What transphobia sounded like in the 1990s and 2000s — birth of the term 'gender ideology'

Kate Walton explains for CNN:

1990s and 2000s transphobia

"The anti-gender movement emerged in the early 1990s in response to international conferences that catalyzed recognition of gender at the United Nations and accelerated progress on gender equality, including the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights. ... In the early 2000s, the Catholic Church began sounding the gender alarm... This led to the emergence of the term “gender ideology,” which conservative and fundamentalist groups began using to refer to the broad swathe of issues they oppose, including LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality."

Now it's fascist

That link — the same link appears twice in the screenshot — goes to “Gender Equality and Gender Backlash,” a 2020 UN Human Rights report.

This is "connected to the political shifts being witnessed around the globe, away from liberal democracy and towards right-wing populism. As Hungarian historian Andrea Pető puts it: 'The anti-gender movement is not merely another offshoot of centuries-old anti-feminism but is a fundamentally new phenomenon that was launched for the sake of establishing a nationalist neoconservative response.'"

And now,

"in 2024, for anti-gender actors, the term “gender” now encompasses everything from the concept of gender itself, to gender studies, legal protections for transgender people, survivors of domestic violence and rape, and women and girls in general. In fact, according to the Association of Women in Development, the concept is now being used to attack all sorts of progressive “struggles,” including even environmental issues.

The US is funding it globally

See below: During the tail-end of the G. W. Bush administration, both Obama administrations, and the beginning of the Trump administration (2008–2017), 11 US-based organizations paid at least $1 billion to fight LGBTQ and women's rights in other countries.

Those links are:
Global Philanthropy Project
Reporting by CNN As Equals
unanimously passed on February 28

Read the original source

"Opposition to gender equality around the world is connected, well funded and spreading. Here’s what you need to know about the anti-gender movement," March 2024.

"In their [Judith Butler's] latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the famed critical theorist frames the scourge of anti-trans legislation here in the U.S. as just one tentacle of a global neo-fascist crusade. The 'anti-gender ideology movement,' as Butler calls it, exists everywhere from Bolsanaro’s Brazil to Putin’s Russia to the TERFs of the United Kingdom and beyond. And though it may take slightly unique forms, the movement is united in its posing of 'gender' not so much as an identity, but as a conceptual container — a 'phantasm,' as they put it — for the perceived erosion of traditional (read: white, cis, and patriarchal) models of family and society."
— Wren Sanders, introduction to Judith Butler Knows What Makes Transphobes Tick, interview by Wren Sanders, Them, April 5, 2024

In that interview, Butler says:

"I tell a story in the acknowledgements about what happened in Brazil in 2017, when I was really shocked to discover that there was this whole right-wing movement called the anti-gender ideology movement, who had decided that I was a devil, or a demon, or a force from hell. [In Brazil], I was burnt in effigy, and that was pretty freaky. What I saw was that there was a right-wing idea of what gender is that had nothing to do with what I had written, or what other people in gender studies had written, or what was happening under the name of gender in the world among different generations. And yet I was called 'the Pope of Gender,' like I was leading all these beguiled young people over the cliff. ... I could show them why their ideas are wrong, but they’re not really reading; they’re just freaking out. They have this phantasm that they are working with, so the big question was how to dispel that phantasm, or engage it, or offer something contrary to it that could speak more powerfully."

We experience it as transphobia, as Butler explains:

""I think the primary way that we experience the anti-gender ideology movement in the United States is as transphobia. So I include transphobia as part of the anti-gender ideology movement, although there are forms of transphobia that are out there in the world that don’t know anything about that movement and may not know that they’re resonating with it, you know? So there’s that one complication. But in different parts of the world, to be against gender, like Putin, or Meloni, or Bolsonaro and Orbán, is to believe that there’s a natural law, a natural family where there’s a man and a woman; and they engage in sex within the institution of marriage; and sex is primarily reproductive; and that this universal and natural law should not be broken; and that the feminists who introduced the idea of gender identity are destroying not just the family, but also the nation."