Populist tropes in ‘gender critical’ and TERF Movements – and Potential Progressive Responses

Gadea Méndez Grueso’s paper starts by registering the similarities and overlaps between conservative ‘anti-gender’ and so-called ‘gender critical’ feminist (or TERF) discourses, interpreting them through the lens of populism. More exactly, populism understood as a political ideology sheds light on the common tropes that conservative ‘anti-genderists’ and ‘gender critical’ feminists share. Such tropes include: the partition of society between ‘normal’ ‘common sense’ people and malicious (pro-‘gender’) elites; the nostalgia for an idealized past when the gender and sexual order was uncontested; and an ambivalent attitude toward politics, which results in tropes such as the tendency to see political conflict in a binary and warlike way, a quasi-religious quality (which materializes, for instance, in the figure of the defenseless child under threat of corruption by so-called ‘gender ideology’), and a resorting to conspiracy theories. Méndez-Grueso argues that key ideas developed within populism studies can help us to analyze the blurring of the ideological and discursive divide between anti-gender and ‘gender critical’ groups. The paper closes by imagining what a feminist and trans-inclusive response to these populisms can be.