(En)gendering Authoritarianism in Action

The snapshots below illustrate how weaponizing gender facilitates authoritarian goals, with a particular focus on North America and Europe—regions that by no means have a monopoly on democracy (or its erosion), but that are primary areas of focus for our two organizations. Click to expand and read a summary of each snapshot.

Gendered Narratives Driving Women Out of Public Office

Narratives and policies purporting to protect women, children and/or “family values” have been used to facilitate the expansion of state power, challenge women’s rights and advancement, and, ironically, have underpinned attacks on women. Many of these narratives advance arguments that women are too emotional, incompetent, or untrustworthy to hold positions of power—or that doing so violates their patriotic duty to procreate. Amid gender-based political appeals to win male votes, including attacks on feminism, these narratives are increasingly common, pernicious, and giving rise to violent and sexualized threats and harassment targeting women, and particularly women in leadership positions. 

According to the the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international organization of national parliaments, almost half of women legislators in Europe have received death threats or threats of rape or beating. IPU further found that women parliamentarians are significantly more likely to be targeted for their gender than are men, including through sexual images of themselves shared on social media and through rape, death, and abduction threats.  The report further found that female parliamentarians active in addressing gender inequality and violence against women were particularly singled out for attack. 

The Brennan Center similarly found that women holding state and local office in the U.S. were three to four times as likely as men to experience abuse targeting their gender, and “women state legislators were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature.” Women of color face even higher levels of abuse. Separate research found that female mayors were more likely than male mayors to experience physical violence, harassment and psychological abuse. 

The impacts of this are visible. In 2020, we saw a violent plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a naked effigy of her hanging from a noose, following misogynistic rhetoric calling her a “tyrant bitch” who “loves the power she has now” over her COVID-related policies. U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez has publicly spoken about the violent and sexualized content spread about her online, including pornographic deep fakes. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, likewise faced a deluge of assasination and rape threats throughout her tenure, reportedly 50 to 90 times more than other public figures. Even with her widespread popularity, she ultimately resigned, citing that she did not have “enough left in the tank.” 

In this toxic environment, an increasing number of women are choosing to step back from positions of public leadership globally. In the U.S., for instance, the Brennan Center found that half of women officeholders surveyed said they were less willing to run for reelection or higher office because of the threats and harassment they faced. Officeholders also noted that the threats and abuse dampened their willingness to govern on certain issues, including LGBTQ rights and gun regulations, as well as their willingness to interact with their constituents. Collectively, this shows the impact of gendered narratives in communicating that women do not belong in leadership positions, pushing women out of public service, and undermining democratic and representative governance.

How ICE’s Methods Normalize State and Targeted Violence Against Women

Anti-immigration arguments and policies, often couched in false claims that immigrants endanger women, are giving rise to state violence that directly endangers women and children. In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has moved swiftly to arrest and deport or detain—often without due process—immigrants of varying legal status, including those who are DACA recipients, those with pending asylum cases, and many others who have been in the United States for years. ICE and the Trump Administration insist that these activities are in part motivated by a desire to protect women—building on a longstanding, baseless, and dangerous narrative that immigrants from Latin America are “rapists” and thus a threat to (native-born, white) women and children. These arrests have instead created the conditions for state and non-state targeted violence to be perpetrated against women and children (populations they purport to protect) and in society more broadly.

Many of those detained are themselves mothers who are forcibly and often violently separated from their children by ICE. In Louisiana, for instance, a mother of two, married to an American citizen and Marine veteran, who had recently given birth to a baby girl and was still breastfeeding, was arrested and detained during an interview for her green card application. In Florida, a mom to a one-year old baby, also still breastfeeding, and also married to a U.S. citizen, was deported to Cuba without the option to bring her child with her. In yet another case, ICE arrested and detained a woman who was five months pregnant and later suffered a stillbirth due to being denied medical care while in detention. This trend illustrates how these narratives are deployed in ways that deem some women worthy of protection—typically those that are white—but others “legitimate” or fair targets for state violence and discrimination. 

ICE agents often conduct these arrests while wearing plainclothes, covering their faces, and refusing to display a badge, purportedly to protect ICE agents from doxxing. This has created an opportunity for other troubling instances, in which men are now impersonating ICE agents—who have normalized hiding their faces and not showing badges—and robbing, kidnapping, and even raping women. This is just one example of how state violence—justified in the name of protecting women—both endangers women and creates a permission structure for further violence within society.

Leveraging Foreign Agent Laws to Target Feminist and LGBTQ Organizations

Authoritarians often depict feminist and LGBTQ organizations as threats, encode this into law (further solidifying their status as a scapegoat), and then take actions to push these organizations and the communities they support further out of public life. 

An organized, coordinated, and resilient civil society poses an existential challenge to authoritarians. Recognizing this, authoritarians attack and seek to shrink civic spaces, or create parallel structures and civil societies that are allied with their goals. Alongside reducing shared spaces and further dividing society, this undermines a key check on authoritarian power. 

One of authoritarians’ weapons of choice is “foreign agent laws,” designed to discredit and undermine civil society by branding it as “foreign” and therefore suspicious or subversive. These laws force groups receiving foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” if they engage in vaguely defined “political activity,” including public debate, legal analysis, public opinion polling, or election monitoring. Passed under the pretext of national security or protecting the national interest, these laws’ onerous reporting requirements make it near-impossible for already over-stretched organizations to operate, removing or severely constraining critical checks on executive powers. 

Authoritarian populists target feminist and LGBTQ organizations with these and related laws, enabling them to portray these organizations as threats to national sovereignty and traditional values. 

Russia’s foreign agents law—and its expansion—is a case in point, a law that has since inspired similar legislation (passed or proposed), in Uganda, India, Georgia, Slovakia, Serbia, and Hungary. 

In Russia, the law was passed in 2012 amid widespread anti-government protests following a rigged election that brought Putin to his third term in power. Subsequent legislation has expanded the law’s reach alongside a separate bill banning “homosexual propaganda.” Together, these laws have been a key tool to go after feminist and LGBTQ organizations, including those that support domestic violence victims, under the pretext that they are foreign and threaten national security, women, children, and traditional values.

Putin also deployed the narrative that women’s and LGBTQ rights threaten Russia as a way to justify Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he claimed was in defense of Russia’s “traditional values” that were being attacked by a morally degenerate West. That same year, the Kremlin further expanded the foreign agents law to include anyone supporting Ukraine, as well as the gay propaganda law to “effectively ban public discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity.”

These laws paved the way for Russia to target feminism directly. In March 2023, Russia’s lower house of parliament drafted a law labeling feminism as “extremist,” blaming feminists for the “destruction of traditional values” and accusing them of being “agents of the west.” As exiled Russian feminist Alyona Popova noted, the proposed law reinforced arguments made previously against anti-domestic violence measures in the country: “feminists are ruining a unique Russian way of life, all feminists are sponsored from the West and feminists hate men.” Popova had previously been forced out of Russia after being designated a “foreign agent.” 

Later that year, in November 2023, the Russian Supreme Court designated the “International LGBT Movement” an “extremist organization” that threatens “the demographic situation in the country, [and] contributes to…the self-destruction of society, weakening of family ties…and imposes ideas that imply the denial of human dignity and the value of human life.” As part of the ruling, the court took a particular stance against “femininitives” or feminine gender-specific words, including the feminine forms of “leader,” “director,” or “author”—used within feminist circles as a way of making “women visible in the public space, acknowledg[ing] their expertise and work on par with men’s.” Speaking on the ruling, Aisyn Gaisina, a feminist organizer, explained, “We need a law against domestic violence so that women’s partners and husbands will stop killing them…[instead] the government is doing everything it can so that women would see clearly that they live in a male state.”

Leveraging Homophobia to Oppose Anti-Domestic Violence Legislation Across Europe

The increasing opposition against the Istanbul Convention is another example of how opposition to so-called gender ideology and the purported defense of traditional gender norms are used to roll back critical protections for women and stall progress towards gender equality. It is also a clear instance of leveraging homophobia to undermine women’s rights and protections.

The Istanbul Convention is a Council of Europe treaty designed to prevent violence against women and gender-based violence. Despite initial support for the treaty (and, ironically, its name), Turkey became the first country to withdraw from the convention. Turkey claimed that the treaty, which protected women from domestic violence regardless of their sexual orientation, “normalized homosexuality” and was thus incompatible with Turkish social and family values. Turkish representatives also argued that the convention was rooted in “gender ideology” and threatened traditional gender roles and family structures. Alongside Turkey’s withdrawal from the Convention, there was a measured increase in femicides and “suspicious female deaths,” particularly among women who were employed, had children, and had sought legal protection.

Other countries followed suit amid significant lobbying from activists working against equality and women’s rights. In Bulgaria, for instance, the Constitutional Court, following additional pressure from politicians across the political spectrum, stated that the ratification of the convention was unconstitutional for similar reasoning. The Bulgarian judges further used the opportunity to advance an interpretation of the Bulgarian constitution that “associates the biological sex “woman” with motherhood. 

Opposition to the Istanbul Convention has become a key discursive tool for authoritarian populist actors across Europe, who frame their opposition as protecting national sovereignty, common sense, and popular will against global elites who in their view promote “gender ideology.” This also allows political actors to leverage the threat of so-called gender ideology to appeal to anti-establishment sentiments, while ultimately weakening protections for women and gender minorities. 

From Banning “Homosexual Propaganda” to Banning “Childfree Propaganda”

In Russia, measures used to target the LGBTQ community later served as a template for legislation restricting women’s rights. In 2012, the Kremlin passed a bill banning “homosexual propaganda,” or information that can “harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations.” In effect, the homosexual propaganda bill made it illegal to claim social equality. The law created an explicit association between homosexuality, harming children, and ultimately pedophilia—one that Putin and his supporters reinforced throughout subsequent rhetoric and policy. The propaganda bill was tied to a threefold increase in violence targeting LGBTQ people in Russia, and emboldened vigilante and militia groups to violently and publicly target, typically without accountability, those they suspected of being gay. In 2023, following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—which the Kremlin justified as defending “traditional values”— Russia extended the gay propaganda law to “effectively ban public discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity,” pushing LGBTQ people and feminist organizations farther out of public life. 

In 2024, amid declining birthrates and heavy losses from the invasion of Ukraine, the parliament passed a lawpunishing “childfree propaganda.” The bill mirrored the earlier LGBTQ propaganda law and complementary legislation advancing “traditional family values,” but this time targeted organizations and individuals that “promote the virtues of women voluntarily not having children,” imposing fines up to $51,000. Alongside bans on “childfree propaganda,” Russia has begun restricting abortions, which had been legal in the country since the 1950s. And in September 2024, a lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party submitted legislation to regulate divorces through mandating a reconciliation period, psychological consultations, and/or “reeducation” in cases where there are children or where one spouse wants to maintain the marriage. Critics note this is especially dangerous in instances of domestic violence, which has been largely decriminalized since 2017. In an earlier interview with Radio Free Europe, activist Alyona Popova explained that, according to the state “the function of a woman is to have babies to fill the ranks of soldiers that this regime needs…this is how the government has been thinking publicly for 10 years…our system will try to destroy women’s freedom of thought and leave them only one function [as mothers].”

Manipulating Women’s and LGBTQ Rights to Support Anti-Migration Policies in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom, or PVV) use women’s and LGBTQ rights as a cudgel to attempt to restrict migration. For instance, Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV party, has leveraged defending women’s protection and rights and LGBTQ rights–even centrally incorporating the protection of LGBTQ rights into its party platform–to underpin anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies. Wilders has stated that “Islam is not a religion; it’s an ideology…of a retarded culture.” He has called for the Dutch government to close the country’s borders as a way to protect women from Muslim men, whom he refers to as “Islamic testosterone bombs,” and has separately claimed that integrating “homophobic Muslim migrants” threaten LGBTQ rights across the country, and that Islam is “incompatible” with Dutch society (Wilders has been convicted of discrimination, a decision ratified by the Dutch Supreme Court) in 2021. Still, the support for women’s and LGBTQ rights only extends so far. With all the PVV’s rhetoric on protecting women and LGBTQ people, the party had previously voted against ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women (though it did pass the parliament). More recently, Wilders noted“Trump is right, there are only two genders: male and female. Let’s bring common sense back to our society. No more woke madness or indoctrination.”

From Attacks on “Gender” to Attacks on Civil Society and Human Rights Activists in Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, the English word “gender” entered the national lexicon and transformed into a slur, meant to belittle sexual minorities and gender nonconforming people. The hostile rhetoric intensified in 2019, when government officials and the Orthodox Church openly challenged the legitimacy of organizations advocating for gender equality and LGBTQ rights, driving public institutions to distance themselves from civil society groups connected to a wide range of issues, including the safety of women and LGBTQ people—but also freedom of expression, assembly, and religion, and protection for Roma and refugees. These groups were also sidelined in the legislative process. The term gender, in its derogatory use, became part of a broader arsenal of hateful language directed at human rights advocates and civil society activists. 

In 2024, the Bulgarian parliament passed a vaguely worded amendment to the country’s education code which prohibits the “propaganda, promotion, or incitement” of LGBTQ “ideas and views” in schools. The amendment was introduced by the far-right and pro-Russia Revival party and was unexpectedly backed by other mainstream and pro-EU parties. The new legislation closely tracks the Russian and Hungarian anti-LGBTQ propaganda laws and goes as far as to state that content related to gender and sexual orientation “in the vicinity of” these educational establishments should also be banned. In essence, leveraging gender-related anxieties provided the state a pretext for public censorship and extended control over education.

Creating a Surveillance State in Texas

In Texas, the engineered threat of so-called “gender ideology” and LGBTQ people has laid the groundwork for a web of passed and proposed legislation that extends the arm of the government into private homes, classrooms, doctors’ offices, and even into other states. Together, this has created a robust surveillance state monitoring individuals, parents, and teachers across and beyond Texas. Vaguely-worded laws ban nearly all abortions with narrow exceptions, encourage Texans to report their neighbors for violations, and enable private lawsuits against anyone who assists with an abortion after six weeks, leaving physicians fearful of providing care like D&Cs (dilation and curettage), critical for miscarriage treatment, resulting in delayed care and at least three patient deaths. Texas Governor Abbott has also ordered investigations of parents of trans children, framing gender-affirming care as “child abuse” inspired by “gender ideology” that is responsible for “transing” kids. 

Texas is also testing whether it can enforce its restrictive policies beyond its borders. It is suing a New York physician for prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident, while also demanding records from a medical provider in Georgia for allegedly providing gender-affirming care to Texas minors.

Texas has expanded surveillance over private citizens and their medical decisions in the name of protecting women. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff performed a nationwide search of over 83,000 license plate cameras to track a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion—he claimed the search was undertaken for the woman’s safety. And a recently proposed Texas Senate Bill would mandate wastewater testing for hormones linked to birth control, abortion, and gender-affirming care, under the guise of “environmental protection” (though the state recently moved to exempt the oil and gas industry from environmental regulations). 

Finally, “parents’ rights” arguments have provided rhetorical cover for Texas and other states to dramatically restrict access to a huge swath of books and information under the guise of rooting out gender ideology. In Texas, a series of book bans—one just passed in May 2025—encourage students and parents to report those who teach banned books, including works with LGBTQ characters or those deemed to violate “community values.” In Texas and beyond, these book bans purport to prevent school-age children from accessing material that is “obscene” or “pornographic.” In reality, PEN America reports, these book bans are being weaponized as a means of restricting access to any books that deal with or even touch on gender and sexuality. PEN America’s data showed that about 19% of banned books addressed or included descriptions or discussions of sexual violence, many of them designed to help young adults—particularly girls—navigate and heal from these experiences if they have survived them.About 36% of books banned in the fall 2023 semester dealt with LGBTQ themes, or featured an LGBTQ character.

Together, these pieces of legislation have dramatically expanded state power—reaching into doctors’ offices, classrooms, bathrooms, and private homes. But beyond extending the state’s reach, it has fostered a culture of surveillance, encouraging, even incentivizing, individuals to police one another’s behavior. This shift recalls the paranoia of the Red Scare, creating what Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, calls a “Snitch State.”

Normalizing Authoritarian Ideas through Tradwife Content

Authoritarian populists often perpetuate a narrative hearkening back to the “good old days,” when, they say, family life was prioritized, and men and women had clear gender roles. Tradwives—short for traditional wives—peddle the idea that the true path to women’s liberation is to be freed from the demands of an independent career and the modern world and instead return to their true calling—life as mother, homemaker, and wife. Like many other actors in the broader authoritarian ecosystem, tradwives begin with a kernel of truth, effectively leveraging the well-acknowledged reality that for women, motherhood and having a career are often in tension with one another. However, tradwives take this kernel of truth to the extreme, in ways that are often mutually reinforcing with authoritarian ideas and policies. Importantly, tradwives are not just pushing stay-at-home motherhood (and there are myriad reasons women choose to be stay-at-home moms), but a more pernicious message about returning to a time when men and women had distinct and rigid roles. 

Tradwives’ messages about fulfilling one’s biological vocation tend to be more nuanced than the more overtly patriarchal and misogynistic messages found in the “manosphere,” and they are delivered through idyllic social media content that often obscures their political messages. Tradwife content creators often eschew rigorous science (such as vaccines), mainstream schooling, and gender equality in favor of home remedies, homeschooling, and subservience to their husbands.

Tradwives embody the three central tenets – gender complementarity (the idea that men and women have complementary but fundamentally unequal roles to play), familialism (the idea that the traditional nuclear family is at the center of society), and sexual and social hierarchy (the idea that the “natural” and hierarchical family—comprised of a married man and woman and their biological children—keep society pure, functional, and healthy). 

Tradwives firmly believe in and perpetuate gender complementarity, particularly when it comes to motherhood and marriage. The idea that women and men have complementary but fundamentally different or even unequal roles is a throughline in almost all tradwife content. Many of them even perpetuate the idea that women belong in a submissive role to their husbands. The notion that a woman’s ideal role is not just in the home, but in a position of submission to their male partners is a critical part of the pipeline from homemaking content to authoritarianism, as it sows ideas about differentiated gender roles that are hierarchical rather than equal. 

Second, the tenet of familialism is a defining feature of tradwife content. The focus on having babies is a cornerstone of tradwife content, and different creators vary in the extent to which they overtly reinforce nativist narratives. Being a mother is almost a requirement for being a tradwife (though there are some unmarried trad-girlfriends who aspire to be tradwives), and almost all focus on motherhood as the core and defining facet of their life, giving them sole purpose and identity. 

The obsession with motherhood in the tradwife community also serves as a key testing ground for broader authoritarian language and policies. Popular tradwife creators tend to be white women, some even starkly expressing the need for there to be more white babies to combat the “invasion” of migrants. One tradwife creator, Wife with a Purpose (Ayla Stewart), created the “white baby challenge,” urging her (white) followers to “match me or beat me” in birthing white babies. Although the post posing the challenge was taken down, researchers note that it received plenty of positive comments that supported the “need” for white families to make procreation a serious goal. 

Other tradwife content also further the narrative that their country (whether in the United States or Europe) needs to raise birthrates of white women.  Take, for example, alt-right creator Rebecca Hargraves (Blonde In the Belly of the Beast on social media), who makes videos about the threat of “degradation of European culture,” and discusses her concerns about “civilizational decline,” and whose content reinforces the view that white families need to “take back” the West from migrants. While still mostly on the fringes, this content normalizes talking about demographic changes in ways that frame Brown and Black people as “Other,” not belonging in Western society, and as a demographic threat. These mirror great replacement narratives that have been used to justify discriminatory actions and policies against immigrants and people of color. 

Tradwives also illustrate the third central tenet: sexual and social hierarchy. Tradwife content often acknowledges the very real hardship of being the sole caregiver to a large family of children, but draws on the narrative perpetuated by the Christian Right (in the United States), that suffering for the family is a key way for women to bring honor and dignity to their family. 

Tradwives, of course, are not monolithic, and different creators embrace or express these views to different extents. While some of them are overtly political, others do not publicly take political positions but nonetheless facilitate the normalization of the far right agenda, which seeks to roll back rights and protections that women and the LGBTQ community have gained over the last 50 years. As Seyward Darby, tradwife researcher and author of the 2020 book Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, notes: “[I]t is a slippery slope – and sometimes there’s no slope at all – between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.”

The ideas perpetuated by tradwives now intersects with the policy preferences of authoritarian populists in ways that are mutually reinforcing. That is, we see key messages from politicians and policy-makers mirrored in tradwife content, in the same way that the important throughlines in tradwife content are reflected in political and policy approaches being implemented now. 

For example, the Trump administration recently solicited proposals for policy ideas to entice women to have more children. In addition to the mainstay arguments about reducing access to reproductive care and limiting bodily autonomy, the White House debated proposals ranging from putting women in classes to teach them about their menstrual cycles to giving those who birth many children “motherhood medals.” Other administration proposalswould favor communities with higher-than-average marriage and birth rates when providing federal grant funding,even as healthcare providers anticipate that cuts to medicaid will force hospitals to reduce their pregnancy-related healthcare offerings, resulting in perinatal medicine deserts and pregnant women needing to drive hundreds of miles for care. 

Further, Project 2025 and tradwife content contain many of the same narratives about familialism and sexual and social hierarchy. On the importance of heterosexual nuclear families as the core of a healthy social order, the Project 2025 authors write: "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. [...] In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, [Health and Human Services] policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them." It later reiterates, “...married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”

This mutually reinforcing dynamic between authoritarian populists’ policies and the idyllic tradwife content that builds support for and normalizes those policies illustrates how different actors in the ecosystem can exploit gender in ways that advance social hierarchies. Tradwives serve as very convenient messengers for these ideals: By often appearing in gauzy, light colored dresses, highlighting their roles as mothers, and speaking slowly and gently, they appear purposely benign, which can obscure their political and cultural messaging.

Mainstreaming the “Manosphere”

The “manosphere” is another sub-culture in which authoritarian ideas and gender hierarchies are introduced and popularized. The manosphere broadly refers to a loose network of online communities and influencers that create and share content targeting men and boys, including anti-feminist and male supremacist content. This content openly calls for women to be subjugated to men, as perhaps most infamously exemplified by Andrew Tate, who has “publicly stated that if a girlfriend doesn’t accept cheating, ‘that’s when you start hitting her and being abusive.’ Mr Tate has said that he will choose a husband for any daughter… ‘she’ll end up pregnant at 21 like she’s supposed to be.’” The reach of the manosphere has grown in recent years: Research from Dublin City University found that it can take as little as 9 minutes for TikTok to feed misogynistic or “manospheric” content to accounts inputting gaming, fitness, or other male-coded search terms. As the lead researchers, Catherine Baker and Maja Brandt Andreasen, noted, this “not only serves to mainstream anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ ideology, but may also function as a gateway to fringe Far-Right and other extreme worldviews.” 

Male supremacist content is not catching on in a vacuum, but amid a “male loneliness epidemic” in which men are struggling to have meaningful friendships, face underexamined mental health challenges, and are navigating shifting and conflicting notions of masculinity, as discussed earlier. As manosphere researcher Claudia Young argues, “the manosphere is extremely effective at targeting the legitimate fears and anxieties of boys and young men and then scapegoating women as the root of all their problems.” 

One particularly misogynistic corner of the manosphere is the group of men called “incels,” short for involuntary celibates. These are men who would like to find a female sexual partner, but have been rejected by women. Incels use their rejection to justify a deeply-held hatred of women, intense misogyny, and even violence against women. For example, the first known incel perpetrator of violence, Elliot Rodger, left behind a manifesto, which has been described as a “potentially hagiographic text,” and inspired, according by some counts, at least seven other episodes of mass violence against women. In addition, researchers have found that men who espouse “incel” views are more likely to demonstrate a higher tolerance or proclivity for political violence, further demonstrating the pipeline from manosphere to violence against women and in society more broadly.

In its obsession with masculinity and traditional gender roles, this content helps shape a cultural terrain in which men are mollified into accepting anti-democratic practices, especially those that roll back rights and protections for women and women’s equality. As Rachel Snyder explains in the New York Times: 

Meanwhile, as Elon Musk’s shadowy team of tech bros move with abandon, site after site devoted to women’s health, safety, autonomy, accomplishments and work is being erased. The Office on Violence Against Women has withdrawn all funding opportunities for 2025 from its website. The White House’s Gender Policy Council is gone. At the same time, domestic violence agencies are suspending services or going bankrupt, and millions of dollars in federal funds to address teen dating violence, trafficking and stalking have been frozen.

We live in a new world, where words like “women,” “gender” and “trauma” are banned or limited in research studies. Phrases like “women are property” and “gay people are mentally ill” are no longer violations of conduct at Meta. The fringe went mainstream, and then became the U.S. government. Itappears that a Trump administration official intervened on behalf of the Tate brothers to bring them from Romania to the United States in February. The White House recently hosted Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship star who was found liable for sexual assault in a civil trial in Ireland. Such activities might not be meaningful politically, but they certainly send a message. Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and the manosphere share the same dark vision of the world: that in order to win, others have to lose.

Together, this illustrates the pathways through which these ideas can move from fringe right-wing online spaces to mainstream political forums, and more perniciously, into policy decisions.

Gamergate and Gaming Subcultures as a Gateway to Right-Wing Extremism

Scholars and activists point to 2014’s “Gamergate” as a catalyzing moment in right wing extremists’ use of the internet to attract young men in particular into communities and spaces espousing extremist ideologies. It also illustrates how the pipeline from misogynistic and anti-feminist spaces to full-blown alt-right spaces facilitates broader culture change. Gamergate began in chat rooms like 4chan and Reddit, where Zöe Quinn, a female video game developer, was accused by her ex-boyfriend of cheating and trading sex for positive game reviews. His accusations sparked widespread hate toward female and non-binary gaming celebrities, who received death and rape threats. Those who came to female creators’ defense were labeled "social justice warriors,” popularizing the term that would take hold of online anti-liberal discourse in the years to come. 

Men’s Rights Activists (MRA), a male-supremacist movement that claims to be fighting against feminists conspiring to subordinate and oppress men, capitalized on Gamergate, using its momentum to galvanize support for their traditionalist, anti-feminist beliefs. Game Studies scholar Megan Condis says alt-right gamers poke around gaming chat rooms for users who “exhibit curiosity about white nationalists talking points.” They then “are escorted through a funnel of increasingly racist rhetoric,” intended to normalize white supremacist rhetoric and ideas. Condis argues these “modern internet-based recruitment efforts” targeting young, impressionable gamers, are “designed around the creation of a frictionless pipeline that slowly inoculates potential converts to hate.” 

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist, later reflected on the political utility of Gamergate and of more broadly using online spaces to create a cultural shift. According to Bannon, “you can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” Breitbart News catalyzed efforts to make the Zöe Quinn controversy into a national war cry with the capacity to unite male gamers, incels, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQ+ men to fight the supposed threat of feminism and ‘woke-ism.’ Gamergate illustrates the key tactics of metapolitics: creating a cultural shift by injecting extremist ideologies into mainstream discourse and doing so through a gateway community that targets young men.

Kennedy Center Purge, Spain’s Vox and Culture Change Strategies

Political actors are often explicit about their cultural strategies. A metapolitical approach is pursued before power is achieved, which is useful to shape culture, normalize authoritarian ideas, and justify censorship. But such cultural efforts continue once leaders are in power as well.

In the United States, for instance, President Trump successfully took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a partially federally-funded arts institution which historically had bipartisan support. Trump purged the board, named himself as Chair, and replaced its longtime president with his former ambassador to Germany and longtime Trump loyalist, Richard Grenell. Trump justified the takeover on his social media platform, Truth Social, noting “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — This WILL STOP.” He later stated that the Kennedy Center must instead “reflect the brightest STARS on its stage.” Political commentators noted that in personally overseeing the programming, Trump was following “in the footsteps of Russian czars or monarchs like Louis XIV of France, who established arts institutions as extensions of royal power.”

Spain’s far-right party Vox is also a case-in-point. Vox’s leaders routinely invoke “culture war” rhetoric, speaking of an alliance between so-called “gender ideology” and the “woke agenda,” and at times linking these to Islam or immigration, painting them as jointly responsible for national decline. While Vox has never held power nationally, it has entered several regional and local coalition governments, where it often seeks control over cultural departments—a move that reflects the party’s broader objective of reshaping public values through institutional influence in the cultural and artistic realm.

In these cultural roles, Vox has promoted a nativist and homogenized vision of Spanish identity, using its authority to censor or defund cultural expressions it deems subversive. This includes targeting works that portray pluralism, critique colonial histories, or represent LGBTQ identities and immigrants. For instance, among the works vetoed by Vox in recent years is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the Pixar movie Lightyear, the latter containing a scene where two women kiss. In terms of policy, Vox has identified several advocacy areas, including opposition to gender equality legislation, the LGBTI Equality Act, and legislation to prevent gender-based violence. 

In 2021, Vox published its own “Agenda España” for Spain, a cultural and political counter-narrative to the UN’s Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. The document opposes initiatives associated with gender equality, LGBTQ rights, or what it calls “indigenist” movements in Latin America—movements that highlight colonial violence and defend the rights of Indigenous peoples. Consolidating diverse attacks against those Vox deems as advancing so-called gender ideology reflects a broader authoritarian populist tactic: fusing anxieties about gender, race, and nation into a single narrative of civilizational struggle.

Divided at Home, United Abroad: International Campaigning against Gender Ideology

Across national contexts, opposition to “gender ideology” has brought together an unlikely coalition of allies. This includes segments of conservative Evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, often in cooperation with some Jewish activists and partner organizations in Islamic countries. These religious coalitions frequently collaborate with non-religious cultural and political figures, including both state actors and civil society. 

As international relations scholar Kristopher Velasco remarks, ““Today, illiberal, anti-LGBT+ networks are broad and diverse—consisting of INGOs, multilateral organizations, religious denominations, political elites, media corporations, academics, think tanks, and policy institutes. These distinct coalitions and sub-networks loosely coordinate through forums such as World Congress of Families, Political Network for Values, and Global Home Education Exchange…These efforts represent the vast global infrastructure and alternative international community polarizing countries’ approach to gender justice and (il)liberalism more broadly.”

At the UN and in other global fora, this coalition has included governments in Islamic and post-Soviet states, the Trump administration, and groups such as the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, the UN Africa Group, and the G77. 

These actors forge cross-border alliances, building institutions and networks that operate as a broad, mobilized front. Transnational structures like the Political Network for Values exemplify this approach, linking activists and NGOs across continents in ways that mirror the strategies of international human rights organizations—or, as anti-LGBTQ activists often call them, the “global gender lobby.”

In ways that bolster these religious and state actors, opposition to “gender ideology” has also united an eclectic range of supporters, including anti-immigration activists, business elites, tech oligarchs, and wellness and lifestyle influencers. This has increased authoritarians’ pillars of support, the key organizations or institutions that give those leaders the resources and legitimacy they need to exercise power.

The U.S. Pronatalist Coalition

In the United States, specific issues tied to gender and sexual equality serve as the lowest common denominator to build a motley crew coalition of unlikely allies that work toward shared political goals. Consider the U.S. pronatalist coalition, which is united by two desires: first, to boost the population, and second, in their support of President Donald Trump and a shared contempt for “wokeness.” This coalition unites a subset of conservative religious and political figures with prominent tech-futurists. These groups are “coalescing around an authoritarian agenda guided by anti-trans, gender-essentialist beliefs. Rather than a single movement with a unified ideology, though, right-wing pronatalism is better understood as a coalition of overlapping factions–one that allows traditional conservatives, abortion opponents, and White nationalists to find common cause with tech moguls, futurists, libertarians, and libertines,” even if they have different views of how to make that happen. Despite significant differences, most of these groups also share the beliefs in rigid biological truths about gender and race and a rigid social hierarchy (see section “Normalize Authoritarian Ideas”).

Separate the T from LGBT as Political Strategy in the United States

Faced with an increasingly LGBTQ-friendly electorate and the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, the anti-gender equality activist movements in the United Stateswere in search of another animating cause that could define and mobilize a social and political campaign, and divide their opponents. By their own admission, these groups “threw everything at the wall,” and found that transgender rights were a sticky issue across party-lines.

These activists have been conscientious in their narrative building, and much of the discussion in the United States around trans rights has been boiled down to “protecting children.” This has enabled state legislatures to pass laws expanding power of all sorts, including through allowing surveillance of girls in bathrooms. One school district, for instance, used taxpayer money to install a window into the gender neutral bathroom under the guise of protecting girls from trans students. Proposed laws would also allow genital inspection for athletes in school and college level sports (as was proposed in Kansas, Ohio, and even in the U.S. Congress). 

But why is this movement focusing so much time, energy, and attention on an issue that affects relatively few children? Hélène Barthélemy of the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that the focus on trans rights is a strategic decision “meant to weaken transgender rights advocates by attempting to separate them from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates.” By forcing this into the political sphere and making it a centerpiece of social and political discourse, it constructed or strengthened a wedge issue among an opposition that is not clearly aligned on their position on trans rights. 

Indeed, conservative groups conducted a significant amount of research to identify an issue that would allow them to divide their opponents, claim the “common sense” majority opinion, and give far right candidates a unifying talking point. And while initial efforts to scapegoat trans people backfired with the 2016 North Carolina bathroom bills, this changed once conservative groups settled on framing trans rights as “harmful” to children and related “parents rights” arguments. According to Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, “Once they opened that parents’ rights frame, they began to use it everywhere,” including to justify book bans and restrictions on teaching about racism. The impact was both a mobilized political base and a divided opposition.

Not Just a Culture War: Trans Rights as a Tool to Divide and Polarize in the United Kingdom

The anti-trans movement in the U.K. pointedly illustrates how political and cultural figures leverage debates over trans rights in ways that fracture opposition coalitions. The movement brings together self-described gender critical feminists (commonly referred to as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFs, many of whom identify as feminists and progressives), anti-gender actors, pro-conversion therapy activists, and far-right conspiracy-prone groups. TERFs argue that trans people threaten women’s rights and progress, and claim to protect women’s rights by excluding trans women from female-only spaces, while still supporting abortion access and anti-domestic violence legislation.

The effort to use trans rights to polarize follows a familiar pattern. First, selecting a narrowly defined and complex issue that the public barely understands, and amplifying it in highly emotional and negative terms to provoke fear about its implications. These issues are then repeatedly invoked in public debates and media coverage to ensure the issue maintains its salience. The issue is framed in overly simplistic and binary terms, making it difficult to shift the focus to other topics or to engage in more nuanced discussion. Author J.K. Rowling, who has dedicated significant time and financial resources to anti-trans campaigning, has helped “gender-critical” actors gain visibility and influence in public discourse, despite representing a small segment of the feminist ecosystem.

Far-right actors have seized on TERF rhetoric to legitimize their own agendas. This has allowed far-right movements to present themselves as defenders of women—even as they continue to oppose reproductive rights, protections against gender-based violence, and LGBTQ inclusion. 

For example, Tommy Robinson, one of the U.K.’s most well-known far-right and anti-Islam campaigners (who has accumulated a series of criminal convictions), has centrally focused on trans people as dangerous to women and children. His speech, THE TRANS TIME BOMB!!!,” equated gender-neutral children’s books and LGBTQ education with child abuse and sexual grooming.

This co-optation of TERF/gender-critical discourse has enabled authoritarian populist actors to fracture progressive coalitions and muddy public understanding, reframing opposition to trans rights as a credible feminist concern and, increasingly, as a pro-gay and pro-lesbian stance. 

As one example, the LGB alliance in the U.K. was founded in 2019 to see “lesbians, gay men and bisexuals living free from discrimination or disadvantage based on their sexual orientation,” but has focused on campaigning against trans rights, which it claims are dangerous to women and children. For instance, it ran a campaign titled “The LGB and TQ+ must split” —which mirrors the strategy in the U.S. snapshot above—and has advocated that the U.K. Equality Act should focus on same-sex rights and exclude trans people from sexual orientation protection. The group has been linked to the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, and was recently exposed as sharing office space with a variety of far-right think tanks.

Defining a “Woman”

In the United States, the nearly all-encompassing obsession by Republicans with defining gender has been used to force Democrats and others who might oppose their broader agenda into binary positions on polarizing issues that can later be used to frame them as unreasonable, incompetent, too radical, or lacking common sense. On multiple occasions, those testifying on Capitol Hill have been asked to define a woman, often in the course of hearings unrelated or only tangentially related to gender. For example, during her confirmation hearing to become an Associate Supreme Court Justice, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define a woman. President Biden’s Education Secretary, Miguel Cardonas was asked the same question. During a more recent hearing, Representative Nancy Mace aggressively questioned Governor Tim Walz about being able to define a woman. The far right in the United States then uses these staged “gotcha” moments to frame their opposition as being unable to answer a “common sense” question like “what is a woman?”. While these issues and questions are framed as “obvious,” they are quite difficult to answer, as illustrated when the same politicians pushing these questions are themselves asked to define a woman.

Generating a Moral Panic to Distract from Economic Troubles in Turkey

President Erdogan declared 2025 “the Year of the Family,” in an effort to emphasize traditional and Islamic values, address falling birthrates, and to combat the “policy of genderlessness” that was “attacking” the family in Turkish society. This also allowed Erdogan to distract from rising femicides in Turkey and an economic downturn. As part of the announcement, Erdogan declared that “neither destroying the institution of the family, nor eliminating the line between men and women makes us modern…[but rather] playthings of imperialists and globalists.” Women’s rights activists in Turkey noted that—amid increasing femicides in Turkey (many without accountability)— the campaign would “only help to consolidate the subordinate role of women in society” and would “sweep male violence towards women and children under the carpet.” 

As the President of the Federation of Women’s Associations of Turkey told DW, “2025 should not have been declared the Year of the Family, but the year of preventing femicide…In a country where so many women are murdered, the top priority should be to protect this right [to life]. It is a big mistake to reduce women to encouraging them to give birth.” Reflecting on the announcement, another women’s rights activist explained, “We are currently living in unprecedented poverty in Turkey. The government needs issues that distract citizens from the real problems, and at the same time keep society together. But the only topic of conversation should be the severe poverty, for which the government itself is responsible."

This did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed years of Erdogan encouraging women to “give birth at least three times” to address falling birthrates, and, more recently, a 2023 presidential campaign that ratcheted up fears and anxieties around gender and sexuality to mobilize his conservative base and distract from concerns about inflation, the rising cost of living, and corruption. The 2023 campaign followed years of Erdogan consolidating and removing independent checks on his power, including through controlling the media, attacking civil society, enfeebling opposition parties, and undermining the legislature and judiciary. Erdogan’s campaign rhetoric referred to the LGBTQ community as ”deviant structures,” a “virus of heresy,” and “spreading like the plague.” He further notedthat, “If the concept of family is not strong, the destruction of the nation happens quickly…” Political commentators noted that the obsession with “family values” throughout the campaign rhetoric was an attempt to divert attention from rising cost of living and inflation. Erdogan narrowly won the election, which commentators described as held “under deeply unfair conditions, where the opposition was set to fail.”

Leveraging Gender to Distract from Political Opposition in Hungary

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has long leveraged moral panic over gender and sexuality to consolidate power and create social hierarchies. Orbán has promoted fears such as a “Muslim invasion” that threatened Hungarian women and children, or depicted “gender ideology” as likewise threatening Hungarian values, women and children to mobilize his base and distract from ineffective or unpopular policies and his power consolidation. In 2018, for instance, he revoked accreditation for gender studies courses at universities, a move that his allies defended by declaring that gender studies has no business being taught since it is an “ideology not a science.” Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party planned to replace gender studies with a “family studies” master’s program. In 2020, he passed a constitutional amendment to defend “Christian values” by banning gay adoption to distract from an unpopular COVID lockdown, Hungary’s enfeebled healthcare system and public services, and a proposed new law that made it harder for opposition parties to run in elections. Fidesz also passed a “child protection law,” modeled after Russia’s, that prohibited depicting LGBTQ people in media and literature available to minors and banned the public display of products that depict gender deviating from sex at birth. Around the same time, the government launched a billboard campaign asking the Hungarian public: “Are you afraid your child could be exposed to sexual propaganda?” Orbán also regularly describes motherhood as a woman’s patriotic duty to protect the country from demographic change spurred by migration, as noted. Together, this demonstrates how Orbán has engineered fear around the erosion of traditional “family values” and threats to children to pass measures that simultaneously target and endanger LGBTQ people and women, distract from ineffective policies, and facilitate power consolidation.

More recently, in 2025, faced with renewed political opposition, Orbán ratcheted up rhetoric against so-called “gender madness,” amending the constitution to mandate that all Hungarians are either male or female. Fidesz also passed a constitutional amendment banning LGBTQ events, including Pride, claiming they threaten children’s “moral, physical, and spiritual development.” According to Orbán, the “international gender network must take its hands off our children…Now, with the change in America [with the election of Donald Trump], the winds have shifted in our favor.” 

Critics of the amendment note that it is an effort to generate public fear to distract from economic problems, corruption, and political opposition ahead of Hungary’s 2026 general elections. The gender focus of the amendment also distracts from its larger impact: Creating precedent that would enable the government to suspend freedom of assembly whenever it seeks to silence political opposition—particularly as opposition to Orbán’s rule is surging. For the first time since taking office fourteen years ago, Orbán is facing a political challenger, Peter Magyar, who has overtaken him in the polls through a campaign focused on Fidesz’ corruption and plundering of public resources. Magyar initially rose to prominence through mobilizing opposition to Fidesz after the country’s former President and Fidesz member, Katalin Novak, pardoned a man convicted of covering up pedophilia in a state-run children’s home, a move that directly challenged Fidesz’ self-styled image as protectors of Hungarian family values and children.

Focus on Trans Rights to Distract from Power Grabs and Anti-Democratic Practices in the United States

In the United States, the far right has been purposely inflaming and centering debate on rights for trans individuals as a means of distracting from deeply unpopular abortion restrictions and an anti-democratic agenda (e.g. Project 2025) that dramatically expands executive branch authority and severely cuts social services. 

During the 2024 election, experts and commentators noted that the outsized focus on trans rights was a ploy to drum up fear and distract from Trump’s unpopular or inconsistent stances on abortion. While trans people comprise just 0.6% of the population, Republicans spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans advertisements throughout the election, perhaps most notably the “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you” ad. Discussing the strategy of these ads, journalist Erin Reed explained, “the purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people…that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.” She further noted, “So afraid that you’re not going to care about the economy anymore, you’re not going to care about abortion anymore.” As a means of distracting from both the abortion conversation and the campaign’s policy proposals, the Trump campaign instead shifted the focus to trans individuals and their rights. 

Since the Republican party took control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency in January 2025, there has been a public all-out assault on trans individuals, most notably through Trump’s multiple executive orders eliminating rights for trans individuals, including through (1) defining “men” and “women” using sex rather than gender, (2) disallowing gender-affirming care for minors, (3) laying the groundwork for the Department of Defense to out, dismiss, and ban trans individuals from serving in the military, and (4) banning trans women from competing in women and girls’ sports. 

Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have been no less effusive about pursuing the persecution of trans individuals, and have themselves introduced and passed a slew of bills targeting trans rights, including legislationthat specifically targeted the first openly trans member of Congress, Sarah McBride. That the legislation was designed to target McBride was not a secret: the sponsor of the bill, Nancy Mace, admitted it publicly. The House has also held hearings to castigate the head of USA Fencing, for disqualifying a female fencer for refusing to compete against a trans woman. At the same time, there have been no Congressional investigations into the multiple allegations of executive overreach (including very serious concerns about impoundment, disobeying court orders, and denial of due process rights to immigrants) by the Trump White House. 

This overt and outsized focus on targeting trans individuals exemplifies the strategy of stirring up a cultural and moral panic to distract from the unpopular and authoritarian practices. Representative Sarah McBride underscored the strategic nature of the continued obsession with trans individuals (and trans women in particular) in the weeks after her election: 

I think we are all united that attempts to attack a vulnerable community are not only mean-spirited but really an attempt to misdirect. Because every single time we hear the incoming administration or Republicans in Congress talk about any vulnerable group in this country, we have to be clear that this is an attempt to distract. [...] Every single time we hear them say the word ‘trans,’ look at what they’re doing with their right hand. Look at what they’re doing to pick the pocket of American workers, to fleece seniors by privatizing social security and Medicare. 

McBride’s comments anticipated much of what we would begin to see in early 2025, but is also supported by new polling, which suggests that the American people, too, are beginning to see that the manufactured “crises” around trans rights are a means of distracting from the Administration’s policy agenda and an expansion of executive authority that challenges the system of checks and balances that define American democracy.