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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy is the idea of 'gender' provoking backlash the world over?
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. Turkeys 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.
It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence. They assemble and launch incendiary claims in order to defeat what they see as gender ideology or gender studies by any rhetorical means necessary. For instance, they object to gender because it putatively denies biological sex or because it undermines the natural or divine character of the heteronormative family. They fear that men will lose their dominant positions or become fatally diminished if we start thinking along gender lines. They believe that children are being told to change genders, are actively recruited by gay and trans people, or pressured to declare themselves as gay in educational settings where an open discourse about gender is caricatured as a form of indoctrination. And they worry that if something called gender is socially accepted, a flood of sexual perversities, including bestiality and pedophilia, will be unleashed upon the earth.
Although nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements. Indeed, in attacking gender they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing. All this fervor ramped up during a pandemic time in which domestic abuse has soared and queer and trans kids have been deprived of their spaces for gathering in life-supporting communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash
Aristus
(66,520 posts)That's why so many people do it...
WhiskeyGrinder
(22,504 posts)oppressors.
Solly Mack
(90,800 posts)and people don't fit into those beliefs, proving the desired narrative isn't true, then they see that as an attack on how safe and secure they feel in the world. Their place in the world, favored by their narrative, propped up by their beliefs, is challenged and they see that as an attack.
They need to control the narrative. They need that narrative to favor their beliefs. Otherwise, everything they want to believe as true is wrong.
They go on the defensive instead of adapting to the facts.
WhiskeyGrinder
(22,504 posts)JI7
(89,286 posts)WhiskeyGrinder
(22,504 posts)rickyhall
(4,889 posts)slightlv
(2,869 posts)who can only see things in terms of black and white; for them, there are no shades of gray. Everything is "either/or"; there is no continuum, no hierarchy, except in terms of power. We have too many people who refuse to recognize reality.
GoodRaisin
(8,933 posts)onto others.
Doodley
(9,174 posts)Sympthsical
(9,176 posts)It's pretty embedded in the cultures there. I remember, ten or so years ago, Poland was in the news a lot for this sort of thing. Russia will not have any part of it. It's wild how conservative many of those countries are.
Celerity
(43,728 posts)So much of the bullshit in the world for tens (hundreds?) of thousands of years comes down to the wilful suspension of disbelief necessary to believe in a god or gods.
It is the single biggest mistake, disaster, and animating force for misery, sorrow, darkness of mind, torture, slavery, war, and death in the 2.5 million years or so that humans/hominids have roamed the earth.
Humans are not the flawed creation of gods. Gods are the flawed creation of humans.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)The human race wasn't born yesterday, and our most sacred and deeply embedded belief systems weren't cribbed up over breakfast and inculcated by lunch.
Initech
(100,132 posts)And yes Fox News does have overseas outlets.