Portugal’s Transgender Agenda Leaves Parents Fighting an Uphill Battle

The horrendous phenomenon of gender ideology in public schools is not exclusive to the Anglosphere, and the social epidemic of sex changes and its inhumane consequences do not seem to perturb the Portuguese government, be it the Socialist Party (PS) or the Social Democratic Party (PSD) in power.

What is being observed across the West is the very clear result of indoctrination, peer pressure, and brainwashing. To use Marxist terminology, it is an artificial ‘social construct’ directly correlated to the intersectional propaganda in the social environment of the young individuals in question. The more ideology present, the higher the likelihood of ‘gender dysphoria’ cases. The epidemic has been diagnosed as ROGD—’rapid-onset gender dysphoria’—in official circles, to create a jargon to describe the blatantly abnormal situation. The NGO sector in Portugal is heavily dominated by far-left activists, often enjoying governmental, international, and EU subsidies. For example, the NGO SOS Racismo—run by a former advisor to the Left Bloc—gets much of its funding from the national government as well as from Brussels. The same applies to the cultural sphere, where half of the budget of the culture ministry goes to finance the public TV network RTP, and the other half is distributed to Marxist-biased cultural associations. These are also often welcomed into schools to spread their ideology. Children’s literature and cartoons repeat the transgender propaganda, famous intellectuals and academics come up with biased pseudo-scientific studies that claim that gender-reassignment ‘saves lives,’ and teachers and school psychologists/guidance counselors are recommending that children in crisis be redirected to the national health service for gender reassignment.

The most perverse aspect of the trend is that the children and adolescents most prone to fall for the indoctrination are the most impressionable and vulnerable: socially-pressured pubescent girls (almost 90% of transition surgeries in public hospitals), children on the autism spectrum, and those with Down Syndrome. The medical system is practically an industrial conveyor belt: there are several recorded cases of children being formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and in need of gender reassignment after a single consultation. Nowadays, not even a medical prescription is required for hormone replacement medication or puberty blockers. Legally, it is extremely easy to proceed to a change of name—but almost impossible to change it back; A new name change requires a court order, which can only be obtained by hiring a lawyer and petitioning the court, requiring money, determination and time. In the medical field, some characters take advantage of the crazed trend to boost their credentials in order to ride the money windfall. On its final day in office in 2023, the socialist government approved the ‘conversion therapy ban’ into law. If any medical professionals had the courage to resist, it went out the window when the law was approved, criminalising any instance of ‘conversion’ efforts—i.e., genuine psychotherapeutic help.

Anumber of NGOs have recorded the monstrosities occurring in the medical and education fields. Some were founded by religiously-minded activists and others by outraged parents looking for answers and mutual support. The Conservative Family Association, led by Maria Helena Costa, has been warning about this issue since 2020 and is now Portugal’s leading voice on it. Juventude em Transição (JeT), formalised in 2024, brings together parents of children in crisis and has since joined Genspect, a network of NGOs opposing the gender-transition trend across more than 30 countries.

These organisations do not question the very real phenomena of gender dysphoria disorders or intersex conditions. Such disorders, while rare, are very real and should be handled with the utmost caution and kindness. Organisations supporting parents describe school psychologists and teachers as ‘toxic’ agents who weaponize their access to and credibility with children to promote private ideological agendas. These authority figures have even been known to direct the teens to NGOs that teach them to threaten self-harm to emotionally blackmail parents into paying for hormone replacement and genital mutilation. Renata Mendes from JeT recounts that if parents resist, children will at times run away from home and be placed in care by social authorities, while awaiting legal age for emancipation. These transgender NGOs are also in touch with activists collecting private international donations for the surgeries of the runaway teens. In cases where the Portuguese health service would take too long to schedule the operation, options are available in less scrupulous jurisdictions in Latin America or the Middle East. No one takes responsibility for the obvious comorbidity of suicide following these mutilating procedures, or for the fact that the national health service ends up paying the bill for the years of remedial treatments necessary to cope with the health issues resulting from the mental and physical scarring. Journalists denouncing the scheme risk their careers, partly as a result of far-left dominance in the media, partly because the media owners do not wish to lose viewers to politically incorrect narratives or lose political favour with the establishment. Reporters assigned to cover these issues are themselves often not ‘cisnormative,’ which only exacerbates the bias.

Legally, no recourse is available. In 2022, I wrote about the case of the Mesquita Guimarães family who was legally persecuted by the Socialist minister of education for refusing to allow their sons to attend civics class where they knew gender ideology was part of the curriculum. Just in the past month, the family was again reported to social services and will have to appear in court to defend itself from anonymous accusations the substance of which they have not been informed about.

Far-left networks of activists in schools conspire to keep sex change intentions and transitions secret from the parents until it’s too late. Often, parents are confronted with situations where their child was already known by a different name to the entire school for months—including in school reports and grading documents. If parents push back, they run the very real risk of actually losing custody of their children. This Kafkaesque procedure was codified by the Direito a Ser nas Escolas manual guidelines (The Right to Be, in Schools) which was implemented by the Socialist government’s Education Ministry under advice from LGBT NGOs and which stated that in matters pertaining to gender dysphoria

the self-styled name must be respected in all school and extra-curricular activities to be organised

and that

when communicating with the family, the importance of privacy and dignity in this matter, must be recognised. There may be situations when the person [student] has not yet communicated the gender identity to the legal custodians, father, mother, relatives and even social circles.

How many children undergo the entire process up to surgery is unknown but we do know that each year, hundreds of adolescents request name changes to their ID cards.. Organisations like JeT and activists on the conservative Right have attempted to fight the Orwellian drive of the cultural Marxist government through a constitutional approach: the Portuguese constitution states in its article 43 that “the State cannot program education and culture according to any philosophical, aesthetic, political, ideological or religious directives” and this article has been quoted in national petitions and in individual cases by parents when justifying opposition to the totalitarian manual implemented in the public school system. The arrival of a new government in 2024 has not changed anything, as the infamous public school manual is still pushed by governmental bodies. In fact, the new ‘centre-right’ government has also replaced the word ‘women’ with ‘menstruating persons’ and the LGBT colours were projected on the facade of both Parliament and the Health Ministry. One can only hope that the mutilation of innocent minors will be the final death knell for the progressive dystopian regimes which rule Western Europe.