While extant research has sought to understand the complex entanglements of anti-gender campaigns, anti-trans feminisms and far-right groups in Europe (e.g., Bassi & LaFleur 2022; Hines 2025; Lamble 2024), it often overlooks how these movements increasingly target trans children and youth (see Amery 2024). Despite a growing interest in conceptualizing anti-gender politics in the Nordic states (e.g., Karlberg, Korolczuk & Sältenberg 2024; Engebretsen, Eslen-Ziya & Giorgi 2022; Hansen 2021; Norocel & Pettersson 2025), attempts to theorize the Finnish manifestations of the phenomenon remain limited. This paper contributes to these ongoing debates by offering empirical insights into the political struggles surrounding trans children and youth’s rights in the 2023 legal gender recognition (LGR) reform in Finland.
After a heated public debate, the reform abolished the harmful requirements to prove forced infertility and to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to obtain LGR. Previous research has explored the discursive strategies utilized in Finnish parliamentary debates surrounding the reform, emphasizing the need for further investigation into the increasing politicization of trans minors’ rights (Järviö & Pihlajamaa, in press). Although the new law continues to exclude minors from accessing LGR, trans and children’s rights advocates successfully pushed the Parliament to adopt a statement obliging the government to explore and prepare legislative changes aimed at safeguarding trans children and youth’s right to self-determination, despite growing transnational opposition to gender and LGBTIQ+ equality.
Through an affective-discursive reading of parliamentary debates, committee reports and expert hearings, this paper critically examines the gender knowledge (Cavaghan 2017; Verloo 2018; Paternotte & Verloo 2021) constructed by both opponents and proponents of extending LGR access to trans minors. It further explores how these constructions are situated within broader anti-trans mobilizations and trans rights organizing in Europe, and how they circulate between domestic parliamentary and non-parliamentary actors. By centering its analytical gaze on the intersection of gender diversity and age, the article sheds light on the challenges facing contemporary democracies from a perspective often marginalized in parliamentary practices and their feminist research.
