Who's Afraid of Gender?

Who's Afraid of Gender? Plot Summary

Introduction

The global rise of anti-gender movements represents one of the most significant yet underexamined political developments of our time. What was once a marginal discourse has transformed into a powerful transnational force shaping legislation, education policy, and public debate across continents. These movements have successfully reframed "gender" - previously an ordinary analytical term - into a phantasmatic threat to civilization itself, portrayed as equivalent to nuclear weapons or totalitarian regimes. This phantasmatic construction serves specific political purposes: it deflects attention from actual sources of social anxiety while providing a convenient scapegoat for authoritarian agendas. Through rigorous analysis of the rhetorical strategies, institutional networks, and political consequences of anti-gender campaigns, we can better understand how legitimate fears about the future are exploited by movements seeking to restore patriarchal power. The framework of "phantasmatic construction" reveals how processes of condensation and displacement allow the concept of gender to absorb unrelated anxieties while obscuring the actual operation of power. By examining these mechanisms across religious, political, and scientific domains, we gain crucial insights into how moral panics function as vehicles for rights-stripping and state control over marginalized bodies.

Chapter 1: The Global Anti-Gender Movement: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The anti-gender movement emerged in the 1990s when the Roman Catholic Council for the Family first warned that "gender" threatened biblical authority and traditional family structures. What began as theological objection has since evolved into a sophisticated transnational network spanning religious institutions, political parties, and grassroots organizations. The Vatican's stance proved particularly influential, with Pope Benedict XVI condemning gender ideologies for denying the "pre-ordained duality of man and woman" established by divine creation. Pope Francis later escalated this rhetoric, comparing gender theory to nuclear weapons and claiming both "plot designs of death, that disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation." These religious objections found fertile ground in political movements worldwide. In Russia, Vladimir Putin identified "gender" as a Western ideological construction threatening Russian spiritual identity. In Brazil under Bolsonaro, gender ideology was characterized as a dangerous cultural import undermining masculinity and national identity. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán linked opposition to gender with anti-immigration policies, claiming both necessary to protect "natural reproduction" and the future of Europe. The movement has gained significant electoral traction across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, often through strategic collaborations between Catholic and Evangelical churches. Organizations like CitizenGo, the World Congress of Families, and the International Organization for the Family have created powerful transnational networks opposing reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and transgender recognition. These groups effectively mobilize millions through sophisticated online platforms and social media campaigns. Their influence extends to policy decisions, educational curricula, and legal frameworks across multiple continents. The movement's effectiveness stems from its ability to adapt to local contexts while maintaining core opposition to gender equality, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQIA+ rights. The anti-gender movement represents more than mere backlash against progressive social changes. It reflects a deeper desire to restore a patriarchal order where gender roles remain fixed and hierarchical. This restoration project is inherently fragile because the idealized past it seeks to recreate never existed in the form imagined. Nevertheless, the movement's ability to channel diffuse anxieties about social change into a coherent political force makes it a powerful vehicle for authoritarian politics. By portraying gender as an existential threat, it justifies increasingly repressive measures against feminists, LGBTQIA+ communities, and other marginalized groups. What makes this movement particularly effective is its inflammatory syntax that condenses disparate fears into a single terrifying entity. Through processes of condensation and displacement, the phantasm of "gender" absorbs unrelated concerns - simultaneously representing Marxism and unbridled capitalism, libertarianism and totalitarianism, foreign invasion and imperialist power. These contradictions strengthen rather than weaken the movement by allowing the phantasm to capture whatever anxiety resonates most strongly with different audiences. The result is a powerful psychosocial phenomenon that mobilizes political passions while obscuring its actual operation.

Chapter 2: Religious Foundations: How the Vatican Weaponized Gender Anxiety

The Vatican has played a pivotal role in establishing the conceptual framework underpinning the global anti-gender movement. In 2004, Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), while directing the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, wrote an influential letter to bishops distinguishing between two approaches to "women's issues." He criticized the second approach, which he characterized as denying differences between men and women by minimizing physical difference (sex) and emphasizing cultural elements (gender). According to Ratzinger, this perspective threatened the "natural two-parent structure" and made homosexuality and heterosexuality "virtually equivalent." Central to the Vatican's objection is the doctrine of "complementarity," which stipulates that humanity is defined by the divinely created polarity of man and woman. This doctrine holds that marriage must be restricted to heterosexuals and that any attempt at "self-constitution" represents a dangerous exercise of human freedom - essentially stealing creative powers from the divine. The Vatican views gender theory as an attempt at "self-emancipation from creation and the Creator," a form of rebellion against natural law. Theologians have noted, however, that this doctrine of complementarity emerged primarily in the second half of the twentieth century in response to feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, rather than representing a longstanding theological tradition. Pope Francis, despite being perceived as more progressive than his predecessor, has amplified this rhetoric to alarming levels. He has likened gender theory to Nazism and nuclear weapons, claiming it represents a force capable of annihilating humanity. In his view, gender theory constitutes an "ideological colonization" comparable to the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. This inflammatory language serves to mobilize opposition by portraying gender as an existential threat requiring immediate response. The Vatican's 2019 document "Male and Female He Created Them" further claimed that transgender identity "annihilate[s] the concept of nature" itself. The Vatican's position relies on a strategic distinction between acceptable and unacceptable approaches to gender. While claiming to be open to dialogue with certain forms of gender research, it simultaneously characterizes other approaches as "absolute and unquestionable" ideologies that "dictate how children should be raised." This distinction proves unstable upon examination, as the Church's own dogmatic positions on gender and sexuality function as dictates that it seeks to enforce through educational and political channels. The document was distributed to over 6,200 Catholic schools in the United States alone, demonstrating how religious doctrine is actively disseminated to shape educational practices. This conflation of consensual same-sex relationships with abusive practices reveals a fundamental contradiction in the Vatican's position. While claiming to protect children from harm, the Church has a documented history of protecting priests who have sexually abused children. The projection of harm onto gender theory and LGBTQIA+ communities serves to externalize and disavow the Church's own complicity in child abuse. This moral inversion allows the Church to position itself as a protector of children while continuing to cause harm through its policies and practices. The anti-gender movement thus functions as a form of moral sadism, using the language of protection to justify discrimination and violence against vulnerable communities.

Chapter 3: The Phantasmatic Construction: Condensation and Displacement in Gender Discourse

The anti-gender movement operates through a distinctive inflammatory syntax that transforms gender from an analytical category into a phantasmatic threat. This transformation occurs through psychosocial processes similar to what Freud identified as condensation and displacement in dream-work. Through condensation, diverse anxieties about social change, economic insecurity, and cultural transformation become compressed into the single signifier "gender." This explains why discussions about gender often trigger disproportionate emotional reactions - the term has become a repository for numerous social anxieties only tangentially related to gender itself. Displacement functions as the complementary mechanism, where fears about one phenomenon are transferred onto another. Concerns about neoliberal economic policies that undermine family stability become projected onto gender theory rather than directed at economic structures. Similarly, anxieties about declining national influence or changing demographic patterns become channeled into opposition to gender studies or LGBTQ+ rights. This displacement allows complex systemic problems to be simplified into moral narratives about defending tradition against ideological corruption. The phantasmatic construction of gender thus serves as a convenient scapegoat for social anxieties that might otherwise lead to critiques of capitalism, nationalism, or other dominant systems. What makes this phantasmatic construction particularly powerful is its contradictory nature. The anti-gender movement portrays gender simultaneously as an elite academic theory and a mass contagion, as both too abstract to comprehend and too simplistic to be credible. Gender theory is characterized as both rigidly dogmatic and dangerously fluid, as both totalitarian in its uniformity and anarchic in its effects. These contradictions, rather than weakening the movement, actually strengthen it by allowing the phantasm to capture whatever anxiety resonates most strongly with different audiences. The phantasm can simultaneously represent Marxism and unbridled capitalism, libertarianism and totalitarianism, foreign invasion and imperialist power. The emotional power of this phantasm stems partly from its connection to deeply personal aspects of identity. Gender organizes intimate relationships, family structures, and individual self-understanding. When gender is presented as unstable or socially constructed, this can be experienced as threatening the very foundations of personal identity. The anti-gender movement exploits this connection by suggesting that gender theory will erase meaningful distinctions between men and women, thereby undermining core aspects of social and personal life. This framing activates existential anxieties that override critical thinking, making it difficult to engage in nuanced discussions about gender. The phantasmatic construction of gender as threat relies heavily on the figure of the endangered child. By framing gender theory as endangering children - through sex education, transgender healthcare, or exposure to LGBTQ+ content - the movement creates a powerful moral imperative for action. This framing activates protective instincts that override critical thinking, making it difficult to engage in nuanced discussions about gender in educational or healthcare contexts. The phantasmatic scene of the child in danger serves to justify increasingly restrictive policies while obscuring the actual harm done to real children through the denial of comprehensive education, healthcare, and community support.

Chapter 4: Beyond Binary Thinking: The Co-Construction of Sex and Gender

The debate over sex and gender often centers on a fundamental question: Does gender theory deny the material reality of sex? Critics claim that gender theorists reject biological facts in favor of social constructionism, while defenders argue that this characterization fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between biological and social dimensions of embodiment. This controversy came to the forefront during the Trump administration when the Department of Health and Human Services attempted to define "sex" as an unchangeable feature determined by genitalia at birth. This definition aimed to narrow the scope of sex discrimination under the law, potentially excluding transgender individuals from legal protections. The Supreme Court, however, took a different approach in its landmark Bostock v. Clayton County decision. Rather than attempting to establish a definitive definition of sex, the Court focused on how sex operates in discriminatory treatment. Justice Gorsuch argued that discrimination against LGBTQ individuals necessarily involves sex-based considerations: "It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex." This approach recognizes that sex discrimination does not require agreement on what sex is, but rather examines how assumptions about sex function in unequal treatment. The scientific understanding of sex has evolved beyond simple binary models. Research on elite athletes has found considerable overlap in testosterone levels between men and women, challenging assumptions about clear hormonal boundaries between sexes. The International Olympic Committee revised its guidelines on transgender athletes after acknowledging that "the science has moved on" and that performance does not correlate in predictable ways with endogenous testosterone levels. These scientific developments support a more complex understanding of sex as a spectrum or mosaic rather than a strict binary. The materiality of the body cannot be understood through positivist frameworks that treat it as a decontextualized fact. Instead, we must recognize how bodies are formed through constant interaction with their environments. The model of co-construction offers a more accurate understanding of how material and social dimensions are intertwined in the production of gendered embodiment. This perspective moves beyond the nature/culture dichotomy that has long structured debates about sex and gender, recognizing instead that biological and social forces interact in ways that cannot be neatly separated. The body's materiality is fundamentally relational - it exists through its connections to other bodies, social systems, and environmental factors. As feminist science scholars have demonstrated, the body is porous, constantly taking in elements from the external world that become part of its biological functioning. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the environmental toxins we're exposed to - all these factors become incorporated into our bodily materiality. This means that social and economic infrastructures directly shape the material reality of our bodies. Nutrition affects bone density, blood composition, and mortality rates; air quality impacts respiratory health; environmental toxins can disrupt hormonal systems. The development of secondary sex characteristics, hormonal patterns, and reproductive capacities all depend on complex interactions between genetic factors and environmental conditions.

Chapter 5: Political Consequences: Rights-Stripping and State Control

The anti-gender movement has rapidly transformed from religious doctrine into state policy across multiple continents, resulting in concrete legislative actions that strip rights from women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and other marginalized groups. In the United States, what once seemed a distant European or Latin American phenomenon has now become central to domestic politics. Since 2020, state legislatures have introduced hundreds of bills targeting transgender people, with a particular focus on youth. These bills restrict access to healthcare, ban transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, and prohibit discussion of gender and sexuality in educational settings. Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation exemplifies this trend, prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in early grades. Governor Ron DeSantis has justified this censorship by blaming "woke gender ideology" for corrupting education. Similar bills have spread across dozens of states, accompanied by rhetoric that portrays educators who discuss gender as "groomers" or "pedophiles." This inflammatory language transforms educational efforts into imagined scenes of abuse, inverting the reality that such legislation itself harms vulnerable youth by depriving them of knowledge, community, and healthcare. The deprivation of healthcare represents another dimension of state control over gendered bodies. In Alabama, legislation criminalized gender-affirming care for transgender youth, carrying penalties of up to ten years in prison for physicians. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas directed state authorities to investigate parents who seek medical assistance for their transitioning children as potential child abusers. These policies directly contradict the positions of major medical organizations, which recognize gender-affirming care as potentially lifesaving treatment. The state thus positions itself as having greater authority over children's bodies than medical experts, parents, or the children themselves. These legislative efforts parallel the attack on reproductive rights, culminating in the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. Both movements share a common logic: they seek to expand state power over bodily autonomy while simultaneously restricting individual freedoms in the name of protection. The attribution of personhood to the fetus preempts the freedom of the pregnant person, just as the original sex assignment is used to deny transgender individuals' self-determination. In both cases, the state enlarges its domain of interest and restricts bodily autonomy in the name of protecting either the fetus or an imagined future self that conforms to assigned gender. What makes this political movement particularly dangerous is its ability to transform legitimate concerns about child welfare into justifications for censorship and discrimination. By portraying gender education as indoctrination or abuse, it positions the state as a necessary protector against imagined harms. This moral inversion allows for increasingly authoritarian measures to be implemented in the name of protection, while the actual harm done to LGBTQIA+ youth through deprivation of education, community, and healthcare is rendered invisible. The result is a political landscape where moral sadism masquerades as concern, and where the state's expansion of control over gendered bodies is justified as necessary intervention against a phantasmatic threat.

Chapter 6: Building Coalitions: Solidarity Across Difference

The anti-gender movement has successfully exploited divisions within progressive movements, particularly between some feminists and transgender advocates. These divisions weaken collective resistance to authoritarian politics and undermine the potential for effective coalitions. In the United Kingdom, self-proclaimed "gender-critical" feminists have aligned with right-wing forces to oppose transgender rights, creating bitter conflicts within academic departments and public discourse. This alliance, though perhaps unwitting, serves the broader authoritarian agenda by fracturing progressive solidarity and legitimizing discrimination against vulnerable communities. The trans-exclusionary position fundamentally misunderstands the nature of gender categories and feminist politics. Gender categories are not property to be owned but social and historical formations that precede and exceed individual lives. When trans-exclusionary feminists claim proprietary rights to the category of "women," they contradict feminism's historical commitment to challenging fixed gender definitions. Joan W. Scott's insight remains crucial: gender categories are "at once empty and overflowing," containing "alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions" even when they appear fixed. Feminism has always relied on the historically changing character of gender categories to demand changes in how women and men are defined and treated. The arguments deployed by trans-exclusionary feminists often mirror those of right-wing opponents of gender. Both insist on the immutability of sex assigned at birth, both oppose self-determination as the basis for gender recognition, and both support bureaucratic barriers to exercising rights of gender reassignment. This convergence reveals how trans-exclusionary politics, despite its feminist branding, ultimately reinforces patriarchal authority over gendered bodies. The claim that transgender women threaten women assigned female at birth relies on phantasmatic constructions of danger that displace actual sources of gender-based violence onto marginalized communities. Building effective coalitions requires recognizing shared struggles against common sources of oppression. The freedom to determine one's gender and the freedom to control one's reproductive capacity are fundamentally connected through the principle of bodily autonomy. Both transgender rights movements and reproductive justice movements oppose state control over embodied life and affirm the right to self-determination. Similarly, the struggle against gender-based violence requires solidarity among all those who experience such violence, regardless of their gender identity or assigned sex. Trans women face disproportionate rates of violence precisely because they challenge patriarchal gender norms, making them natural allies in feminist struggles against gender oppression. Effective coalition-building does not require resolving all differences or achieving perfect agreement. As Bernice Johnson Reagon argued in her call for "difficult coalitions," movements must learn to work together across differences that may never be fully reconciled. This approach recognizes that oppressive forces can be defeated by acting together and moving forward with difficult differences without insisting on their ultimate resolution. The task is not to create a unified theory of gender that everyone must accept, but to identify concrete shared interests in opposing authoritarian control over gendered bodies and lives.

Chapter 7: Reclaiming Critical Thinking Against Weaponized Fear

The anti-gender movement thrives on shutting down critical thought through the weaponization of fear. It portrays gender studies and critical inquiry as forms of indoctrination while simultaneously imposing dogmatic views that restrict freedom of thought. This strategy relies on a fundamental misunderstanding - or deliberate misrepresentation - of what critical thinking entails. Critical inquiry does not mean uncritically accepting a predetermined doctrine but rather examining the conditions of possibility for certain concepts and opening up thinking to more historical and structural analysis. The attack on gender studies parallels the assault on critical race theory, with both fields reduced to caricatures that can be more easily vilified. These caricatures bear little resemblance to the actual scholarly work being done in these fields, which is characterized by internal debate, methodological diversity, and ongoing critical reflection. Gender studies, far from being a monolithic ideology, encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches to understanding how gender operates in society. Similarly, critical race theory represents diverse methodologies for examining how race and racism function structurally, not a singular doctrine to be accepted or rejected. The refusal to engage with the actual content of these fields reveals the anti-intellectual nature of the anti-gender movement. Opponents often proudly proclaim their unwillingness to read the texts they criticize, treating such refusal as a virtue rather than a failure of intellectual responsibility. This stance reflects a deeper fear - not that reading will introduce confusion, but that it might open the mind to new possibilities and challenge existing power structures. The opposition to gender and critical race theory is thus fundamentally an opposition to the kind of critical thinking that contests the status quo. Reclaiming critical thinking requires understanding critique not as mere opposition but as a process of examining the conditions that make certain ways of thinking possible. Critique asks why gender is organized in particular ways and not others, opening up possibilities for imagining alternative arrangements. It examines how categories like race and gender have been historically constructed and how they might be reconstructed in more just ways. This form of critical inquiry does not deny reality but seeks to understand how reality is framed and how that framing affects what we can perceive and understand. The task of countering the anti-gender movement cannot be accomplished solely through better arguments or more accurate information, though these remain important. It requires producing a compelling ethical and political vision that exposes and opposes the cruelty and destruction currently being unleashed. This vision must affirm the right to live and breathe in freedom, to move through the world without fear of violence, and to find community and care in diverse forms of kinship and solidarity. It must challenge the moral inversions that portray efforts to expand freedom as threats to society.

Summary

The global anti-gender movement represents a sophisticated political strategy that transforms legitimate anxieties about social change into phantasmatic fears directed at gender theory, feminist activism, and LGBTQIA+ communities. Through processes of condensation and displacement, this movement constructs gender as an existential threat equivalent to nuclear weapons or totalitarian regimes, justifying increasingly authoritarian state control over gendered bodies. This phantasmatic construction serves specific political purposes - deflecting attention from actual sources of social anxiety while providing moral alibis for rights-stripping legislation that disproportionately harms vulnerable populations. Countering this movement requires more than factual corrections or better arguments; it demands building coalitions across differences that recognize shared interests in bodily autonomy and freedom from state control. By understanding how the anti-gender movement operates through psychosocial mechanisms that transform analytical categories into phantasmatic threats, we can develop more effective strategies for reclaiming critical thinking against weaponized fear. The path forward lies not in resolving all theoretical differences but in practical solidarity against the forces that would deny fundamental freedoms to determine one's gender, control one's reproduction, and live without fear of violence or discrimination.

About Author

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Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism. Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, and mourning and war. Their most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy and exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

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