Eldur Smári Kristinsson
Gay activist and LGBT alliance chairman
Eldur Smári Kristinsson chairs Iceland's Lesbian and Gay Alliance and has become one of the most compelling—and legally embattled—voices in the debate over gender-identity ideology. A gay man facing his third criminal investigation for speaking out, he joined Stella O'Malley to explain how a small, progressive nation of 400,000 came to resemble what he calls a gender Gilead.
Eldur Smári Kristinsson is chairman of Iceland's Lesbian and Gay Alliance and a long-standing gay rights activist in a country that once seemed a model of LGBT tolerance. Iceland—a nation of just 400,000—enacted some of the most expansive gender-identity legislation in the world, and Kristinsson has become one of the few voices within the LGBT community willing to say, publicly and on the record, that something has gone seriously wrong.
His dissent has come at a legal price. By the time he joined Stella O'Malley on Beyond Gender, he was facing his third criminal investigation for statements criticising gender-identity ideology—a record that speaks both to his persistence and to the atmosphere inside Icelandic public life. Gay men and lesbians who hold same-sex attraction as the basis of their identity, he argues, now find themselves on the wrong side of a law designed to protect them.
In The Gay Man Iceland Wants to Silence: Inside a "Gender Gilead" (episode 24, July 2025), Kristinsson gives Stella a first-hand account of how that transformation unfolded and what it costs, personally and legally, to resist it. He uses the phrase "gender Gilead" not as hyperbole but as a precise description: a society where ideological conformity has become legally enforced orthodoxy, and where dissent—even from within a historically marginalised community—is treated as a criminal matter.
It ranks among the most striking conversations in this series. Kristinsson is measured and specific, making the case that gay and lesbian rights and gender-identity ideology are not always compatible—and that Iceland's experience is a warning about what happens when that tension goes unexamined and unopposed.
