- The Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to eliminate all teaching associated with LGBTQI rights.
- The nation for which they are fighting is built upon white supremacy, the heteronormative family, that have restricted the freedoms and imperilled the lives of so many people.
- The concept of gender seems to be against religious beliefs.
- These reactionary flames have been fanned by the Vatican.
In June, the Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to eliminate from public schools all teaching related to “homosexuality and gender change”, associating LGBTQI rights and education with pedophilia and totalitarian cultural politics, reported by The Guardian.
Gender ideology
In late May, Danish MPs passed a resolution against “excessive activism” in academic research environments, including gender studies, race theory, postcolonial and immigration studies in their list of culprits.
Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul convention in March sent shudders through the EU, since one of its main objections was the inclusion of protections for women and children against violence, and this “problem” was linked to the foreign word, “gender”.
The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive right-wing Catholic and evangelical organizations.
Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.
Gender creates fervor
It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence.
They fear that men will lose their dominant positions or become fatally diminished if we start thinking along gender lines.
Although nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements.
Indeed, in attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence, and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing.
All this fervor ramped up during a pandemic time in which domestic abuse has soared and queer and trans kids have been deprived of their spaces for gathering in life-supporting communities.
Ideals of dimorphism
Generally, yes, but even the ideals of dimorphism that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science as well as the intersex movement, which has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.
To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender, and with what consequences for understanding bodies, lived experience, intimate association, and pleasure, is to engage in a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions that seek to stop and reverse the emancipatory change.
Concept of gender
Given that most of these opponents refuse to read any material that might contradict their beliefs or cherry-pick from complex texts to support a caricature, how is one to proceed?
Still, others claim that the very concept of “gender” is an attack on Christianity (or, in some countries, traditional Islam), and accuse the proponents of “gender” of discriminating against their religious beliefs.
And yet, the significant field of gender and religion suggests that the enemies do not come from the outside and that the dogma is to be found on the side of the censors.
Stoked by fears of infrastructural collapse, anti-migrant anger and, in Europe, the fear of losing the sanctity of the heteronormative family, national identity and white supremacy, many insist that the destructive forces of gender, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory are to blame.
Colonizing imperialism
The vanishing of social services under neoliberalism has put pressure on the traditional family to provide care work, as many feminists have rightly argued.
Such a phantasm of destructive power can only be subdued through desperate appeals to nationalism, anti-intellectualism, censorship, expulsion, and more strongly fortified borders.
These reactionary flames have been fanned by the Vatican, which has proclaimed “gender ideology” “diabolical”, calling it a form of “colonizing imperialism” originating in the north and raising fears about the “inculcation” of “gender ideology” in the schools.
The third is Agenda Europe, consisting of more than 100 organizations, which casts gay marriage, trans rights, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQI anti-discrimination efforts as assaults on Christianity.
The anti-gender advocates claim that “gender ideologists” deny the material differences between men and women, but their materialism quickly devolves into the assertion that the two sexes are timeless “facts”.
As a fascist trend, the anti-gender movement supports ever-strengthening forms of authoritarianism.
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Source: The Guardian
