The Curious Case of Non-Binary People in EU Data
By Faika El-Nagashi, Anna Zobnina, Róisín Michaux
If you’ve ever been involved in a European Union-funded project, you’ll know it entails an excruciating amount of reporting. So much, in fact, that you may find yourself spending more time filling out forms and writing reports than doing actual work. Logging in and out of clunky, 1990s-era online systems becomes routine, as does the relentless task of counting: counting leaflets printed, counting clicks on Facebook posts, and, most importantly, counting people. Not just any people, of course, but those officially designated as “beneficiaries” of the project. Beneficiaries can be young or old, employed or unemployed, single or married. And, until recently, they were either women or men.
But things have changed. Over the past three years, the European Commission has introduced a new reporting category: non-binary people. EU-funded projects must now report not only how many women, men, boys, and girls participate in their activities but also how many non-binary individuals were involved1. The problem is glaring: while humanity has spent millennia perfecting the ability to distinguish between men and women—a skill particularly important for women seeking to avoid unwanted male attention—no one, including the European Commission, seems to know what a “non-binary person” actually is.
What Does “Non-Binary” Even Mean?
Is it simply someone who declares themselves so? Could it encompass individuals who reject stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity—the very stereotypes the EU claims as a core target to dismantle2? For instance, might a man who enjoys pink—a colour frowned upon by his conservative parents—decide to adopt a “non-binary” identity? Not because he disputes being male, but because he doesn’t fit the rigid “manly” mould his parents envisioned. If this is the standard, how are project managers meant to categorise people accurately?
This question has serious implications. Consider EU-funded medical research under the Horizon Europe programme, which the European Union has been funding in abundance3 with sex being the first among the EU indicators on health4 . After decades—if not centuries—of neglecting sex differences in medicine, such research is finally starting to acknowledge their importance5. Introducing a nebulous data category like “non-binary” risks undermining this progress. How will researchers handle this ambiguous category when their focus is on biological sex?
Is “Non-Binary” About Intersex People?
Perhaps “non-binary” is intended to refer to individuals with intersex conditions—a term historically and offensively referred to as “hermaphrodite.” Medically, these are individuals with Disorders (or Differences) of Sexual Development (DSD). However, most intersex individuals present physically as either male or female, reflecting their biological sex despite their condition. Identifying such individuals typically requires medical diagnosis—something outside the EU’s purview, as healthcare systems are the domain of member states, not the European Commission6.
No Definition, No Clarity
Despite demanding data on “non-binary” individuals across its funding programmes, the European Commission provides no coherent definition of the term. This leaves project coordinators in the unenviable position of guessing when reporting their data. In their eagerness to please EU bureaucrats, some may even claim the presence of non-binary participants where none exist. After all, this is what the EU wants to hear—particularly when they are told “we still have relatively little data on what non-binary people want from the law and how they are currently experiencing different legal systems”7.
Yet the term “non-binary” is conspicuously absent from EU legal instruments—at least for now, despite the persistent efforts of activists to promote it8.
The European Commission’s own “Guidance note on the collection and use of data for LGBTIQ equality” describes non-binary as “an umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of gender experiences,” including “bi-, pan-, poly-, and a-gender people”9. This definition is absurd, legally meaningless, and unenforceable. Another definition, in the Commission’s report “Legal Gender Recognition in the EU,” states that “non-binary identities are varied and can include people who identify with some aspects of binary identities, while others reject them entirely”10. This, too, is vague, non-sensical, and carries no legal weight—especially as the report itself clarifies that it “reflects the views only of the authors” and not the Commission’s official position.
What About Eurostat?
Interestingly, the EU’s main statistical agency, Eurostat, continues to collect data on the basis of sex, that is, female or male sex. This provides statistics to illuminate the differences between women and men. Those differences are not about pink and blue brains. They are not about one group of men embracing masculinist stereotypes and others rejecting them. The sex-disaggregated data collected by Eurostat is supposed to explain in numbers to the European Commission, EU states, and EU citizens the differences in distribution of resources, opportunities, power, care work, and many other important aspects of our lives, between women and men11. Such data is essential for the EU to fulfil its founding principle: equality between women and men—not equality between poly- and a-gender individuals and the rest of genders.
Sacrificing Women’s Rights on an Ideological Altar
One might expect that introducing a new data category with the potential to disrupt statistics on women’s rights across 27 member states would warrant careful consideration. Yet, the EU has not provided a clear definition of “non-binary,” nor has it aligned this category with its legal obligations.
Advocates for this new category argue that a small fraction of EU states (e.g. Germany, Belgium, and Austria) have introduced markers like “diverse” or “X” on legal identification documents. These individuals, they claim, will not be reflected in EU sex-disaggregated statistics. But why should they be? Such statistics are grounded in biological sex, which cannot be altered by self-declarations or state-issued certificates. The EU’s primary legal obligations are clear: they are based on the equality of the sexes, not the equality of “genders.”12
The attempt to redefine sex as a “spectrum” stems from ideology, not science. It is a leap of faith, driven by a small clique of activists, but one with far-reaching consequences for women’s rights and the integrity of EU policy. The idea that gender feelings can replace biological realities isn’t just legally baseless—it’s a profound act of cultural gaslighting.
For now, the EU’s obsession with non-binary data remains just that: an ideological obsession. It is undefined, legally baseless, and potentially harmful to the very purpose of EU statistics—to illuminate and eliminate inequalities between the sexes.
Faika El-Nagashi is a former Member of Parliament (MP) with Austria’s Green Party, a political scientist, and a longstanding advocate for human rights.
Anna Zobnina is a feminist advocate specializing in the rights and protection of migrant and refugee women.
Róisín Michaux is a Brussels-based journalist.
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Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash