In addition to my published essays I’m sharing lectures I’ve given and other writing on gender and racial equity . Please share and cite them accordingly.

Trump’s Dangerous War on Gender Ideology

Kathryn Moeller & Bruna Dalmaso-Junqueira

February 3, 2025

President Trump has declared war on “gender ideology.”  His Executive Orders on Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling and Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government aim to protect women and children from perceived threats to their safety and freedom and attacks on biological sex and heterosexuality.  But the real threat to women and children isn’t liberal indoctrination from gender affirming schools; curriculum on gender and sexuality; or trans girls and women in bathrooms, locker rooms, or domestic violence shelters.  It’s President Trump’s new Executive Orders that codify dangerous, false narratives into law and threaten women and children’s actual rights, safety, and freedoms. 

But what is gender ideology, and is it even real? 

For right-wing populist and conservative Catholic and Evangelical movements, gender ideology is anything feminist, queer, or trans that is a threat to traditional social values.  Over the last three decades, these religious and political actors have organized an anti-gender agenda in regions around the world to rid schools and society of this perceived threat  They fear the influence of feminism, women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and gender studies on their homes, families, schools, and the law.  While there is no such thing as a gender ideology, either in academia or in practice, social and religious conservatives have taken up this war with a vengeance in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ghana, Spain, Hungary, Finland, Poland, and Turkey.  It has been central to the rise of political figures like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Hungarian President Viktor Orbán.    

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, global women’s and LGBTQ movements advanced radical changes in the common sense and in public policies regarding gender and sexuality-based inequalities, including violence against women and LGBTQ communities, which faced heightened discrimination due to the HIV-AIDS epidemic. These movements were institutionalized in the 1980s and 1990s, in part through the United Nations Decade on Women. As scholar Sara Garbagnoli explains, the Vatican and later Evangelical groups feared that “this deconstruction of the sexual order destroys the social order,” thus sowing the seeds for the anti-gender agenda. Since then, these anti-gender campaigns have shifted from primarily religious motivations and actions by largely conservative Catholics and Evangelicals concerned with the collapse of a traditional religious social order towards legal and political ones that more broadly threaten the democratic and human rights foundations of societies around the world. 

Yet, while “gender” has been a lightning rod, as scholars Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk explain in their book on anti-gender ideology in populist movements, these right-wing religious and populist forces are “aiming for a wholesale elite change in the spheres of politics, culture, education and transnational institutions, ending the decades-long ideological and political dominance of progressive liberalism in the West.”  These agendas often articulate with anti-immigrant, nationalist, and white supremacist politics that seek to unify through a politics of fear and hate. 

As seen in Trump’s Executive Order, our research shows that K-12 schools are one of the principal targets of these campaigns. Proponents claim to protect children and youth from being sexualized and manipulated by the gender ideology of “woke” teachers, counsellors, school principals, and policymakers.  This agenda has influenced education in the U.S. and across the world in recent years. These include the anti-LGBTQ bills in Florida, Texas, and other U.S. states that ban books and instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, prohibit gender inclusive bathrooms, deny trans women and girls from participating in sports teams that match their gender, and criminalize parent’s support of trans children’s gender-affirming health care.  Hungary banned content seen to be promoting homosexuality in schools and abolished gender studies in higher education.  In Ghana, this has resulted in intense political contestations over comprehensive sexuality education.   

The Trump administration is now threatening federal funding if schools recognize transgender and nonbinary children and teach about gender, sexuality, and racial inequality in their curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities.  It is also threatening child safety because the orders undermine the role of schools as safe spaces for young people who may not feel safe at home or in their communities.  

These orders are part of a descent into fascist rule.  As philosopher Jason Stanley explains, fascist leaders come to power by conjuring up a mythic past, often one that is patriarchal and imagined to be racially pure or segregated, only to have been destroyed by feminists, queer people, Black people, Jewish people, or immigrants, among other marginalised groups.  Trump, like other authoritarian leaders, has projected this idyllic past, seeking to making the U.S. “great again,” by wiping out any curricular or pedagogical counternarratives.    

It is incumbent upon us, individually and collectively, to resist this descent towards fascism.  We must courageously do so on multiple scales.  In schools, US teachers have much to learn from teachers in states like Florida and Texas and countries like Brazil, who have developed creative practices for incorporating feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist curriculum in their classrooms and schools. For example, scholar Bruna Dalmaso-Junqueira’s research on feminist teachers in Brazil shows that teachers are using covert, non-conventional actions to introduce topics.  One teacher approached the issues of gender and feminism without using the terms and another teacher carefully wove a set of Black feminist lessons into the formal social sciences curriculum. 

This is not a responsibility that teachers should be expected to shoulder alone, however. In communities, families and educators need to organize and make collective demands to their local school boards and political representatives to ensure schools and other public institutions are safe and welcoming for all children and families. On the state and federal levels, policymakers and the courts must act now to genuinely protect children’s, women’s and queer people’s rights to dignity, bodily autonomy, and freedom.  Academics, inside and outside of the U.S., must use their research to support schools, community organizations, and policymakers in fighting against these assaults on safety and freedom in schools and communities, and they too must resist executive orders that threaten higher education and scientific research in government institutions and universities.  

As MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow Aleksandar Hemon asserts, “Fascism is not an idea to be debated. It is a set of actions to fight.” The United States is slipping into a dangerous form of authoritarianism that will damage lives irrevocably and leave millions of its own people behind. The time to fight this is now. 

Feminism in Fascist Times 

November 12, 2018, Lecture at Stanford University

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”  Antonio Gramsci  

As an organizing principle, feminism has become increasingly visible in the public sphere over the past two years.  Feminism has a long intellectual and political history in the U.S. and Brazil.  These include the movements to end slavery; win suffrage; the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s; efforts to end the dictatorship; and the institutionalization of feminism in recent decades through federal offices like the Women’s Secretariat.   

In discussing feminism today, I will borrow Black feminist theorist bell hook’s definition of “feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”  This includes intersecting forms of oppression based on race, class, and other interlocking relations of power. 

With this in mind, what I would like to bring to our conversation today is how the threat of fascism and violence in both in the US and Brazil has galvanized feminist movements the likes of which we have not seen in recent decades, and without which we may end up captive to futures desired by Trump and Bolsonaro and their increasingly violent followers.        

As Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley explains, fascist leaders come to power by conjuring up a mythic past, often one that is patriarchal and racially pure or segregated, only to have been destroyed by feminists, Black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ people or immigrants.  Trump and Bolsonaro have projected this idyllic past, seeking to make our countries “great again.”   

Feminism, born out of patriarchy, is at odds (or at least should be) with this mythic past and desired future.  As we have seen over the past two years, the white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia of Trump and Bolsonaro have provoked powerful feminist movements in both countries.   

The unprecedented women’s marches of 2017 in response to Trump’s election did not just shape and fuel the feminist movement, as journalist L.A. Kaufman explains.  They created a new political moment in the U.S., popularly characterized by #MeToo and #TimesUp.  As Stanford professor Estelle Freedman explains, “The kindling was there, and it got ignited by the misogyny” of the 2016 election.  

The feminist response to Bolsonaro’s rise, as represented by the hash tags #EleNão and #mulherescontrabolsonaro, similarly resulted in the largest women-led march in the country’s history in September. Women-led protests and mobilizations in Brazil are likely to continue into the foreseeable future.      

This new wave of feminism in the U.S., Brazil, and globally is marked by feminists (and women who may have never before identified as feminists) forcefully occupying the public sphere.  And asserting a politics of refusal – refusal to be governed by oppressive regimes that seek to roll-back the rights and opportunities that have been extended to those who have been previously marginalized in our societies – Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and women.   

In Brazil, feminist gains have included quotas for Black and Indigenous peoples in higher education; same sex unions; laws against domestic violence and femicide; and labor rights for domestic employees.  These laws and programs are not perfect, but they moved the country’s moral arc a bit further towards justice.  Bolsonaro has threatened to overturn these laws in order to return to an idyllic past – when Black people didn’t attend public universities; queer people couldn’t be joined together under the law; men could abuse women with impunity; and domestic laborers had no rights. 

Bolsonaro’s seemingly precipitous, yet orchestrated rise has taken hold in a moment of economic decline and increasing violence and fear throughout Brazilian society.  Middle and upper classes, as well as lower classes in many cases galvanized by conservative Evangelical and Catholic religious groups, have supported an increasingly militarized approach to governance and increasingly conservative social politics.   

Similar to the U.S., the consequences of this securitization in Brazil are usually felt by poor, mostly Black communities targeted by increasing militarization.  In March of this year, the assassination of Rio assembly woman Marielle Franco revealed the consequence of speaking out against these policies…. She represented the struggle for a new politics as a queer, Black human rights activist who grew up in the community Maré. She was an elected voice who called out the terrors of state-sponsored racial violence through federal interventions in poor, mostly Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio and beyond.  As a collective of U.S. Black feminist scholars, including Tianna S. Paschel of Berkeley and Keisha-Khan Perry of Brown, have explained, “her death is not a sign of the strength” of a white supremacist, patriarchal state. “Rather, it is a sign of its ever-expanding weakness.”  Weakness that needs to silence oppositional voices that threaten its hegemony.  And no one threatens it more than Black, Brown and queer women.     

I am not romanticizing these struggles. While the feminist response in both countries has been one of the most visible opposition forces these leaders have seen, feminism is not without its own internal contradictions.  The deep fractures of race and class that have always divided women in both countries – rooted in our shared histories of enslavement, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and highly unequal class structures – have not been repaired.  These historical racial and class oppressions have made shared feminist struggles difficult to organize, sustain, and grow. 

Yet even with their flaws, these new feminist movements have produced a powerful politic in our countries. A politic that says enough.  Enough of the hatred and violence.  Enough of the exclusion and oppression.  But this politic is also intensely despised, especially by many conservative and right-wing women who claim that feminists don’t speak for their values.  Rather than garner their support, the women’s movement against Bolsonaro emboldened these women to organize in support of him.  So how do we explain right-wing women (and even women in the middle of the political spectrum) voting against their own “gender interest”?   

First is the so-called media and religious war on “gender ideology,” which has come to mean anything feminist, gay, or trans that “threatens” the traditional religious, patriarchal family.  While there is actually no such thing as a gender ideology either in academia or in practice, conservative Catholics and Evangelicals have taken up this war with a vengeance across Brazil and Latin America. It was a concept was created by the Catholic Church and other conservatives in response to the gains of the feminist and women’s rights movements in the 1990s.   

We’ve seen how this so-called threat of gender ideology has recently influenced Brazilian education, including the Plano Nacional de Educação in 2014, the final version of which removed language promoting equity in regard to gender, sexual orientation, race, and region.   

 Fears of “gender ideology” have also sparked Bolsonaro’s insistence on a so-called “gay kit” – which, in reality, were the curricular materials the Ministry of Education developed to combat homophobia that were never actually distributed.  All of which were proven to be fake news, yet continue to circulate as truth.         

A second explanation is white supremacy.  Brazil, like the US was built upon a foundation of slavery, and racial inequality deeply structures all aspects of society.  The gains of the Black Movement and the Black Women’s Movement in recent decades, particularly ineducation, labor rights, and social welfare, have threatened white Brazilians.   

Much like in the U.S., many white families imagined that racial quotas were robbing their children of a place in federal universities even though this has been shown to be a fallacy since the number of overall vacancies doubled due to the REUNI program expanding the university system.  

Moreover, the gains won by mostly Black domestic employees through the organization of informal workers entitling them to a salary, social security, and hourly limits has created a sense “loss” of privilege for the middle classes who could no longer afford domestic servants.  This particularly affected middle-class women, who were then responsible for housework and childcare previously done by a servant class.  Moreover, these workers, began to enjoy luxuries previously only attainable by middle and upper classes, such as traveling via airplane and owning a car. As white Rio socialite Danuza Leao remarked in a Folha de São Paulo, “que ser rico perdeu a graça,” if the porteiro of your building could also fly to Paris or New York.  This politics of resentment, deeply steeped in anti-Blackness, circulates closely with anti-feminist discourses.  

And lastly, this anti-feminist sentiment is often rooted in a belief that gender discrimination doesn’t exist if you work hard enough, that meritocracy in educational and employment opportunities is fair and just. Meritocracy is a seductive concept.  Who wouldn’t support rewarding those that try the hardest and perform the best? Yet, the empirical reality of gender inequity in Brazil illustrates that meritocracy is not always fair.  It ignores the structural forms of oppression that women face if they are poor, Black, or indigenous.   

In summary, there are multiple reasons why (mostly) white women in Brazil have supported the current anti-feminist regime. In part, it has been the media war and religious attacks on so-called “gender ideology.” Also, important has been resentment against the educational and economic gains not only of women, but also of Black and poor people throughout the country. But just as central to this anti-feminist sentiment is this ideology of meritocracy that so many of our institutions promote.  

Yet, despite these challenges, there are reasons for some cautious optimism. Even in this context marked by hatred and violence, we have witnessed an unprecedented number of women running for and winning offices on every scale in both the United States and Brazil.   These elections are the fruit of feminist organizing and other social movements.  In the recent election, four Black women were elected to the state assembly in Rio de Janeiro, undoubtedly connected to society’s anger and outrage at the assassination of Marielle Franco.  The first trans woman was elected to the state assembly in São Paulo, and the first indigenous woman in the country’s history was elected to the lower house of Congress. The US followed a similar pattern last week, electing the first Muslim and Native women to Congress, among many other firsts. These are true feminist victories, because they are not white women winning, as has occurred over the last century, but women of color, queer women, trans women, and Indigenous women occupying positions of power that have been largely inaccessible until today. 

If we want to move our countries from the brinks of fascism towards more inclusive societies, should these feminists and others, including ourselves, dialogue with fascists?  We will perhaps debate this idea during the upcoming panels.  Yet, as MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow Aleksandar Hemon recently wrote, “Fascism is not an idea to be debated.  It is a set of actions to fight.”  Thus, it may be far more productive for us to imagine the forms of intellectual and collective organizing necessary to support a new politics and the candidates and movements that embody this.  This is the social innovation we need to be collectively responsible for in order to create the future many of us have been waiting for.   

Whiteness in an era of Trump: where do we go from here?

Huffington Post, March 8, 2016

From our kitchen tables and Facebook pages to mainstream and progressive media outlets alike, well-intentioned, white Americans are horrified by Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s blatantly racist comments and his attacks on Black protestors, Muslims, and Mexican immigrants. He’s hanging our country’s racist laundry out to dry.

As well-meaning, white Americans, we are used to more palatable forms of racism that mask their racist roots and make us feel comfortable. We’ve grown so accustomed to seeing the wolf in its thinly veiled sheep’s clothing, and so reluctant to see otherwise, that the wolf itself shocks us. But what we need to recognize is that Trump, the Tea Party, and their followers represent a long history of white racialized politics and white supremacy in America that have benefited all white Americans for centuries. The wolf is of our own creation, and it reflects the benefits and privileges we have all accrued. This historical moment of increasing economic inequality and its devastating effects on the white working and middle class have simply brought this wolf and the white racialized anxiety of its followers into the light. 

As legal scholar Ian Haney López argues, politics in the post-Civil Rights era has been based on dog whistle politics. This term refers to the use of racially coded language to talk about race, racist ideas, and people of color. In contrast to explicit, state-sanctioned racism of the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, in the age of colorblind racism, to talk or act in racially explicit ways has been considered racist. As Haney López explains, white American adapted to this new moment by talking in racially coded terms. Former President Reagan’s rhetoric on ‘Cadillac-driving, welfare queens’ and Sarah Palin’s description of President Obama’s politics as ‘shuck and jive’ are examples of dog whistle language, and former President Clinton’s Welfare to Work program is an example of a dog whistle policy. As white Americans, these didn’t offend us as Trump’s explicit language and policy proposals do today; yet, their underlying meaning was the same.

For many moderates, liberal, and progressive white Americans, Trump’s crudeness offends our polite, well-educated sensibilities. We’re embarrassed by the hordes of white people who show up to cheer him on and vote for him across the country. They lack ‘class’ and desperately cling to their whiteness like it’s the only thing they’ve got left. Decades of neoliberal policies by Republican and Democratic administrations alike have undermined the economic security that working and middle-class whites were guaranteed before their jobs were shipped overseas, trade unions dismantled, and educational, healthcare, and credit card debts skyrocketed. Yet, despite increasing class inequality, white Americans across classes continue to receive the material benefits of whiteness in employment,housing, and financial markets as well as in education, healthcare, and food andwater security in comparison to communities of color.

Thus, rather than attempt to sanitize or censor this new moment of racialized politics by hiding it back in the sheep’s clothing, we need to keep it in the light to expose its true nature. As a country, we need a politics that centers race and racial inequity and enables us to talk about and act upon these in meaningful ways. Only this will enable us to transform the racialized culture and political economy of our country that are predicated on the pernicious system of white supremacy that neither acknowledges nor enables the full humanity of people of color.

This change will necessitate transformations from the level of the unconscious mind to the culture, systems, and structures that influence our everyday lives. These are not simple tasks, yet as white Americans who have long benefited from these systems, we have a responsibility to begin working towards them. 

First, we need to check the ways in which we (un)consciously fail to acknowledge the full humanity of Black people and other people of color. The Project Implicitdoes an excellent job towards helping us to look at the ways our implicit biases - “thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control” - function to distort our perceptions of other human beings. This is important for understanding why a return to colorblind and dog whistle politics is not a solution to our current problem of whiteness. 

Second, we need to strive towards “accountable solidarity” with Black people and other communities of color. This necessitates developing ongoing relationships with individuals and communities of color, standing in solidarity as they take the lead in solving problems that disproportionately affect their communities, and supporting transferences of power in our communities and the nation. Moreover, given this long, inequitable history, as whites, we need to be held accountable for our words and actions.

Third, we need to actively participate in a process of material redistribution by promoting and voting for taxation, education, healthcare, housing, justice, financial, and food and water policies and practices that enable just outcomes for all. This will require undoing decades of neoliberal policies that have had devastating, yet uneven effects on the lives and well-being of the majority of Americans. It will also necessitate reparations for hundreds of years of slavery, the Jim Crow system, and decades of racialized government policies, as Ta-Nahesi Coates and others have articulated.

Together these measures will begin to move us closer towards the possibility of dismantling our country’s racially and economically inequitable system. Given our linked fate in this world, this unequal system hurts us all and leads to devastating, yet unevenly distributed, effects on lives and well-being of communities across our country.

Zika, Pregnancy, and the Embodiment of Inequality

Huffington Post, February 1, 2016

Tragically, pregnancies across the U.S. and around the world are deeply unequal. The outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil and Latin America and its association with microcephaly reflect this reality. Microcephaly is a condition in which newborns are born with an unusually small head and brain. If they survive, infants often face a lifetime of physical and developmental challenges.

During the first trimester of my pregnancy, my partner and I were living and working in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Within days of learning of the virus' presence in the city, we boarded a plane to return to the U.S. Our departure marked the difference between thousands of other parents and us - we had the immeasurable privilege of mobility.

Since October 2015, 4,180 cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil. A generation of Brazilian children will grow up in need of tremendous support; yet, the medical, scientific, and public health communities have limited knowledge of the virus' association to microcephaly. While the recent Center for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization warnings advising pregnant women to postpone travel to countries affected by the virus will hopefully prevent those who would have otherwise traveled for work or pleasure from contracting the virus; women and their partners living in affected countries have little choice but to live in everyday fear.

My partner and I are grateful that we had resources and citizenship privileges to leave. When our local public health department in the U.S. called to say that I tested negative for Zika, we cried in gratitude. It was an unspeakable relief. But we also feel a real sadness. To make a major life decision that so clearly differentiated our unborn child from thousands of others was painful. Consciously embodying inequality is always uncomfortable; yet, this discomfort may be instructive in a world where we would often rather not look at the ways in which our decisions reproduce entrenched inequities.

Pregnancy is a deeply embodied experience. As a researcher of gender and inequality, I am aware of the ways inequality is marked on pregnant female bodies in innumerable ways. Whether in the U.S. or Brazil, privileged, frequently white, middle and upper-class women, such as myself, often spend nine months imagining a nursery, registering for baby gifts, attending prenatal yoga, eating nourishing food, writing a birth plan, and receiving excellent medical care. In contrast, far less-privileged, poor and working-class women, often of color, frequently labor in fields, factories, or other people's homes for the entirety of their pregnancy, placing them at higher risk for environmental and toxic exposure and for the dangers of heavy lifting. They often have limited access to nutritious food and safe drinking water, and receive limited or inadequate medical treatment and preventive care. In many ways, pregnancy marks the beginning of very unequal lives.

As with other infectious diseases, risk of exposure to the Zika virus mirrors racial, class, and geographic-based inequalities that run through all aspects of our lives. While mosquitos don't adhere to zip codes or neighborhood boundaries, outbreaks of infectious diseases tend to disproportionately impact poor and vulnerable populations due to the social, economic, environmental, and medical determinants of health. Poor and working-class women are far more likely than middle-class or wealthy Brazilian women to live in communities whose water and sanitation infrastructure has been neglected by the government for decades creating conditions for mosquitos to easily breed, reside in homes without air-conditioning resulting in open windows and doors, and travel to work at dawn and return at dusk when mosquito activity is at its peak.

As public health officials in Brazil, El Salvador, and other countries tell women to delay pregnancy for up to two years, limited access to affordable contraception, particularly emergency contraception, and strict abortion laws present many women with little recourse. Unfortunately, this leads to an increase in clandestine abortions that pose major health risks to the mother. A Brazilian judge recently began to approve a series of case-by-case legal abortions when a fetus is diagnosed with microcephaly despite intense political and religious opposition.

As feminist Sonia Corrêa has noted, the political approach of governments telling women to avoid pregnancy assumes "women themselves responsible for having or not having babies with microcephaly." This places the onus of responsibility for the condition and its life-long consequences onto women and moves it away from the state, whose insufficient actions since the Zika outbreak, inadequate control of mosquitos during prior mosquito-borne outbreaks, and historical neglect of women's sexual and reproductive health are exacerbating the situation. Moreover, since the outbreak began, women whose infants have been born with microcephaly in Brazil have reported inadequate care and attention by the public health system, which seems unprepared to deal with the crisis. As one mother, Marilia Lima, explained in a story reported on NPR, "We are alone. We have been abandoned by the state."

The impact of the Zika virus' recent outbreak on mothers, fetuses, and newborns serves as a tragic reminder that maternal, prenatal, and infant health are neglected and underfunded on national and global scales. While the Zika virus necessitates immediate coordinated national and regional approaches to combat its spread, the virus is only one of the myriad ways in which lives begin unequally. It is imperative that those with time, resources, and influence pressure their local, state, and national governments, international institutions, and non-governmental organizations to invest money and other resources in research, public policies, medical treatment, and preventive care that prioritize the health and well-being of women, fetuses, and infants who are most at risk.