Míriam Juan-Torres González, an expert in authoritarian populism, polarization, and human rights at UC Berkeley, has been tracing the use and abuse of gender narratives in political spaces for years.
The word is seen as controversial because certain conservative groups portray it as an « ideology » that threatens traditional family values and societal norms.
She told me: “It is very common to see anti-gender actors mobilise around international events like COP but also other efforts to design international treaties. This was most prevalent at the Istanbul Convention to prevent violence against women, where a lot of states pushed against inclusion of the word ‘gender’ in the treaty, or even didn’t sign it.”
“So the fact that this happened at COP30 is not surprising”.
González recently published a report exploring how attacks on women’s rights, feminism and LGBTQ communities are part of a larger effort on the part of authoritarian movements aimed at weaponising gender in order to sow division, distract from corruption, and consolidate power.
The report outlines six strategies, that range from using gender to distract from other issues; to picking a group and depicting them as an existential threat which justifies extreme measures (something we are seeing with migrants, for example, as well as LGBTQ people); to building a disparate movement of groups of people who otherwise might not have a reason to collaborate.
“Gender is a very effective realm to do all of these things for a variety of reasons,” González says. “Issues around gender and sexuality are very complex and personal, so it’s easy to manipulate this and create controversy.”
‘Do you only count the males?’
Aguilar agrees. “What we are seeing here is an attempt to diminish everybody who doesn’t fit certain ideas of what people should look and act like. That is what is so worrisome. Of course they dress this up in the easiest thing to attack – how you live and who you love. But what is beneath it is an attempt to rollback advances in human rights – to set us back to where we were half a century ago”.
What Aguilar finds so infuriating about the interventions at COP is that often the people who you are dealing with in these contexts have a background in science. “Oh, so you all profess to understand the importance of biodiversity but the same doesn’t apply when it comes to human beings?” she scoffs.
“I usually always say to them – let me ask you, you work with animal populations, so when you go to the forest, do you only count the males? Because that sounds really stupid.”
The lesson for Aguilar is the need for courage – and new tactics. “Because the opposition are really good at this,” she said. “I didn’t expect the footnotes!”
As for the COP30 negotiations, “there are things we lost, but we didn’t lose that much,” she said. “We came out of that battle feeling happy, proud.”
Her advice for the rest of us? Find courage, get creative, and keep on fighting.
