Case Studies

Leveraging Gender in the United States: How an Ecosystem of Actors Came Together to Normalize Anti-Democratic Practices

This case study focuses specifically on some of the ways in which gender has been weaponized to advance and socialize broader anti-democratic practices in the United States. It is not meant to be comprehensive of every such event or dynamic, but rather an illustration of the ways in which the exploitation of gender is deeply intertwined with—as opposed to ancillary to—authoritarian populism. To learn more about the specific strategies we identify in our research, we encourage you to read the full (En)Gendering Authoritarianism report.1 

In this case study, we focus on the broad ecosystem of actors in the United States that leverages gender in ways that enable and perpetuate anti-democratic behavior rather than on any one particular actor. This consortium of actors, including billionaires, members of Congress, and political leaders, has for years weaponized narratives and gender-related anxieties to launder, normalize, and implement policies and actions that expand state authority and diminish individual rights and freedoms. 

Strategy One: Construct a Threat

Authoritarian populists nurture a sense of threat in order to justify the expansion of state power (including surveillance), the removal of checks on that power, rights restrictions, and even group-targeted violence. These narratives often portray a dangerous “other” (including feminists, those working for women’s rights, and the LGBTQ community) as threatening a country’s way of life, cultural or physical security, or those framed as society’s most innocent victims, such as children and white women. 

Constructing a threat can take many forms and build support for various policies, but we focus here  mostly on book bans, which create an opening for the state to extend control over education and implement ideologically-aligned curricula. Many of these book bans were initially developed in order to combat attempts at greater racial equity and inclusion following the murder of George Floyd. However, they also illustrate the overlap between race and gender, as they quickly expanded to become a medium for far-right, Christian nationalist actors in the United States to restrict access to books featuring LGBTQ characters or discussing themes of gender and sexual identity, books acknowledging or discussing gender equality and feminism, and any books on sexual health or sex education.2 Books and other media dealing with racial and gender equality are often lumped together under the catch-all term of so-called “gender ideology,” into which anti-gender activists dump any topic area they dislike. Book bans have been increasingly popular as a tool for anti-gender activists: according to PEN America, which tracks book bans around the country, actual or attempted book bans have increased dramatically across the United States since 2020. 

In reality, however, despite what those banning books would have us believe, very few, if any, of the books that are being removed include explicit sexual content. The vast majority are removed based on objections to content that discusses systemic racism, gender equality, LGBTQ themes, or provides resources to students who may have questions about healthy sexual development. 

PEN America wrote about this trend, in which books that deal with gender, sexual identity, and/or racial identity are framed as “dangerous” or “pornographic”: 

Persistent attacks conflate LGBTQ+ identities as “sexually explicit” and erase LGBTQ+ representation from schools. Since book challenges and removals exploded in 2021, books depicting same-sex and trans identities have been conflated as inherently “sexual.” In sexualizing LGBTQ+ people, swaths of literature have been removed under the premise of removing “inappropriate” or “obscene” books.

Furthermore, because some school districts remove books based on a single parent’s complaint, in many places, there is no reasonable process for reviewing whether books should be removed or not. In fact, a Washington Post analysis (also cited above) from the 2021-2022 school year found that just 11 adults were responsible for 60 percent of the book bans nationwide. In these cases, not only is the censorship itself anti-democratic, but the process by which the bans are enacted, too, lacks proper input from educators, school district leaders, and other parents. But the reality of policy decisions regarding what material students should have access to and at what age is actually quite nuanced. While advocates of book bans like to paint with a broad brush that frames these questions as “common sense,” these generalizations obscure the complexity of these conversations, and set the terms of the debate in ways that overwhelmingly favor censorship and state overreach.

The narratives that seek to justify these wide-ranging book bans are both very common and also framed in ways that intentionally make them seem benign, but they clearly follow the strategy of constructing and nurturing a threat, conflating just the simple fact of being LGBTQ with being dangerous, specifically to children. In particular, the most common justification for banning books was echoed by the founder of Moms for Liberty—an organization that has orchestrated hundreds of book bans nationwide—when she said that the books that should be available in libraries are those “that don’t have pornography in them.” 

Labeling any books containing themes of gender and sexual identity, or simply a character that belongs to the LGBTQ community, as “pornography” is intentional, and actors like Moms for Liberty and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have employed it frequently. One of the most widely used tactics in this strategy is to frame the threat as based on common sense—in this case, that we should not allow small children access to pornography. Common sense is much harder to prove, disprove, or empirically disqualify. This tactic then puts defenders of access to books on the back foot, having to define pornography and demonstrate that the books in school libraries do not meet this definition. This allows those pushing for book bans to frame their opponents as being “against common sense,” or willing to expose small children to pornography. It also allows book ban proponents to set the terms of the debate; each time someone responds to prove the books are not pornographic, they reinforce the association between pornography and books featuring anything to do with gender and sexuality. 

The political leaders of this movement have been aided in this process by a similar, seemingly benign group of actors: mothers’ groups, of which Moms for Liberty is the most well-known. Moms for Liberty has largely been responsible for the success of the book bans that have proliferated around the country. These moms utilize another rhetorical approach to construct and nurture the “threat” that books pose to children: invoking the broader idea of parents’ rights. This approach is characterized by framing censorship as a battle between individual, concerned parents with little power and a much more powerful radical state apparatus that is bent on “indoctrinating” children against the will of their parents. 

The purposefully chosen name, Moms for Liberty, also utilizes a common tactic: the reappropriation of the language of freedom and liberty to suggest that those who are themselves pushing to restrict access to books are the true victims of censorship and oppression. For example, during their annual conference, Moms for Liberty co-founder likened the organization’s work to those who have fought tyrannical and dictatorial regimes like those of Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, and the Taliban, with the implication being that the organization is fighting for democracy and freedom against an “oppressive” cultural and political apparatus that tries to silence them. 

By repeating these very general arguments, which contain almost no specific details, the idea that books represent a threat to children becomes commonplace, and citizens are socialized into believing that censorship of these books is necessary. This can lay the groundwork for additional forms of censorship and even the erosion of the principles of and rights to free speech. 

Using Policy Levers to Track and Target Gender Identity 

Another, more targeted example of how constructing a threat as a strategy can be implemented is the enactment of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (known in its abbreviated form as NSPM-7). National Security memoranda as a policy tool is nothing new - presidents often use them to organize the National Security Council, which operates within the White House and is therefore not subject to Congressional authorization or to the Senate confirmation process. 

The usage of memoranda under the second Trump administration in particular has focused on a range of issues, but has also been directed towards actors the Trump administration views as adversaries in a manner that is unusual for these types of directives. Among these, NSPM-7 stands out even more. NSPM-7 was enacted in September 2025, and is titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It makes the case that nonprofits and activist organizations that advance “Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” are dangerous and should be labeled as “domestic terrorist organizations.” 

NSPM-7 is similarly concerned with groups that demonstrate “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” or seem to be opposed to “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Importantly, the rhetoric in the memo links these organizations to political violence, suggesting that allowing nonprofits, academics, and other civil society organizations that fall into the aforementioned categories to operate threatens law and order in the United States. It explicitly suggests that organizations that seem “anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian,” are violent and use political assassination to pursue their policy goals. 

The implementation of NSPM-7 is quite literally, the construction of a threat in that it designates any person or organization which counters the Trump administration’s agenda as an enemy and potentially as a domestic terrorist. This type of rhetoric is dangerous and authoritarian, as it counters the foundational principles of a pluralistic democracy, which should welcome peaceful disagreement and healthy debate. Importantly, as we suggest in our (En)Gendering Authoritarianism report, the construction of a threat is just the first step in weaponizing gender to advance anti-democratic practices – the construction of the threat can often lead to the implementation of policies that actually strip particular groups of people of its rights. 

Another use of this type of authority is the release of the May 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy – again, a typical tool used by presidents to lay out their counterterrorism agenda and identify core areas of focus for the counterterrorism community. The most recent Trump administration counterterrorism strategy identifies some of these threats, but also shifts the focus to domestic organizations, particularly those that the administration feels are advocating for an “extremist transgender ideology.” As Politico reported, Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s counterterrorism advisor, said of the new strategy: 

It’s also about the ideology, whether it’s against Western Civilization, America, the U.S. Constitution, our friends, our allies, peace in general, you fit under that rubric [....] Our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-gender or anarchist such as antifa, we will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations.

This type of approach paints with a very broad brush, risking the targeting of groups and people that disagree with the administration (although Gorka claimed this was not the purpose of the order), and also perpetuates the narrative that feminists, and LGBTQ+ activists, particularly those advocating for the rights of the trans community, are violent and dangerous. This sort of language is dangerous and can lead directly to these communities being scapegoated and even to violence against them. 

Strategies Two and Three: Normalize Authoritarian Ideas and Change Culture

In this section, we look at the ways in which gender provides inroads to contest ideas around equality, pluralism, and human rights—key ideals in democracy—and to launder and normalize social hierarchies. 

In (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, we discuss the types of actors who help political leaders normalize ideas around hierarchy and dominance, including tradwife influencers and manosphere bloggers. However, for this case study, we focus on additional cultural actors and phenomena, including what is coming to be called the "womanosphere," a similar–but not identical–phenomenon to the “manosphere,” but which also peddles the notions of gender hierarchy that lay the groundwork for normalizing anti-democratic sentiment and practices. 

The Womanosphere

The “womanosphere” is a counterpart to the online ecosystem that researchers call the manosphere.3 In general, manosphere content preaches a deeply patriarchal viewpoint, in which feminism is framed as evil and men are and should be dominant over women. However, manosphere content often includes more than a patriarchal worldview, sometimes spilling over into a deep hatred of women, with narratives framing women as legitimate targets of violence.  While womanosphere influencers agree that feminism is bad for women, the womanosphere also celebrates what they believe is women’s unique ability to care for their children and their home. Influencers preach a return to “traditional” gender roles, in which men are the head of the household and the financial providers, while women serve a subservient role at home, taking care of their children and husband.

As we explain in (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, the tradwife phenomenon is different from the role of a stay-at-home mother. There are myriad reasons why women choose to be stay-at-home moms. But tradwives peddle the theory that men and women have fundamentally different and hierarchical roles to play in the home and in society, with men serving as the head of the family and household, and women maintaining the home and the family. They further argue that this hierarchical structure is “natural” and that they are simply seeking to return to the natural order of things. 

Unlike the dark and sometimes even violent undertones in manosphere content, the womanosphere tends to be lighter and more focused on encouraging women to embrace their “true” calling of being wives and mothers. Here, the tradwife influencers are, of course, an important subset, but there are other media that are less overt in their narratives about the appropriate role of women in society. 

Take, for example, the online lifestyle magazine Evie.4 Marketed as an online magazine “focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique,” Evie’s content is framed as pro-woman, but is also clearly designed to reinforce rigid and traditional ideas about femininity, beauty, and family. This content also reinforces the narrative that feminism has failed women and that a return to hierarchical gender roles in the home (and, by extension, in society) would better serve women’s interest. 

Over the course of writing this case study, some of the most prominently featured articles on Evie’s homepage have, in different iterations, encouraged a particular vision of the ideal woman: one who is thin, prefers to stay at home with her many children, adheres to some form of Christianity, and prioritizes the needs of her husband and family over her career. For example, one article entitled “I Don’t Want to be Independent Anymore” suggests that it is brave and noble for women to seek partnerships in which they are financially dependent on their husbands, rather than embracing financial independence.

Another article in the same vein asks, “Why Does Hollywood Keep Telling Women to Pick Broke Men?” The article is purportedly a review of the movie The Materialists, in which the main character faces a decision between pursuing a relationship with a poor man she loves versus pursuing a relationship with an extremely rich man she does not love. The article normalizes the idea that both in society and in the home, men and women have complementary—but not equal—roles, and that women should seek husbands who would fulfill their role as financial provider and head of the household so that they can fulfill their separate and more submissive role as wives and mothers. 

Other articles emphasize the return to religion, suggesting that core democratic principles about separation of church and state and religious freedom have led to moral crises that have contributed to the erosion of the nuclear family (defined as a heterosexual man, his wife, and their biological children). Still, other writing focuses on encouraging women to have many children, including an article by a mother of 10 proclaiming “Babies Don’t Ruin Your Body. I Would Know – I’ve Given Birth to Ten,” and another article entitled, “Why I Chose a Big Family in a World That Told Me Not To.” Indeed, as we explain in the (En)Gendering Authoritarianism report, the pro-natalist coalition is deeply invested in and intertwined with authoritarianism.

These topic areas are framed as apolitical, but this is in fact what makes messengers like tradwives and Evie so effective. Rather than men preaching to women that their role is to be subservient to their husbands in the home, women delivering this message to other women creates a sense of benignity, safety, and credibility. It is a particularly effective counter to the manosphere, which, in large part, exists to preach how men can dominate and subjugate women. While this vision of the home and of society is consistent across the manosphere and the womanosphere, womanosphere influencers present their ideas in a much gentler and more palatable way, which obscures their deeper messages about hierarchy and domination and their contrast to the democratic ideals of equality and equal participation. 

From Gender Complementarity to Gender Hierarchy 

As we discuss in (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, one of the key pillars that lays the groundwork for normalizing authoritarian practices is the idea of gender complementarity, as opposed to the idea of gender equality. Those who believe in gender complementarity suggest that men and women have separate and different roles to play (as dictated either by nature or God); the gender hierarchy that naturally results from this is not only permissible, but in fact beneficial to a healthy society. On the other hand, those actors (such as feminists) who advocate gender equality believe that men and women are fundamentally equal, and that they can choose the role(s) they wish to play both in the home and in society more broadly.

Those pushing gender complementarity centrally focus on the institution of marriage, the (heterosexual) family as the building block of society, and how many (biological) children couples are having. These questions have been the recent focus of the Heritage Foundation–the organization that authored Project 2025, which has been the basis for the Trump administration’s policy on virtually everything from immigration to education. 

In a January 2026 report entitled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” Heritage Foundation authors argue that the United States is facing a crisis of declining birth rates and declining rates of marriage. They blame “disruptions to American family life” resulting from an expanded social safety net in the form of welfare, feminism, and increased access to reproductive health care for women. They contend that these crises are a result of adults deprioritizing family life and the needs of their children. They argue that, “One knows from universal experience that children are best raised in homes with their married mothers and fathers.” To bring society back into a healthy balance in which the “natural family”—comprising a married man, his wife, and their biological children—is the cornerstone, the report advocates for several drastic policy changes, which would undo decades of progress on women’s rights and gender equality. 

Among these policy solutions are the creation of economic incentives for young people to marry and have children, introduction of new criteria for receiving welfare to overwhelmingly benefit married couples with children, restricting access to both reproductive healthcare and reproductive assistive care (such as IVF), eliminating no-fault divorce (which allows marital assets to be evenly divided and therefore protects stay-at-home mothers who earned less or no money during the marriage), and requiring federal agencies to conduct an impact study on how their policies would affect marriage and family rates in American communities. Sociological research can clue us into the impact of these policies: women who marry and have children young experience more financial precarity and are less likely to be able to leave their marriage for any reason (including reasons of abuse, violence, and mistreatment). 

These policies normalize the idea of hierarchy in society, first by reinforcing the idea that women’s domain is in the home, that this domain is hierarchically subservient to the man’s role as head-of-household and primary wage-earner, and that these roles and this hierarchy are “natural,” and therefore ought to be prioritized by social and political life. They also reinforce the notion that the “natural” family, comprised of a married heterosexual couple and their biological children, is the “healthiest” form of family for society and for the couple’s (hopefully many) children. Other types of families—with single parents, divorced parents, childfree married couples, LGBTQ couples and their children, just to name a few—are thus implied to be unhealthy for society and for children, and thus should be deprioritized and discouraged by developing social norms and narratives against them, and through the implementation of government policy. 

In addition, this report leverages another narrative strategy employed across the authoritarian populist ecosystem: the appropriation of the language of equality and democracy in service of what are actually discriminatory policies, or practices that erode the rights of already-marginalized groups. The Heritage Foundation report does exactly this in suggesting that it is married couples and their children who are the victims of systemic discrimination by the US government and welfare policy. They then frame their policy "solutions" as correctives to a long history of injustice, rather than an effort to roll back women's social and economic progress and create conditions where married women may be more financially dependent on their husbands and therefore more easily relegated to the domain of the home.

This exemplifies how cultural and social actors leverage gender to normalize ideas that seem unrelated to democracy but nonetheless help introduce ideas around hierarchy and dominance upon which political actors can later capitalize.

Threats to Voting

As these ideas around hierarchy and dominance spread, political actors build on them by proposing policies that actively strip rights from certain groups in society. One example of this is the discourse around the right of women to vote in the United States. Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution by the 19th amendment, the right of women to vote has long been accepted in the United States, and those who believed women should not be allowed to vote were considered fringe. However, as the discourse around the role of women at home and in society has more explicitly suggested that there is a gender hierarchy in which men are dominant and women are subservient, new channels have been created for the once-fringe ideas about women’s suffrage to be discussed more openly. 

For example, Doug Wilson, a Christian theocrat who argues that the United States should follow biblical law, has long existed on the fringe of politics, with most people considering his viewpoints to be too extreme. Among other ideas, Wilson advocates for one vote per household, with the male head of household casting a vote. Unmarried women might be permitted to cast a vote, provided they represent their own household, but only if they are Christian women. Similarly, in the world Wilson imagines, politicians could only hold public office if they were committed Christians. 

For several decades, these ideas existed well outside the mainstream of even the far-right in the United States, until Wilson’s church gained a high-profile supporter: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, is a member of Wilson’s network of churches. Hegseth has praised Wilson’s ideas and church, and in February 2026, invited him to give a sermon at the Department of Defense. Wilson himself has said that he is glad that there is someone who agrees with his ideas who is also in a position to “do something about it,” and while his influence in Washington is spreading, so too are his extreme ideas about women’s suffrage. 

At the same time, while Wilson’s most extreme ideas are not currently being implemented, there are actual efforts to limit the rights of women to vote. Framed as addressing weaknesses in voting security, and as a remedy to (virtually-nonexistent) voter fraud, the SAVE Act has become a hot-button political issue in Washington. One major impact that the SAVE Act would have is that its requirements would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for married women who changed their last names upon marriage to vote. The Act requires proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate, but also requires that the name on the birth certificate match the voter’s current name, which of course, would not be the case for women who changed their maiden names upon marriage. These women would face additional administrative requirements in order to be allowed to vote. 

The SAVE Act has passed the House but, at the time of this writing, is stalled in the Senate. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Trump administration has made it a key priority. He has, on a number of occasions, refused to sign any legislation until the SAVE Act is passed, and more recently suggested that Congress skip its August recess in order to pursue its passage. 

Strategy Five: Divide and Polarize

Authoritarian populist leaders seek to increase their own power and authority by deepening divisions within society in order to scapegoat marginalized populations and weaken the opposition. 

Here, we look specifically at some of Donald Trump’s rhetoric around gender to divide society and specifically to construct a narrative of “us” vs “them” in the United States, as well as the ways in which this polarization morphs from narrative to practice. 

One of the clearest examples of the polarization strategy comes from a campaign ad that the Trump campaign ran during the 2024 election cycle. The ad featured an old clip of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, highlighting Harris’s stance on allowing prisoners (whose expenses are borne by taxpayers) access to gender-affirming medical care. The ad debuted the slogan “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” 

This strategy explicitly made “trans people” a stand-in for all the discontent that average Americans were feeling at a time of inflation and rapid social change. Like book banning, it also puts defenders of gender and sexual equality on the back foot by having to demonstrate that supporting LGBTQ rights does not mean being against the average person. The weaponization of these issues—as well as the tactic of putting them front and center—sets the terms of the debate in conditions that are favorable to authoritarian political and cultural leaders. These narratives both lay the groundwork for scapegoating trans individuals and drive the opposition to prove that they are not supporting LGBTQ rights at the expense of everyday Americans. Most of the time, these questions are also framed as issues of “common sense,” much in the same way as the question of “pornography for children” is used to perpetuate book bans, which again puts the opposition on the defensive and erodes the nuance and the lived experiences of trans individuals. 

This “us” vs “they/them” approach is also a tactic used to divide feminists, women’s rights advocates, and those working in the pro-democracy space—particularly by framing women’s rights and trans rights as against one another in a zero-sum competition, especially because the Trump Administration uses rights for trans individuals as a way of claiming that they (the Trump Administration and their political and cultural allies) are, in fact, protecting women and women’s rights by targeting trans rights. 

For example, trans rights are often used to create a wedge issue amongst feminists and women’s rights advocates, a certain subset of whom identify as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (or “TERFs”), and who do not believe that anyone assigned male at birth is welcome in the women’s rights space. The consistent focus on trans rights by cultural and political actors, therefore, continues to prevent a coherent and unified opposition in this space and fans the flames of a distracting argument. 

Splintering coalitions creates openings for authoritarian populists to implement policies that scapegoat or erode the rights of women and the LGBTQ community. For example, the Executive Order that Donald Trump signed on day one of his second term is entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and states that the administration will protect women from “men who self-identify as women” who try to access “intimate” spaces such as “domestic abuse shelters and women’s workplace showers.” It goes on to state that the Trump administration “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” 

The idea that American society and institutions have gone too far toward so-called gender ideology and in supporting trans rights is a prominent one that is advanced by political and cultural leaders in many circumstances, including by President Trump himself. For example, during his West Point commencement address, he commented that disallowing trans individuals to serve in the military has made the military “strong,” and “great,” and “respected” once again. In his speech, Trump said:

And we’ve liberated our troops from diversive and demeaning political trainings. There will be no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody forced onto our brave men and women in uniform or anybody else for that matter. And we will not have men playing in women’s sports if that’s okay. [...] How crazy is it, men playing in women’s sports? How crazy is it? So ridiculous. So demeaning. So demeaning to women. And it’s over. That’s over. We’ve ended it. 

This is an especially important example because it clearly illustrates both how supporting trans rights is framed as making us “weak,” as well as how issues around trans rights are framed as “common sense” to “protect women.” This rhetorical approach also sows division, not just between the trans community and the rest of society, but between those who support trans rights and those who do not.

Conclusion

Although we may often think of limitations on gender equality as a consequence of authoritarian populist politics and practices, it is also used as the medium through which anti-democratic practices are socialized and normalized, as shown here. The far-right Christian nationalist movement in the United States–now joined by a motley crew of actors including pro-natalists, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, and libertarians–has been using gender strategically for years to chip away at the rights of women and marginalized individuals, to perpetuate a narrative of gender roles that justifies removing social safety nets and rolling back equal opportunities for women, target LGBTQ youth and erase the LGBTQ identity through book bans, and intentionally drive up division and polarization that can even lead to increased violence. The combined rhetorical and policy approach in the United States demonstrates the strategic nature of the weaponization of gender to justify and socialize deeply anti-democratic behavior. 

Weaponizing Gender in Meloni's Italy: Motherhood, Migration, and the 'Natural Family'

Italy represents an interesting combination of overlapping phenomena. It is the seat of the Catholic Church, which in the 1990s adopted the concept of “gender ideology” in response to changing norms around sex, sexuality, and marriage, as a result of decades of activism by feminists and the LGBTQ community. Italy is also a prime example of how narratives around gender and migration intersect and are used to nurture moral panics, which we examine in this case study. 

Context

Until recently, Italy had been characterized by political instability and a fragmented political landscape. From the end of World War II until 2022, Italy had formed 70 different governments and averaged a new cabinet every 13 months. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—repeatedly accused of corruption and sexual scandals—was perhaps the most well-known politician in the country. For years after his downfall, no party had been able to attain a majority in parliamentary elections, leading to a succession of large tent coalition governments and unpopular technocrats.

In 2022, the pendulum of governments swinging back and forth between parties gave way to a more declarative victory when Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first female prime minister. It also became the first time that her party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), became the country’s ruling party, a fact that had previously seemed unlikely given its well-documented ties to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (whom some party members still revere). Meloni is careful to deny and denounce claims that she is herself authoritarian or linked to Italy’s fascist past, although she became involved in politics as a young adult by joining the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was founded by a member of Mussolini’s government.

While running for prime minister, she downplayed her party’s historical ties to fascism, and claimed that “fascism has been consigned to history.” At the same time, though, journalists noted that “she refused calls to remove MSI’s [tricolored] flame from the Brothers of Italy logo and maintains the fascist motto, ‘God, family, fatherland.’” Despite pushing the narrative that her party’s ties to Italy’s fascist past are incidental, many of her government’s policies also have a distinctly undemocratic flavor.

Her government’s stated focus on “law and order” as a core pillar of both her campaign and her prime ministership–similar to arguments espoused by alike movements—has resulted in a number of laws that limit the rights of journalists, protestors, and everyday Italians in the name of security. For example, the first law she passed raised the penalty for illegally-hosted raves of up to six years of jail time. Another example is a “security” bill that criminalizes the obstruction of roads during protests, and which experts say directly targets climate activists. It is not just climate activists that have been targeted by Meloni’s administration. Her government has created penalties for additional forms of protest, such as hunger strikes, and has increased penalties on things that were once considered minor infractions. 

Meloni’s government exhibits other signs of authoritarian populism, including threatening Italy’s independent judiciary by lashing out at judges—particularly those handling migration cases. In a sign that Meloni’s government had overreached in its attempts to undermine judicial independence, in early 2026, voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to change the oversight structure for jurists and prosecutors in Italy. 

In addition, Italian journalists have raised concerns about feeling threatened for criticizing Meloni’s government, suggesting that she is creating a culture of intimidation designed to discredit, frighten, and silence her critics. In fact, concerns about Meloni’s treatment of journalists drew the attention of the EU, which, in its 2024 Rule of Law Report, urged Meloni’s government to protect freedom of the press. The report followed a dramatic increase in violations of media freedom, and a government takeover of a public broadcasting company, whose employees accused Meloni of “attempting to turn [the company] into a mouthpiece for the government."5

Strategy One: Construct a Threat

The first strategy that we identify in our "(En)gendering Authoritarianism" report is for the authoritarian populist to develop and nurture a sense that particular groups pose a grave threat to the “native” population, the country’s “original way of life,” and the core identity that defines the nation. This “extreme threat” is then used to justify the need for undemocratic measures, such as suppression or suspension of civil and political rights, mass surveillance, and even political violence. This section illustrates how concerns about migration encroach into gendered anxieties, and how the overlap of racial and gender identities ultimately enables migrant and LGBTQ communities to be scapegoated. In particular, women’s protection is invoked in order to paint migrants as a violent threat to native women; at the same time, women’s identities are flattened to their roles as mothers and the bearers of the future generations, which also ignores their agency and desires for their own lives. 

Often—and Italy is no exception—the groups that are purposely constructed as threatening to women, children, and the native “way of life” are (1) gender minorities, and (2) racial minorities and immigrants. Giorgia Meloni, in particular, invokes support for women and women’s rights to narratively cast racial minorities and immigrants as a threat to native Italian women.

Meloni is notoriously anti-Islam, and has made anti-migration a core part of her political and policy agenda and rhetoric. She has stigmatized migrants, particularly Muslim migrants, calling the migration of “153,000 immigrants, primarily African men” a process of “ethnic replacement,” which has been used as shorthand for racial anxieties about demographic changes in society.

Meloni is masterful at twisting tragedies into broader narratives that can then be used to justify particular policy actions. These narratives often hinge on concerns about the protection of women and women’s rights. Using support for feminism to paint Muslim men as a threat in this way is one example of what scholars call “femonationalism.” Meloni, while not claiming herself to be a feminist, does at times appropriate the femonationalist narratives about protection of women as a priority and therefore a reason to prevent immigration of Muslims—particularly Muslim men—to Italy or stigmatize Muslims in the country.

Meloni and her government use migration narratives to create a sense of crisis, particularly one that threatens white Italian women. This is then used to justify an increase in state authority—from wider police powers to greater authority to prosecute those suspected of migrating illegally. 

In 2024, while speaking at the opening of a foundation to honor Giulia Cecchettin, a victim of intimate partner violence who had been kidnapped and killed by her ex-boyfriend, Meloni’s education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, used the opportunity to push a narrative about the “threat” posed to Italian women by migrants. Valditara stated, “We must not overlook the fact that the rise in incidents of sexual violence is somehow linked to forms of marginali[z]ation and perversion stemming from illegal immigration.” The victim’s family condemned Valditara’s comments, with one family member writing on social media, “What is the government doing? Giulia was killed by a respectable, white Italian man.” 

When given an opportunity to distance herself from the minister's statement, Meloni instead defended it. During an interview, she amplified Valditara’s comments, and added: “Now I will be called a racist [...] but there is a greater larger problem, unfortunately, in cases of sexual violence by immigrants, especially illegally. Because, clearly, when you have nothing, a decline occurs that can lead anywhere.” 

Data from Italy’s own interior ministry debunked the argument that immigration led to an increase in violent crime. As the leader of the More Europe Party wrote in response, “data from the interior ministry clearly shows that more than 80 percent of femicides in Italy are committed by Italian citizens.” In addition, the Italian Institute for Statistics (Istat) found that in 2023 (the year Giulia was killed), 94.3 percent of Italian women who were murder victims were killed by Italian citizens. In addition, Istat flagged significant differences in reporting bias that also promote the narrative that migrants are more violent or pose a threat to Italian women, noting that “only 4.4 percent of women who said they were raped by an Italian filed a complaint about the incident, compared to 24.7 percent if they claim it was a foreigner.” 

This data clearly shows that, overwhelmingly, the presence of immigrants does not dramatically increase the risk to Italian women, as Meloni and her government would like everyone to believe.  

Meloni also frames migrants as a threat to Italian culture and tradition, and to the white Italian racial majority. There have been immense concerns about the falling Italian birth rate in Italy, and Meloni’s government has made increasing the birthrate of (native) Italian women a priority, including renaming the Ministry of Family to the Ministry of Family, Birth Rates, and Equal Opportunities. In fact, some small towns in Italy experience only a few births a year, and elders in those communities express worries that those towns will eventually run out of citizens. 

However, even though as gender and democracy researcher Saskia Brechenmacher points out that immigration is “the most obvious solution” to decreasing birth rates, it is not politically palatable to the Italian government to acknowledge this, even though it would mitigate the demographic changes that are occurring. Meloni has acknowledged that immigration might ease the demographic challenges Italy is facing, but continues to suggest that non-white immigrants should not be permanently welcomed, saying: "I think that a quota of legal migration… can make a positive contribution to our economies, but I remain convinced that it would be more responsible for us to entrust European citizens with the solution to the European welfare system crisis.” 

This perspective is not unusual among authoritarian populists. Changing demographics often spark gendered and racialized anxieties that political actors drum up and use to justify everything, ranging from clampdowns on immigration to infringing upon reproductive rights and impeding access to healthcare for women. Consider the following statement from Meloni, with a subtle reference to the Great Replacement Theory underpinning her comments:

Shocking demographic data released by Istat [Italian National Institute of Statistics]: for the second time in a row, fewer than 500,000 children were born in Italy. To make things worse, more than 76,000 Italians no longer live in Italy because they went to live abroad. Faced by this disastrous reality, left wing governments have only proposed to fund the invasion to replace Italians with immigrants and give away citizenship with a new law.

Yet, faced with the practicalities of falling birth rates, aging workers, and strict migration policies, the Meloni government issued a decree allowing 500,000 workers to enter Italy between 2026 and 2028 for the purposes of meeting business needs. However, while this decree allows workers to enter, it does not guarantee that they will be able to legally remain, nor that they will successfully gain a permit to work there. This policy continues to be paired with language that demonizes migrants, even as the government instrumentalizes cheaper migrant labor to meet the needs of Italian businesses. 

Strategy Two: Normalize Authoritarian Ideas 

As we describe in the "En(Gendering) Authoritarianism" report, authoritarian populists like Giorgia Meloni use gender as the medium through which they socialize the public into passivity on anti-democratic practices such as executive overreach, censorship, and stripping gender, sexual, and racial minorities of their rights.

Gender is often used as the pretext for this erosion of rights, and Italy is no different. Meloni ran on a campaign of a return to “traditional” Italian values, and has often perpetuated messages against so-called “gender ideology.” In a 2022 speech to members of Spain’s far-right Vox party, she declared: “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to big international finance… no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!” As prime minister, she has used her position to advance an adamantly anti-gender agenda that also embraces anti-democratic behavior. 

Flattening Women’s Roles to Motherhood  

Meloni believes strongly in the core tenets of a movement against gender equality: gender complementarity, familialism, and a sexual and social order. These tenets are accompanied by the belief that women have a “natural” role to fulfill as mothers, and that feminism has tried to convince them that there is something wrong with wanting to be a mother rather than also having  a career. In a 2023 conference organized by her Ministry of Family, Birth Rates, and Equal Opportunities focused on increasing birth rates, she said: 

Today, the government is proposing that you sign a pact, because the demographic challenge involves everyone, and needs everyone. It is a challenge regarding Italy’s future, a challenge regarding freedom, particularly women’s freedom. There are unfortunately still too many women being forced to resign from their jobs after becoming mothers; there are still too many working moms who see their career paths hindered by a system that does not recognize the value of what they do; there are still too many women who give up on having children because they experience this choice as being an alternative to professional fulfilment. We cannot allow all this to happen.

Meloni’s purposeful entanglement of motherhood with women’s freedom allows her to appropriate language about women’s choices and opportunities while simultaneously perpetuating a very patriarchal vision of Italian society, which is described in greater detail below. Her language capitalizes on a nostalgia for a past in which, because of the lack of women in the workplace, women were able to focus more on the family. One narrative tool she deploys consistently in this vein is to suggest that opponents of this vision think that children are bad. For example, in a 2025 speech, she said: “For decades, bad teachers have affirmed that parenthood is an archaic and patriarchal concept, which should be fought against and replaced by modern values. The thing is though that there is nothing modern about [...] legally depriving children of a mother or a father figure, or sending the message that parenthood is an enemy of self-fulfilment.” 

One of Meloni’s colleagues in the Brothers for Italy party put it more explicitly, saying that becoming a mother should be every Italian woman’s “first aspiration,” and advocating policies to encourage younger people to get married and start families earlier. This sort of language may sound benign, or like it is expressing differences in preferences for gender roles, but becomes more dangerous when it is then used to justify policies that erode women’s rights. At the same time, this narrative that women’s “natural” role is mother flattens women to just this position and ignores the other dimensions that women embody. 

Meloni often uses the embrace of motherhood (famously declaring, “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can't take that away from me”) as a means of stripping women of their reproductive rights. For example, Meloni’s government worked to enhance access for anti-abortion rights groups to engage women seeking abortions at clinics. This serves both an ideological and a political purpose. Access to control over their reproductive timeline often results in women delaying childbearing and motherhood, and denying women access to a full range of reproductive health care is one way to both try to raise the birth rate while also advancing the goal of a society with more “natural” families. It also moves Italian society closer to Meloni’s vision of an Italy politically and demographically dominated by white, Christian, heterosexual families. 

Finally, while Meloni and her allies claim that motherhood, childrearing, and child welfare must be prioritized above all else, these concerns are applied inconsistently. Under Meloni’s government, the Italian parliament in 2024 passed a new law targeting incarcerated mothers. As Politico reported, prior to the passage of the law, “pregnant women and mothers of children under one received an automatic deferral of their sentence.” Under the new law: “women and their newborns will be locked up together. Women will also be forced to serve their prison sentences even if they are pregnant.” 

The law has alarmed child development experts, who raised concerns for the wellbeing and welfare of babies, who, particularly in infancy, can face severe developmental delays from being locked up in prison, not to mention from lack of access to quality pediatric care. 

This hyperfocus on women as mothers is often hypocritical—with both explicit and implicit implications that only certain types of women deserve to be mothers, and that expanding the role of mother can threaten the sanctity of the national lineage. This hypocrisy is perhaps best exemplified when it comes to the Meloni government’s multiple attempts to delegitimize LGBTQ families. 

Attacks on LGBTQ Families

Meloni and her allies are purposeful with their rhetoric, creating an “us” and a “them,” where the “us” is characterized as native, white, Christian, heterosexual Italians who have “common sense” about politics and society. The “them” is characterized as those of different faith, race, gender or sexual identity—those depicted as threatening Italian culture, history, and way of life. 

Meloni and her allies staunchly believe that LGBTQ+ couples should not be able to be parents—and indeed, in Italy, it is already quite challenging for same-sex couples to become parents, as they are not allowed to use IVF or adopt. Eugenia Roccella, Meloni’s minister of equalities, families, and birthrates, has publicly stated on numerous occasions her belief that same-sex couples should not even be allowed to enter into civil unions (Italy bans same-sex marriage). Additionally, she has said that children need both a mother and a father, and that depriving them of one parent is detrimental to children, who deserve to know both of their parents.

This language is used to sow division between what Meloni calls “natural families” and those who are implied to be “unnatural.” The pure and “natural” families must be protected from those she deems “unnatural.” For instance, Meloni’s interior minister ordered municipalities to review birth certificates of babies born to lesbian couples and remove the non-birthing parent. This deprives parents of their rights in relation to their children, and forces many of them into a complex and expensive legal process in which they must petition the state to adopt their own children, canceling previously recognized maternity. As Human Rights Watch noted, this resulted in “the cancellation of 33 birth certificates of lesbian couples’ children” in just one northern Italian city. In May 2025, Italy’s constitutional court ruled that a lesbian couple must be allowed to list both mothers’ names on the child’s birth certificate, complicating the Meloni government’s attempts to allow only the birthing parent to be listed.  

This sort of action, which literally strips parents of their legal ties to their child, normalizes ideas about domination, hierarchy, and belonging. As we mention in the "(En)Gendering Authoritarianism" report, gender is an intimate part of self-identity, which is what makes it such an effective pathway to the normalization of anti-democratic ideas. 

By focusing on a very specific and relatively small group of people, Meloni’s government introduced ideas about who deserves to be considered a parent and who does not. By actually canceling legal documents that had named the non-birthing partner as a parent, Meloni’s government went further than just normalizing the idea of hierarchy; it actually implemented a hierarchy. This policy was then framed in a way that created divisions and debate over parental rights, again paving the way for potential expansion in the future. Even though the Italian court system overruled Meloni’s government and, in the end, restored rights to these parents, this effort nonetheless represents a chilling and symbolic effort to erase LGBTQ+ people from social life and creates an environment of fear for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families.

Meloni’s government has also fought against those who seek to allow gender neutral language used for parents on birth certificates or for a non-birthing partner to be listed as “mother” on a birth certificate for children born to lesbian couples. As Meloni has said: “And so national identity, religious identity, gender identity and family identity are under attack. I must not be able to define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother—no, I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2, I must be a number.” This rhetoric exists alongside numerous policies that penalize LGBTQ+ families specifically. Following this perspective for example, the Meloni government ordered municipalities to reverse gender neutral language (“parent 1” and “parent 2”) on birth certificates in favor of the original “mother” and “father,” which excludes families with same-gendered parents.

When only men and women are recognized, it makes it necessary to erase those who don’t fit into those categories from public life. This is done through extending the arm of the state into the realms of education and health—in part via censorship.

Expansion of the State Apparatus into Education Through Narratives About Parents’ Rights 

Another domain in which anti-democratic practices are often introduced as necessary and benign, but which also opens up avenues for further intrusion into private life by the state, is education. Meloni’s government has begun to implement policies into the Italian education system that erode the rights of certain groups of students, including trans and nonbinary students. Framed as a set of policies to uphold Italian traditional values and as “common sense” (much as we see in other parts of the world), these policies in fact begin to sow deeper ideas about dominance, hierarchy, and belonging. 

The examples that follow are important because, although they right now affect a relatively small number of students, they nonetheless introduce and normalize ideas that fundamentally shift the narrative from equality to hierarchy. In other words, these policies single out particular groups of people under the guise of “tradition” or “common sense,” and strip them of access to full and equal rights, which paves the way for policies like these to be deepened or expanded to other groups in the future. 

For example, as part of the “return to tradition” approach that she ran on, her education minister instructed Italian schools to ban the use of gender neutral symbols (in particular the asterisk (*) and the schwa (ə)). Because Italian is a Latin-based language, there is no gender-neutral plural equivalent, and nouns are assigned to be either masculine or feminine in both the singular and the plural. This means that there is no gender-neutral “they” the way there is in English. To accommodate trans and non-binary individuals, some in Italy had introduced the use of the aforementioned special symbols to denote gender neutrality. Claiming that these symbols were not linguistically compatible with Italian, Meloni’s government banned schools from using them altogether. 

Another area of government intrusion in schools under the guise of “parents’ rights” or family values has been the introduction of a new rule requiring parental consent before any topics on sexuality or sex can be discussed. This has two consequences. First, it makes it much harder for Italian schools to deliver comprehensive sex education. Advocates of comprehensive sex education in Italy point to the rise in gender-based violence and domestic violence as a reason to introduce conversations around sex and relationships. However, the Meloni government’s new rules make this much harder. The second consequence of Meloni’s rule requiring parental consent is that it naturally excludes students who may not be cisgender or heterosexual. In amendments proposed to the rule, some members of parliament would like to go further and outright ban students from using chosen pronouns or names in school. 

All of these actions—taken under the guise of “protecting students” from so-called gender ideology and protecting parents’ rights—strip students, particularly those who identify as a gender or sexual minority, of essential protections and inclusive practices. This normalizes discrimination against trans and nonbinary students and reinforces the idea that there are only two biological sexes (and that gender identity does not exist). In addition, these state mandates, couched in narratives around “protection” of students and Italian tradition, create opportunities for the state to involve itself in local decision-making and open up pathways to normalize censorship of schools and teachers. 

These narratives about “parents’ rights” and “common sense,” and the policies that follow, create political openings that are instrumentalized by authoritarian populists like Meloni, and are used to justify the consolidation and expansion of executive power, as well as state intrusion into private medical and family decisions. For example, the Meloni government’s hysteria about “protecting children” undergirded a law denying access to any form of gender-affirming care to minors that paved the way for the creation of a national registry, purportedly to control medications used to provide gender-affirming care. The registry, however, will not only collect information about individuals who are prescribed those medications, it will also “collect the detailed medical histories of each transgender person undergoing treatment.” This means that the Italian government will have granular and private medical information about any trans individual who seeks gender-affirming care. Although this is a recent development and many impacts of this are yet to unfold, this practice increases state surveillance of people’s private medical data and sets up an infrastructure for the state to intrude in medical information and decisions that could be expanded beyond trans individuals in the future. 

Conclusion 

A healthy and pluralistic democracy does not depend on everyone agreeing on everything, and there are many good faith perspectives that engage with these questions. However, when culture and politics around questions of gender are weaponized to strip certain groups of their rights, scapegoat them, and normalize policies in which certain groups dominate others, democratic integrity and principles are put at risk. 

Examining how gender is leveraged in Italy is instructive. Giorgia Meloni, her government, and her political allies exemplify the ways in which gender issues are weaponized to introduce ideas about who belongs in Italian society, and normalize hierarchies in which certain groups have fewer rights than others. While it may seem as though gender is a convenient narrative tool for politicians and other political actors to convey their beliefs about general social norms, it often belies a more pernicious policy agenda that has important consequences for their citizens, and even for the strength of the democracy they represent. 

Snapshots

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.