‘Gender issues’ are being used as cover to erode democracy, UC Berkeley report finds

According to the nonprofit organization Freedom House, nearly 40% of people live in countries where democracy is eroding — places where executive power is consolidating, voter influence is diminishing and civil liberties are threatened. These trends are often exacerbated by broader social issues, like rising income inequality, polarization and misinformation. 

But one often overlooked way authoritarian leaders chip away at democratic norms is by weaponizing gender.

Authoritarians often foment anger and division over gender-related issues, like transgender rights or declining birth rates, and use this engineered frenzy as an excuse to advance anti-democratic measures, says Míriam Juan-Torres González, an author of a new report published by UC Berkeley and the violence prevention organization Over Zero. The report enumerates the ways such authoritarian movements leverage gender, articulating the patterns and strategies researchers see repeated in various countries.

In the report, Juan-Torres — who is the head of research at the Democracy & Belonging Forum at Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute — and her co-authors, Laura Livingston and Tara Chandra, identify six key ways authoritarians use gender as a way to entrench their own power. 

“Authoritarians need enemies — people or ideas they claim are a threat,” the researchers write. “… This engineered threat often takes the form of fighting so-called ‘gender ideology,’ a moniker that unites women’s and LGBTQ rights and freedoms into a single boogeyman.”

The report is rife with real-world examples, from canceling drag shows at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to anti-Muslim fears about endangering women and LGBTQ people being used to justify hostile migration proposals in the Netherlands. While the report focuses on Europe and the U.S., Juan-Torres said similar playbooks are being deployed around the world, including in India, Brazil and Ghana.

UC Berkeley News spoke with Juan-Torres about the patterns the researchers saw and how they tracked gender’s role in the rhetoric, policies and rollout of authoritarian movements.

UC Berkeley News: What do you define as gender ideology?

Míriam Juan-Torres González: As a term, “gender ideology” was created in Vatican circles in the early ’90s. It’s morphed to become a very loose set of ideas under which you can lump together a lot of things that authoritarian populists don’t like. So “gender ideology” can be used to refer to feminism, the quest for trans rights, for LGBTQ rights, for reproductive rights, but sometimes it’s also invoked to refer to “woke ideology” as well. 

It really is a pretext and excuse. They are opting to speak of “ideology” and not actually name the reality: that they’re targeting real human beings with lives like yours and mine. But it is easier to disregard an ideology than disregard human lives and human rights.

According to your research, what do authoritarians hope to achieve by focusing on “gender ideology”?

Create an excuse to normalize anti-democratic practices. There are personal, spiritual and religious values that lead people to have different views on issues having to do with gender and sexuality. In a healthy and pluralistic society, it is possible to have those opinion divides and not fall for dehumanization or political violence.

However, the boogeyman of gender ideology is being used to justify extreme measures to fight it. A clear example is the use of censorship. There have been several states in the U.S., but also similar examples in Hungary and Russia, where the fact that some books had LGBTQ characters was an excuse to ban them. Through that, a measure that’s related to LGBTQ rights in this case, you normalize book censorship as well. Combating gender ideology is this pretext to adopt authoritarian measures, first in the domain of gender and sexuality, but then more broadly.

Can you walk me through the six strategies your team identified where gender issues were used to advance authoritarianism? 

The first one is to construct a threat. Authoritarians need enemies because fear is a very potent emotion, and people are more willing to accept extreme measures, anti-democratic measures, if they believe that they are under attack. 

Another strategy is to reshape our values. Over the past few decades, there were these aspirations for equality, pluralism and so on. Gender equality as an idea became quite common. Authoritarians explore ideas around domination and hierarchy first in the domain of gender and sexuality and then export them more broadly to challenge equality, pluralism and human rights. We can see this, for example, when it comes to there being equality between men, women and people of other genders. Authoritarians have started to challenge that idea. They will say, “Actually, only men and women are acceptable. Men and women have complementary roles. Hierarchies are natural and normal, as we see between men and women, but we are saying that they’re equal in dignity.” This then opens the door to challenge the idea of equality more broadly.

Another strategy is to change culture. A lot of people do not follow politics, but a lot of us are consumers of culture. To change people’s openness to certain ideas or how people view politics and identity, you influence culture through, on the one hand, think tanks and parallel universities, but also through communities that are generally not perceived as political. This has been the case in mixed martial arts, tradwives and other spaces that generally, and not coincidentally, are also segregated by gender.

Another strategy has been to build a big coalition. The MAGA coalition is a disparate group of actors that, in a lot of respects, don’t hold a lot of shared views. However, we’ve seen how combating gender ideology has been a glue that brings them together. It’s convenient that “gender ideology” can mean many different things to many different people.

Another is to divide and polarize. Authoritarians will pick issues that they will frame in black-and-white terms, try to bring to the front of the political conversation and force the political opposition into a corner. What’s sad is that the opposition often falls for it. They generally will pick a topic that already fractures the opposition, that is sensitive or very complex. 

Finally, gender-related narratives are very useful to distract. So often, authoritarian populists will manufacture or exploit gender-related controversies when they want to distract from other power grabs or controversies they are involved in. 

Since the report covers multiple countries, can you talk about how you saw this playbook repeated or iterated on? 

There’s very similar rhetoric, legislation and even imagery across countries. Anti-gender ideology groups developed international forums, events and summer schools, spaces where they shared strategies and tactics. They learned from progressive activists; a lot of what they did mirrored how LGBTQ activism operated at the international level. The conservative infrastructure, which includes the Political Network for Values and the World Congress of Families, is an infrastructure that far-right politicians have been able to build on. A lot of the legislation that we’ve seen, for example, in Florida or Texas mirrors other legislation that was passed previously in Russia and that’s also being adopted in Uganda and the country of Georgia. 

Your report includes many real-world examples. Can you dive into one that embodies this playbook of weaponizing gender?

I mentioned that authoritarian populists use gender issues to polarize and divide. 

Only six years ago, the New York Times noted that despite efforts by Republican politicians to deny transgender individuals legal protections, the conservatives had been unable to make transgender people an effective focal point in their campaigning. This was in 2019; some legislation that conservatives tried to pass in North Carolina really backfired. Yet only a few years later, we are in the last stretches of the 2024 election, and the Trump campaign is spending millions on anti-trans advertisements and the commentary from the center-left and center-right is blaming trans issues as one explanation for the Democrats’ loss. 

This shift is not incidental. It’s a product of strategic efforts by anti-gender actors and the MAGA coalition to identify ways of creating rifts — identifying trans rights as issues that are complex, that people don’t know much about, that people are not likely to know a lot of trans people and thus form their own opinions based on their experiences with them — and also realizing that if they started framing the issue around children’s rights, parental rights and protecting women, they would have an advantage. This is deploying a particular issue in order to polarize and as a path towards obtaining political success. 

This is how it unfolded in the U.S. But the way in which debates around trans rights have developed in the United Kingdom is also a good example of how this becomes an issue that bolsters far-right actors who, generally speaking, are not very supportive of women’s rights but have seized on this rhetoric to legitimize their own agendas and self-fashion themselves as “feminists.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.