Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler

Increasingly, authoritarians are likening genderism' to communism' and totalitarianism'

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. 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. In December 2020, the supreme court in Romania struck down a law that would have forbidden the teaching of gender identity theory" but the debate there rages on. Trans-free spaces in Poland have been declared by transphobes eager to purify Poland of corrosive cultural influences from the US and the UK. 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 rightwing 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 a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even man" himself.