This bonus episode of Gender Lupa is a short interview with Spanish feminist Zuriñe Ojeda, who broke the story about the abuse at a summer camp in Bernedo this summer. Listen to the interview above and read the full story below.
A few weeks ago I came across a story which stopped me in my tracks. Spanish feminist Zuriñe Ojeda had published an article in the left-wing publication El Comúnalleging that children between thirteen and fifteen years old had been required to shower naked in mixed sex groups at a summer camp in the Basque Country in Northern Spain.
As soon as I read this, I suspected there was an ideological motive behind the otherwise inexplicable practice with kids at the the age of peak shyness about their bodies. Sure enough, it turned out that when they had objected to stripping naked in front of their opposite-sex peers, the children were told this was necessary in case there were some trans people who felt categorized. Some tried to avoid full nudity by showering in their bathing suits, but were pressured not to by the adult volunteer monitors who run the camp.
Parents, who had not been warned about in advance about any of this, obviously complained to the organisers, but did not receive a satisfactory response. When Zuriñe’s story was published and other families started to come forward, the allegations became even more serious. Incredibly, the adult monitors had actually showered naked with the children, and even, allegedly, walked around the camp with their genitals exposed.
The camp took place in August this year in the small village of Bernedo, in the province of Álava in northern Spain. It was run by a non-profit association Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea which organises Basque language immersion summer camps and other youth-oriented activities at three centres in the province. The camps are staffed by young volunteers. On the website, the organisation claims to promote an inclusive environment and a feminist perspective.
As other media outlets, like El Diaro Vasco, started to pick up the story, Zuriñe was contacted by a man she calls Alex, who works for a company contracted by the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council to protect and care for at-risk children, some of whom had attended the camp in previous years. One of them - a girl who had experienced past sexual trauma - reported having to suck an adult monitor’s toe in order to get her afternoon snack. Alex’s complaints to the police were referred to a judge in Vittoria, but for reasons that are still unclear, the case did not proceed any further.
Before this summer’s camp, Council authorities quietly decided to no longer send children to Bernedo. But until the recent media storm, there seems to have been a complete lack of curiosity, let alone action, by the various authorities about multiple complaints against the Bernedo camp going back as far as 2019.
In the month since Zuriñe published the first story, the allegations of abuse and the inadequate response from the authorities, has developed into a national story in the Spanish media covered by major outlets like RTVE and Telecinco. After being asleep at the wheel for years, the police, the courts, councils and regional government are all of a sudden scrambling to announce investigations and develop new policies.
Far from denying the abuse, the camp organisers confirmed and defended what had happened at Bernedo. Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea released a statement on their Instagram account. Here is a taste (translated):
“We strongly condemn the transphobic attacks we have suffered…Our educational project is based on transfeminist values and seeks to create safe spaces for all identities and bodies…In our society, bathrooms and showers are a tool to divide people according to binary logic and gender…This proposal is political and, therefore, ethical…This is not a proposal isolated from children and young people…We believe that working on the desexualization 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 sexualization.”
You get the idea. You can read their full statement (in Spanish) here. They couldn’t make it any clearer - nothing about this was an accident.
It shouldn’t need saying, but pressuring thirteen to fifteen year olds to get naked, not just in mixed-sex groups but with the adults who are supposed to ensure their wellbeing, does not protect children from violence - quite the opposite.
Abusive practices like this, imposed on children by those in authority, and disguised with language of kindness and inclusion, are part of a deliberate strategy designed to break down the boundaries that exist to prevent abuse, in a context where children are away from the protection of their parents. Social pressure and adult authority are used to coerce children into ignoring their evolved self-protective instinct for privacy in order to conform to a grotesque ideology that cloaks itself in reassuring, progressive language but actually serves to make children vulnerable to predators.
Iconic Spanish feminist Lidia Falcón captured it perfectly, writing in El Común (translated):
“The facts reported by the families and gathered by El Común are clear, and the organizers have wrapped them up in the gift paper of ‘bodily normalization’ and ‘transfeminist education.’ Translated into plain language: the exposure of adolescents to the nudity of the adult supervisors, with a narrative that disarms parents by accusing them of being prudish if they take offense, and that blames the minors themselves if they feel uncomfortable for not being sufficiently open. That is not education, that is symbolic and material violence, and no rhetoric can conceal it.”
In case anyone is still hoping that the camp organisers fall into the deluded-but-well-intentioned category, I’d like you to meet Aner Peritz. Nicknamed “Euzkitze,” Aner is a bertsolari (a kind of Basque singing poet), a well-known trans activist and member of the board of Sarrea Euskal Udalekua Elkartea, the organisation who ran the Bernedo camp.
Here’s an except from an opinion piece by Aner in Basque publication Berria from February this year where he laid out part of his philosophy on educating minors (translated, complete with slurs):
“We have learned that cis-heterosexual education and supposedly neutral systems create cis-heterosexual people, desires, and practices. We have been subjected to heterosexual indoctrination. Now we want to use those tools ourselves. We know that heterosexual education is answered with “transmaribollo” education [lit. ‘trans-fag-dyke’]. We want to implement “transmaribollo” indoctrination, and we are ready to do it: we want to “mariconizar” [‘faggotize’] your children (since we usually don’t have children of our own) so that you don’t heterosexualize them. And we also have teaching degrees.”
Aner is telling us very clearly who he is and what he wants. As Maya Angelou advises, we should believe him. By spelling it out so clearly, he does us a favour, because the huge influence gender identity ideology has had on education policies in Spain, and indeed throughout Europe (if you don’t know about the horrors of IGLYO, you should) has been achieved by stealth.
Parents are reassured by progressive-sounding language about kindness, inclusion, anti-bullying and even feminism, but are not told that in practice this means naked adults showering with children.
Another tool in the activist arsenal is the viscous suppression of dissent via social pressure. If the policies are kind and inclusive, then it follows logically that parents asking awkward questions must be the opposite. You wouldn’t want to be a bigot, would you?
The magazine Pikara - which calls itself feminist without showing any sign of knowing what the word means - said the complaints against the camp “have been exploited to launch a morbid, alarmist, and hateful campaign of criminalization.” They also called Zuriñe Ojeda transphobic for writing about it, because apparently the feminist thing to do when abuse is alleged is to keep quiet.
Perhaps it is the fear of being condemned as hateful, transphobic bigots that convinced everyone in a position of authority in relation to the Bernedo camp to look the other way until press attention forced them into action. In Spain, where four decades of fascist dictatorship are still well within living memory, the accusation of being aligned with the ultraderecha (far right) carries a particular sting for anyone with left of centre politics, especially feminists, and this makes it a useful weapon for trans activists.
But the only way out of this mess is to look these people in the eye and say no. We don’t buy it. Adults showering naked with children is not “desexualisation of bodies”, it is not kindness nor inclusion and it is certainly not feminism. It is abuse. Calling it out is not hateful, or transphobic, or even right wing.
In the podcast episode that accompanies this piece, Zuriñe Ojeda says that justice in Spain can be slow, so it may be some time before we know the details of any criminal charges and other consequences in relation to this disturbing case. But in the meantime we must, each of us in their own small way, refuse to be manipulated and bullied into accepting this harmful ideology in spaces where our children should expect to be safe and free.
