Lesson 1.1: What is ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics? Origins, Uses & Controversies
| Site: | OpenLearn Create |
| Course: | Solidarity and Struggle: Resisting Anti-Gender Politics |
| Book: | Lesson 1.1: What is ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics? Origins, Uses & Controversies |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Friday, 21 August 2026, 8:56 PM |
Description
We start with explaining the origins, definitions, and political uses of the term ‘anti-gender’ politics, including scholarly debates and critiques.
1. Introduction
Have you heard politicians speak out against so-called ‘gender ideology’? Or seen media headlines warning about threats to children and ‘traditional families’?
These are not isolated local debates. They form part of a coordinated political movement known as ‘anti-gender' politics – a transnational mobilisation targeting feminist, queer, and trans rights across Europe and beyond.
The term 'anti-gender' politics has become central to understanding the contemporary landscape of attacks on gender and sexual rights. But what exactly does it mean, and where does it come from?
| As you read and reflect, consider |
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● How do anti-gender narratives appear in your own national or media context? ● Who is framed as the threat, and whose rights are treated as expendable? ● What deeper social anxieties or political interests do these narratives tap into? ● |
2. ‘Anti-Gender’ & ‘Gender Ideology’
In academic research, anti-gender refers to political, religious, and civic mobilisations that target what is labelled ‘gender ideology’ – a term deliberately constructed to discredit feminist, queer, and trans movements (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017; Grzebalska, Kováts & Pető, 2017; Graff & Korolczuk, 2022).
The phrase ‘gender ideology’ is intentionally vague. It gathers together many different fields – from reproductive rights to LGBTIQ+ recognition and gender studies – and reframes them as dangerous or illegitimate.
Scholars such as Kováts, Grzebalska, and Pető describe ‘gender ideology’ as a ‘symbolic glue’ – a flexible frame that unites actors with otherwise divergent worldviews: right-wing populists, conservative church networks, centrist nationalists, and trans-exclusionary feminists. Because the term is so elastic, it absorbs multiple fears, including anxieties about demographic decline, globalisation, secularism, or ‘elite’ cultural influence.
Key concepts |
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| Moral panic: a social reaction in which a group is constructed as a threat to societal values. | Symbolic glue: how gender acts as a unifying narrative connecting otherwise unrelated political demands (e.g. nationalism, migration, education). |
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'Anti-gender 'mobilisations are sometimes described as a backlash: However, the idea of backlash must be used carefully. In many contexts, there was little or no prior progress to ‘reverse’. |
'Anti-gender' mobilisation can arise: |
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In other words, anti-gender campaigns do not always respond to progressive achievements – they frequently pre-empt them, producing a climate of fear or moral panic to justify restrictive policies. |
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3. Concept: How It Came About?
Academic discussion of anti-gender politics took shape in the early 2010s, when researchers noticed the rise of transnational networks mobilising against gender equality and sexual rights.
Paternotte and Kuhar’s Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe (2017) demonstrated that these movements are not isolated national reactions but cross-border coalitions. Messages, strategies, and funding circulate across churches, NGOs, political parties, think-tanks, and digital platforms. Graff and Korolczuk (2022) argue that anti-gender politics defend patriarchal, heteronormative, nationalist, and racialised hierarchies by depicting equality itself as a threat. Their work shows that anti-gender politics mobilise moral panic to produce a sense of cultural siege.
RESIST Quote
'The idea of gender, feminism and LGBTIQ+ is presented as a threat to the privileged position of the heteronormative nuclear family, sex-based roles and identities, and, in multiple ways, the given order of the nation. For ‘anti-gender’ actors across contexts and arenas, ‘gender’ is framed as an ideology foisted onto unwilling populations, and this framing of gender diversity and non-heterosexuality as an imposition is critical to legitimating the force and hostility of ‘anti-gender’ politics.’ – RESIST Mapping Report, Transnational findings p. 3
Recent intersectional analyses, including the RESIST Project Reports (2024), demonstrate that anti-gender movements are deeply entangled with racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and class inequality. The hostility toward gender and sexuality disproportionately targets those already marginalised: racialised communities, migrants, trans people, and people with disabilities. In this sense, anti-gender politics acts as a gateway for broader authoritarian and exclusionary projects.
4. Variances Across Europe
How do scholarly approaches vary across Europe?
Although anti-gender mobilisation is transnational, scholarship reflects distinct regional contexts:
| Western Europe (France, Germany): Scholarship frequently examines how anti-gender and anti-trans politics are articulated through debates on secularism, liberalism, national identity, and freedom of speech. In France, research highlights how references to ‘gender ideology’ intersect with anxieties about Islam, republican universalism, and critiques of so-called ‘Anglo-American’ identity politics, while also encompassing broader anti-trans and anti-feminist mobilisation. In Germany, scholarly work analyses how discourses such as Genderwahn and appeals to institutional ‘neutrality’ frame gender equality, trans rights, and inclusive language as threats to social cohesion, democratic order, or academic standards. These framings coexist with wider anti-gender equality and anti-trans activism that cannot be reduced to questions of secularism alone.. |
| Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary): Here, scholarship often foregrounds post-socialist transformations, sovereignty narratives, and tensions around European integration. Gender is analysed as a symbolic marker of ‘imposed Westernisation’, mobilised against perceived external elites, liberal norms, and EU institutions. However, scholars also emphasise that these mobilisations draw on longer histories of antifeminism, nationalism, and moral conservatism, rather than representing a simple reaction to recent policy changes.. |
| Southern Europe (Italy, Spain): Research in this context frequently examines how anti-gender mobilisation intersects with religious institutions, family norms, and moral discourses, particularly during periods of political or economic crisis. In Greece, scholars analyse the role of the Orthodox Church and conservative actors in framing feminism, gender education, and LGBTIQ+ rights as threats to family, nation, and moral order, often in conjunction with far-right mobilisation. In Spain, scholarship highlights contestation over feminist policy gains, education, and gender-based violence legislation, especially in the context of far-right resurgence. Religious influence is treated as one factor among others, rather than a defining feature of the region as a whole.. |
Across all these contexts, scholars agree that anti-gender politics is not a unified ideology, but a strategic practice that adapts to local histories, political opportunities, and anxieties.
Who is affected - and why?
Research consistently shows that anti-gender campaigns do not affect everyone equally. They target groups and institutions that symbolise alternative ways of organising gender, sexuality, family, or citizenship:
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• LGBTQIA+ people • Trans communities • Feminists and gender-equality advocates • Migrant and racialised groups • Teachers, educators, and academic researchers • Gender-equality institutions and human rights bodies • |
And why? Because they challenge – symbolically and materially – the social hierarchies anti-gender movements seek to defend. They represent:
| • alternative family and kinship structures; • critiques of patriarchal, nationalist, or racialised norms • calls for social and legal recognition of gender diversity • knowledge that disrupts conservative or authoritarian narratives • |
Anti-gender attacks therefore do not only target individuals. They aim to reshape societal norms about family, nation, citizenship, and belonging, redefining whose lives and knowledge are valued.
Let's have a little break and watch
Prof. Judith Butler explaining the concept of 'gender'.
Alternative link: https://youtu.be/UD9IOllUR4k?si=QqXPwNDuTObWoc0T [accessed: 01/03/2026]
5. Rethinking the Term ‘Anti-Gender’
Over the past decade, anti-gender has become a dominant term in academic and policy discussions. It helps describe coordinated campaigns that attack gender and sexual rights across Europe and beyond. Yet scholars caution that the term itself is not unproblematic. It can clarify, but it can also obscure. Using it critically means recognising its limits and political effects.
It risks reifying the binary it describes
Several feminist and queer theorists warn that naming actors as ‘anti-gender’ may unintentionally reinforce the very binary they promote – ‘pro-gender’ versus ‘anti-gender’, modernity versus tradition, progress versus backlash.
As Sara Ahmed (2017) notes, naming practices shape the political field: they fix identities and delimit who can speak. Treating ‘anti-gender’ as a coherent bloc may strengthen the perception that ‘gender’ itself is an ideology needing defence, rather than a site of ongoing negotiation. In this sense, the term can freeze dynamic conflicts into static oppositions.
It flattens very different realities under one label
Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2022) argue that the ‘anti-gender’ frame can mask profound differences between actors. A Catholic bishop in Poland, a far-right party in Italy, a secular nationalist in France, and a TERF network in the UK might all be grouped as ‘anti-gender’, but their motivations, strategies, and audiences diverge widely. Overuse of the umbrella term risks:
- erasing local conditions such as post-socialist transitions, austerity, or racism
- obscuring divergent goals and ideological foundations
- rendering the category analytically vague
It centres Western European policy vocabularies
Scholars such as Eszter Kováts and Roman Kuhar note that the term emerged largely within Western European and EU-funded academic and policy circles concerned with ‘European values’. In Central and Eastern Europe, activists sometimes view ‘anti-gender’ as an external label imposed from above. This raises epistemic questions:
- Whose knowledge is being institutionalised?
- Does the term reproduce a North-Western gaze that casts the East or Global South as perpetual sites of ‘backlash’?
Thus, while helpful for transnational comparison, the term risks carrying Eurocentric assumptions if used unreflectively.
It obscures continuity with older forms of conservatism
Brigitte Vasallo (2020) and Andrea Pető (2019) highlight that the term can make anti-feminist mobilisation appear unprecedented or sudden. Yet many so-called anti-gender campaigns reproduce long-standing patterns:
- clerical conservatism
- moral panic about sexuality
- nationalist family politics
- antifeminist mobilisation
Seeing them as ‘new’ may obscure these genealogies and the recurring cyclical nature of reaction to social change.
It may divert attention from structural systems of power
Intersectional scholars warn that focusing on ‘anti-gender’ as a discursive movement can distract from the material forces sustaining it. Gargi Bhattacharyya (2018) and Nancy Fraser (2022) remind us that these mobilisations cannot be separated from:
- neoliberal austerity
- racial capitalism
- the crisis of care
- global flows of conservative funding and media power
If ‘anti-gender’ is understood only as rhetoric, we risk missing the socioeconomic structures that enable it.
| Furthermore, RESIST research also highlights that ‘anti-gender’ does not translate easily across languages and political contexts, and is not always a term used by activists, journalists, or communities themselves. In places such as Ireland, Spain, Germany, Greece and many others interviewees emphasised that while opposition to gender equality and sexual rights is visible, the label ‘anti-gender’ remains largely confined to academic debate. This course therefore does not require you to adopt the term in your own work. Even if you do not use – or recognise – ‘anti-gender’ as a local category, the ideas, patterns, and strategies discussed in this module can still help make sense of how gendered and sexual politics are contested in your context. |
6. EXTRA: Annotated Bibliography
1. Paternotte, David & Kuhar, Roman (eds.) (2017). Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. The first comparative volume on anti-gender politics. Shows how campaigns share networks, funding sources, and frames across Europe.
2. Graff, Agnieszka & Korolczuk, Elżbieta (2022). Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Oxford University Press. Analyses anti-gender as a reactionary populist movement that defends patriarchal and nationalist hierarchies. Offers detailed Polish and transnational case studies.
3. Grzebalska, Weronika; Kováts, Eszter; & Pető, Andrea (2017). ’Gender as Symbolic Glue.’ Political Critique / FEPS Report. Introduces the key metaphor of ‘symbolic glue’ explaining how ‘gender ideology’ unites diverse political actors.
| 4. RESIST Project Team (2024). National and Transnational Reports on the Formation of Anti-Gender Politics.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10778419 A comprehensive empirical study covering nine European countries. Demonstrates how anti-gender rhetoric adapts to local histories and intersects with race, class, and nationalism. |
5. Fassin, Éric (2017). Populisme: Le grand ressentiment. Textuel. Situates French anti-gender and anti-’Islamo-gauchisme’ discourses within republican universalism and the politics of resentment.
6. Hark, Sabine & Villa, Paula-Irene (2015). ’Anti-Genderism: Sexuality and Gender as Scenes of Current Political Conflicts.’ Transcript Verlag. Explores how German debates about ‘Genderwahn’ (gender madness) reveal struggles over democracy, knowledge, and family norms.
7. Graff, Agnieszka & Korolczuk, Elżbieta (2018). ’Towards an Illiberal Consensus: Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43(4), 797–821. Shows how anti-gender narratives connect illiberal populism, nationalism, and religious conservatism.
8. European Parliament / Reuters / IAMCR Reports (2021-2024). Document policy cases such as Hungary’s 2018 ban on Gender Studies and 2021 ‘Child Protection Law,’ confirming the persistence of state-driven anti-gender legislation.