Hanna Lee Joshi
Hours after being sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump used his constitutionally vested powers to define “man” and “woman.” In an executive order, he said his administration would recognize only two immutable, biological sexes, determined at conception, in the name of “defending women” from a rising scourge: “gender ideology.”
It was the first-ever use of the phrase in an official White House statement, but it wasn’t new. Over the last decade, the fear of “gender ideology” has been used to mobilize right-wing movements from Argentina to Poland to Turkey. Now it’s a part of American parlance, too. It appeared in federal legislation in 2022, and Republicans have wielded it ever since to attack health care, picture books, and pronouns.
Like critical race theory and “wokeness,” “gender ideology” is both a bogeyman for the right and a reactionary backlash to social progress. The expression is generally used to scorn the idea that gender is a social construct different from biological sex (a distinction that has existed in the United States since at least the mid-20th century). For many people, this isn’t an ideology at all—just lived experience. But the Heritage Foundation describes “gender ideology” as a form of brainwashing: “the belief that children can be born in the wrong body,” which “inspires opaque proclamations like ‘transwomen are women.’”
In the right’s telling, the origins of this supposed ideology are varied: It is false consciousness, a leftist lie, a plot by globalist elites, a spiritual affront to the Lord—or all of these things combined. These ascribed meanings are both capacious and inconsistent, and that ambiguity is key to its weaponization. By condensing a range of anxieties into a single enemy, the phrase produces “existential fear”—your core values are under attack!—that “can then be exploited” by authoritarians, as philosopher Judith Butler argues in their 2024 book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
The right seeks to cast gender identity not as something you are, but as something dangerous that you believe.
Butler traces the term’s provenance to the 1990s, when conservative Catholics began warning that the very concept of “gender” had subverted God’s will and “inspired ideologies” that were imperiling the nuclear family. In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women “adversaries” of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love. Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large.
The idea of a cancerous gender ideology really took off in the mid-2010s, appearing first in political debates in predominantly Catholic Latin American countries, and later getting cited by some of the world’s most notorious right-wing authoritarian leaders.
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro—recently convicted of plotting a coup to stay in power—pledged in his 2019 inauguration speech to “combat gender ideology and rescue our values.” In an address to US Republicans at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán likened its spread to a foreign invasion. “We had to build not just a physical wall on our borders,” he said, “but a legal wall around our children to protect them from the ‘gender ideology’ that targets them.” Russia’s Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that the notion of “gender freedoms” is a “decadent” threat, imported from the West.
The MAGA right deploys the phrase as an allegory for a broad liberal agenda it claims is polluting the nation—the idea is that trans people are part of “a corrupt elite that [have] imposed a whole bunch of ideologies from the top down on ‘regular people,’” explains Jules Gill-Peterson, a scholar of transgender history at Johns Hopkins University.
Trump famously exploited that notion to rally his base, pinning economic hardship on trans people. One notable campaign ad opened with the line “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” and concluded with: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” More recently, as the federal government shutdown caused SNAP benefits to lapse, the Trump administration saw an opportunity to blame trans people and immigrants for the imminent hunger of 42 million Americans. “Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown ‘leverage’ points,” read a banner on the US Department of Agriculture’s website.
The right’s gripe isn’t just that trans people exist, but that their existence is tearing down the old world—of good men, obedient women, traditional family structures—and unleashing a new, godless age of chaos and precarity on you. Never mind that this idealized past of “American values” never existed. Trump and his allies stoke the fear of a false history’s destruction so they can, as Butler writes, “enter as forces of redemption and restoration.”
This is why Trump’s executive order promises specifically to “protect” women. And why the right echoes the rhetoric of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who have been some of the loudest voices calling for the eradication of “gender ideology.”
“There is a benefit for right-wing anti-feminist groups in adopting and legitimizing themselves [with] the vocabularies provided by feminism,” Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms, told me. But, she notes, it’s not as straightforward as “a co-optation or a weaponization or a sort of bad-faith borrowing.” The same extinction panic animates TERFs and Republican politicians alike. Both claim trans people pose an eliminationist threat, endangering not just women’s physical safety, but womanhood as we know it.
This perceived existential battle is, in part, why the anti-trans movement has focused so much of its attention on children. Stripping trans kids of gender-affirming health care and banning certain books and curricula are part of how the right attempts to enact its vision for the nation’s future.
Of late, the anti-trans messaging has grown increasingly sinister. Prominent Republicans now frequently peddle the lie that trans people are violent, dangerous, and out for blood. Donald Trump Jr. has called trans people, who make up about 1 percent of the US population, “the most violent domestic terror threat, if not in America, probably [in] the entire world.” In September, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly claimed trans activists and individuals have “been running around killing Americans in the name of transgender ideology.”
With its hateful rhetoric, the right seeks to cast gender identity not as something you are, but as something dangerous that you believe. An escalating regime of persecution and repression is therefore justified; we aren’t against trans people, just their ideology. Yet the end goal is the same: to wipe out transness itself.
