Lesson 3.1: Institutional and Everyday Impacts of ‘Anti-Gender’ Politics

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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.

5. Everyday policing of identities

‘Anti-gender’ politics create an atmosphere where visibility itself becomes risky. Queer, trans, and feminist people are portrayed as threats while being denied safety and legitimacy.
In Poland and Greece, participants described practising self-surveillance - the they avoid public affection or changing appearance to avoid harassment. In the words of Marachi:

 
You may have internalised a form of policing, ‘oh, I should wear this and not the other in case someone says something’, or ‘I should be careful in the street not to hold hands with my girlfriend’ (Greece Report, p. 9)

Trans and non-binary people in Germany and the UK face a combination of hostile media representation and institutional hesitation to act, deepening this form of hypervisibility.

This combination of exposure and erasure constitutes what scholars call ’dangerous hypervisibility’, a condition in which being seen becomes a form of vulnerability.

Normalizing inequality through neglect

Finally, ‘anti-gender’ politics achieve power through quiet institutionalisation. When discrimination is no longer seen as an exception, exclusion becomes ordinary.

Examples include:

  • Healthcare: delays or refusal of treatment for trans and intersex people.
  • Education: teachers told to ‘balance inclusion with family values’.
  • Law enforcement: underreporting and downgrading of hate crimes. 

In Switzerland, one participant observed that even "when no controversy is happening, hostility remains – it has just become more socially accepted” (SWIINT07, p. 7).

Spain – Catalonia and the Basque Country
  Participants described a sense of abandonment by institutions. Irantzu recalled:
My phone number, car’s licence and ID were on Twitter for three weeks […] not even my lawyer could get them to remove it. (Spain Report, p. 11)

For many, distrust of police is rooted in historical and political context. As Irantzu put it:

The last thing to do is to go to the police, because you already know that the police are evil. (Spain Report, p. 11)

  

Activists like Rosa, working in trans health services, stressed that community vigilance is essential because institutional guarantees are fragile.

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