How the right uses "gender ideology" to blame trans people for everythinghttps://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/11/how-the-right-uses-gender-ideology-to-blame-trans-people-for-everything/ 🔗Schuyler Mitchell (17 Nov 2025)
Hours after being sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump used his constitutionally vested powers to define "man" and "woman." In an executive order, he said his administration would recognize only two immutable, biological sexes, determined at conception, in the name of "defending women" from a rising scourge: "gender ideology."
It was the first-ever use of the phrase in an official White House statement, but it wasn't new. Over the last decade, the fear of "gender ideology" has been used to mobilize right-wing movements from Argentina to Poland to Turkey. Now it's a part of American parlance, too. It appeared in federal legislation in 2022, and Republicans have wielded it ever since to attack health care, picture books, and pronouns.
Like critical race theory and "wokeness," "gender ideology" is both a bogeyman for the right and a reactionary backlash to social progress. The expression is generally used to scorn the idea that gender is a social construct different from biological sex (a distinction that has existed in the United States since at least the mid-20th century). For many people, this isn't an ideology at all—just lived experience. But the Heritage Foundation describes "gender ideology" as a form of brainwashing: "the belief that children can be born in the wrong body," which "inspires opaque proclamations like 'transwomen are women.'"
In the right's telling, the origins of this supposed ideology are varied: It is false consciousness, a leftist lie, a plot by globalist elites, a spiritual affront to the Lord—or all of these things combined. These ascribed meanings are both capacious and inconsistent, and that ambiguity is key to its weaponization.
