A Note On "Gender Ideology"

A 2020 document titled Understanding the Resourcing of the Global "Anti-Gender Ideology" Movement by the Global Philanthropy Project[1] states:

In recent decades, we have witnessed a confluence and re-framing of multiple longtime anti-rights movements under the banner of a global "anti-gender" movement which attempts to codify and enforce the concept that biological sex represents the "natural" order while gender is an invention and an "ideology."

There are a few key vectors or nexus points for the organization of the movement, including the World Congress of Families... Agenda Europe... the International Organization for the Family... the Alliance Defending Freedom... the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ)... the Christian Broadcasting Network... religious institutions such as the Catholic Church, private funding through wealthy individuals or corporations such as Grupo Bimbo, and funding through government institutions such as ministries of health or education.

Alarmingly, the level of funding for actors in the anti-gender movement between 2013-2017 far outpaced funding to the global LGBTI moment in the same period. Between 2013-2017, LGBTI movements worldwide received $1.2 billion, while the anti-gender movement received $3.7 billion.

The rise of the anti-gender movement, which advocates for legal and social systems that are based on patriarchal and "traditional" values, presents a threat to progress made in advancing gender equality. Efforts to address LBQ, trans, and intersex issues are an important part of working towards gender equality. Indeed, many LBQ, trans, and intersex-led organizations and movements are advancing gender equality and responding to the threat of conservative, anti-rights movements at the local, national, and global levels.

This document is being highlighted because it quickly illustrates both the scale and the scope of the counter-progressive movement which threatens the advancements being made by women and LGBTI people since the invention of private property - something that we will examine closely to understand the problem at its foundation.

Simply put, as humanity made technological advances around the time of the establishment of agriculture, we went from a phase of sustainable production of life's necessities to a surplus production and, therefore, the ability for humans to accumulate wealth. However, humanity is still not developed enough to make every human being wealthy, so this places us in the era of wealth inequality. In this era emerged structures and systems where wealth inequality is enforced through violence and psychological manipulation. It should not be a surprise that people who are consciously aware of their unequal and lower status choose to rebel against it, and their rebellion is answered with repression.

So if wealth inequality has been a fact for a long while, and it is better than not having any wealth at all (such as returning to something like the hunter-gatherer era) how does humanity decide who becomes wealthy? It's a good question but outside of the scope of this discussion, so we will instead focus on one structural process: wealth inheritance. All people die yet wealth continues to accumulate, and without this accumulation this era of humanity could not exist - it would cease to function. This accumulation happens primarily through the intergenerational transfer of wealth in the structure of the family.

The "patriarchal and traditional values" that the anti-gender movement desires to return to is in line with the patriarchal and traditional family. That is, back when the man accumulated all the wealth, the wealth was passed down through men, the women and children were objects, and gender and sexual transgressors were controlled, outlawed, repressed, or exterminated. The family is the economic nucleus of civilization, the material reproducer of humanity during the eras of private wealth generation. The family can be thought of as having gone through "reforms" over the decades, such as with women's rights, children's rights, and gay and transgender rights. A certain amount of deviation from the traditional model was won through the struggle against the patriarchal family. The struggle to protect the family has mainly been the struggle to protect wealth, to reverse these reforms, cloaked under various disguises, and any "weakening" of the family is in fact a threat to the current economic order.

This library mostly contains works on women's oppression, but this is because women constitute the mass of resistance against the patriarchal and traditional family. It is all applicable to sexuality-and-gender-diverse people because in the big picture we primarily struggle against the same problem. In other words, the women's movement and the queer movement overlap in the material basis for their oppression, and have everything to gain from unity and mutual understanding. This needed to be said explicitly, as it is difficult to find works that describe this situation in such a manner.

This was all vastly oversimplified to conclude that it is extremely beneficial and necessary for all progressive-minded people to learn about the women's struggle as a complement to understanding and overcoming their own struggles. It is for everyone. "Gender ideology" is thus a code phrase for any ideas that challenge the disintegrating and archaic system of private wealth accumulation at its nuclear core. Once it is understood this way, we have the power to unite against a common adversary.

May your studies be fruitful, so that we can invent and discover something beyond the family and beyond civilization.