A Global 'Anti-Gender' Movement Is Coming for Our Democracy. Here's How We Fight Back.
(a very sobering read. the haters in this country are spreading it all over the world)
A Global ‘Anti-Gender’ Movement Is Coming for Our Democracy. Here’s How We Fight Back.
8/3/2023 by Pamela Shifman
Crackdowns on LGBTQ rights and abortion access go hand-in-hand. Connecting the dots is not just good policy—it’s a path to victory.
Qween Jean, a costume designer and LGBTQ rights activist, helps to lead the annual Queer Liberation March on June 25, 2023, in New York City. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images)
This op-ed was originally published on The Hill. It has been republished with permission.
This year alone, over 460 bills targeting LGBTQ rights have been introduced in states across the country. Twenty-four states have now banned abortion or are likely to do so, cutting off millions from bodily autonomy and essential health care. This month, Missouri became the first state in the country to severely restrict gender-affirming care for people of all ages. What some Americans might not realize is that many of these crackdowns draw from a strikingly similar playbook used by extremists in other countries. Understanding threats to our own democracy now demands that we see the connections to these tactics around the world. “Right-wing agendas have consistently identified feminism, gender equality and anti-racism as a problem, and have used ‘anti-gender’, anti-feminist, and anti-migrant feeling as a way of garnering support for nationalist, cultural, religious or political agendas,” as the London School of Economics wrote.
News coming out of Florida has clear echoes in Budapest and Warsaw.
Just this month, Florida’s Board of Education approved a proposal to forbid classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades, a dramatic expansion of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” ban that originally applied only to kindergarten through the third grade.
In 2021, Hungary’s parliament passed a law banning gay people from being featured in school educational materials or on television shows for kids under 18. For the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, demonization of LGBTQ communities is a key ingredient in his nationalistic vision of Hungary as the last holdout against godless, western liberals.
In Poland, far-right president Andrzej Duda fearmongers about the “LGBT ideology,” which he describes as “worse than communism” and a direct threat to traditional family values.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken confronts countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, he warns that backlash against LGBTQ communities is a “canary in the coal mine” for broader human rights and democratic freedoms. More Americans are waking up to this terrifying reality: If it’s true in other countries, it’s also true at home. The same lesson applies to the erosion of abortion rights. As Macarena Sáez of Human Rights Watch has pointed out, “In the United States, the criminalization of abortion also becomes an issue of freedom of speech, expression and information, as well as privacy,” since state governments may now prosecute people seeking information about abortion on social media. The results curtail the freedom of everyone by increasing “the arbitrary power of the government over community.”
. . . .
Connecting the dots between attacks on abortion rights, trans communities and communities of color—and tying them to the democratic freedoms of everyone—is not just good policy, it’s a path to victory. Rather than pivot away from these issues, it’s time for progressive leaders to take them on, and win. And it can be done. Look at Gov. Tim Walz in Minnesota, who just signed an executive order guaranteeing that gender-affirming care will remain available in the state, a key part of his winning agenda. Under Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s leadership, Michigan this year joined 10 other states who have moved to boldly protect reproductive freedoms and access to safe, legal abortion in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. With critical elections of 2024 rapidly approaching, crackdowns on LGBTQ people, women and communities of color have moved to center stage. Until more of us see these attacks for what they are, and come together to defeat them, these forces will keep gaining ground.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/08/03/gender-lgbtq-abortion-women-democracy/
