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Lesson 3.3: Mental Health and Personal Consequences

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Course: Solidarity and Struggle: Resisting Anti-Gender Politics
Book: Lesson 3.3: Mental Health and Personal Consequences
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Date: Friday, 21 August 2026, 9:05 PM

Description

This lesson examines the emotional, psychological, and intersectional effects of ‘anti-gender’ politics. It explores how chronic hostility, stigma, and erasure produce exhaustion, trauma, demobilization, self-censorship, and loss of community. It also considers how individuals navigate burnout, fear, and isolation while continuing forms of everyday resistance and mutual care.

 

Table of contents

1. Intro

2. Everyday hostility and accumulated stress

The hostility circulating through politics, media, and public space does not remain abstract — it enters homes, workplaces, and bodies. Across Europe, participants in the RESIST research described a slow accumulation of stress: the constant need to defend one’s existence, to justify one’s work, to prepare for potential attack. Over time, this produces a climate of hypervigilance — being perpetually ‘on alert’ — which wears down both mind and body.

Those most affected are often people who already experience multiple forms of marginalisation: queer, trans, feminist, migrant, or racialised individuals. The emotional energy spent on staying safe and credible drains creative, intellectual, and collective capacity. What emerges is a pattern of chronic fatigue and internalised caution. Constant vigilance, defensive labour, and the need to justify one’s existence drain emotional and cognitive resources. Over time, this produces a climate in which exhaustion becomes normalised. Across the RESIST case studies, many participants described symptoms of chronic anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion that persisted long after individual incidents had passed. These effects were especially visible among activists and educators — those who make gender and equality issues visible in public life.

 

Compounded trauma refers to the layering of multiple stressors over time. For example, living with fear of violence, harassment, and exclusion simultaneously. Unlike one-time traumatic events, compounded trauma builds gradually and often goes unrecognised. Compounded trauma is not only emotional; it also affects political imagination. When fear accumulates, people describe difficulty planning, organising, or envisioning safer futures.

Trauma and compounded harm

Ireland

This sense of residual fear — the quiet, enduring aftermath of trauma — recurred across interviews. In Ireland, for example, the trauma of public targeting lingered long after attacks ended:

 
The residual event […] it festers there, waiting for its next time to pounce. (Kevin, Ireland Report, p. 15)

Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country

In Spain, the emotional dimension of ‘anti-gender’ politics was deeply tied to fear — of insult, job loss, or physical aggression. Participants spoke of living in a state of ‘hyper-alert modus,’ where even ordinary activities felt risky. Tiredness is a sensation of fatigue and exhaustion of having to argue, explain, or face attacks on a daily basis.

Hyper-alertness restricts civic engagement: people avoid public forums that do not explicitly welcome feminist perspectives.

 
There comes a point where, in order to participate in any political space that is not explicitly feminist, you have to leave aside certain feminist issues. (Núria,  Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country Report, pp. 9-10)

These reflections illustrate how continuous vigilance becomes normalised. Self-censorship and withdrawal are not failures of courage but adaptive responses to an exhausting environment.

Belarus

Finally, among Belarusian activists in exile, ‘anti-gender’ campaigns reopened older wounds. Many were already survivors of political persecution and described renewed trauma in exile, amplified by economic precarity and lack of access to psychological care. The Belarus report notes that: 

 
The community’s capacity for mutual care is very low due to the trauma from the events of 2020 and their aftermath. (Belarus Report, p. 21)

2.1. Everyday hostility - more examples

 

Trauma and compounded harm

Greece

In Greece, the language of exhaustion often reflected not only personal burnout but the fragmentation of struggles and the isolation of movements from one another. Activists who were women, migrants, or carers described feeling ‘isolated, trapped, suffocated, exhausted, burnt out’ as they faced what they experienced as multiple, disconnected fronts of struggle rather than a shared political space. Pati, a migrant woman activist, expressed this vividly:

 
The sites of struggle are so many, and taking care of ourselves and of each other is so necessary because exhaustion prevails. [...] Especially when you are a woman who is an immigrant who also cares about the environment and you want to approach them intersectionally, what do you address first? […] I feel that I am personally at a point of exhaustion. (Greece Report, p. 16)

Her testimony points to how the separation of political struggles into silos — feminist, migrant, environmental, anti-racist — places a disproportionate burden on those who live at their intersections. Rather than being supported by integrated movements, intersectional activists are often forced to navigate fragmented spaces alone. Exhaustion here emerges not simply as an individual condition, but as a structural effect of political isolation and movement fragmentation.

Germany

In another example of Germany, trauma was tied to fear of political regression and far-right normalisation that has been observed in the recent years.

 
Together with my partner I applied for a passport, because we thought that at some point we might need one. (Momo, Germany Report, p. 10)
 
It just hurts so much hearing about the passport thing […] that people talk more and more about how to liquidate property and their possessions. (SJB, Germany Report, p. 10)

Such statements reveal how anticipatory anxiety - preparing for possible repression - shapes life decisions even before any new laws are enacted.

3. Fatigue and emotional exhaustion

‘Anti-gender’ mobilisations produce what participants called ‘intellectual fatigue’ or ‘methodological exhaustion.’ Activists feel trapped in repetitive, defensive labour — explaining, correcting, and debating the same misconceptions. 

Emotional fatigue functions as a political strategy: it narrows what people feel able to demand or imagine.

Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country

“Reactionism creates fatigue, an intellectual fatigue. It creates a fatigue of saying that we are not moving forward. It creates a methodological fatigue, I no longer know how to close this debate once and for all.”  (ESPINT02, Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country Report, p. 10)

Roger, another participant in the case study on Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country, reflected:

“If you’ve been fighting for something for a few years and what you see is that the situation is going to the opposite extreme, it’s very discouraging. You feel that everything is already lost and there is no new world.” (Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country Report, p. 10)

These words capture how exhaustion becomes political: it narrows what can be imagined, demanded, or sustained. Yet fatigue can coexist with moments of renewal. Roger also recalled how collective protest reignited hope, reminding us that solidarity remains a source of emotional repair.

4. Self-censorship and withdrawal

Self-censorship is not a personal failing but 

a rational adaptation to hostile environments.

Activists described adjusting tone, vocabulary, and appearance to avoid accusations of radicalism — a subtle but powerful form of self-regulation.

Switzerland

Professionals delivering gender training noted a cultural shift as ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric spread:

There were professionals who came to us, who wanted to be trained, to understand better, to do better. And now, there’s a bit of a turnaround. Because people are saying to themselves, this is woke stuff, it’s going too far […] But not at all! (SWIINT03 witzerland Report, p. 11)

Greece

Marachi described this as internalised violence:

All this micro-policing that we do to protect ourselves, it is essentially a form of violence we have internalised and we deprive ourselves of our own freedom. (Greece Report, p. 9)

Germany

In Germany, where public educators and researchers were targeted online, many resorted to anonymity:

I try to get as little out there as possible, regarding publications or similar. I silence myself. That’s an effect. (GERINT08, German Report, p. 13)

These testimonies show how fear gradually shifts from external repression to self-surveillance, altering how people inhabit public space. They show how fear gradually shifts from external repression to self-surveillance, altering how people inhabit public space.

5. Isolation and loss of community

Isolation emerged as one of the most painful and recurring effects. Being visible enough to be attacked but not enough to be defended produces deep loneliness. But isolation is not only emotional — it is produced structurally when institutions fail to defend those targeted.

France

I felt quite alone, because nobody defended me. I didn’t have that thing on the networks of having accomplices or allies or people defending me. (Lucie, France Report, p. 17)

For migrant women like Oumaima, isolation intersected with racialisation:

My mother keeps telling me that I’ve been westernised […]these experiences lead to a kind of isolation from a social group to which I belong. (France Report, p. 17)

 

Belarus

After the 2020 repressions, collective networks that once provided mental health support in Belarus largely collapsed:

These groups used to be a huge source of mental health support […] but individual therapy does not compensate for the loss of collective support. (Belarus Report, p. 21)

Isolation thus functions as a form of structural violence, fragmenting movements and eroding the social fabric that sustains resistance.

6. Hostile visibility and chronic stress

Hostile visibility is the condition in which being seen becomes a source of danger; trans participants described this with particular clarity. For example, the Swiss report notes:

Increased visibility of gender identity issues has heightened the risk of direct violence for some groups. (Switzerland Report, p. 8)

Luna, a trans woman who participated in the Swiss case-study explained that’anti-gender’ politics is often perceived as a rhetoric, whereas it has tangible effectsleading notably to a higher prevalence of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts amongst young trans people.

Reports by ILGA-Europe and the Transgender Network confirm this: online hostility, street harassment, and the rise of anti-trans media narratives have sharply increased feelings of unsafety. Chronic exposure to such hostility can lead to what psychologists call anticipatory stress — the expectation of harm that never fully arrives but never disappears.

7. Suggested resources

 

Business Insider reel — Inside Poland's 'LGBT-Free' Zones 

https://youtu.be/ADb60W8jTsM?si=yDOkSFGQrs8kRbJ4