Covert Core: The Dentons Playbook’s Secretive Tactics

The Dentons Playbook, formally titled Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth , is a 2019 document produced by IGLYO, Dentons, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Its most insidious feature is its explicit endorsement of secrecy, instructing activists to push legal gender recognition (LGR) reforms "under the radar" to avoid public scrutiny. This calculated strategy undermines democratic principles, prioritizing activist agendas over transparent debate and informed consent, and represents a brazen attack on the integrity of legislative processes.

The playbook advocates attaching LGR reforms to broadly supported causes to slip them through unnoticed. In Ireland, activists tethered LGR to the popular marriage equality movement, ensuring minimal resistance as the legislation passed without significant public debate. This tactic was replicated in New South Wales with Alex Greenwich’s 2024 Equality Bill, a sprawling omnibus amending over 20 laws. By embedding self-identification, decriminalized pimping, and commercial surrogacy within a chaotic bundle of 27 or 29 amendments, the bill overwhelmed parliamentary and public oversight, deliberately confusing lawmakers and stifling opposition.

The playbook further encourages exploiting "political moments" such as elections or public backlashes to rush reforms before opposition can organize. This approach dismisses transparency as a risk, treating the public as an obstacle rather than a legitimate stakeholder. For example, in Norway, activists leveraged international criticism to push LGR for children as young as six, bypassing robust debate. Such clandestine methods mock the democratic values the playbook claims to champion, eroding trust in governance and prioritizing ideology over accountability.

This covert core of the Dentons Playbook is not merely a strategy but a deliberate subversion of democratic norms. By advocating for legislation to be passed in the shadows, it undermines the public’s right to engage in policy discussions that profoundly affect societal structures, particularly those impacting vulnerable groups like children. The playbook’s tactics demand urgent exposure and resistance to restore transparency and integrity to legal processes.

Based on research and posts by Women’s News Network, preserving the Dentons Playbook after its removal from public sites by Dentons and activists, available on Substack .