In his presidential order of 20 January 2025, (Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government), Trump decrees that his government will only recognise two sexes: male and female. With this political nonsense, which goes against the grain of human rights and scientific research on the relationship between biological sex (an undeniable and indisputable reality) and gender, the President of the United States intends to erase at a stroke the existence of gender identities that do not respond to social constructs about biological sex.
The decree that obliges all government departments to substitute the term gender for sex in all official documents has unleashed various panics, even some paranoia. In addition to the legitimate fear that people with dissident identities have in the face of such arbitrariness, another fear is documented by The Atlantic magazine (2025). Katherine J. Wu’s report on how many researchers are downloading their data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website for fear that it will be altered or deleted. The CDC is the government body that collects all epidemiological information to control and prevent disease and its website currently announces that it is being modified to comply with Trump’s decree. Wu points out that this measure will have a negative impact on medical research.
In this absurd move, which attempts to slow down the advancement of knowledge about human differences, the Vatican got ahead of Trump. Thirty years ago it unsuccessfully demanded that the term gender be removed from the official documents of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995). Since then, the Catholic Church has been joined by evangelical groups and right-wing political parties in a campaign that distorts the explanation offered by gender theory about the biopsychosocial condition of human beings. Thus the concept of gender has been converted into a political device used to transmit the belief that a conceptual tool is a totalitarian and diabolical threat that destroys the family and Christian civilisation.
In Latin America, the political device of ‘gender ideology’ has been used for some time and the mere mention of the word gender has provoked extraordinary reactions. In Colombia, in 2016, the threat of ‘gender ideology’ was used to promote a ‘no’ vote on the Peace Accords. In 2017 in Peru the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to introduce ‘gender ideology’ into the school curriculum as it supposedly violates the right of parents to decide on the upbringing of their children. In Chile, José Antonio Kast, a candidate in the 2017 presidential elections, was supported by the Spanish digital platform CitizenGO, which fights against the right to abortion and gay marriage. After being defeated at the ballot box, Kast was elected president of one of the most important global networking platforms in the ultra-conservative field, the Political Network for Values, which aims to eradicate the gender perspective. In 2018 Jair Bolsonaro, then president of Brazil, declared that ‘’gender ideology‘’ was the work of the devil. In Costa Rica, the rise of the evangelical pastor Fabricio Alvarado, who won the first round of the 2018 presidential elections, was due in part to his anti-gender discourse (and only in the second round was he defeated by the center-left candidate Carlos Alvarado). Even in a secular society like Uruguay’s, a few months before the 2019 general elections, Cabildo Abierto, a far-right party, won 12% of the vote, making similar accusations about ‘’gender ideology‘’ and calling for a heavy hand to be applied to the public security crisis. In 2024, Presidents Nayid Bukele of El Salvador and Javier Milei of Argentina spoke out against gender perspective.
The anti-gender campaign has caused conflict in other regions of the world. Even in a traditionally progressive society like Sweden, there was a smoke bomb attack on the National Secretariat for Gender Research in Gothenburg in 2018. In addition, female academics specialising in gender studies have been trolled and have received rape and death threats. Ivar Arpi, a famous Swedish tabloid journalist, described gender studies as a cult that transmits a set of premises without scientific basis and that are used to indoctrinate young people in higher education institutions. Similar issues have occurred in other European societies, creating a hostile atmosphere that is forcing many academics to change their lines of work. The aim of the attacks on gender studies is to discredit them and make them illegal. In August 2018, Hungary’s right-wing government banned gender studies in both public and private universities. In June 2020, the Romanian parliament passed a law making it illegal to use the concept of gender in higher education, as well as to question the direct relationship between sex and gender. The law was overturned by the Constitutional Court, but a large number of professors and researchers lost their jobs. And as if that were not enough, in the United States, before Trump won the presidency, several Republicans declared that if their candidate were to win, they would ban gender studies in public universities. In 2023, Republican governor Ron DeSantis moved in that direction, and got the board of trustees of New College, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, to close the prestigious gender studies department, causing more than 40% of its professors to resign. De Santis has stated that he will do the same to all educational institutions, even private ones, and now the arrival of Trump strengthens this ominous outlook.
What is going on? Why are a wide variety of social actors from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, groups from the feminist movement, and prominent political figures attacking the concept of gender? That a field of academic knowledge (gender studies) and a tool for public policy (gender perspective) should receive a barrage of disqualifications from a strange alliance of detractors means, quite simply, that the term gender studies has become an element in the ongoing cultural battle for ideological hegemony. Political scientists Eszter Kováts and Maari Põim consider that gender functions as a ‘symbolic glue’ that articulates religious, far-right and extremist feminist positions in the context of the multinational network that is driving the battle against ‘gender ideology’. All over the world religious conservatism is being reconfigured and reorganised, sheltering different political organisations that oppose the progress of the demands of feminist movements and sexual and identity diversity.
Today we are witnessing a kind of transnational conservative revolution against homosexuality, assisted reproduction techniques, the legality of abortion, the recognition of new family forms and identities that deviate from the norm, especially those of trans and non-binary people, also called queers. Campaigns against “gender ideology” or simply against the idea of gender not only disregard scientific knowledge but also try to cancel hard-won rights, based on the belief that human beings have a “natural” condition, determined by biology. Its spokespeople maintain that gender theory is an ideology that attacks the human essence and this political device, which links many heterogeneous elements (discourses, regulations, laws, administrative measures), is strengthened when it is assumed by a powerful figure, as Trump does today. Although initially public figures such as popes and bishops of the Catholic Church launched the anti-gender campaign, today presidents (Putin, Orban, Trump, Bukele, Milei, etc.) are the leaders who are launching a discourse that aims to politically unite the population and distract it from the devastating effects of neoliberalism.
In the face of the exponential growth of dissident identities of the traditional binary order, ultra-conservative groups use apocalyptic rhetoric about the supposed risk that these atypical identities imply for the future of humanity. However, the real threat to the democratic agenda comes from fanatical, ignorant and well-funded groups that cling to religious beliefs and cultural prejudices. Feminism has challenged the position that socio-economic and political inequality between women and men is a ‘’natural‘’ consequence of biology, and insisted that it is key to distinguish precisely between sex and the attributions made to it, that is, gender. The campaign against ‘gender ideology’, in which feminists and people of sexual and identity diversity are accused of encouraging a perversion of the ‘natural’ order, is being waged regardless of the scientific evidence and the political progress that has been made as a result of this advance in knowledge. Trump’s decree is another example of how ignorance and conservatism have terrifying consequences on people’s lives. Trump’s decree is another example of how ignorance and conservatism have terrifying consequences on people’s lives.
