A Deep-Dive on The Global Anti-Gender Movement

The anti-gender and anti-rights movement is a loosely connected set of groups and money, sometimes working in tandem with governments, who are looking to claw back LGBTQI+ rights and abortion rights that have been realized around the world. Beirne Roose-Snyder, Senior Policy Fellow for the Council for Global Equality, sits down to talk with us about how these movements came to be and the danger they pose to human rights and democratic systems.

The anti-gender and anti-rights movement simultaneously works on a global and domestic scale. Misinformation and information flooding has contributed greatly to the anti-gender and anti-rights movement, undermining expertise and civil society, and creating a world in which no factual information can be trusted. From a domestic perspective, this can be very closely intertwined with authoritarian and anti-democratic movements. In a move to diminish civil society, the anti-gender movement will often target organizations that promote or support LGBTQI+ rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, or other human rights—whether through formal complaints or targeted harassment and abuse. For example, in Uganda, the anti-gender government targeted Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a Kampala-based LGBTQI+ human rights nonprofit. Similarly, Boston Children’s Hospital has faced an extreme increase of threats and harassment for providing gender-affirming healthcare.

The sexual and reproductive health and rights movement and the LGBTQI+ movement are being out funded by the anti-gender, anti-rights movement at incredible rates. In addition, U.S. religious institutions are not required to report their funding activities. Between 2013 and 2017, LGBTQI movements worldwide received 1.2 billion dollars in funding, while the anti-gender movement received 3.7 billion in funding.

Links from this episode

Council for Global Equality on Twitter
Council for Global Equality on Facebook
Power Over Rights – Center for Feminist Foreign Policy
Rights at Risk – Observatory on the Universality of Rights
Exporting Disinformation - Mozilla Foundation
Manufacturing Moral Panic – Global Philanthropy Project

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of rePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So first I just wanna kick off the episode by saying thank you. We had so much love and support and well wishes about the growing of rePROs and how we're growing into a fuller initiative beyond just the podcast. It just made my heart so happy. It's just so wonderful to see the outpouring of love we got. So thank you. I really appreciate it. I know Rachel really appreciates it. It made both of us very, very happy. So thank you. And I can't wait to see what we build together next. I just wanted to take a couple minutes in the intro to reflect on, we recently just passed a hundred days post the Dobbs decision that took away abortion rights and a lot has changed in that time, right? And seems like a really important time to kind of reflect on that. And the Guttmacher Institute actually put out a report that looked into some of the numbers and the data of what this has meant. So let's talk about it. Right? Since the Dobbs decision, 66 clinics across 15 states have been forced to stop offering abortions. Now this is having a huge impact. Those 15 states are home to almost 22 million women of reproductive age. And you know, we know that that's bigger than that, right? It's not just about those 22 million women of reproductive age because we know that women aren't the only people who are able to get pregnant. There are people who don't identify as women who aren't being caught in that data. So we know that the 22 million women is actually bigger and that means that 29% of the total population of women of reproductive age in the US live in states where abortion is either unavailable or severely restricted. That is a ginormous impact. There are so many people who are being impacted by these terrible laws, preventing them from accessing basic healthcare. You know, it really gave me an opportunity to reflect on some of the things that I can do to help support. So, you know, I did another round of donating to abortion funds, to Keep Our Clinics. I think that those are both really important. You know, donating to abortion funds ensures that patients who need to travel or can't afford to access abortion are able to get the support they need, but also Keep Our Clinics is also really important to donate to if you are able because it makes sure that the clinics can stay open. So, you know, there are clinics left behind in those states where abortion is banned, but they are providing family planning services or doing so many other really important reproductive health related things that they need our support to make sure that they can stay open to provide the care that they're able to provide in states where abortion is currently banned. So, you know, if you're able to also make sure to donate to Keep Our Clinics, you know, I know times are hard and it's not always like donating isn't always something you can easily do.

Jennie: I also think, and it's something we've talked about on the podcast before, of just having conversations with friends and family in places where you feel like you can have them. It's just really important that we are changing hearts and minds because that is so important to ensuring that everyone is able to get the abortion care they need and the love and support they need by building communities who are supporting abortion care. So, you know, even if you don't feel like you can donate, you can always talk to friends and family or you can try to talk to friends and family. Sometimes those aren't easy conversations, but changing hearts and minds is really important. Another thing I do is, I think I've talked about this before, is I have bought a huge range of abortion fund or other abortion related t-shirts and I wear them out so that people can see 'em and you're spreading, you know, the message that abortion is healthcare or everyone loves someone who's had an abortion. I have a full range. You know, there's bags, there's so many things you can do to just spread the word that I think can always be really helpful. So yeah, it's, I just, I don't know, a hundred days post-Roe just made me sit and think about what little things that I can do. So I just thought I would share some small ideas of things that you could do if you were interested. Okay. With that, I'm really excited for this week's interview one because I always love talking to my friend Beirne. But because we've been so focused on everything happening domestically, I mean for obvious reasons, there is so much happening; it was nice to be able to take a step back and talk a little bit more about the global side because there is also things happening there. And this will relate to some other conversations we've had on the podcast where we've talked about how we need to be talking about trans rights and abortion care together. Cause they're very similar issues, right? They're both about bodily autonomy. They both have the same enemies of people who are attacking them. There's very similar things happening on a global stage. And so I talked to my wonderful friend, Beirne Roose-Snyder at the Council for Global Equality, all about the anti-gender movement and what we are seeing happening around the world and what they are doing. So with that, let's turn to my conversation with Beirne to talk about the anti-gender movement. Hi Beirne. Thank you so much for being here.

Beirne: Hi Jennie. It's so wonderful to be back with you.

Jennie: I'm so excited to have you. Okay. Before I forget cuz I feel like I've done this for like a couple episodes, I get so excited to talk to the person I skip over. Do you wanna take a quick second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Beirne: I would love that. My name is Beirne Roose-Snyder. I use she/her pronouns and I'm the Senior Policy Fellow for the Council for Global Equality, which is a DC based coalition of 32 organizations, human rights organizations and LGBT rights organizations, promoting rights of LGTQI+ communities worldwide.

Jennie: Awesome. Um, I am so excited to talk to you today. I feel like we've had similar conversations on the podcast before where we've talked about domestically, right? Why we need to talk about repro rights and LGBTQ rights or trans rights together. But this is like a similar thing that we need to talk about globally and it's part of like a bigger movement that we're seeing globally among anti-gender and anti-rights groups. So maybe let's just kind of talk about like what is happening globally?

Beirne: Yeah, well I'm gonna try not to sound too dispiriting. Yeah. This whole time. And I, I really appreciate sort of the opportunity to try to try to get into this with you. Cause in the global sphere, you know, we've really have this understanding of the, the global anti-gender or sometimes called the anti-rights movement. And, and this is really a loosely coordinated and loosely connected set of groups and money working oftentimes with governments who are really looking to - claw back in many cases the LGBTQI+ rights and abortion rights that have been realized in the, the last 40 years or so. But they're also not just, it's not just a reactionary movement. They're asserting like a whole new set of who gets rights and what type of rights. That's why oftentimes it's called the anti-rights movement because oftentimes you hear them, the opposition, the anti-gender movement, talk about gender ideology, which is sort of their notion around radical gender feminists, what they've oftentimes called the “homosexual agenda”. And they view it as the “natural order” of things. So you oftentimes hear them talking about the natural state of family, the natural state of hierarchy between men and women. And so they have this view of what we would think of as the reproductive health rights and justice and LGBTQI+ rights movements as gender ideology that's being pushed over these last 40 years or so. I think it's really important to understand that that's how they're using it and that they are couching us all as a single movement in opposition to what they view as traditional institutions and traditional family structures. So it's, it's oftentimes very hard to articulate clearly in part cause you're sort of being anti-anti, which is the worst position to be in for advocacy. Cause we wanna be putting forward our positive view of ourselves, our positive view of the world, the positive view of what's possible in relationships. So that's a little messy, but I think it becomes a little bit more clear when we start thinking about how it shows up in movements and rhetoric and politics worldwide. I do just wanna say sort of some sense of introduction is that the reason I think it's really exciting for me to get to talk to your podcast about the anti-gender movement and anti-rights movement is that, that are really are one and the same-- that it's, it's an important bucket for people in the US to understand what we're dealing with. There can be a tendency to not really wanna see this whole big loose global movement cause it's exhausting and it makes you feel and sound a little like you've embraced conspiracy theories, but folks dealing with anti-trans state legislation and book banning by school boards this week and folks who have been dealing with the unrelenting waves of anti-abortion law and policy really need to know how much it's connected and that each of those wildly overwhelming things that people are dealing with at the state and local and federal level in the United States, it's being manufactured by the same loosely connected global movement. And there are incredible similarities by what's being faced in Hungary right now and what's being faced in Oklahoma. And we're all gonna be stronger if we can recognize it and organize around it.

Jennie: There were like a whole field of like red flags, like everywhere and like all the things you said, right? Like talking about the “natural family” and a lot of traditional, like I just, Beirne and I have worked in in coalitions together and just, you hear these words and like we're used to it…and where this comes from. So like for us they're like these ginormous red flags that I think in the domestic context, like they're like smaller red flags. But like when you start talking globally how this stuff is talked about…they're like the big thing that we need to be talking about.

Beirne: Yeah. And, and I think we've talked about this before on the podcast, but oftentimes there can be a real disconnect between how people working on global advocacy, advocacy at the UN level, or advocacy based off of international human rights documents... So, so people in Kenya and Bangladesh may be using very similar language to talk about sexual and reproductive health and rights, but the US domestic advocacy sphere has its own set of vocabulary as well as our own sense of actors. And oftentimes we end up feeling quite disconnected. And this is a really important opportunity, as depressing as it is, to see some of the sort of global solidarity and similarity opportunities. And it's really hard to, to talk and advocate against the anti-gender movement by design. Judith Butler had a really great piece in The Guardian last year where she sort of said, it's hard to fully reconstruct the arguments or the actors by the anti-gender ideology movement because they don't hold themselves to any kind of standards of consistency or coherence. They assemble and launch incendiary claims in order to defeat what they see as gender ideology or gender studies by any rhetorical means. And so that's why oftentimes we feel like we're playing whack-a-mole as we try to formulate all of our really good experts, our very careful language and, and we're, we're sort of boxing against smoke cause they aren't bound by any of the same expectations we have for ourselves. And I do wanna say, you know, translating a lot of what's happening globally to the podcast context, there's just been extraordinary research and work in the last couple of years, these sort of issues and trying to get to the core of that smoke cloud of the anti-gender movement. I really wanna acknowledge all of these activists and researchers who have been working really thanklessly on it for years. I know that you always do an amazing job of linking to resources at the end and, and we'll make sure to share some of these that are really great work, but also just I think for American advocates who can feel so tired, so in a defensive position, it can be really powerful to read some of these and understand both how big the problem is, but also how not alone we are. Power Over Rights from the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy is really useful. As well as a document called Rights at Risk from the Observatory on the Universality of Rights. There is a report on Exporting Disinformation from the Mozilla Foundation, which is really about the use of influencers and Twitter in Kenya to influence dialogue about abortion rights there. I learned so much from that. And Global Philanthropy Project has a bunch of great documents, but especially Manufacturing Moral Panic, which really is all around how faith-based and gender restrictive groups work across religious denominations and work transnationally to use children and child protection rhetoric to manufacture moral panic and mobilize it against human rights, especially those about gender justice, which for anyone living in Florida or Oklahoma or Texas should sound so familiar.

Jennie: Right.

Beirne: And there's, there's a whole playbook of how do you manufacture a moral panic using child protection as your argument? So the immediate thank you to all of these experts and, you Jennie, could do a marathon of guests on the links to fascism, the links to the use of misinformation in technology, the way elected officials use the anti-gender movement and the movement uses and enlists elected officials. You could do so much on this and it's, it's really hard to start. But as a sexual and reproductive health rights and justice movement, we're pretty far behind and um, this is a great chance to, to think a little bit about what our, our global colleagues have been facing, winning and losing on for the last, you know, 40 years.

Jennie: I think the other bucket of things, I mean all of that and yeah, we'll definitely have to like have more conversations about this because it is such a big movement and it is having such a huge impact on so many things globally and domestically. One of the things we actually talked about before we started to record but has been a refrain in other times, we've talked about repro and trans rights together, was the use of anti-science, right? Being like so based in anti-science. And I think that's something that as a domestic audience we can understand very well because we see it in in abortion restrictions, we see it and a lot of anti-trans stuff happening right now and so many other things. But this is also happening globally.

Beirne: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that we've really seen in the last three to five years is the use of misinformation and sort of information flooding. So that sense of like, well you can't trust anything and that's different than just the anti-science attacks we've seen in the United States. Cause it's creating a world in which you shouldn't trust any of it. Not just, not just science undermines expertise in a way that is particularly harmful for our movements that have been really grounded in data and facts. So that is coming back with maternal mortality statistics for unsafe abortion or for, you know, the importance of the links of contraception to child health outcomes. None of those work in a world that is post-information and it lets this anti-gender movement be very context specific. So in the United States we see a lot of free speech push and language around it and sort of the cancel culture rhetoric that is used. That's a really powerful tool of the anti-gender movement that wouldn't necessarily work in other countries where maybe they may be making class-based arguments or you know, fear of communism based arguments that might work for a different audience. And again, cause they can be so flexible and context specific, that once you throw out the idea of expertise and science and sort of the beloved use of citations and footnotes, then you get into a world in which you can just create anything that works rhetorically to get to the end result you want. Yeah, it can be really hard for all of us.

Jennie: Yeah, just the like the just vibes, no facts. Like just yeah, this is how it feels. Yeah, this feels right. Yeah.

Beirne: Uh, and I mean to do a lot of the bleak stuff up front, right? One of the things that we see globally and, and I think it's important for us to see domestically is that it, it doesn't happen everywhere, but it really leads and is intertwined with authoritarian and anti-democratic movements. I think this is something we have a sense of, we're using it in the political context in the United States more this year than we ever have before. But you oftentimes see within the anti-gender movement this real shared interest in the past, which is also like a very key feature of fascism, undermining science and independent expertise, right? Like we were just talking about, and then diminishing or destroying independent civil society. And that's another one of those things that's very much global language. And in the US we don't necessarily sort of talk quite as much about the importance of civil society, but civil society generally refers to like a huge array of organizations, community groups, non-governmental organizations, labor unions, indigenous groups, charitable foundations and orgs, faith-based organizations, sort of all of that fits within civil society. It's much bigger than just organizations. But we oftentimes talk about civil society as civil society orgs in the US-- that's gonna be everyone from the national ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Human Rights Campaign, all the way down to our, our local, oftentimes, our nonprofit clinic or, and like organizations that may be doing education, community building around sexual reproductive health rights and justice. It may be our faith-based groups in our communities as well as national level organizations. Civil society encompasses all of that. And we see a lot of these anti-democratic governments and also the pre governments, right? The movements that are trying to come into government going after this third sector of civil society and to try to diminish it. And they usually start with these gender wedges. They start with us and the LGBTQI+ movement. So like right now, this, this as we speak, the government of Uganda has [attacked] SMUG, which is Sexual Minorities Uganda, and their ability to be a registered organization. This is happening concurrently with complaints against other LGBTQI organizations and the human rights organizations that support and defend them, like literally defend them as their lawyers. Some of these are official complaints and some are more individual harassment and targeting that should sound really familiar with the combination of targeted harassment of individuals and public complaints that like abortion providers in the US have faced for decades. And that we were seeing, you know, everything from clinics providing gender affirming care to drag lunches or drag brunches, uh, in the last few months in the United States, it's the same type of creating individual harassment, government targeting, really bogging down civil society working on LGBT rights, abortion rights, gender equality, bogging them down in both individual fear and government, and you know, harassment, needing to fill out new forms, go through new processes. When you're doing all of this stuff, you're not providing patient care, you're not providing support groups, you're not doing the, the work that you're supposed to be doing. And so this is oftentimes the starting place of governments and they may start with LGBTQI groups, especially trans rights. They may start with abortion rights depending on sort of the internal makeup of the government or community. They don't end there. Closing civil society space, closing off that third sector is a way to make all of our world smaller and make the role of government much, much bigger, which is an integral part of building an authoritarian government. And so we oftentimes see in Hungary, we're seeing it for sure, it's a constant battle for civil society activists and feminists in Kenya. It's been a, a huge challenge in Tanzania right now. You we're seeing it in Poland as well. These gender wedges of abortion rights and LGBTQI rights. And you see the targeted harassment along with state investigation or sanction propaganda laws. They're very similar to what we're seeing in Florida and Texas and other places in the United States. They don't stop there, which is one of the reasons that it's so important for us to get a better view of, of what we're dealing with.

Jennie: Okay. That was dark and and bleak, but I think we need to get to like the next big chunk, which is like funding. Like how, how is this movement funded?

Beirne: There's quite a few good, good reports and it's, it's a huge amount of investigative work for folks to try to figure this out. The Global Philanthropy Project has done a couple really excellent reports, including one from 2020 called Meet the Moment. The situation is pretty bleak on both LGBT rights globally and abortion rights globally. We are being, we as the sexual and reproductive health rights and justice movement, are being outspent at incredible rates. The Meet the Moment report is really interesting. They put a lot of notation into the fact that it's likely their numbers are bleak and I'll share them in a second. But it's, it's a huge under count for two really interesting reasons. One is less traditional resource mobilization. So the anti-gender movement has a lot of success with some of the very modern types of fundraising, YouTube influencers, GoFundMe, other types of influencers, new media opportunities that are not gonna be tracked through like normal fundraising apparatus. So it's just, we just don't know, but we have a sense that there's a lot of money being raised that way. There's also a very traditional reason that we think this is a really huge under count, which is US religious institutions are not required to report their funding activities. So think about that. Yeah. And think about what we know about evangelical church power and money in the United States and what we know about Catholic church money and power in the United States. So these are not, this is not antireligious sort of hype. The two huge sources of funding for the anti-gender movement, particularly money coming from the United States, is evangelical money and Catholic money; not Catholic individuals, Catholic institutions. So with those two caveats that US religious institutions are very big, very big and not required to report their funding activities, and these new type of sort of YouTube funding mechanisms, I mean that's such a, like a reduction in this way of describing it. But with those two caveats, you know, we basically see, between 2013 and 2017, as an example, LGBTQI+ movements worldwide received in this report 1.2 billion in funding while the anti-gender movement received 3.7 billion. So more than triple on paper, the amount of funding. So we're being outspent in that sphere, we're being outspent three to one. So there's really interesting movement of money. A lot of money does come from the United States and it goes across the world, which makes the fact that oftentimes abortion rights activists, reproductive rights activists, LGBT rights activists, in a lot of the world are accused of being funded by Westerners importing Western values…which is incredibly disingenuous when many of the anti-abortion laws, most of the anti-abortion and anti LGBT laws are colonial laws. And so much of the money propping up the anti-gender movements and politicians is coming from the United States in a period in which the Global Philanthropy Project was looking at during, in the report Meet the Moment you see just like 11 US orgs associated with the anti-gender movement sending at least a billion dollars. And again, these are the orgs, these are not the religious groups that don't have to report. These are just like 11 orgs sending at least a billion dollars around the globe. And of that, about 250 million went to Asia, about 250 million went to South America, 238 million went to Africa, 70 million to Russia, a million to Europe. That's just 11 organizations based in the US associated with the anti-gender movement. So, really important to understand that when we are thinking about the money movement and the rhetoric, a lot of money is coming from the US and from religious based actors in the US. It's not exclusive though. And I think there's been some really good mapping done by groups around the world just trying to figure out who it is that's influence, like who their enemy is, who's, who's messing up their, their advocacy priorities, their clinic availability, their ability to work in coalition together. I think the report about misinformation and the use of influencers to really change the conversation about abortion in Kenya, the author there found that most of that money was coming from Citizen Go for groups in the US; that may be a group you've, you've never heard of, but it's a big actor, it's, its Spanish, right? I

Jennie: Wanna say yes, but now I'm questioning myself. Beirne: I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Spanish, and it's putting a ton of money into like branding and tech and youth mobilization on both anti-abortion and anti-gender [movements]. They have a huge amount of resources and are probably one of the largest, sort of external to the United States, funding actors in this. We're really willing to, you know, pay Instagram influencers in Kenya to be spreading misinformation messages about abortion. The other big actor that comes up again and again is the Alliance Defending Freedom or ADF. They are interesting cause we see them come up again and again in the United States as well as these, these global attacks. They're one of the few that I think that often used meme of, of the slightly crazed looking guy with all of the pins on the end strings, connecting all the different things behind him. That is what you sound like when you get into Alliance Defending Freedom staff funding flows, who they're connected to.

Jennie: Yeah. And you may look like that meme, but you're not wrong to look like that meme.

Beirne: Yeah. They're everywhere. And, and I think it's important as we think about what do we do is to think about how do we message this, right? How do we message the money? I think so often one of the successes of the anti-rights movement is to make everything sound or seem organic and local. So it's that Poland is defending Polish values, It's that Texas is defending Texas values, and they've been very successful at making things seem grassroots, community led, mothers led. I really cannot stress enough that everyone should read Manufacturing Moral Panic… They've been very successful at that. And I think figuring out how, even as independent community activists, as local groups, as national US organizations, however we're situated, making sure that we feel really comfortable and trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but being honest about it, which is it's a shadowy network of people putting forward manufactured grassroots outrage and funding it not from within the community, from the big donors that they accuse us of having, knowing and being able to articulate how much we're being outspent can actually be a really powerful advocacy tool. Being able to say this is not an indigenous-to-Kenya issue. This is being funded, bought, paid for by Citizen Go and outside interests. It's not a type of rhetoric we've oftentimes engaged in, but I think we do need to think about it cause I think it's a place where we're really, we've let the anti-gender movement set the terms and the tone a lot on that in particular.

Jennie: Okay. I feel like we've already started to like turn the corner into like what do we need to do to, to like push back on all this? I mean having this big kind of amorphous, like you talked about fighting smoke, like how do we as the movement in support of sexual and reproductive health rights and justice, like how do we fight back?

Beirne: Really easy question, right? Like we have that answer. It's just like this one thing and sign this one petition and we'll, it'll all… I actually really hope that this can be an ongoing conversation cause I don't think, I certainly don't have all the answers and I think a lot of the answers come in messy and loving and complicated ways from within our own movement and also from the global movement that we're all part of. I mean I think the obvious thing that everyone knows and all your listeners know is that we do just need, we need more government and foundation investment and we need to find ways to, to get especially that government investment in ways that are gonna be sustaining the funding gap; we just can't ignore it. So, you know, all of the listeners can’t be like, “cool, I've got a clean hundred million dollars that I can commit to this.” Of course not. But I think thinking about how we can work cross movement to manage and maintain the, the conversation about funding and funding gap is, is important. I, and this kinda gets to, it sounds a little cheesy, but I do think that thinking of ourselves as a global rights movement with a shared vision for a world where everyone has rights to their own bodies, relationships and lives can actually be really powerful. We're not isolated. We're not fighting a singular fight at our school board meeting or our, our state legislature or in our court. We're part of a global movement and one that we all really believe in on a really practical level. All of the data show that early, loud and visible mobilization and solidarity mobilization for solidarity is incredibly important. Dividing and conquering, fragmenting is a really powerful tool of the anti-gender movement and very successful one. So when you're sitting in your staff meeting, when you are sitting planning your own work plan, be a little careful saying, “well is that really my lane?” When we see a threat, it's important for us to go out loud and clear in opposition or defense for the marginalized community. We cannot shy away from it. And it's really important to make sure that we are going out hard and taking up space with collective voice. Sign on letters, sign on letters that we are printing in big newspapers that have a huge cross section of groups or a huge cross section of academics is actually, it's not an empty thing. We've seen it be a really important tool, especially for not letting fringes be allowed to speak for the whole. And that's particularly important with the fragmenting voices like we've seen in England in particular, letting these really, really fringe anti-trans voices speak so much that they've become the mainstream. So the very visible, very cross movement solidarity and speaking with an open letter, a sort of sense of the movement can be really important to isolate the fringes that will say, “well I'm trans but I'm opposed to grooming” and not letting there be any oxygen for these type of incredibly fringe groups. Something that we, we talk about, I feel like quite a bit ,but is demonstrably successful in pushing back on the anti-gender movement is to develop hope-based messages. Not just talk about what our threats are, talk about what we hope for and what we work for, not what we're threatened with. And it's really hard, especially at midterms time, talking about the threats is second nature to a lot of us. But it is really important to try to flip and reframe and be talking about the world we are building and what we are hoping for for ourselves, for our communities, for our kids. It's a little off book but for folks that this resonates with, talk to your faith communities to take a stand and take up more space. There's been a huge gap left cause moderate, neutral liberal faith denominations and individual churches and synagogues and meetings oftentimes take neutrality as their best internal option. They don't wanna go down the road of all the meetings it would take to try to have a position on something. This is a space where neutrality is not, it's not a thing. And one of the reasons I think the anti-rights framing can be successful in that space and again, the hope message in that space. But I think for a lot of us who are very religious but don't see that as a space that we should be actively agitating for them to take stands, put out statements, I think we saw a lot of churches and synagogues and mosques and meetings put out statements around racial justice, which was a really big step for a lot of groups. I think a lot of people are struggling to keep them on target of continuing to do work internally on that. But I think it shows that it's possible and that it's possible for us to push the communities we're part of, especially the faith communities we're part of to be outspokenly on the side of bodily autonomy. The ability to, to choose what happens to your body, who you love, who you're with. And those are the sort of core and the international framing. Those are the core sexual and reproductive health and rights that we're, we're fighting for. So that's my a little off the beaten track suggestion.

Jennie: I think it's important and it's always great to see faith voices speaking out because so often the really loud voices are being heard as the only faith voices. So even within some of those denominations, like it's really important to see groups like Catholics for Choice and others speaking out to say that, you know, the, the hierarchy doesn't speak for the, for the members, like that is just as important.

Beirne: Well. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, the, the anti-gender movement is hard to pin down in many ways, but at the same time we saw them in the United States to find themself somewhat clearly during the Trump administration and they did it through two different pieces and a bunch of other sort of behind the scenes stuff that really in some ways defined their terms for us, right? And, and showed us their hand in a way that was both horrifying and very destructive but also helpful. And those two things that the Trump administration did that are sort of classic anti-gender movement things… cause both of what they contained but also their goal, they really undermine in international institutions, which is like a big piece of the anti-gender movement… and those two pieces were the Commission on Unalienable Rights and the Geneva Consensus Declaration. And I know folks have talked about these two pieces on your podcast before, but I think it's so, there's such clear examples of where in the Commission on Unalienable Rights, understanding that as a core action of the anti-gender movement where they pulled together a stacked deck of seemingly reasonable experts to reorder a hierarchy of rights outside of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the entire UN system that has come after it and really saying there is a hierarchy to rights and set aside LGBT rights, abortion rights, repro ,all of us and us as a movement. They set it aside as not within what the Commission on Unalienable Rights should talk about because those are not rights, those are contentious social issues. So the very existence without even the outcome documents, which also are deeply unhelpful, it really has, you know, it sets up, I mean it's just like sort of a perfect anti-gender movement moment. And I will say that's actually another opportunity, um, with both the Commission on Unalienable Rights and then the other big Trump administration piece, which was the Geneva Consensus Declaration. I think it's really important to understand that these things haven't magically gone away cause that administration has gone away and there's a lot of advocacy opportunity there. Ask your institutions, ask your universities to stop platforming these people. They're putting out an alternative version of human rights frameworks that does not include us. And that is not something you have to like passively accept. So I will just note, like right now Georgetown University is, is hosting a, a big speaking event for Peter Berkowitz from the Commission on Rights to talk about that work and [his] document. If that's your institution, ask them not to, or ask them to have a more robust space where it's challenged. Don't just let them platform this alternative view of rights frameworks that doesn't include us and only grounds rights in family and faith in a way that intentionally excludes abortion rights, reproductive rights, the right to decide who, when and if you marry. I mean, all of these things that are so core to who we are, and we’re being excluded from that. So I think it's fair to ask your universities, ask your institutions about why that's the message that they're choosing to share. And oftentimes it's the anti-gender movement. Again, it can look like smoke, but recognizing that each of those platforms is really important for them normalizing it, I think it's reasonable to, to, to ask more questions before your university or your institutions throw money at that world view.

Jennie: Oh man, I could talk to you for so long but maybe let's just wrap it up there. I think that's like a good place to stop as always, it was a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Beirne: Thank you so much for having me Jennie.

Jennie: Okay y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Beirne. It's always intimidating to talk about the anti-gender movement cause as we talk about in the podcast, it's really big and amorphous and kind of hard to see, but they are really , they're doing a lot globally and it's really important that we see these connections not just on the global stage, but how it is coming back to the US and how people in the US are supporting attacks on rights in other countries. So I'm just really glad that we were able to talk about it on the podcast today. With that, we will end it.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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