“Gender ideology” is a made-up bogeyman — why it matters & how to stop it
I had the incredible experience of attending the 2024 AWID Forum, a gathering of more than 4,000 global feminist activists and advocates, in Bangkok last month. It was the second learning journey for philanthropists that I organized with my friend and colleague Tracy Mack Parker in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project utilizes global convenings as unique venues for a curated experience—meeting activists and advocates; developing relationships with peer philanthropists; and getting a more nuanced understanding of social change and the role of philanthropy—with a goal of enabling people with significant resources to deepen their understanding of and connection to gender equity issues and nurture a community of support to enable them to take their philanthropy to a new level.
It was clear from our 2023 learning journey at the Women Deliver conference that, even among our well-informed and engaged group of participants, there was less familiarity with trans people and issues than other topics related to gender equity. So, for AWID in 2024, I was determined to demystify the topic. Our hope was to invite a speaker who could provide historical context and a political analysis of the concept of “gender ideology” and how it is connected to current culture-war topics like trans identity, but also to much more mainstream issues of reproductive freedom and—most consequentially—the very foundation of democracy. We were so fortunate to have Juliana Martinez, of The Nebula Fund, join us in this capacity, and the group agreed wholeheartedly that her talk with us over lunch was one of the most important, and powerful, parts of our program.
Her session included but went far beyond the content of the 2021 report of which she is a co-author: Manufacturing Moral Panic: Weaponizing Children to Undermine Gender Justice and Human Rights. She started with deep historical dive, explaining the creation of the concept of “gender ideology” in the mid-1980s by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) as a scornful umbrella term for belief in a range of sexual and reproductive freedoms, from access to contraception and abortion to marriage equality to comprehensive sex education[1]. She helped us understand how this framing has become an avenue to unite a variety of strains of Christian nationalist ideology, bringing the Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestants together in a way that they hadn’t been bonded before—as well as religious fundamentalists and political actors across a wide spectrum of the left/right divide, particularly in Latin America[2]. And ultimately, how “protection of children” has become the animating narrative of the whole system, allowing these actors to mobilize millions against women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom and access to not only sex education but, more broadly, fact-based education on a wide range of topics. The throughline to authoritarianism is clear, as she writes in Manufacturing Moral Panic: “[These actors] have allied with and built support for authoritarian regimes, amplified anti-democratic forces, and strengthened illiberal politics while amplifying and disseminating disinformation.”
Tuesday’s hearings on a Republican-sponsored bill barring transgender children from participation in K-12 girls’ sports made it so clear to me why it was—and is—so crucial to have this conversation and share this information widely. All Americans need to understand that the Republicans’ alarmist outburst (and sudden desire to pass legislation on something!) is just a sideshow—a brazen attempt to weaponize fears about trans people as a means to undermine human rights as a whole. It is just the tip of the authoritarian iceberg. Trans people are simply the most convenient and easily exploitable target. Worst of all is how easily this misinformation is splitting our communities—bringing far too many so-called feminists over to their fearmongering camp.
This is no longer a fringe concern. We cannot underestimate how these issues are being used to undermine our democracy. Every minute that we are distracted by talking about how the microscopically small number of trans students in schools are somehow preventing “real girls” from participating in sports, or threatening other children’s safety (when in fact trans young people are many MANY times more likely to be victims of violence than non-trans young people) we are not solving the problems that are actually in front of us—the climate crisis, access to decent health care, oligarchic takeover of our democratic system, the decimation of public education, a true epidemic of gun violence. Our entire political life is being hijacked by someone’s alarmist fear that their child or grandchild wants to use different pronouns. It is an outrage, and it must stop.
Read Manufacturing Moral Panic and share it. Start a conversation with someone you know about how these issues connect. Confront false narratives about trans people. Our democracy depends on it.
[1] The Catholic origins of the concept of “gender ideology” is deeply explored in University of Chicago law professor Mary Ann Case’s 2019 article in the feminist journal Signs, “Trans Formations in the Vatican’s War on "Gender Ideology". Case writes: “It is worth noting that the level of influence on lived experience Benedict XVI attributed to secular law, and the level of coordination and of power he credited to the feminist and reproductive and LGBT rights activists he saw as shaping that law, vastly exceeded what those activists themselves could imagine.”
[2] Longtime activist and researcher Sonia Correa writes about the use of “gender ideology” language across the spectrum of Latin American authoritarians from Ecuador on the left to Brazil on the right in her 2017 article Gender Ideology: tracking its origins and meanings in current gender politics.
