My research of late has led me down the rabbit hole of investigating global anti-gender movements, whether they be motivated by religion, conservative politics, or a specific anti-trans bias. These actors, some of whom would consider themselves left-wing or even feminist, are united in a battle against what they term “gender ideology.”
Gender ideology has become a watchword for a certain regressive view of gender. It encompasses everything from transgender identities to sexual orientations to non-traditional family forms, and has been extended by right-wing commentators to include sexual and reproductive rights in some cases. As Graff and Korolczuk (2021) write, “gender” is “the right’s name for what the left calls sexual emancipation, modernization and equality, except that, of course, conservatives view the resulting freedom as a form of enslavement.”
The anti-gender movement – for that is what it is, a conservative transnational and transideological politico-religious movement – stands for the preservation of cisheteropatriarchy, a form of hegemonic ideology rooted in patriarchal standards and upholding the stable, bounded identities that make up traditional notions of heterosexual and cisgender identities and family forms (see Butler, 1990, on the heterosexual matrix, and my continuation (Duffy, 2021) in developing the cisgender matrix).
The development of gender theory poses a threat to the social stability that anti-gender actors prize above all. Gender theory is a theory, not an ideology: it gives us a vocabulary to describe a certain set of social dynamics. It describes; it does not impose. Gender – and the observable expression of personal gendered characteristics – existed before Judith Butler began their career in academia, after all. As far back as the 1920s, the Irish/British magazine Urania was positing a world where dyadic sex division did not exist; countless societies around the world have had gendered identities which do not correlate to sex characteristics for hundreds if not thousands of years. The social constructionist view of gender allows us to theorise the workings of these social dynamics.
Anti-gender activism is an ideology. It imposes a certain world order and actively campaigns for the suppression of things it considers threatening. In politico-religious conservatism, the heterosexual, cisgender, patriarchal family is the basic unit of society and is considered to be the natural, essential way in which society organises itself. The concept of gender destabilises this order. For a political demographic who prize order and authority, this is earth-shattering. Society has, in their view, been rocked by revelations of gender as mutable and fluid; of gender roles as constructed based on iteration and performable by anyone, rather than inextricably linked to biological physical characteristics.
Hidden beneath expressed concerns about bathrooms and sports teams from the nominal left, is this same anxiety for the preservation of immutability. This is the root of describing trans men as “confused lesbians” or “escaping misogyny”; it is the fear that underlies the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces. It is an innately conservative anxiety for the world “as it once was” – except it never was so simple. Queer, trans, non-binary, third gender, and culturally specific identities have always existed. What the logical endgame of the anti-gender movement is, is the suppression of these identities into a cisgender, heterosexual frame in which sex is observed, not assigned; gender follows from a dyadic sex designation; and the boundaries of sexual orientation are clearly and strictly defined. The conservative religious elements of the anti-gender movement would go further: heterosexuality is essential, reproduction is key, and children should have two opposite-sexed parents.
Whatever the ideological background to one’s participation in the anti-gender movement, this is the movement’s end goal. It is not a new political force – anti-genderism has been seen in politics and law for decades. Strengthening and organising in the mid-2000s, as a “Vatican-inspired transnational rightwing countermovement against gender equality and LGBTQ rights” which “demonizes the very concept of gender” itself (Graff, 2020), it has picked up adherents from left and right. My research agrees with the analysis of Graff and Korolczuk (2021, op cit) that although it began in religious conservativism, it is now inseparable from political campaigning.
Anti-genderism has been seen around the world – in particular in Catholic strongholds (Vaggione, 2020) such as Latin America (Melo, 2021; Wilkinson, 2021), and Central and Eastern Europe (Valkovičová and Meier, 2020; Tranfic, 2022) – unsurprising, given that the Vatican has been one of the major drivers of the movement at international level. However, it is also evident in the rise of specifically anti-trans movements in places such as the United Kingdom (McLean, 2021) and the United States (Crasnow, 2021). My current interest is in how it impacts law reform processes at national and international levels and I am developing research on this impact for publication – watch this space.
Sandra Duffy 