Why the far right is obsessed with “gender ideology”

The global far right see women, first and foremost, as the “womb of the nation”.

SOPRON, HUNGARY - AUGUST 19: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban attends a press conference on August 19, 2019 in Sopron, Hungary. Angela Merkel is visiting as part of the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the opening of the then-communist border to Austria. On August 19, 1989, following a gathering known as the "Pan European Picnic" organized by Hungarians and Austrians, Hungarian border guards allowed East Germans who had been seeking to flee west to freely cross from Hungary into Austria. The event marked the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe between communist East and capitalist, democratic West. The Berlin Wall fell only a short time later. (Photo by Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images)

Among the stalwarts of the far right, the contemporary threats presented by climate change, Iran, and even global Islam all pale in comparison to “gender ideology”. Earlier this month, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro called for a bill to ban “gender ideology” in the country’s elementary schools. In Poland, the far-right Law and Justice (PiS) government has prohibited gender (and gay and lesbian studies) from schools so that children will once again “study normal, classic subjects”.

In Hungary, students beginning university this year will no longer be able to take courses in gender studies, after the Prime Minister Viktor Orban issued a decree revoking funding for gender studies programmes in October 2018. “The government’s standpoint is that people are either born male or female,” said a spokesperson. For these politicians and others like them, gender ideology is an attack on the traditional family – and an existential threat to the nation.