by Sonia Corrêa [1]
Anti-gender politics: Why the name and how to define it today?
In September 2025, there is little doubt that the relentless wars against “gender” that have swept across Europe and the Americas over the past ten years are like cyclones contributing to fueling the political storms that have paved the way for the times of neo-fascism in which we are now immersed. In this brief note, I will limit myself to reviewing the trajectories of these mobilizations in these geographical areas, since what happens in other contexts has its own characteristics, and these differences should not be blurred. On the other hand, the impact of anti-gender policies on human rights has much wider effects.
When, about ten years ago, we began researching the crusades against gender, we used the term anti-gender not as an analytical lens, but as a descriptive resource to portray what the political forces engaged in these offensives were doing and declared to be doing. They were very concretely waging vigorous attacks on “gender”, as a large basket that could hold many targets, but which also addressed the very concept of gender as critical theory.
Today, it is increasingly evident that anti-gender politics is never just about or against “gender.” Suffice to watch carefully what is happening in the US since Trump’s return in January 2025, where a fierce and cruel attack on “gender” is being deployed that is imbricated with systematic offensives against progressivism more broadly and the production of critical knowledge, with the incitement of racism and anti-immigrant brutality, and much more. [2] As Eastern European feminists astutely realized a decade ago, anti-gender politics is indeed a multifaceted adhesive that allows multiple targets of neo-fascist politics to be brought together at once. [3]
In this conflicted landscape, it is essential to discern between social mobilizations, or even legal actions against “gender” that precede what may come next, from what happens when anti-gender ideology is transported into the grammar of states. That is, when it is translated to the speech acts by public authorities, normative measures, legislative proposals, and public policies, as happened in Brazil under Bolsonaro (2019-2022) and is now unfolding on a decidedly more massive scale in the United States. [4]
How did anti-gender forces gain power?
Anti-gender forces did not suddenly gain power in the last ten years. Returning to the metaphor of anti-gender politics as a many-headed hydra5.1—which I have been using for some time—most of these heads have always been very powerful: the Vatican, the ultra-Catholic camp, various fundamentalist evangelical platforms, and also powerful secular political and economic actors, some of whom adhere to the rejection of gender, others who invest in attacks on gender to achieve other goals.
Today, what appears as their greater power is the result of a long, complex, and persistent trajectory of reorganization that can be traced back to the 1960s. This means that labeling these forces as the “new right” misses a few crucial aspects. Some of these forces are very old, to begin with the Catholic or other Christian churches, but present in this same ecosystem are Opus Dei—which will celebrate its centenary in two years—and other platforms that were new when this long journey began, — such as the TFP, the Heritage Foundation, CPAC, or the European secular intellectual group known as GRECE—but now have been in existence for more than half a century.
That said, the forces fueling anti-gender policies do, in fact, present a glaring new feature: in the long process of reorganization mentioned above, their way of doing politics was reconfigured. Reactionary ways of reestablishing political orders, such as coups d’état, have been set aside as this plethora of actors began to systematically invest in cultural disputes for political hegemony. This new way of acting politically was named by its creators as metapolitics, as it goes far beyond the influence on conventional political institutions. We researchers of anti-gender offensives have named this shift the Gramscian turn of the far right.
This mutation has benefited enormously from the digitization of politics that began in 1990s. It also implied adjusting strategic gears in order to take state power through electoral politics, before eventually establishing autocratic regimes (the Brazilian experience during the Bolsonaro era, which ended with an attempted military coup, is exemplary in this sense). [5]
Lastly, it is also essential to consider the robust intersectionality that characterizes the political mode of operation of anti-gender forces. Their multiple heads flare in many directions, but despite differences or even divergences, the body moves steadily toward the same goal. This is another unequivocal source of their strength.
Impacts on human rights
For some time now, I have been saying and writing that, from the point of view of long cycles, but also because of other dimensions, the term “anti-rights,” which has been widely used to describe the impacts of anti-gender policies on human rights, is not a good descriptor. Anti-gender forces do, in fact, fiercely oppose certain rights—especially those related to gender, sexuality, and procreation. This does not mean, however, that their political project does not encompass a robust legal framework. It does, just as historical fascisms were not “lawless” regimes. [6]
Furthermore, when we claim that these forces are merely secularizing their beliefs or instrumentalizing the language of human rights, we are once again overlooking crucial points. For example, the broader history of human rights shows that—although sacralized by the secular revolutions of the 18th century— the “rights of men” were not exempt from traits or legacies derived from Christian philosophy. These hidden legacies would later enable re-Christianization of human rights, illustrated by the elaboration made by Hegel in The Philosophy of Law, which follows:
“… that man must be free in himself and for himself, by virtue of his own essence, that he must be born free as a man was unknown to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, or the Roman jurists, although the source of human rights lies in this concept. Only in the Christian principle does the individual personal spirit essentially assume infinite and absolute value; God wants us to help all human beings. In the Christian religion, the doctrine that all men are equal before God because Christ called them to Christian freedom gained strength… These statements ensured that freedom became independent of birth, social class, education, etc.… The significance of this principle acted as a catalyst over the centuries and millennia, producing the most gigantic revolutions.”
In the same vein, historians of the renaissance of human rights after 1945 have also revealed that it has also been influenced by Christian conceptions, beginning with the very composition of the Drafting Committee of the 1948 Universal Declaration, in which only one of the members was not Christian. These traces are especially flagrant in the definitions of the right to life and dignity adopted in the text, the latter derived from the thinking of Jacques Maritain, the progressive French Catholic intellectual.[7] It is therefore not surprising that, in the Americas, at least since 1948, the Vatican has used these frameworks to demolish or prevent the inclusion of exceptions for abortion in criminal codes.[8]
The actors now engaged with anti-gender politics, particularly those situated in the Catholic quadrants of this ecosystem, are very familiar with the Christian elements imprinted in the contemporary epistemology of human rights; and have for some time invested in their re-legitimization. These efforts gained a new scale from the 1960s, when the Vatican began consistently developing its own human rights framework. The famous 1968 papal letter Humanae Vitae, which abhors contraception and abortion, should be seen as one early outcome of this endeavor. At the other extreme, the Declaration Dignitas Infinita, published in April 2024, is to be read as the most recent and sophisticated elaboration of the Vatican’s elucubrations on gender, sexuality, procreation, and human rights. [9]
However, similar investments developed concurrently beyond the walls of the Vatican. The best known, most consolidated, and most influential is the so-called American originalist movement. This ultra-conservative line of legal reasoning emerged in response to the progressive decisions of the Warren Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s, based on contemporary conceptions of the so-called living Constitution. [10] Its foundations, initially applied to anti-racist demands raised by civil rights movements, would later be extended to other areas, such as contraception and, above all, the constitutional right to abortion granted by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.[11]
This interpretative frame, which can be situated in the wider frame of democratic constitutionalism, would gradually be extended to other courts. Including those in the south of the Equator, especially after the 1980s and 1990s re-democratization processes, with the Constitutional Courts of South Africa and Colombia serving as prime examples. They also expanded into the field of international human rights law, with greater intensity and vigor following the Vienna Conference (1993) and subsequent UN conferences.
As is well known, the first open political attack on “gender” erupted in the transition between two of these conferences, the ICPD in Cairo (1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), and has never ceased. [12] And, this crusade would be carried over to the Vatican´s continuing elaborations on its human rights frame. In 2003, the Lexicon of Ambiguous Terms on the Family, considered a kind of bible of today’s anti-gender politics, was published that includes entries on “gender”, “abortion”, “homosexuality,” as well as a full section on the “industry of new rights”.
This term that had been dormant for some time, is being vigorously revived, reiterated, and reworked in some key recent documents, both non-clerical and from the Vatican itself, such as: the Report of the Commission on Inalienable Rights, created in 2020 during the first Trump administration [13]; the final document of the 2023 Transnational Summit of the Political Network for Values, held at the United Nations in New York, which fervently calls for a return to and a literal reading of the 1948 Universal Declaration [14]; and, unsurprisingly, the Declaration Dignitas Infinita.
To conclude
This brief essay recapitulates the trajectory of anti-gender policies in the Americas and Europe and offers elements to sustain the arguments on why it is not productive to label anti-gender forces as “anti-rights”. Although they openly oppose a plethora of rights, mainly related to gender, sexuality, and procreation—which they call “new rights”—what we witness today is more structural and riskier. These forces are vigorously disputing the very epistemology and heuristics of human rights as they evolved after 1948.
If there are still doubts about this, I can offer one last illustration. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, a key player in the efforts that paved the way for the takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court by an ultra-conservative majority in 2020, said on several occasions that: “The Constitution is not a living document… It is dead. Dead, dead, dead“. In 2025, when the Court has became totally subservient to Donald Trump’s designs, Justice Clarence Thomas, who had always been aligned with Scalia’s positions, has recently declared that the time of ”stare decisis” — the legal principle that the court must uphold previous decisions — was over. According to Thomas, “precedents must respect our legal tradition, our country, and our laws, and must be based on something, not just something that someone dreamed up and others agreed to”.
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[1] Notes prepared for a conversation with Amnesty International in September 2025 based on questions I was asked about the origins of anti-gender policies and their accumulation of strength and power. In answering them, I added a brief elaboration on their impact in the field of human rights.
[2] For an overview of the North American scene, see https://sxpolitics.org/ptbr/biblioteca-spw/boletim-da-politica-sexual/o-retorno-de-trump-180-dias-de-destruicao-sadismo-e-desordem-mundial/27249
[3] This seminal elaboration is available at: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/budapest/11382.pdf [4] On the case of Brazil, see https://sxpolitics.org/ptbr/biblioteca-spw/publicacoes/relatorio-ofensivas-antigenero-no-brasil-politicas-de-estado-legislacao-mobilizacao-social/25955[5] A more complete overview of these trajectories is available in a 2022 interview for Revista Sur, available at https://sur.conectas.org/e-importante-entender-o-alcance-historico-a-longevidade-da-mobilizacao-conservadora/
[5.1] https://sxpolitics.org/sem-categoria/dr-frankensteins-hydra-contours-meanings-and-effects-of-anti-gender-politics/34675/[6] In this regard, it is worth recalling Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s self-defense argument that he was “only obeying the law.”
[7] This genealogy was examined in depth in Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia.
[8] This happened, for example, in the debates of the Bogotá Charter, which established the Organization of American States in 1948. See Lorea, Roberto Arriada. (2006). Access or abortion and secular freedoms. Horizontes Antropológicos, 12 (26), 185-201 . https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-7183200600020000 8
[9] For a preliminary critical review of the Declaration, see https://sxpolitics.org/ptbr/biblioteca-spw/artigos/dignitas-infinita-uma-primeira-leitura/26249
[10] Whose roots can be traced back to Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice at the beginning of the Progressive Era, whose remarkable work The Living Law is worth reading. Available at: http://www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org/assets/Brandeis–Living%20Law.pdf
[11] As known, this definition was revoked by the 2022 Dobbs decision that constituted a crucial moment in long trajectory of the ultra-conservative legal shift in the US, which began exactly when the re-configuration of the ultra-rights began. See https://sxpolitics.org/we-recommend/compilations/roe-vs-wade-overturned-us-supreme-court-ends-constitucional-rights-to-abortion/22513/
[12] See “The politics of gender: a genealogical commentary” at https://doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800530001
[13] Ver https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf
[14] See https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf
[15] See https://www.ipas.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/PoliticalNetworkforValuesSpanish-c.pdf