Wednesday, December 24th 2025
“When a law becomes a tool to force people to think alike, it ceases to be a law and turns into an instrument for tyranny.” This is what the French philosopher Monstequieu warned, giving perhaps one of the strongest definitions of the vices and wickedness contained in a project, as in the case of the debate on “gender self-determination”, where a small part of society seeks to impose itself on the majority by inventing concepts that can change not only the understanding of gender, but also logic, science and justice.
But why should we be careful about trying to redefine the concept on gender?
First, we must affirm that the draft law “On Gender Equality” is not related to the Istanbul Convention, as the drafters of the draft law “On Gender Equality” have tried to defend. In fact, the defenders of the draft law make a deliberate misreading and an attempt to give an international basis to a draft law that has nothing to do with either the spirit or the text of the Convention.
The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention (adopted in 2011), is one of the most serious documents that recognizes violence against women as a violation of human rights. human and form of gender discrimination. But its purpose is clear: to protect women and girls from violence, punish perpetrators, provide shelter for victims and educate society. At no point does this document invent new concepts on “social gender” or “gender self-determination”. And even less, it is not an ideological manual to rewrite the meaning of man and woman. In fact, in Article 3(c), the Convention explains that “gender” means the roles, behaviors and attributes that a society considers appropriate for men and women.
So the word “gender” there has nothing to do with the personal identity or subjective feelings of the individual.
The Convention talks about social roles that create inequality — not to change them or to reinvent them. It is essentially binary: it deals with two categories, man and woman. Nothing in its text suggests the existence of a “third gender” or a “gender spectrum” that the Albanian bill tries to legalize. From the introduction to the last article, the Convention is exclusively focused on women. In fact, the Preamble expressly states: “Violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women.”
This is the reason why many European countries have ratified the Convention without changing the binary definition of gender. The Convention was built to address a real inequality between women and men – not to promote new identity theories that have no international legal basis.
One of the points that is often used to “support” the Albanian draft law is Article 4(3) of the Convention, which prohibits discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender identity. But this article does not change the definition of “gender”. It only ensures that no one is excluded from protection if they are victims of violence. This is a procedural non-discrimination clause, not a basis for gender redefinition.
However, in the case of the draft law that is now under debate in the Assembly, this article has been misread, turning it into an ideological basis, which overturns the very logic of the Convention.
In none of its articles, the Istanbul Convention requires states:
These are initiatives that some countries have followed according to their policies internal, but do not originate from the Convention. In essence, the Convention rests on the biological and social reality of the two sexes — because only in this way can the inequalities that lead to violence against women be understood. The claim that the Albanian draft law “harmonizes with the Istanbul Convention” is more of a political trick than a legal fact. The Convention does not recognize “gender identity” as a legal category, does not require a redefinition of man and woman and does not speak of “fluid gender”. Its purpose is clear: to protect women from violence, not to undo the concept of woman.
If this draft law is approved without the changes proposed by many critics, it will not only lose its connection with the Istanbul Convention, but also with the logic of gender equality itself. Because gender equality, to be true, must be based on the real existence of two sexes and not on their denial. And this, more clearly than anyone, has been said by Europe itself.
In fact, such a draft law does not only contradict the Istanbul Convention, which is being abused by taking it as a protection, but also the standards of the European Union. The defenders of the draft law claim that the law is harmonized with the EU Strategy for Gender Equality 2020-2025. But with a quick analysis it is understood that this is one of the most serious and deliberate misinterpretations that has been made to an official EU document. In fact, the Albanian draft law is not in accordance with EU standards, on the contrary, it deviates deeply from them, distorting the basic notions on which the entire European policy for gender equality is built. The European Commission’s strategic document clearly defines its goal: to ensure equality between women and men, that is, between the two biological sexes. Every policy, measure, or objective – from closing the wage gap to balance in decision-making is built on this binary axis.
The claim that the EU has moved towards a “fluid” understanding of gender or a replacement of the categories “man” and “woman” with “subjective gender identities” is completely untrue. No EU document supports such an approach. In fact, the draft law in question deliberately misuses the phrase found in the EU strategy – “in all their diversity” – to justify the inclusion of concepts related to gender identity.
The EU does not talk about “gender diversity”, but about diversity of experience within the category of women or men – e.g. the experience of a disabled woman, a migrant woman or an elderly woman. These are social dimensions, not the creation of new gender categories.
Finally, it is worth saying that the dangerous distortion of the draft law is the artificial union of gender issues with those of sexual identity, since in no official document of the Commission, Parliament or Council of the EU there is a formulation that legally recognizes “gender self-determination” as a basis for building public policies.
The use of this concept in the Albanian draft law is an ideological import, with no legal reference in the EU framework. Indeed, many EU member states, such as France, Hungary, Greece, Poland or Italy, have refused to include this notion in their national legislation. Thus, it is absurd to claim that the adoption of this law “brings us closer to the EU”, when many EU member states have carefully excluded it from their legal frameworks.
…Therefore, Albania should stop, reflect and follow the example of the countries that have dared to say: enough with ideology, it is time to return to biological reality and to the true protection of the fundamental rights of human.
Kaynak: prizrenpost
