The publication of our report, [Family, rights and resistance[DC1] ], bookends a strand of public work we have been doing at SDDirect to support the wider sector with practical thinking on resistance: what it looks like, how it operates, and how we respond. The public series may be closing, but the work, of course, continues.
Last month marked the International Day of Families. This month is Pride Month. Together, they bring into sharp focus a central reality of the current backlash: across the world, the language of family is being used in increasingly organised ways to restrict rights.
Anti-gender actors have taken words associated with care, belonging, protection and social stability, and used them to resist progress on gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, LGBTQI+ rights, comprehensive sexuality education, and efforts to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls.
This is not accidental. It is part of a wider political strategy that has been building for many years, and which is now mainstream. Words, phrases and policy positions that would have been unthinkable a few years ago are now being spoken from pulpits by elected leaders across the world.
The family has become central to that strategy because family is powerful. It is emotional. It is cultural. It is political. It is often tied to faith, identity, memory, care and belonging. This is exactly why anti-gender actors have worked so hard to claim it.
But the family is not inherently regressive. Progressive actors should not retreat from family-focused language. We should work across movements to ensure that the family is for everyone, not a concept owned by those seeking to roll back rights.
Families can and should be places of love, care, identity, safety and belonging. They can also be places of violence, coercion, control, exclusion and inequality. A rights-based approach has to hold both truths. It must value family life without allowing “family” to become a shield for abuse, discrimination or impunity.
The question of who gets recognised as a family, whose family is protected, and whose family is treated as a threat shapes people’s lives in real terms, not in the abstract. It shapes children’s safety and belonging. It shapes whether people are allowed to live with dignity, freedom and love.
For me, this is also personal. I want to be able to move freely across borders with my wife and children and be accepted as a family wherever we go. I want families, globally, in their full diversity to be recognised, supported and protected by policy and by communities. I want childcare that enables women to study, work and participate fully in public life. I want violence in the home to end.
These are not separate issues. They are all centred on the family. Anti-gender and anti-rights movements understand this. They connect LGBTQI+ rights, women’s rights, child rights, sexual and reproductive rights, education, migration, race, religion and national identity. They sow division through xenophobic rhetoric about replacement, “civilisational” threat and the “protection” of women and children (whilst simultaneously undermining it). They hold up narrow, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal models of the family as natural, moral and necessary. And they know that when they divide progressive movements, they win.
Progressive movements often know that these issues are linked, but too often we still work in silos. We defend LGBTQI+ rights over here, women’s rights over there, child rights somewhere else, and violence prevention in another space entirely. But the backlash is connected and our resistance has to be connected too. The answer, then, is not to abandon the language of family, it is to reclaim it: together.
A progressive family narrative starts from a simple position: families matter, and so do the rights of every person within them. Families are strengthened, not weakened, when people have equality, autonomy, safety, dignity and freedom from violence.
That means recognising families in all their diversity: nuclear families, single-parent families, extended families, adoptive families, foster families, LGBTQI+ families, chosen families, childless by choice families and kinship networks. It means refusing the idea that one narrow family model should be treated as the only legitimate form of care and belonging.
It also means being clear about what rights-based family policy must protect:
- safety before family unity
- autonomy before control
- care that is recognised, reduced and redistributed
- children’s access to information, safety and protection
- freedom from violence within families
- equal rights and decision-making within family life
- support for families in all their diversity
Anti-gender narratives are well-funded, transnational and professionalised. They use the language of rights, democracy, protection and sustainable development to advance regressive agendas. Progressive movements need to respond with the same seriousness.
Funding for longer-term, cross-movement narrative change has never felt more palpably urgent in my lifetime. Too often, progressive funding is fragmented by issue area. But anti-gender actors do not work in silos. Their narratives connect these issues together. Our resistance has to do the same.
Donors, multilaterals, governments and civil society need to invest in the long-term narrative work that helps us defend and advance rights across movements. We need to support coalitions that can respond to anti-gender organising with clarity, confidence and political imagination. We need to challenge regressive language without conceding the language of family itself.
The launch of [Family, rights and resistance[DC2] ] is intended as a practical tool. It sets out seven recurring family-focused narratives used by anti-gender actors, explains how they work, and offers rights-based responses for policy, advocacy and funding spaces. A quick guide is shared in the table below.
The aim is not only to expose how anti-gender actors use the family to restrict rights. It is to help us take that language back.
Family should not be used to narrow freedoms. It should not be used to silence survivors. It should not be used to exclude LGBTQI+ people, restrict women’s autonomy, block comprehensive sexuality education, or defend harmful gender norms.
Family can be a site of care, equality, safety and justice. This is the narrative we need to build – together. Read the full report here. [DC3]
The table below provides a summary of the arguments used by the anti-gender movement and the narratives that can be used to resist these arguments. We hope you find this useful in your resistance.
|
Anti-gender narrative |
What it claims |
What it does |
Rights-based response |
|
Traditional family structures are natural and necessary |
The heterosexual nuclear family is the foundation of society |
Delegitimises diverse families and reinforces rigid gender roles |
Families are diverse. What matters is equality, safety, dignity and care within them |
|
Declining fertility rates threaten national survival |
Women’s reproductive choices are a demographic threat |
Turns women’s bodies into instruments of national survival and can reinforce racist or xenophobic agendas |
Support people to make free decisions about whether, when and how to have children |
|
“Gender ideology” is destroying social order |
Gender equality is an external threat to family, culture and tradition |
Mobilises fear against women’s rights, children’s rights, LGBTQI+ rights and inclusive education |
Focus on concrete rights: equality, safety, autonomy, services and freedom from violence |
|
Women need rescuing from rights-based movements |
Feminism, abortion and SRHR harm women |
Uses protection language to restrict autonomy |
Protection without autonomy is control |
|
Women and children must be protected through regressive policy |
Women and children are at risk from gender diversity and progressive policy |
Uses safety language to justify exclusion and discrimination |
Protection must not be used to restrict the rights of others |
|
Comprehensive sexuality education undermines parental authority |
CSE threatens religious, cultural or moral education within families |
Restricts children’s access to information on health, rights, consent and relationships |
CSE supports safety, dignity, health and violence prevention |
|
VAWG is a private family issue |
Violence should be resolved within the family |
Silences survivors and prioritises family unity over justice |
Violence is not private. States must prevent violence, protect survivors and ensure accountability |
Table 1: Quick guide to responding to anti-gender narratives