Lesson 1.3: Who Drives ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics?
When imagining 'anti-gender' politics, it is easy to picture only populist leaders or powerful churches. But the RESIST Project demonstrates that anti-gender mobilisation is neither uniform nor contained within the far right. It is a flexible, opportunistic coalition that crosses ideological, institutional, and national boundaries. These alliances adapt their framing – children, women’s safety, secularism, parental rights, national heritage – to local political opportunities.
2. Actors, Strategies, Impacts
A coalition of uneasy allies
Findings from RESIST reveal how ‘anti-gender’ coalitions function as strategic, shifting alliances. While actors may disagree on other political questions, they converge around opposition to gender equality, sexual and reproductive rights, and gender and sexual diversity, including abortion and trans rights.
| Examples include: | |
| ● Far-right parties and movements that link gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights to nationalist, anti-immigration, and anti-globalist agendas, framing ‘gender ideology’ as a civilisational threat and portraying abortion and gender equality policies as demographic or moral dangers. | ● Conservative religious institutions, including transnational Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical networks, that mobilise against feminism, LGBTIQ+ rights, and abortion in the name of the ‘natural family’ and moral order. |
| ● State-funded institutions and civic platforms that reframe anti-feminist, anti-abortion, and anti-trans positions as concerns about child protection, family policy, or cultural preservation. | ● Centrist and liberal politicians who adopt selective anti-gender or anti-abortion rhetoric to promote pronatalist, family-centred, or assimilationist goals, often appealing to conservative constituencies while distancing themselves from overt extremism. |
| ● So-called ‘gender-critical’ or trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) who claim to defend ‘women’s rights’ while aligning with anti-trans legislation and rhetoric, and at times indirectly reinforcing broader anti-gender equality agendas. | ● Sex-work-exclusionary feminists (SWERFs) who oppose sex work as, in their view (that is not supported in research), inherently exploitative, often overlapping with moral-conservative frames. |
| ● Homonationalist LGBTQ+ figures –for example, right-wing gay politicians or organisations –who use selective inclusion of cis, white, gay, lesbian, identities to legitimise nationalist ideas and/or Islamophobia. | |
Across Europe, these actors borrow from each other’s scripts: moral panic around ‘protecting children,’ ‘defending free speech,’ or ‘saving the family’ travels easily across languages and borders.
National variations
Anti-gender alliances adapt to local opportunity structures. Here are some examples:
- ● Hungary, Belarus: State-led anti-gender regimes institutionalise hostility toward feminism and LGBTQ+ rights through media control, education policy, and NGO repression.
- ● France: Right- and centre-right politicians weaponise laïcité (secularism) and ‘Republican universalism’ to attack intersectional and trans-inclusive feminism as divisive.
- ● United Kingdom: ’Gender-critical’ think tanks, commentators, and lobbyists have turned trans rights into a national culture war centred on ‘protecting women’ and ‘free speech.’
- ● Switzerland: Populist parties and civic groups frame Drag Story Hours and inclusive education as moral threats to children, linking them to ‘anti-woke’ discourse.
- ● Ireland: Small but vocal anti-gender actors use social-media echo chambers and US-linked networks to amplify fears about migration, sexuality, and gender identity.
- ● Greece: ‘Anti-gender’ cuts broadly across Orthodox Christian hegemony, elected representatives, governments instituting law and policy, far right political parties and associations, socially empowered men’s rights groups, the male-dominated Left, and trans- and lesbian-exclusionary reactionary feminism.
Despite differences, they draw on shared affective frames: innocence (children), purity (nation), nature (‘sex,’ family), divine order, and common sense (neutrality).