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.