When does anti-gender mobilization impact transgender rights? Global patterns of rights recognition and anti-transgender persecution

With the emergence and growth of transnational anti-gender networks in the last decades, campaigns against transgender rights have been on the rise and are increasingly obtaining success in their persecution of transgender minorities. In many countries, the popularization of these campaigns are associated with multilevel factors such as right-wing populism; alliances between religious and secular authorities; and economic anxiety. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which conditions are more likely to enable these anti-rights campaigns to succeed in undermining the rights of transgender people in some countries and not others. In this paper, I employ panel data with two-way fixed effects to assess which country-level characteristics – such as regime type, economic development, political influence of religious authorities, and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people – are associated with changes in the status of transgender rights in the period from from 2000 to 2021. By identifying factors that shape the success of anti-transgender campaigns, this paper seeks to contribute to the development of a systematic understanding of patterns of anti-gender mobilization and human rights regression.