1The Global Scene


The idea of a dangerous gender ideology emerged in the 1990s when the Roman Catholic Council for the Family warned that “gender” was a threat to the family and to biblical authority.1 One can trace the idea’s origins through the Vatican’s Council for the Family documents,2 but since then it has traveled in ways that track the political power of the Vatican as well as its recently formed alliance with the Evangelical church in Latin America. To underscore the power of “gender” within contemporary political discourse, it is clear that the Vatican’s stance intensifies the term’s phantasmatic power within the global political landscape.

For some Christians, natural law and divine will are the same: God made the sexes in a binary way, and it is not the prerogative of humans to remake them outside those terms. Of course, some feminist scholars of religion dispute this, suggesting that the Bible has conflicting views on this very topic.3 Regardless, this older science holds to the proposition that sex differences are established in natural law; that is, that the content of that law is established by nature and therefore, presumably, has universal validity. Since nature is understood to be created by God, to defy natural law is to defy the will of God. What follows from this set of beliefs is that if one has a will, or acts willfully, then one not only defies God and the natural order he created but also threatens to take over his will.

These are but some of the conservative Catholic points against gender.4 The contemporary furor took shape in 2004 when the Pope’s Council for the Family, then directed by Joseph Ratzinger, warned that gender theorists were imperiling the family by challenging the proposition that Christian family roles could and should be derived from biological sex.5 According to the Vatican, the sexual division of labor is to be found in the nature of sex: women are to do domestic work and men are to undertake action in paid employment and public life. The integrity of the family, understood as both Christian and natural, was said to be imperiled by a specter looming on the horizon: “gender ideology.” Ratzinger first made public his concern at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, and then again in 2004, as head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in a letter to bishops underscoring the potential of “gender” to destroy feminine values important to the Church and the natural distinction between the two sexes.6 As Pope Benedict XVI, he went further in 2012, maintaining that such “ideologies” deny the “pre-ordained duality of man and woman,” and thus deny “the family” as “a reality established by creation.” Because, he argued, man and woman are created by God, those who seek to create themselves deny the creative power of God, assume that they have divine powers of self-creation, and are misled by an atheistic set of beliefs.

By 2016, Pope Francis, despite his occasionally progressive views, continued the line developed by Pope Benedict and sounded an even louder alarm: “We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God.” He specifically included as an instance of this defacement “[the ideology of] ‘gender.’” He was clearly outraged that “today children—children!—are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex … And this [sic] terrible!” He then made affirmative reference to Benedict XVI and claimed, “God created man and woman; God created the world in a certain way … and we are doing the exact opposite.”7 From this perspective, humans experimenting with gender are taking over the creative power of the divine. Pope Francis has since gone further to argue that proponents of gender are like those who support or deploy nuclear arms targeting creation itself. This analogy suggests that whatever gender is, it carries enormous destructive power in the minds of those who oppose it—indeed, an unfathomable and terrifying destructiveness. It is represented as a demonic force of annihilation pitted against God’s creative powers.

Many mixed metaphors proliferate in the effort to portray gender as an extreme danger. The various figures of destruction do not fit into a coherent picture, but they do accumulate without regard for consistency or contradiction. And the more “gender” can gather up those diverse fears and anxieties, the more powerful the phantasm becomes. If one figure of destruction does not work with every audience, another one often will, and if they all accumulate with sufficient speed and intensity under a single name, they can circulate all the more widely, catching different audiences as they go. Together they seek to identify the source of the fear of destruction, what we have to be afraid of, and what will destroy our lives, and in so doing, they start to destroy the lives of those who have been scapegoated.

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Although Pope Francis has been commended for his open-minded approach to “homosexuality,” it is important to remember that it was gay and lesbian civil unions, rather than gay and lesbian sexuality, that he defended in 2020.8 In a book-length interview entitled This Economy Kills, first published in 2015 in Italian, the Pope compares gender theory’s rejection of the doctrine of “complementarity” (the view that the human is composed of man and woman essentially and exclusively, and that sexual union between the two is the only human and natural form) as evidence for the existence of “Herods” in every historical period. The Herodian gender theorists, mentioned earlier, “plot designs of death, that disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation.” The analogy with nuclear arms underscores the annihilating force attributed to “gender theory”: “Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings … Let’s also think of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.” It was in this context that Pope Francis advised his audience to consider gender theorists as analogous to “the dictators of the last century … think of Hitler Youth.”9

By comparing “gender ideology” to both nuclear war and Nazism, Pope Francis has galvanized those who oppose both the LGBTQIA+ movement and feminism into thinking they are waging a just war against the forces of destruction. Of course, not all Catholics or Catholic organizations agree with this point of view, and some, like DignityUSA, have remained admirably firm in calling for rights for a spectrum of genders and sexual orientations, as well as for rights for intersex people.10 The consequences of the Pope’s fearmongering rhetoric can be clearly seen by considering the active interventions on the part of the Vatican, especially the Pontifical Council for the Family.

University of Chicago law professor Mary Anne Case documents these interventions, including the alliance that the Vatican made with Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011 to withdraw high school textbooks in France that included sections on “gender.” That same year, the Vatican presented its view that gender has the power of undermining “the very foundation of the human rights system.” At stake was the idea of the human, which, it seems, “gender ideology” has the power to destroy since the human is defined by the complementarity of the sexes: a two-in-one definition of human form. A year after the successful legal battle for gay marriage in France in 2013, a backlash followed in which the Lacanian psychoanalyst and priest Tony Anatrella played a major role.11 A prominent course curriculum in France called ABCD de l’égalité offered students a way to think about the difference between biological sex and cultural gender, but it was rescinded after Anatrella warned that “gender theory” was being taught in the primary schools, and that would disorient and harm sexual development. Pope Francis himself met with one of the organizers of the effort to withdraw the program, raising objections by some in France that the Church was meddling in public educational policy, which should remain the proper purview of the state. The curriculum was, in fact, withdrawn. The Vatican then published its own text on gender to provide a countervailing view.12

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For Pope Francis, this phantasm called “gender” is both diabolical and ideological. “Diabolical” means that gender comes from the devil and is the devil’s work, and so is not a divine creation and constitutes a rival, false, and destructive form of “creation.” To the extent that “gender” is understood by the Vatican as a doctrine or belief that claims that one can create a gender one was not assigned at birth, it is a false and deceptive form of creation. The divine is the only one who has creative powers, and the divine created male and female, or so the Bible claims. If anyone departs from the sex that has been divinely created for them, they are stealing and destroying the creative powers that belong solely to God. A diabolical force is especially dangerous for the vulnerable and the susceptible, those who are at risk of being influenced and indoctrinated by this “ideology” that flies in the face of Christian doctrine. The devil, or the demonic more generally, works to entice and influence, inculcate and groom, exploit the youth and others who are susceptible to believing in these new powers of self-definition provided by something called “gender.”

In fact, gender does not presume that each of us chooses who we are or how we desire and love. Indeed, the thesis that gender is “hardwired” is still a theory of gender. The ancient debates about free will and determinism take shape within gender theory as well. Yet here a distinction should be made between whether or not gender and sexuality are chosen and whether people should be free to live according to the gender and sexuality that they are. For instance, a trans person can claim that their gendered truth is internal, even God-given, while another may regard themselves as formed by culture or even freely chosen. All of them deserve the right to live freely, which means that their demand for political freedom does not necessarily presuppose that gender or sexuality is chosen. When people claim a gender or, indeed, a sex for themselves that was not the one originally assigned at birth, they exercise human powers of self-definition at the expense of a natural sex divinely created or established in a Christian version of nature. According to the Pope, they are acting as if they have divine powers, flagrantly disputing the power of divinity to establish their sex for all time. At some moments, the Pope has declared that gender advocates seek to steal the powers of God, thus confirming that they work from the devil. For the devil always disguises himself in a mesmerizing appearance. If gender is such a devil, or the devil himself, then to argue with him is to fall inside his trap. To argue with the devil would be to accept the false appearance as a plausible interlocutor. Devils and demons can only be expelled or banished, burned in effigy, which is why censorship, bullying, and pathologization become the key strategies for the anti-gender movement.

An informed debate on matters of freedom and necessity, the constitution of desire, and sex and gender would be most useful, but as Professor Case has maintained, “the multiplicity and variety [of definitions and genealogies] also indicate how little scholarly work Catholic so-called experts on gender theory have done concerning the origins and parameters of the theories they deplore.”13

For instance, the proposition that gender is a social construction led some people to conclude that individuals could choose their gender as they see fit and at a moment’s notice. In some versions of the Church’s objection to social construction, gender is regarded as nothing other than unbridled personal liberty or licentiousness. Such presumptions disregard the fact that social construction emphasizes the role of social norms in the making of gender. The idea that social construction means that you and I can make ourselves however and whenever we wish forgets the constraints imposed by society and the obduracy of the unconscious in the formation of both sexuality and gender. In fact, that identification of gender with the idea of personal liberty misconstrues the collective struggle it takes to make room for new gendered ways of being that are more livable than the ones assigned to us.

One of the most influential Catholic critics who has faulted social construction as a radical (and dangerous) form of personal liberty is Jorge Scala, who published a book in Argentina in 2010 attacking “gender ideology” that was first read by Catholic communities and then widely distributed by the Evangelical church.14 It warned against the voluntarist concept of gender as a deformation of the doctrine of creation, condemning it as inimical both to religion and to science. At the same time that Scala opposed this idea of radical liberty as a co-optation of divine powers and a break with a natural order, he insisted that children would be harmed by this “ideology,” insisting that learning about gay and lesbian lives in schools would lead to children becoming “homosexualized” by teachers. As he elaborated his attack on gender as a form of personal liberty, it pivoted in another direction: gender is a form of indoctrination. Children should not be so free! Children should not lose their freedom! Either gender teaches that one is radically free or gender is what takes away freedom.

Contradictions like these abound in the anti–gender ideology movement, and the more their incoherent and contradictory forms circulate, the more powerful they become. One of the most powerful sites of anti-gender influence is in national elections. In recent years, “gender” has become an issue in several major presidential elections in Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Ecuador, and Germany, and it has been, for some time, a central issue in an increasingly authoritarian Hungary, where the Department of Gender Studies, where Professor Andrea Peto taught, was abolished at the Central European University and was subsequently compelled to relocate to Vienna. The abolition of such programs continued throughout the Balkans.15 In Spain, the campaign against gender ideology became a central part of the platform of the right-wing Vox, whose propaganda includes frequent references to “gender jihadism” and “feminazis.” In the Turkish elections of 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan referred to gay and lesbian rights advocates as “cultural terrorists,” claiming that they were not on the path to Muhammad.16 Francisco Serrano, one of the leaders of Vox in Andalusia, authored a book called Gender Dictatorship in 2012, and then another, in 2019, titled Practical Guide for Mistreated Parents: How to Survive the Gender Dictatorship. Vox had at that time made an alliance with the Italian party Fratelli d’Italia to save the family, including women and mothers, from the destructive force of gender ideology. Only the “natural family,” they argued, could secure the nation, and that required preserving the place of the mother within patriarchal family formations. The foundations of the nation, however, seem threatened equally by gender ideology and migration from North Africa, according to Prime Minister Meloni, along with “Goldman Sachs” (what I take to be a thinly veiled antisemitic slur identifying Jews with corporate power, since why this name rather than, say, Citibank?) and “progressive intellectuals.”17

In the course of pledging the state’s allegiance to the patriarchal family in 2015, Vladimir Putin identified “gender” as a Western ideological construction, arguing in the National Security Strategy in that year that opposing gender, a nefarious Western influence, is necessary to preserve the spiritual identity and unity of the Russian nation. In May 2012, in response to the legalization of gay marriage in parts of Europe, he referred to “Gayropa” to mock and thwart the potential tidal wave of LGBTQIA+ influence on Russian values.18 Objecting to the use of “foreign words” that upend traditional linguistic meanings, Putin warned that challenging the basic ideas of “mother” and “father” was unacceptable. In this way, despite the anti-European rhetoric, his views ally with European conservative movements opposed to “gender ideology.” In her critique of Putin, Daria Ukhova points out that issues such as “gender” should not be dismissed as merely cultural, for they are understood to strike at the spiritual core of the country. Indeed, the strategic document, in its own words, aims to “give priority [to] the spiritual over the material; protection of human life and of human rights and freedoms; family; creative labour; service to the homeland; moral and ethical norms; humanism; charity; fairness; mutual assistance; collectivism; the historical unity of the peoples of Russia; the continuity of our motherland’s history.” The ideology of “traditional family values,” in Ukhova’s view, aims to legitimize only very specific forms of gender relations, that is, “heterosexual, fecund [reproductive], based on the provision of unpaid care, etc.” The way that genders are distinguished from one another and cast in a hierarchical relation are, in Ukhova’s analysis, “inherent to such forms of gender relations—although not openly endorsed in the legislation—[and] represent essential elements of this ideology.”19

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In all of these contexts, and in more that will be discussed below, gender is cast as a single “ideology” that refutes the reality of sexual difference and that seeks to appropriate the divine power of creation for those who wish to create their own genders. Trans identity is regarded as a choice, a wayward or excessive expression of personal liberty, rather than an individual truth and social reality deserving of public recognition. Often the reduction of gender identity to personal choice is followed by the claim that the creation of gender identities is now taking the place of divine creativity. Yet in other regions, such as Germany, gender ideology, or, indeed, gender studies, is regularly characterized as totalitarian, suggesting that it mandates new gender identities and suppresses personal liberty.20 It is either personal liberty or its vanquishing, a form of individualism or a usurpation of divine power, indoctrination and totalitarianism or many other versions of fearsome political specters that hold sway over people.

In Brazil under Bolsonaro, as with Putin’s Russia, the very idea of the nation, of masculinity itself, was understood to be threatened by a “gender ideology” characterized as a dangerous cultural import.21 According to the scholar and activist Sonia Corrêa, anti-gender movements took form in Brazil in the 2000s and were clearly inflamed after Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) in Aparecida do Norte in 2007. In 2013, Catholics and Evangelicals further overcame their differences to forge an alliance to take down the proposed National Education Plan and to eradicate any reference to gender in education.22 In the years since, hundreds of municipal and state laws against gender in education were passed. Bolsonaro’s inaugural speech in early January 2019 contained a commitment to eradicate “gender ideology in the schools” and he vowed to resist “ideological submission.”23 Human Rights Watch reports that “since around 2014, lawmakers at the federal, state, and municipal levels in Brazil have introduced over 200 legislative proposals to ban ‘indoctrination’ or ‘gender ideology’ in Brazilian schools. These proposals, which target gender and sexuality education, have been the subject of intense political and social debate in Brazilian society, with some bills ultimately passing, many still pending, and others withdrawn.”24

In Colombia, after decades of violence, the prospect of a peace accord between FARC (the armed revolutionary forces of Colombia) and the government was submitted to a popular vote in early October 2016. Colombians voted against the peace agreement by a narrow majority. Significantly, the campaign was led by the Pentecostal Evangelical churches, which argued that the agreement, though ostensibly about peace, was mired in “gender ideology.” In fact, the agreement mentions the specific ways that the protracted conflict had affected women and “LGBTI” people, referencing discrimination, exposure to violence, forced displacement, lack of access to property rights for women, and the masculinist hierarchies within various armed factions. The scholars William Beltrán and Sian Creely argue that in the churches’ campaign, “‘gender’ comes to be shorthand for the host of social ills with which it was associated during the debates around the Colombian peace plebiscite through use of the term ‘gender ideology.’ We posit that it is the links between ‘gender’ modernity, colonialism and the development industry, its academic, value-neutral quality and its status as an isolated technical term that allow ‘gender’ to become a proxy for a wide range of social dissatisfactions.”25 In this case, “gender” threatens to inaugurate a time when religious intervention in state affairs will no longer exist, and the Church will be firmly severed from the state. Pentecostal leaders warned that the family would come under attack were peace achieved, and that the country would become both atheistic and communist as a result of the accord. As gender, functioning now as a phantasm, accumulates fears about the future, it loses any concrete referent but increases its frightening power. Beltrán and Creely make clear that “gender” is not given a definition in such debates and suggest that the critical task under these circumstances is to ask not what gender is, but what it does. They also underscore that “gender” in the Colombian context served as shorthand, that is condensing and representing a host of ancillary anxieties, and “accrues semantic noise which allows for its demonization via the phrase ‘gender ideology.’”26 Were gender merely noise, it would not have the political power that it has. It works not by drowning out the referent, but by layering the word with multidirectional trajectories of threatening force.

Even as the arguments against “gender” emerge from different localities, regions, and nations and for different purposes, they are unified and amplified by political parties, global organizations, online networks, election platforms (Vox in Spain, La Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy), and interconnected Evangelical and Catholic church organizations. According to Agnieszka Graff, Polish scholar and activist, one of the main networks amplifying and circulating the anti-gender viewpoint is the International Organization for the Family (previously the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society), which boasts thousands of participants at its conferences, as well as the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), a socially conservative organization founded in 2002 by health care professionals who opposed adoption by gay couples. Perhaps the most influential among these groups is the online platform called CitizenGo, which was founded in Spain in 2013 and which mobilizes people against lectures, exhibitions, and political candidates who defend LGBTQIA+ rights. It has quickly become a powerful online actor in opposing reproductive rights in several countries. CitizenGo claims to have over nine million followers, ready to mobilize at an instant. Recently, it paid people to launch a social media campaign against reproductive rights in Kenya, where it succeeded in temporarily banning abortion services. According to Quartz Africa, the organization promotes petitions in at least fifty countries, opposing same-sex marriage, abortion, and euthanasia. In 2019, CitizenGo bragged about running campaigns against clinics offering abortion in Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania, in addition to Kenya.27 It was reported that the organization paid people to spread disinformation on social media to oppose both reproductive rights and sex education for young people in several regions (a claim to which CitizenGo apparently did not respond).28

CitizenGo was founded in Spain and its influence throughout Europe and, lately, Africa, has been significant, but it is also present in the United States. It uses “gender” to designate an array of social movements, public policies, and regional and national laws. The organization called Hazte Oir (Make Yourself Heard), founded in 2001, opposes gay, lesbian, and trans rights and legalized abortion in Spain. It was founded by Ignacio Arsuaga, who then founded CitizenGo in 2013 to circulate the same agenda internationally. Arsuaga, a supporter of the Spanish right-wing party Vox, is also a representative of the World Congress of Families, which includes the National Organization for Marriage in the United States. And in 2017, he led a campaign to oppose gay marriage and trans rights on the basis of the popular version of the Vatican’s “complementarity” thesis. Their slogan: “Boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” The group hired a bus blazoned with the slogan to tour Spain in 2017, but the bus was quickly banned by the Socialist Party in Madrid as a public nuisance. WikiLeaks’ “Intolerance Network” has collected a wide range of initiatives of CitizenGo’s in Russia, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Italy, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.29 CitizenGo sustains ties to both Russia and the United States, especially anti–marriage rights organizations and platforms, including the ultraconservative ActRight, a group also tied to the World Congress of Families. The World Congress of Families (WCF) is a project of the International Organization for the Family that serves to connect a massive number of Christian Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical organizations devoted to defending “the natural family” and to opposing lesbian, gay, and trans rights. Formed in 1995 by a Reagan appointee, Allan Carlson, who worked with two Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, it focuses on the fear that birth rates were falling, and that both the right to abortion and pro-LGBT legislation would bring about civilizational collapse.30 Present at that initial meeting was Ivan Shevchenko, who represented the perspective of the Russian Christian Orthodoxy.31 The WCF has supported anti-gay politics in Serbia, Lithuania, and Romania, as well as in Kenya, where Vatican doctrine was channeled into social policy in 2016.32


Copyright © 2024 by Judith Butler