleaguered man on the phone that the hall was certainly available if arrangements could be made on such short notice.
I later found out that as soon as our venue had been listed, our political party and many of our members had been bombarded with calls from activists telling us to cancel the event (often with colourful language). This wasn´t even our event, we were just renting out a venue.
What did these activists expect us to do, ban an organisation fighting for the rights of homosexuals from renting the premises? Such a course of action would almost certainly have been illegal and probably unconstitutional.
How did we get to a point where public institutions and political parties are threatened for hosting a meeting to discuss human rights issues? Why did Iceland´s biggest LGBTQIA+ organisation – an organisation that receives considerable government grants and has been tasked with educating children and advising on government bills – feel it was necessary to try to stop an LGB organisation having a meeting anywhere in the country?
I was flabbergasted and found the vitriol aimed at the people who had met in the party’s conference hall a bit discerning. Why in the week of ‘universal love, tolerance and acceptance’ was a group of people meeting with a human rights professor being called a hate group that should not be allowed to convene anywhere?
When I asked what hate speech this group had engaged in, no one would provide me with any specific examples. Some said that they were not trans inclusive, apparently because this group of people have doubts about biological men competing in women’s sport, are against overt sexual education for young children, and do not want a system where parents and doctors are not allowed to question a whether a child should transition.
Despite my bewilderment at seeing these events unfold it was not my first experience of being perplexed by these issues. When the Scottish SNP government was working on its self-ID bills the Icelandic government introduced a bill that was intended to beat the world on the issue. This was meant to happen without any debate about its influence on women’s sports, private spaces or prisons.
The bill generated very little debate in Iceland and that was just what the government wanted. Their members in parliament avoided discussing it apart from short statements to remind people that Iceland was now becoming the World Leader in human rights.
When I and members of my party asked questions while emphasising the importance of protecting transgender people’s rights we got no answers, only smears.
But this was only the beginning. Since then, the government has introduced a law which makes standard surgical procedures for children with birth defects more difficult – if those defects have anything to do with reproductive organs. This is because these defects are seen as a ‘representation’ of gender identity. Parents in Iceland have started taking their children to other countries for procedures that had been standard and safe for decades.
We were the only ones to criticise this in parliament and again we were met with derision. But at the same time many medical professionals contacted us personally to thank us for our criticism, offer insight and explain why these proposals went not only against common sense but also against science and medicine. None of them were willing to say these things publicly for fear of losing their jobs or future prospects.
However, it should be mentioned that a couple of doctors who took part in preparing the proposals managed to implement some temporary exemptions. But these exemptions are then to be reassessed by the very activists who were against them. In fact all of the government’s proposals in this field are now being instigated and worked on by activists.
Currently the government has started deleting the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ from their bills. These people are now replaced with ‘uterus havers’ and ‘birthing parents’.
How did I get into this position, having to spend my time excusing my commitment to free speech and pointing to what I suppose we might now call ‘the general theory of reality’? In any case I am always willing to listen. A good friend of mine, who is better initiated into this modern world than I am, has offered to give me further insight into these issues. I am thankful for that because if a politician is to have any governing principles it must be a commitment to freedom of speech and debate
I am just a bloke who entered my field of work in order to be a centrist common sense politician who would like everyone to be equal before the law and focus on the economy, housing and improving people’s lives. It seems that in modern politics all of a sudden you can be called fanatical for saying what everyone knew to be true a couple of years ago.
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