“The religious right has turned its sights on a new secular bogeyman”

An interesting and balanced article in that hotbed of radical leftism, the Financial Times: The front line of the new gender wars. It looks at the Catholic Church’s war on so-called “gender ideology” and how it’s been picked up by right-wing populists and religious conservatives worldwide. The article attempts to give context to the culture war in which trans people find their very existence weaponised.

From the US and Brazil to Poland and Hungary, tilting against “gender ideology” plays to a particular constituency: disaffected voters who perceive they have been marginalised due to identity politics gone mad, and that their needs have been subordinated to the interests of outsiders, be they foreign or dark or queer.

To this constituency, the special pleading of an entitled minority threatens to encroach on the wellbeing of the majority. What makes the politics of this so complex, in the US and the UK at least, is that people putting forward this argument find themselves aligned with some feminists.

 


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