When do anti-gender campaigns impact transgender rights? Human rights contestation and anti-transgender persecution in the populist moment

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 Europe and in the Americas, the popularization of these campaigns are associated with multilevel factors such as right-wing populism; alliances between religious and secular authorities; and economic anxiety or growing inequality, among others. While the targeting of transgender minorities can be a backlash against advances in LGBTQ+ rights in a country, it can also be raised preemptively against expected advances. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which conditions enable these anti-rights campaigns to succeed in undermining the rights of transgender people in some countries and not others in the same region. Focusing on two regions, Europe and in the Americas, I will use descriptive statistics and OLS regression to assess which country-level conditions – such as regime type, economic development, economic inequality, power of religious authorities, public acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights over time, and membership in international organizations – allow for different levels of targeted persecution of transgender people within the same region. To assess anti-trans persecution, I rely on a two-component measure that considers the status of transgender rights in each country (the Trans Rights Indicator Project dataset), as well as the murder rates of transgender people (according to the Trans Murder Monitor project). 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. The paper, which is part of the author’s dissertation research on transnational patterns of anti-gender mobilization, seeks to further help advance scholarly debates on anti-gender persecution, human rights contestation, and their relationships to populism and illiberalism as global phenomena.