Anti-Gender Politics and the Redefinition of the Demos

Much literature emphasizes the contribution of anti-gender mobilization to democratic decline. While it’s true that anti-gender actors fuel authoritarianism with their exclusionary and hierarchical worldviews, Roggeband et al. (2025) argue that they emerge from democratic flaws and weaknesses rather than that they cause them. The anti-democratic logic apparent in anti-gender projects builds on exclusionary logics, that have been present in these societies before anti-gender politics started to emerge and intensify: capitalism, colonialism, Christianity, nationalism, fascism, state-socialism, and patriarchy, the latter crosscutting them all (Roggeband et al. 2023). In this paper, we want to take that argument one step further, and focus on the efforts of anti-gender politics to reimagine and transform liberal (representative) democracy. We argue that a basic push of it consists in shrinking the demos, defining it in (more) exclusive terms. To that end, the different constellations of the legacies of these exclusionary logics provide anti-gender actors with discourses, symbols, repertoires of action and infrastructure, all of which can be mobilized to shrink the contours of the demos. To develop our argument we’ll unpack two key dimensions regarding the demos: the first focuses on who is included in each legacy’s conception of the demos and what dimensions of citizenship are addressed; the second focuses on how these boundaries work through specific operating premises, methods, and means. Together, these dimensions demonstrate how each legacy provides anti-gender actors with both conceptual frameworks for defining political membership and practical tools for enforcing exclusionary boundaries. We then develop how anti-gender actors combine and layer these legacies of systems of oppression to construct a multi-dimensional argument for restricting the demos. We contend that the power of anti-gender politics lies precisely in i) their tapping into the lingering (c)overt legitimacy of older, familiar patterns of hierarchy, power and domination; and ii) their ability to weave together these multiple exclusionary legacies into a seemingly coherent vision of who deserves democratic inclusion and on what terms. These two factors make their claims appear natural, necessary, and even democratic—as protecting the “true” demos against illegitimate claimants. These legacies are not only relevant because they structure democracies and can easily be tapped into, providing feeding ground for anti-gender actors and their politics. It is also important to unpack these legacies as they provide anti-gender actors with arguments to reshape democracy and those who are entitled to be part of it, the demos, in highly exclusionary terms. Thereby they contribute to the weaking or destruction of both the demos and democracy at large.