As communities continue to push back against anti-democratic measures and group-targeted violence, it is more critical than ever to understand the narratives and policies driving and seeking to justify these rollbacks. While democratic erosion takes many forms, one often overlooked, if not altogether dismissed, dimension is how gender is weaponized to justify and build a permission structure for authoritarian practices and even violence. Across the world, gender is central to authoritarian populists’ efforts to generate public support, justify power expansion, and enact discriminatory actions that threaten everyone’s rights and freedoms. This often happens under the pretext of concerns around traditional and family values, gendered anxieties, and shifting gender norms.

We set out to understand the connection between the increasing attacks on women’s rights, feminists, and the LGBTQ+ community and democratic backsliding in the United States and Europe. These regions, by no means, have a monopoly on democracy (or its erosion), but they are key areas of focus for our organizations. We shared our findings in our recently released report, (En)gendering Authoritarianism.

Why Gender?

Efforts to weaponize gender and sexuality are particularly potent because both are deeply personal aspects of people’s identities that shape how individuals understand themselves and interact with the world. If political leaders are able to govern the most private parts of our lives, they gain control at a deeply personal level. This can then be leveraged to govern everything else. Authoritarians are also able to leverage the complexities of these topics, enabling them to manipulate and exploit limited public understanding.

Further, gender intersects with other identity categories that are frequently weaponized, including race, religion, and migration status. This interplay is perhaps best illustrated by the false and racist Great Replacement Theory, which posits a conspiracy to “out-breed” or “replace” White populations with immigrants, linking together demographic and gendered anxieties, anti-immigrant sentiments, and antisemitism.

Gender as a Political Tool

Across countries, authoritarian populist leaders often invoke the phantasm of so-called “gender ideology,” a term that originated in Catholic circles in the 1990s as a way to oppose women’s and LGBTQ+ rights movements. Since then, it has spread through global networks, including the World Congress for Families, and has been adopted by secular political figures, anti-rights civil society groups, and other religious actors as a catch-all term to oppose women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, trans rights, new reproductive technologies, sex and gender education, and even the Istanbul Convention, which aims to combat violence against women. Using “ideology” as a label is strategic because it enables opponents to categorize any issue to do with gender as a set of beliefs that can be countered and dismissed, rather than a matter that affects people’s rights and identities. This tactic also provides cover against claims of bigotry or discrimination. Efforts to root out so-called gender ideology are portrayed as battles against insidious ideas, rather than targeted attacks against specific groups of people.

In the US, promise #1 in Project 2025 is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life” and to “protect children.” These statements are not neutral—the same section portrays gender ideology as a philosophy that poisons children—a position that has been used to justify expanding state powers into doctor’s offices, classrooms, bathrooms, and private homes. On day one of the second Trump administration, the president issued an executive order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which sought to delegitimize transgender identities altogether.

We also observed how gender serves as a potent political tool because of the flexibility it allows. For instance, far-right political actors in countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, at times co-opt language around women’s and LGBTQ+ rights as a means of opposing immigration and othering different groups. These characterizations portray Muslims and Islam as a threat to women’s and LGBTQ+ equality, which they claim to support.

Efforts to leverage gender as part of an authoritarian political project continue. In January 2026, the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, released the report “Saving America by Saving the Family,” which frames advancements in rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community as destructive to the “natural” family. It also advances gender hierarchy, rather than gender equality, as the title suggests, as being necessary to “save America.” If enacted, these ideas would set women’s rights back by decades.

At the same time, advocating for equal rights opens opportunities to counter authoritarianism. After years of the far-right Law and Justice Party rule in Poland, feminists and pro-democracy actors fueled a broad coalition that mobilized the public and bolstered the opposition (though the coalition has since struggled). In Hungary, recent government attempts to ban pride parades sparked the largest anti-government mobilizations the country had seen in decades. Public opinion offers another opening. In many countries, there is a significant disconnect between the policies and narratives that authoritarian populist leaders and anti-gender actors espouse and what the public actually believes, particularly on issues such as abortion, women’s rights, and many other gender equality matters. This gap becomes strategically valuable when the connections between gender instrumentalization and authoritarianism are made visible.

In (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, we identify six strategies through which authoritarian populists weaponize gender to advance their agenda. These gender-centered narratives and policies serve multiple purposes. They

• construct threats,
• normalize authoritarian ideas,
• shift culture to make the public more receptive to authoritarian practices,
• build big tent coalitions that increase the likelihood of attaining and maintaining power,
• divide and polarize both the public and the opposition, and
• work to distract from failures and scandals.

While these efforts by authoritarian actors seem overwhelming, understanding the strategies that underpin anti-democratic behavior better equips us to respond, as communities and organizations around the globe are doing every day. In part two, we will unpack each strategy with concrete examples.

Miriam Juan-Torres is Head of Research, Democracy & Belonging Program at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. The Othering & Belonging Institute is a think-and-do-tank that advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality. We are scholars, organizers, communicators, researchers, artists, and policymakers committed to building a world where all people belong.

Laura Livingston is the Senior Director of Field Support & Strategy at Over Zero, an organization dedicated to building resilience to political and identity-based violence. Her role focuses on developing frameworks and resources to support organizations and leaders in navigating risks of violence. She leads Over Zero’s work to examine how gender and sexuality are weaponized to advance authoritarianism.

Tara Chandra is a consultant and researcher focused on human rights and democracy, gender, and international security. She received her PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, where her research focused on violence perpetrated against women in civil conflicts.

Resilience & Resistance is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that features the insights of thought leaders and practitioners who are working to expand and support inclusive democracies around the globe. Direct any queries to globalteam@kettering.org.