Anti-Gender Politics as Digital Rights Mediation: From Child Online Safety to the Protection of LGBTQ+ Children’s Digital Rights

As the European Union positions itself as a global leader in value-based digital governance, protection of children online has become one of its most prominent political projects. Framed as a necessary response to digital risks and platform power, this agenda reflects a broader neoliberal logic of responsibilisation - casting guardians, platforms and children as risk-managers - while also intersecting with reactionary anxieties about gender, sexuality, and the family. In this context, child protection emerges as a powerful site through which exclusionary and heteronormative ideologies are re-ligitimised, often under the guise of restoring innocence, the moral order, or returning to “traditional values”. Debates over child online safety tend to generalise “children”. This is problematic as we know little about the distinct online experiences of LGBTQ+ children. Existing limited research points to a paradox: digital environments can serve as lifelines for LGBTQ+ youth, offering spaces for connection, expression, and information, yet they also expose them to surveillance, censorship, and harm - especially where platform governance and/or their families do not support their identities. This paper addresses the lack of socio-legal research at the triad intersection of digital, children’s, and LGBTQ+ rights by conducting a quantitative content analysis of EU digital law and policy texts concerning various aspects of children’s digital lives. It maps (i) what digital rights are - and are not - extended to LGBTQ+ children, (ii) how these rights are constructed, and (iii) where they are located within the EU’s fragmented digital regulatory framework. By situating this analysis in a queer-feminist understanding of digital constitutionalism in the EU, the paper brings digital governance into conversation with broader struggles over gendered and sexual normativity as well as social constructions of childhood. In doing so, it shows how anti-gender politics shape what children are imagined, whose rights are protected, and how online safety is defined. It demonstrates the importance of tracing not just the diffusion but the institutionalisation of anti-gender ideologies within digital spaces, and argues that a queer-feminist interrogation of law and policy offers insights into the affective and epistemic politics through which exclusionary agendas are rendered legitimate, “technical”, and lawful.