Lesson 3.1: Institutional and Everyday Impacts of ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics
This lesson traces how ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations move from rhetoric to structure. It examines how governments, media actors, and local institutions translate ideological hostility into concrete actions: restrictive laws, censorship, defunding, surveillance of civil society, policing of public spaces, and subtle forms of bureaucratic exclusion. You will see how these mechanisms interact, forming an infrastructure of discrimination that affects everyday life.
2. Policy and legal rollbacks
Legal restrictions are among the most visible expressions of ‘anti-gender’ politics. Governments often frame them as defending ‘children’, ‘the family’, or ‘national values’, while in practice they curtail bodily autonomy and freedom of expression.
Hungary
Since 2018, a series of laws has systematically eroded gender and sexual rights.
- Gender-studies programmes were banned in universities in 2018 and
- legal gender recognition for trans people was abolished in 2020.
- The 2021 ‘Child Protection Law’ prohibits the depiction of LGBTIQ+ people in schools, advertising, and children’s media.
The packaging of books with queer content in plastic foil continues in 2025 (in many bookstores, selling books with queer content has been prohibited), signalling that censorship has become a routinised administrative act rather than an exceptional measure.
These laws transform moral panic into a state-driven system of ideological control.
France
In France, ‘anti-gender’ rhetoric often manifests as debates over ‘parental rights’. Far-right networks mobilise against sex education, inclusive curricula, and what they call ‘gender ideology in schools’. As participants in the RESIST France case study noted (France Report, p. 17):
“Vigilant Parents—a conservative and ‘anti-gender’ collective—infiltrate parents’ representatives’ elections and actively lobby at the departmental level to disrupt gender education”
‘Anti-gender’ discourse also overlaps with accusations of ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ (‘Islamo-leftism’), which link gender equality to race and religion, portraying intersectional and postcolonial scholarship as threats to republican universalism. This illustrates how laïcité and colonial legacies can be mobilised to delegitimise feminist and anti-racist analysis.
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Watch: France 24 France’s “parental rights” backlash: gender, education and the far right (2024) This example illustrates how ‘anti-gender’ moral panic becomes institutional through parental-rights discourse. |
Germany
In Germany, backlash increasingly manifests through
- education censorship and
- political infiltration.
Teachers and educators describe pressure to ‘avoid ideological content’ when discussing gender or migration. Far-right parties, especially the AfD, have pushed for bans on inclusive language and ‘gender ideology’ in curricula, framing equality as indoctrination. Several Länder (federal states) have debated ‘neutrality’ laws that could silence teachers addressing gender diversity.
Simultaneously, the AfD’s infiltration of school boards and education committees extends ‘anti-gender’ ideology into policymaking. This is a form of institutional capture that normalises exclusionary discourse within democratic institutions. Several participants from Germany reported how they are concerned that the AfD systematically uses parliamentary
According to those participants who work in this field, such parliamentary inquiries have the effect of debilitating the work of political and civil society education initiatives. GERFG1.4, (Germany Listen Report, pp. 13-14):
“(Th)is debilitation of work processes, the fact that we increasingly have to hide things that we used to be open about, just to avoid accusations and or potential consequences.”