Conservatives Around the World Are Peddling a Conspiracy Theory About Sex and Gender Ana Campoy - Quartz
go to original November 5, 2016

A new term has been creeping into the speech of conservatives around the world.

In Mexico, thousands of protesters denounced the spread (link in Spanish) of “gender ideology” in marches against same-sex marriage this September. Weeks earlier, religious groups in Colombia accused the government of wanting to indoctrinate children by teaching “gender ideology” in schools; weeks later, they would accuse officials of injecting similar forms of treachery (Spanish) into an attempted peace deal to end the country’s half-century of civil war.

Activists in Spain and Poland have used the same phrase to combat efforts to recognize that gender identity and sexual orientation go beyond heterosexual men and women. In France, the idea has circulated (link in French) under the slightly different “gender theory.” Even Pope Francis raised the notion last month, urging priestly compassion for individuals grappling with their gender identity or sexual orientation but rejecting “the indoctrination of gender theory” and its “ideological colonization.”

What is this seemingly ubiquitous ideology that has Catholics and other conservatives so nervous? According to them, it’s a worldview, concocted by lesbian academics and radical feminists, that gender has nothing to do with biological differences and can be chosen at will. They characterize it as a dangerous line of thought that threatens to infect children and destroy democracy.

In fact, “gender ideology” is an invention of the right. It’s a hodgepodge of disparate ideas developed by a diverse group of thinkers over the past 50 years, linked mainly in the minds of its opponents. It doesn’t really exist beyond its creators’ manifestos and protest banners, but it’s already helped them score some very real victories.

The Catholic church and other conservative groups have long had a problem with gender understood as the cultural layer of behaviors and traits that societies slather atop biological sex. This perspective challenges many of their notions about how humanity should be organized, modeled in the “family values” ascribed to them. If traditional roles of husband and wife, father and mother, man and woman are merely social constructs, then other identities beyond those binaries become just as valid, injecting chaos into the order of things.

“Gender ideology” is the straw man they invented to fight against this threat. Its origins can be traced back to two United Nations summits that addressed gender inequality and women’s sexual and reproductive rights: the 1994 conference on population and development in Cairo, and the women’s conference in Beijing the following year.

Read the rest at Quartz

Photo:Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski

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