What Is Anti-Gender Discourse?

The emergence of the anti-gender movement is closely bound up with the history of the discourse on gender itself. While sustained deployment of gender as a concept for understanding the body reaches back to the middle of the twentieth century (Repo 2016), it was the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1991) that brought gender into the discursive foreground. Butler’s (1991, 11) contention was that the commonplace understanding of the sex/gender distinction as broadly mapping onto a nature/culture distinction is untenable. Sexed bodies only become intelligible as such through a cultural matrix that is already gendered; thus, there is no sex that exists outside of gender: the “production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.” Butler’s contention is that we cannot distinguish between sex and gender because sex is always already gendered.

The consequence of the enormous influence of Butler’s intervention is that the twenty-first century has seen the development of a prominent thread of thinking around questions of sexuality/gender (sometimes, perhaps unhelpfully, described as “4th wave feminism” (Cameron 2019, 5–6)) in which gender provides the central conceptual architecture. As such, even though there have been people opposed to non-normative gender identities and expressions since antiquity, it would be incorrect to label them as belonging to the anti-gender movement as the discourse on gender against which the movement came into being is a relatively recent phenomenon (Graff and Korolczuck 2021).

This history explains the make-up of the anti-gender movement as a coalition of actors with diverse political commitments. Within the anti-gender movement, we find actors who hold a broadly conservative position across a wide range of social issues but also feminists, lesbians, and gay people who are opposed to the conceptual orientation towards gender ushered in by Butler. Opposition to discourses of gender functions as a “symbolic glue” that works across lines of political divergence (Kováts and Põim 2015). Alongside the more active participants in the anti-gender movement are doubtless many people who may feel alienated or confused by the challenges posed to “common sense” accounts of sex/gender by contemporary gender discourses. Thus, far from a unified cadre of committed ideologues, the anti-gender movement is a heterogeneous grouping. It is worth emphasizing that this heterogeneity does not fully align with other political cleavages. For example, although the Labour government elected in the United Kingdom in 2024 marks a clear ideological break with the previous Conservative government in many ways, some within the Labour Party (notably, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Health Wes Streeting) have signaled a continuity with their predecessors in terms of some of the political manifestations of anti-gender discourse.

This heterogeneity does not, however, mean that anti-gender discourse is incoherent. Or rather, as queer theorists have noted with respect to sexual and gender norms more broadly, the incoherence of anti-gender discourse does not imply its weakness (Wiegman and Wison 2015, 11). To understand this, it is helpful to consider the social operation of discourse.

For Michel Foucault (1972, 49), discourses are historically and socially contingent assemblages of actors, systems, and ideas that make knowledge possible. These discourses are not simply reflections of the world but actually bring their subjects into being: they are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.” It is, for example, the repetition of the discourse of sexuality that brings sexuality itself (as a particular way of understanding the subject, their desire, and their relationality) into being (Foucault 1978, 11).

Thus, anti-gender discourse is not just a way of speaking about gender. Rather, it is an attempt to produce a new way of knowing gender and bring a particular social form of gender into being in which non-normative forms of gender identity and expression are to be averred. The stakes of countering anti-gender discourse are not merely speaking more kindly and productively about gender but concern the very possibility of knowing non-normative gender identities and expressions as anything other than undesirable.

Importantly, the social functioning of discourse is not tied to the specifics of the claims it contains. In his exploration of homophobia, the queer historian and theorist David Halperin (1995, 33) contends that “homophobic discourses contain no fixed propositional content.” This is not to say that these discourses are void of all meaning. Rather, it is a contention that the power relations that make these discourses socially legible are not bound to the specifics of the propositions they advance. The relative unimportance of the propositional content of these discourses means that different homophobic discourses can exist alongside one other (Halperin 1995, 55). Anti-gender discourse functions similarly, and it is for this reason that the discourse can incorporate voices as diverse as conservative traditionalists, lesbian feminists, and adherents to “common sense” on questions of gender.

Two further important features of contemporary anti-gender discourse are important to understanding the details of this crisis. The first is that this discourse operates within an uneven socio-spatial landscape for LGBT+ people, with recent years having seen substantial positive developments for LGBT+ people in some parts of the world. While more radical queer thinkers are correct that the significance of these developments should not be overstated (Tonstad 2015, 258–59), it is also true that these legal developments have had a significant positive impact on public perception of LGBT+ people (Flores and Barclay 2015). This heterogeneity is particularly apparent in the United States, wherein state-level legislative divergence has resulted in marked regional differences in the legal and social equality of LGBT+ people (Movement Advancement Project 2024). Anti-gender discourse operates across this heterogeneity and is thus simultaneously a dominant discourse within certain socio-spatial locations and marginal within others.

Connected to this, leading proponents of anti-gender discourse often frame themselves as insurgents. Political populism frequently exhibits a strong orientation towards anti-LGBT rhetoric, and thus it is unsurprising that we can identify alliances between contemporary populist movements and key participants in the anti-gender discourse (Corrales and Kiryk 2022). As such, although there is little evidence of a “democratic backlash” against LGBT+ acceptance (Bishin et al. 2016), key figures within the anti-gender discourse often figure themselves as insurgents expressing a repressed popular opinion. This figuration as an insurgent is often at odds with the actual social and political positions of many of these actors. In the United Kingdom, members of parliament, leading broadcast journalists, and even cabinet members of the previous government have sought to position themselves as marginalized voices speaking out against a “totalitarian woke culture” that somehow holds the reins of power (Cammaerts 2022).

Why Is Anti-Gender Discourse a Crisis for LGBT+ People?

The proliferation of anti-gender discourse is a crisis for LGBT+ people for many reasons. Perhaps most obviously, this discourse has made public conversation around issues of gender identity and expression extremely fraught. As a consequence, the measured and nuanced deliberation often required in considering these issues becomes impossible. This is especially true in the cause of the use of synthetic androgens. The use of these hormones concatenates a wide range of different systems and structures: medical and regulatory infrastructures, biopolitical systems of bodily control, and discourses of bodily autonomy (Preciado 2013, 33–34). It is not unreasonable, therefore, that the use of synthetic androgens in gender transition raises complex questions (although the existence of these questions should not preclude their use by trans people).

However, these complex questions are often lost in public conversation as a result of the tensions produced by anti-gender discourse. In the United Kingdom, 2024 saw the publication of the Cass Review into the gender identity services provided by the National Health Services (NHS). The report covers a wide range of topics and makes multiple recommendations. On the topic of synthetic hormones, it notes that there is a relative paucity of data on the outcomes of use of these hormones by young people and recommends more data is sought (Cass et al. 2024, 182–97). In itself, this is a sensible position. Yet, the publication of the report catalyzed a fractious public debate in which many of its important details were obscured. It seems unlikely that the 130 members of parliament, peers, and doctors who publicly wrote to the then prime minister as a result of the report calling for an investigation into “transgender ideology” in the NHS are interested in developing a robust clinical basis for recommending the use of hormone therapy (Turner 2024).

More concerningly, it is likely that the climate of hostility towards LGBT+ people produced by anti-gender discourse has contributed to the precipitous increase in violent acts these marginalized communities face. The United Kingdom’s Home Office (2023) reports that hate crimes against people on the basis of their perceived gender identity increased 110% between the years 2018/19 and 2022/23. Similar increases have been recorded across the Anglosphere. Of course, such figures should be approached with great caution. They may well reflect, in part, changes in reporting methodology or an increase in LGBT+ people feeling comfortable reporting violence to law enforcement (Herek 2017). Regardless, it is clear that very many LGBT+ people are victims of violence and aggression on the basis of their perceived gender identity or expression, and it would be hard to argue that this is disconnected from the proliferation of a discourse that grants social legibility to knowledge of non-normative gender identities and expressions as detestable. It is important that we continually remember that the crisis of anti-gender discourse is not an object of purely disinterested academic concern but is felt as disaster in the lives of LGBT+ people.

The Crisis of Anti-Gender Discourse within the Polycrisis

Beyond its disastrous implications for LGBT+ people, anti-gender discourse should be concerning for everyone. To properly understand this, it is important to situate this discourse within the developing conditions of the polycrisis. Polycrisis is a somewhat complex concept. At base, it is a contention that the world of the early twenty-first century is composed of interlocking crises that overwhelm our ability to respond effectively (Tooze 2022). While there is nothing novel about different crises dominating public life, what is distinctive about the polycrisis is the extent to which individual crises—each of them notionally manageable—aggregate into an overwhelming profusion. Moreover, these crises are interconnected such that they form a tangled web, and it is, the theory holds, impossible to fully understand and appropriately respond to any one of the constituent crises that together constitute the polycrisis without taking account of these interconnections (Zeitlin, Nicoli, and Laffan 2019).

Importantly, the interconnections of the polycrisis do not only connect similar crises. Rather, the polycrisis is a “coming together at a single moment of things which, on the face of it, don’t have anything to do with each other” (Markovitz 2023). In the case of anti-gender discourse, this is perhaps most immediately apparent in the case of the Russo-Ukrainian War, in which gendered discourses have become tightly connected to the seemingly distant issues of geopolitics and military affairs (Kratochvíl and O’Sullivan 2023).

However, this interrelation of anti-gender discourse and seemingly disconnected crises is just as evident in the core Anglosphere if one is attuned to it. In the United Kingdom, early 2023 saw anti-gender discourse focus on the issue of transgender inmates in Scottish prisons. In this, questions of gender transition and expression became folded in with both the ongoing crises of prison funding and the overall structural challenges of the carceral system, as well as the ongoing political crisis around the devolution of power between the constituent nations of the UK (Torrance and Pyper 2023). At the same time, the aforementioned entanglement of the invasion of Ukraine and anti-gender discourse has, in the United States, concatenated the crisis of anti-gender discourse with crises surrounding political polarization, social media disinformation, and geopolitical tension.

This does not, of course, mean that these other crises are really about gender. Nor can we only understand either these other crises or the polycrisis by engaging with anti-gender discourse. Rather, I contend that we should not think of the crisis of the proliferation of anti-gender discourse as a “niche issue” only relevant to LGBT+ people and their allies. If anti-gender discourse is threaded through the polycrisis, and the polycrisis is the defining condition of the early twenty-first century, then anti-gender discourse is relevant to everyone. Not only is this discourse actively working to define a social script in which we all participate, but it is connected in complex ways with crises that bear on us all regardless of our involvement with the dramas of contestation over non-normative gender identity and expression.

What Responses Do Queer Theologies Offer to the Crisis of Anti-Gender Discourse?

As noted, if Butler (2024, 73) is correct in her identification of anti-gender discourse as emerging from both conservative Evangelicalism and official Catholic doctrine, then responses to the crisis of anti-gender discourse that emerge from Christian theology will be particularly efficacious. Thus, even if one has no real interest in Christian theological perspectives, if they have an interest in contesting anti-gender discourse and ameliorating some of the damage it causes, they ought to be interested in how Christian theology can respond to this crisis.

To my reading, there are two responses to anti-gender discourse from the pluriform approaches of queer theology that stand out as especially deserving of further consideration. The first is direct contestation of knowledge of non-normative gender identities and expressions as undesirable. More than the specific content of these alternative knowledge, their very existence reframes questions of sexuality and gender as sites of specifically theological contest and thus imputes a queering force to these conversations.

The second queer theological response to anti-gender discourse operates in a more constructive mode. The late queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman argues that queerness ought to be understood as inaugurating a more expansive vision of sociality for all people, and she develops this through a queer reading of baptismal and Eucharistic theology. My contention is that Christian theology can, when queerly enriched, further expand our vision of sociality to imagine ways of “doing” gender that are wholly orthogonal to the invidious claims of anti-gender discourse. Thus, queer readings of Christian thought and practice offer a response to this crisis that moves beyond its contours and offers to remake the kinds of bonds and ties all people experience.

Directly Contesting Knowledge of Non-Normative Gender Identities and Expressions as Undesirable

For those outside the subdiscipline, it is common to assume that queer theology is composed of theological arguments oriented solely to the affirmation of LGBT+ people (Tonstad 2018, 3). This is not an unreasonable assumption, but it is important to recognize that the subdiscipline is far more variegated and contains a profusion of theological trajectories that do not align with this description. That notwithstanding, it is also true that much of the subdiscipline, especially as it extends beyond the confines of academic theological argument, is principally concerned with furthering the inclusion of LGBT+ people within Christian communities. This has been termed an “inclusivist” cluster within queer theology (Slater and Cornwall 2022) and is a dominant component of the different directions that constitute the subdiscipline.

The specific details of the theological argumentation advanced within this cluster vary, but there is a shared articulation of a broad compatibility between Christianity and LGBT+ identities, orientations, and practices. Some theologies within this cluster argue that the center of Christ’s message is a radical inclusivity that encompasses all human variation (Robinson-Brown 2020, 15–21). Others contend that there is an often-obscured queerness within the Christian tradition itself (Buechel 2015, 13–16). Still others posit that the Biblical tradition is replete with characters whose relationships could readily be read as queer in multiple dimensions (West 2006; Presser 2017). Moreover, this cluster also contains a wealth of more practical considerations about the facilitation of LGBT+ inclusion. These vary from the development of ancillary liturgical resources for “queer rites of passage” (Storey 2002) to more transformative revisions of approaches to marriage.

These inclusivist theological arguments should be understood as themselves components of a discourse—an assemblage of actors, systems, and ideas—that produces knowledge of gender that contradicts that produced by anti-gender discourse. These theologians contend that we can, and should, know gender differently and are providing material through which that knowledge can be constructed. It is an approach to non-normative gender identities and expressions that does not cast these as illicit.

It is important not to think of the inclusivist cluster of queer theology as an argument for assimilation. Queer theology is well resourced with arguments highlighting the deeply problematic nature of seeking the approval of the theological mainstream (Althaus-Reid and Isherwood 2007, 304). If queerness is, to some extent, a descriptor of that which resists normalization and categorization (Halperin 1995, 62; Edelman 2004, 17) then there would be something profoundly theoretically muddled about queer efforts at assimilation. Inclusive queer theologians are well aware of this. Those operating within this cluster argue that such inclusion would only be possible through the transformation of Christian communities and structures as they relate to issues of sexuality/gender. Indeed, the transformations that would be necessary for the full inclusion of LGBT+ people would, these theologians argue, catalyze broader transformations across Christian doctrine and practice (Shore-Goss and Goh 2021).

Understood thusly, the inclusivist cluster of queer theologies is more transformative than it might appear. By generating knowledge of gender that runs counter to that advanced by anti-gender discourse, these theologies disrupt the efforts of this discourse to stabilize a socially legible understanding of non-normative gender identity and expression as undesirable. In doing so, they reconfigure gender as a site of ongoing contestation, and it is in this contestation that the queerness of these theologies is most manifest. Thus, the queerness of these theologies does not so much inhere to the specific knowledge of queerness as compatible with Christianity these theologies advance but the fact that this knowledge disrupts, undermines, and contests that produced by anti-gender discourse.

Theologically Expanding Queer Relationality

Contesting the knowledge of queerness produced by anti-gender discourse is undoubtedly important. However, there is a risk that these efforts are constrained by the discursive landscape anti-gender discourse produces. Queer theologians have argued that problematic approaches to sexuality/gender can so thoroughly precondition the terms in which LGBT+ orientations and practices are discussed that an entirely distinct approach to these issues is needed. In the context of the doctrine of sin, it is not enough to simply refute that LGBT+ orientations and practices are sinful, because the entire language of sin is so mired in anti-LGBT+ sentiment that it can be hard to imagine how LGBT+ people can flourish within this discourse (Robinson-Brown 2020, 21). My concern is that this might also hold true for anti-gender discourse: it is not enough to simply produce new knowledge of gender that contests that produced by this discourse. Rather, an entirely new approach to gender is needed. Here, recent developments at the intersection of queer theology and queer theory have proven especially generative.

Within queer theory more broadly, a central debate concerns what has been termed the “antisocial thesis” (Caserio et al. 2006). The details of this debate are beyond the scope of this article, but in the simplest terms, there is a divide between thinkers who understand a queer politics as opposed to investment in existing social forms (Edelman 2004, 2–5, 27) and those who think queerness has a more ambiguous relation with sociality (Muñoz 2009, 11–14; Berlant 2011, 1–22).

For theologians, one of the most interesting responses to the antisocial thesis is provided by Freeman (2019). Freeman contends that the antisocial thesis needs to be turned on its head: queerness is not about disinvestment from social relations but instead about an abundant overinvestment in our relations with others. She terms this vision of queer relationality “hypersociality,” drawing on the different registers of “hyper-” as abundant (hypermassive), improper (hyperactive), and nonlinear (hyperlink) (Freeman 2019, 14). Taken together, this is a vision of queerness as an expanded relationality between different subjects that runs backwards and forwards in time and pays little heed to what constitutes “proper” forms of relationality.

In envisioning queerness thusly, Freeman contends that it is through recognizing this expansive relationality and working to manifest it in our embodied relations with others that LGBT+ people can most fully flourish. Moreover, this is a vision of relationality not delimited solely to LGBT+ people: it is not the case that LGBT+ people should luxuriate in the expansive relationality queerness enacts but straight and cisgender people ought to continue unaffected. Rather, this is a queer reconfiguration that points towards a reimagining of relationality itself.

For Christian theologians, perhaps the most interesting part of Freeman’s analysis is her contention that we can identify forms of this expansive relationality within existing Christian practices. Central to her argument are sacramental practices, which, she argues, act as intersections between broader social and theological formation and quotidian, bodily reality. In particular, she draws on the queer presentation of baptism within Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood to contend that there is something akin to a nascent hypersociality within this foundational Christian practice and the theology that undergirds it. As presented by Barnes, baptism satisfies the three features of this relationality as captured by the “hyper-” prefix. Clearly, baptism brings the baptized into an abundant and expansive web of relations between vast numbers of people in very varied social and geographical contexts. Moreover, these relationships do not, at least in theory, follow lines of propriety: baptism unites people across distinctions of race, gender, and class (Freeman 2019, 169–76). Finally, as queer theologians have previously noted (Jordan 2006, 331), the relationships established by baptism exhibit a peculiar temporality that connects the present and those baptized in the distant past as well as those to be baptized in the future.

It is important to be clear that Freeman is not arguing that, left unreconstructed, dominant configurations of the Christian practice and theology of baptism exhibit the expansive relationality she is advocating for. There is clearly a marked divergence between the image of baptism as presented in Nightwood and that proffered by conventional sacramental theologies, and it is for this reason Freeman (2019, 197) argues the novel is best read as presenting a “countertheology of Catholicism.” Rather, her proposition is that within the practice and theology of baptism, we can find productive material for imagining an expansive, improper, and nonlinear relationality.

This is, I think, crucial for the development of a constructive response to anti-gender discourse from within Christian theology. If anti-gender discourse has the potential to produce a discursive landscape tilted against the flourishing of LGBT+ people and the reimagining of relationality more broadly, then there is a need for an approach to knowing gender that is wholly distinct from this discourse. Freeman’s vision of an expanded relationality provides this, and if Christian practices and theologies are generative for better understanding and envisioning this relationality, it seems clear that this is a generative avenue through which queer theologians can address the damaging effects of the crisis of anti-gender discourse. An expansive queer relationality provides knowledge of non-normative gender identity and expression that moves orthogonally to anti-gender discourse and is therefore able to move the constraints such a discourse throws up for imagining the possible configurations of relationality for all people.

Rendered differently, this is a constructive theological response to the crisis of anti-gender discourse that does not directly contest the knowledge of gender such a discourse produces. Instead, this knowledge is circumvented through references to existing concepts and frameworks within Christian theology. While Freeman (2019, 180–86) draws most extensively on baptism for articulating hypersociality, her sacramental focus also includes the Eucharist as another cluster of Christian thought and practice that is generative for imagining an expansive queer relationality. I think it very unlikely that these two will exhaust the potential of Christian theology here: there are doubtless many other areas of Christian theology that could be deployed to this end. As a purely illustrative example, queer theologians have elsewhere argued that the rhetoric and conceptual frameworks of “sinful incurvature” (Jenson 2007) can be deployed to produce an account of an expansive relationality with pluriform others (Slater 2023). The broad reach of the Christian tradition is replete with examples of sacramental practice that could be productively deployed in reworking queer relationality, and it is a task of queer theologians and their allies to identify and explore these.

Anti-gender discourse works to solidify one invidious approach to knowing non-normative gender identities and expressions. Through theological expansions of queer relationality, Christian theologians can advance alternative knowledge that can point to entirely new ways of knowing and doing this strange phenomenon of gender.

Conclusion

It is quite difficult to predict with any certainty the future of the unfolding crisis of anti-gender discourse. While its prominence is growing in digital spaces, the experiences of the 2022 midterm elections in the United States and the 2024 general election in the United Kingdom suggest the discourse might not have the political salience its proponents have hoped. Regardless of its ultimate trajectory, anti-gender discourse, and its disastrous consequences for LGBT+ people and their allies, is not going away. With its roots in Christian theology, this should be of particular concern to all those with an interest in or commitment to Christian thought and practice. We are not responsible for theologies that harm LGBT+ people, but we are particularly well posed to counter them.

In this article, I presented two approaches from within queer theology that provide generative responses to the crisis of anti-gender discourse. Through one approach, queer theologies can directly contest the knowledge of gender produced by this discourse. Through the other, Christian theology can be deployed in pursuit of an expansive envisioning of relationality that undercuts and sidelines the imaginary of gender produced by anti-gender discourse. Alone, neither will wholly unwind the damage caused by anti-gender discourse. But my hope is that they can be important parts of building a world beyond this discourse and the harm it brings.