“First Our Children, Then Our Gender”: The Anti-Gender Movement in Slovenia

In this paper, we aim to examine the main components of Slovenia’s anti-gender movement, which emerged for the first time in 2009 in the context of the proposed Family Code legislative reform. With time, the movement increasingly relied on the discourse of ‘gender theory’ in order to oppose the rights of LGBTIQ+ people. However, the anti-gender movement’s targets have started to expand to other gender- and sexuality-related issues (e.g. abortion). Our objective is to capture its split into diverse directions, which nonetheless tend to oscillate around the particular notion of family, with the latter serving as the metaphor of national existence. The object of family, placed at the central stage of anti-gender agenda, is approached to in a refractory manner, which enables coalescence of diverse political actors and (sub)agendas. In this way, Slovenian anti-gender movement cluster around the following issues: 1) of marriage equality and LG(B) rights to marriage and adoption, 2) of reproductive rights (abortion, access to hormonal contraception,) and 3) more recently, of transgender rights, primarily in terms of medical and legal gender affirmation. However, despite the refraction to these three main directions, the anti-gender agenda remains loyal to its foundation, that is, to safeguard and (re)consolidate the regimes of gender and sexuality. To achieve this, anti-gender movement relies on framing its claim within two broader frames of anti-intellectualism and of ethno-nationalism. While the former represents the means by which the anti-gender movement delegitimize the role of science, the latter reproduces the ethno-nationalist “imagining” of the Slovenian nation, a broader frame which is peculiar to Slovenian anti-gender movement in the context of the former Yugoslav republics. Additionally, based on examining the split of Slovenian anti-gender agenda into various directions, we also examine how anti-gender actors use democratic practices and discourses to cunningly conceal their exclusionary discursive practices, and how they support the larger authoritarian processes of de-democratization facing Europe and beyond.