The horror of Spain’s ‘transfeminist’ summer camp

Over the past few weeks, Spain has been horrified by allegations of rampant sexual abuse at a kids’ summer camp. The camp’s adult staff have been accused of showering naked with children, cooking wearing nothing but aprons, and engaging in sexual activity in front of young teens.

The camp, which took place in August in the small Basque village of Bernedo, is one of three run by non-profit youth association Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea. The organisation describes its aims as the preservation of the Basque language and ‘transfeminist values’. A month after the camp wrapped up, Zuriñe Ojeda, vice-president of Spain’s feminist political party, Partido Feministas al Congreso, reported some of the allegations in the El Común newspaper. Since then, numerous families have come forward to allege serious failures of safeguarding.

Children who attended the camp told their parents that the mirrors in the bathrooms were painted over with explicit images. One showed a woman whose legs were spread wide around the words on egin (‘enjoy your meal’). El Correo reported that a staff member appeared before the children with his genitals exposed and covered in plastic wrap during a dramatised re-enactment of scenes from Basque mythology. Allegedly, adult monitors also engaged in sexual activity with each other while children were present.

Similar complaints were made by vulnerable children who, under the guardianship of Guipúzcoa Provincial Council, had attended the same camp in previous years. One girl, who had already suffered from previous sexual trauma, reported having to suck the big toe of an adult staff member in order to get her afternoon snack. A young man, who was 15 years old at the time he attended the camp, testified that ‘they talked to us about whether they were homosexual… and they asked me what I liked… There was a boy who didn’t want to undress to shower, and the monitor pulled down his underwear.’ The council quietly stopped sending children in care to the camp after a social worker made a police report last year, but it did not deem it necessary to investigate further.

Basque police have now confirmed they are investigating 12 allegations made in relation to the camp, though no charges have been filed so far. Following the intense media attention, authorities have been forced to explain how official complaints could have been made going back as far as 2019 with no action being taken. Officials from the Alava Provincial Council insist they were not officially aware of the camp, since the organisers never registered it. Nerea Melgosa, a minister in the regional government, has promised measures to ensure summer camps are better regulated in future.

What these children report is the stuff of nightmares. More alarming still is the fact that, even in the face of outrage from the press and public, the camp organisers have expressed no contrition. Instead, Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea released a statement condemning the complaints as ‘transphobic’. It also confirmed that the practice of mixed-sex showers was not an oversight or a mistake, but an intentional part of the camp’s programme. ‘In our society, bathrooms and showers are tools to divide people according to binary logic and gender’, it said. ‘We believe that working on the desexualisation of nudity and gender relations is essential to protect ourselves from various types of violence, and we believe that mixed-gender showers can be a space to deconstruct this sexualisation.’

This perverse ideology appears to be deeply embedded in Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea and is exemplified by the statements of board-member Aner Peritz Manterola (nicknamed ‘Euzkitze’), a 23-year-old trans activist. Writing in Berria, a Basque-language newspaper, back in February, he argued that ‘cis-heterosexual education and supposedly neutral systems create cis-heterosexual people, desires and practices. We have been subjected to heterosexual indoctrination.’ Apparently, the answer to ‘heterosexual education’ is what he calls ‘transmaribollo education’, which literally translates as ‘fag-dyke education’. ‘We want to “faggotise” your children (since we usually don’t have children of our own) so that you don’t heterosexualise them’, he wrote. ‘And we also have teaching degrees.’

The fact that Peritz Manterola can proudly state his longing to ‘faggotise’ children in his local paper should serve as a harsh reality check for the Spanish establishment. Undoubtedly, this vile nonsense has been encouraged and emboldened by Spain’s woke education system. An obsessive focus on adopting ‘inclusive practices’ and policies wrapped in reassuring, progressive language has clearly, in some cases, served to erode safeguarding principles.

Dispiritingly, the same trans-extremist ideology championed by the organisers of the Bernedo camp has many supporters among Spanish politicians, journalists and even the ordinary public. More than 130 families signed a letter in support of the camp following the allegations. The ‘feminist’ magazine, Pikara, called press reports of the alleged abuse ‘sensationalist’ and a ‘hateful campaign of criminalisation’. It condemned Zuriñe Ojeda, who broke the story, as ‘transphobic’.

But as accounts of what happened at Bernedo continue to emerge, many in Spain are seeing for the first time the real-life consequences of unscrutinised gender ideology. Whether or not any criminal charges are pressed, there will be no shoving the genie back into the bottle now. The logical endpoint of endless ‘inclusion’ has been exposed for all to see.

Annette Pacey is a freelance writer based in Barcelona.