Beyond the Backlash: Gender Justice and the Fight for Democratic Futures

On the occasion of the International Women’s Day on March 8th, feminist and gender justice movements mobilize across the globe in support of equality, dignity, and democracy. This year’s mobilizations take place once again in a political climate marked by an intensifying anti-gender backlash. Rather than viewing these as isolated reactions to specific policies, activists and scholars have come to understand anti-gender movements as part of an integrated transnational political project sharing discursive strategies, tactics, and funding pools, with the goal of reversing not only feminist gains but broader social justice and democratic agendas. What, then, has feminism learned in this context? Feminism responded to the backlash by evolving into a more intersectional, transnational, participatory, strategic, and mass mobilizing force. A fundamental question remains unresolved: in this challenging historical conjuncture, can the current wave of feminist mobilizations endure and keep the possibility of justice-oriented and democratically inclusive futures firmly on the table?

The Emergence of a Transnational Anti-Gender Movement 

Over the past decade, gender equality has become a central battleground in national and international politics. While opposition to gender equality is not new, scholars increasingly use the term “anti-gender backlash” to describe the most recent wave of opposition to gender equality policies as deliberate and orchestrated attempts to roll back commitments to women’s empowerment, gender equality policies, and LGBTQ+ rights. The evidence supports it: 1 in 4 countries reported a backlash against women’s rights in 2024, women globally have only 64% of the rights that men have, and 70% of countries still maintain discriminatory legal frameworks. Abortion rights have been rolled back in Poland (2021) and the United States (2022). Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda introduced in 2023 laws deepening the criminalization that LGBTQ+ people in these countries were already facing. At this rate, international organizations conclude, achieving gender equality could take centuries.

While cuts in international development budgets have dramatically affected gender equality programs and the life of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in the developing world, funding for anti-rights groups has risen exponentially (between 2009-2018, anti-gender funding quadrupled in Europe; globally it stands at three times higher than gender equality and LGBTQ funding). Appealing to common framing strategies and relying on the power of transnational networks, anti-gender equality movements have gained in recent years unprecedented visibility and strength. 

From the early anti-gender mobilizations of 2012-13 (Manif pour Tous), which focused on reproductive rights (abortion, reproductive technologies) in France, Spain, Italy, and Poland, to the campaigns and referenda opposing marriage equality legislation in Croatia, Romania, and Slovenia or the protests against sex and gender education in schools, the movement has evolved into a more transnational, populist, and institutional project. From the late 2010s, anti-gender politics became embedded in electoral campaigns and governmental agendas in Brazil, the United States, Hungary, Russia, and Turkey, while also gaining visible advocacy presence within the European Union and the United Nations. This shift reflects both an expansion into a wider ideological agenda – contesting human rights, immigration, multiculturalism, democratic and global institutions – and its consolidation within populist and nationalist politics.

The discursive foundation for these movements is given by the notion of “gender ideology”, a catch all and flexible matrix able to unite old and new conservatives, with religious groups, right-wing populists, and activists of the manosphere in an “opportunistic synergy” around this new strategic framing. Their strategies differ from previous anti-gender actors in their appropriation of the discourse of human rights to justify violations of the rights of others and the capacity to produce a broader set of equivalences. Their strategies are also transversal. If earlier movements couched claims in moral or religious language, the current discursive framework gives actors the ability to produce more macro diagnoses of broader social ills. From the loss of order and “natural hierarchies” to the threat to national identity and even sovereignty, “the target is not just abortion, but the entire infrastructure of gender equality policies, sexual rights, and progressive epistemologies”. In the language of anti-gender entrepreneurs like Viktor Orbán, gender discourse is cast as “a progressive virus” posing a civilizational threat to us all. Beyond gender, this securitizing logic justifies the targeting of broader sets of equality policies in Hungary. Using a tried and tested global tactic of creating moral panics around specific local issues – children’s education in the United States or Mexico, immigration in Europe, or low fertility rates in East Asia – anti-gender actors present the return to “traditional family” as the only solution to urgent moral, social, and demographic crises.

Feminist Movements at the Heart of the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice

The current anti-gender backlash cannot be understood outside of the broader context of democratic decline and shrinking of civic space which, combined with the rising authoritarian politics, the dismantlement of the multilateral order, and restructuring of global development finance, work in concert to amplify each other’s effects and produce a most fertile ground for the emergence of “retrogressive”  political movements and visions. 

As recent analyses of retrogressive movements have highlighted, sexuality, gender, and border politics are deeply intertwined in contemporary right-wing politics. On the one hand, racialized or Muslim background migrants are often portrayed as “backward, illiberal, and patriarchal”, a strategy used to justify restrictive immigration policies in the name of allegedly preventing sexual violence and protecting LGBTQ+ communities from intolerance, as recent debates on immigration and integration in Germany, the Netherlands, or Denmark have illustrated. On the other hand, framing sexuality and reproduction as matters of national survival, such politics reinforces the control of women’s bodies and restrictions of LGBTQ+ rights, as in the case of Russia or Hungary. Under this form of “sexual nationalism”, the instrumentalization of gender to enforce racialized border regimes goes hand in hand with the rollback on gender equality policies, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights in the name of protecting national cultures and the traditional family.

Anti-gender movements and actors thus oppose not only women’s and LGBTQ+ rights but also migrant rights, racial justice, and democratic pluralism. Gender equality becomes the crucial battleground for a larger ideological and discursive confrontation between a political agenda steeped in the defense of hierarchy and exclusion, in the name of a neoconservative social order to come, and one committed to the struggle for an order now under siege based on equality, democratic inclusion, racial, and gender justice. Feminist movements have thus become the critical frontline in the confrontation between two opposed models of social organization: one extractivist, patriarchal, neo-colonial, and authoritarian that values privilege, profit, and domination, and the other anti-extractivist, pro-equality, anti-colonial, anti-racist, pro-democracy, and ecological that bases equality, solidarity, and dignity of both human and non-human life at its core. 

What Feminist and Gender Justice Movements Have Learned from the Backlash

Intersectionality is crucial: As we saw with the instrumentalization of gender equality to restrict immigration, sexuality and gender are not solely cultural issues but have become technologies of governance used to define national belonging and justify restrictive immigration policies. It demonstrates that without an intersectional approach, feminist and LGBTQ+ discourses risk being co-opted by nationalist, anti-immigrant, and exclusionary political projects. Feminist movements have responded to this challenge by strengthening intersectional alliances, linking gender justice to migrant rights, anti-racist activism, and climate justice struggles. Feminism today is also transnational, connecting activists, scholars, and NGOs across borders facilitating the exchange of knowledge, strategies, advocacy and legal tools through international conferences, digital platforms, and global mobilizations. 

Reframing narratives around broader struggles for democracy and social justice: A central strategy for feminist movements today is reframing gender equality as part of broader struggles for democracy and social justice, rather than a narrower reproductive or women’s rights approach. Given anti-gender actors’ efforts to construct gender equality as a threat to national identity, centering gender justice and equality at the heart of contemporary democratic and social justice struggles is key. 

We saw this in Poland during the protests against abortion restrictions when the Polish Women’ s Strike used left populist strategies to build a mass movement and frame demands as struggles for democratic freedoms, judicial independence, and a rejection of ethnonationalist definitions of “the people”. This allowed them to build broad coalitions with labor unions, student, refugee solidarity movements, and pro-democracy organizations. Similarly, Ni Una Menos, in Argentina and across Latin America, succeeded in re-politicizing feminism by casting gender violence as structural and embedding feminicide into the analysis of a broader system of inequality, illustrated by precarious labor, the feminization of debt, and neoliberal state restructuring.

Confrontation is not always the answer: Balancing out strategic non-engagement, given the need to avoid legitimizing anti-gender actors and agendas, with the necessity to correct, fact-check, and reappropriate narratives is not an easy task. Beyond a few notable digital countermobilizations, feminism has re-discovered the power of offline community building and community-based education. Examples come from Spain, where feminist organizations collaborate with local governments on gendered-based violence prevention in schools, from India’s legal literacy in marginalized communities programs, or from the use of participatory education to address gender inequality through peer learning and community workshops in  Malawi.

The mobilizing power of affects: As anti-austerity movements before them, feminist movements today experiment with affects that empower and make collective action possible. As the call for this year’s 8 March mobilizations in Madrid proclaims: against a demobilizing politics of fear that underpins today’s colonial, genocidal, racial, and gender violence, an antiracist, antifascist, antimilitarist, intersectional feminism mobilizes anger but also hope in order to resist productively. By converting the bodies’ exhaustion and vulnerability into a collective refusal of self-attrition, intersectional feminism’ struggle for a politics of livable lives re-opens the possibility of more inclusive and democratic futures.

Simona Rentea is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Saint Louis University, Madrid. Her research lies at the intersection of political theory, International Relations, and migration investigating the proactive and biopolitical use of crisis in governance practice today, as well as popular resistance to crisis governance from social movements and civil society organizations. She has explored the dynamics of narrative contestation and the affective dimension of crises in the context of the 2008 financial crisis and rise of anti-austerity mobilizations, currently investigating these aspects in the context of the management of migration within the European Union. She is co-author of The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics.

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To quote this article, please use the following reference:

Rentea, S. (2026, March).Beyond the Backlash: Gender Justice and the Fight for Democratic Futures. Observatory On Contemporary Crises. https://www.crisesobservatory.org/post/beyond-the-backlash-gender-justice-and-the-fight-for-democratic-futures