The Gay Man Iceland Wants to Silence: Inside a "Gender Gilead" - Eldur Smári Kristinsson (#24)
28 July 2025
With Eldur Smári Kristinsson
Europe
Iceland's hate speech law has been invoked three times against Eldur Smári Kristinsson, chairman of the country's Lesbian and Gay Alliance, for social media posts questioning gender-identity doctrine. His prosecutions illustrate how legal frameworks designed to protect minorities are being directed at gay rights advocates who refuse to accept the redefinition of homosexuality. With gender ideology embedded in kindergartens and BDSM classified as a sexual orientation in school curricula, Iceland stands as a European case study in what happens when ideological capture outpaces evidence-based scrutiny.
Eldur Smári Kristinsson chairs Samtökin 22, Iceland's Lesbian and Gay Alliance, and has been speaking publicly about gender-identity ideology since 2015. His entry point was a question that many gay men and lesbians across Europe have quietly asked: why are same-sex attracted people expected to affirm sexual access to bodies of the opposite sex — a demand framed as inclusion but experienced as a redefinition of homosexuality itself. For raising that question in Iceland, Kristinsson has faced three separate rounds of criminal investigation under the country's hate speech legislation. Iceland, with a population of roughly 400,000, has adopted some of the most expansive gender-identity policy in Europe. According to Kristinsson, the ideology has entered the kindergarten curriculum to the point where young children return home asking whether they can change sex, and school sex education has been expanded to classify BDSM as a sexual orientation. These developments took place without the kind of systematic evidence review that has prompted formal course corrections in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the United Kingdom — countries with comparable welfare states and legal traditions that have since restricted or suspended paediatric gender medicine after independent clinical audits found the evidence base inadequate. The criminal complaints against Kristinsson centre on Iceland's hate speech provisions. The first arose from a social media post in which he misgendered a biological male who had breastfed a child, stating that breastfeeding is a female biological function. Subsequent complaints followed a similar pattern, with his third investigation also connected to criticism of male breastfeeding. Iceland's hate speech framework does not appear to require proof of actual incitement or demonstrable harm; subjective offence taken by a complainant can be sufficient to open a police investigation. The cumulative effect has been a severe chilling of public debate, with Kristinsson reporting that he now carries hidden recording equipment in public as his primary form of protection. Kristinsson presented his account of Iceland's situation at Genspect's Lisbon conference, and the domestic reception was significant enough that he subsequently stood as a parliamentary candidate. His case reached the political class at the same moment that neighbouring Nordic countries were publicly reconsidering the evidence base for paediatric gender transition. The contrast is instructive: countries with structurally similar health systems convened systematic reviews and tightened clinical guidelines on the basis of the available evidence, while Iceland moved in the opposite direction at the levels of both law and school curriculum. The broader European dimension is constitutional. Hate speech laws exist across Council of Europe member states and were designed to protect people from persecution on grounds of race, religion and sexual orientation. Their application to factual statements about biological sex — or to a gay man's objection to the ideological redefinition of same-sex attraction — raises live questions about whether free expression guarantees under the European Convention on Human Rights are being applied consistently. Kristinsson's repeated prosecutions are not an isolated Icelandic curiosity; they are an early data point in a legal tension that courts and legislatures across Europe will eventually be required to confront directly.
