Gender and Authoritarianism

A Framework for Analysis and Action
A purple checkered background with protestors holding signs in favor of women's rights
Collage of protestors during an anti-Trump rally, and the Women’s March in 2016 (Credit: PRA)
Annie Wilkinson
April 2, 2025
The Public Eye, Winter/Spring 2025

Two weeks before the 2024 election, Tucker Carlson, whose documentary, The End of Men,[1] laments the persecution of men, spoke at a Turning Point rally for Donald Trump. After describing a nation degraded and feminized by woke culture and Democratic leadership, Carlson cast Trump as a strongman who would restore law and order with a “vigorous spanking,”[2] personifying the U.S. as a teenage girl requiring her patriarch’s dutiful discipline. The audience enthusiastically chanted “Daddy Don!” in response to this promise of “patriarchal restoration.”[3] Days later, Trump delivered on this portrayal, promising at a campaign rally[4] to “protect” women “whether [they] like it or not.” 

Trump’s and Carlson’s statements could be construed as a campaign tactic that uses the dysfunctional family trope as a dog whistle for the culturally and economically downtrodden male and appeals to patriarchal norms. But they also illustrate the importance of gender, cisheteropatriarchy[5], and misogyny to authoritarian politics. 

Gendered power inheres in authoritarianism. Contemporary authoritarians everywhere—from Texas to Turkey to Tel Aviv—mobilize misogyny[6] to consolidate their power by reinforcing gendered hierarchies led by cis men (and rewarded female loyalists[7]) while preserving racialized, economic, and geopolitical hierarchical orders. They also weaponize gender politics and the gendered domination that animates it as a “core mechanism of democratic erosion.”[8] Countering authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally thus requires a framework for analyzing and understanding the centrality of gender—and the anti-gender campaigns that mobilize it—to authoritarian politics. This analysis also reveals the power of a robust gender justice front in pro-democracy efforts.

Authoritarianism’s Global Acceleration

The world is witnessing a wave of autocratization[9], as established authoritarians consolidate power and antidemocratic movements challenge the liberal democracies from which they have emerged.[10] Anti-gender movements have played a pivotal role in this process. As a political system characterized by power concentrated in a single leader—or a few, most often men—authoritarianism is maintained through limited tolerance of contestations to that power, whether from political rivals, dissidents, democratic social movements, or liberatory ideas—like the assertion that gender inequality is not inevitable. 

Many of the world’s recently emerged autocrats have captured and consolidated power from within liberal democracies by employing tactics that exploit these societies’ features. Like their global and historical counterparts[11], authoritarian actors in the U.S. have bent the electoral system[12] to their favor, injected widespread mis- and disinformation[13] into political discourse, captured and weakened judicial independence,[14] and encouraged the gradual erosion of democratic institutions and will.[15] Their formula also includes attacking the media;[16] curtailing access to information via attacks on public school curricula,[17]higher education,[18]books,[19] and public libraries;[20]cracking down on civil society;[21] and weakening the independence of civil institutions.[22] At the same time, they aggrandize executive power[23]—including at the state level, as Chancie Calliham examines[24] in this issue—and weaponize the state apparatus to punish or eliminate political rivals[25] and expand carceral systems.[26]

Over the past few years, states under GOP control have acted as “laboratories of autocracy”[27] to test, modify, and replicate policies[28] that advance an anti-gender politics, seeking to match their counterparts’ successes in consolidating[29] enclaves of authoritarian control within the U.S. This uneven authoritarian capture has resulted in a well-entrenched system of subnational (or federated) authoritarianism in which “some states remain committed to inherited forms of democratic liberalism while others cling to (or develop, or resurrect) patterns of illiberal authoritarianism.”[30]

After capturing the Republican party, the Supreme Court, and trifectas in nearly half of U.S. states, the MAGA-led authoritarian coalition has consolidated its control over the federal government with Project 2025 as the blueprint.[31] As this process of autocratization accelerates, the dismantling of democracy will become difficult to hold back.[32]

Contemporary authoritarians use demographic identity to sow division, enabling their takeover of state power.[33] Their base-building strategies often combine economic populist rhetoric[34] with racialized and gendered resentment politics[35] that tap into and exacerbate social and economic anxieties. This frequently involves ethnonationalist fearmongering[36] that mobilizes latent and blatant forms of racism to frame racialized “others” as outsider threats. Trump has done this, for instance, by labeling immigrants as invaders[37] and promising the sentimental[38] restoration of national glory and stability, including via an idealized gendered order.

Rooted in the (Cishetero)Patriarchal Family

Authoritarian regimes and movements often deploy gendered power in two key, interrelated ways: They mobilize misogyny[39] to capture power, and they consolidate and maintain it by exercising control over sex, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. One fundamental way that authoritarians mobilize gender stems from the challenge they face in justifying their exceptional power. When authoritarians subvert the consent of the governed, they must legitimate their authority by other means. This is done by activating another source of authority deeply ingrained in most societies: the cisheteropatriarchal family. In the U.S., this manifests in the implicit though elusive[40] ideal of the White Christian nuclear family.

In this normative unit, women are relegated to biological and social reproductive roles and men serve as provider and protector while regulating women’s sexuality and reproduction. A strict gender binary and hierarchy anchors men’s exercise of authority and dominion over women and children while providing a permission structure for exceptional male behavior, enabling authoritarians like Trump to be found liable for sexual abuse, roll back gender equality, and spew misogynistic rhetoric without imperiling their legitimacy. Those who resist this arrangement are, like Tucker Carlson suggested, disciplined through punishment within the family and criminalization by the state. Such control over female bodies and persecution of LGBTQ individuals is, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat points[41] out, a “throughline of authoritarianism,” and the core message of the all-male chorus of “your body, my choice” in the wake of Trump’s 2024 election.

Treated as essential and natural, religious traditionalists like the Holy See and the U.S. Christian Right also claim that this arrangement is divinely ordained and thus morally just. This model of naturalized cisheteropatriarchy, especially when framed as the “basic unit of society” and the nation, is used to justify the necessity of a strongman[42] who, as its patriarch, is empowered to exercise dominion over the national family,[43] including through sanctioned violence—like a spanking.

But it is not only those who spank their daughters who find the justification of patriarchal discipline compelling. Research shows that support for group-based hierarchies and inequality as the natural order[44]—a “social dominance orientation”—correlates with an endorsement of hegemonic traditional masculinity and right-wing authoritarian belief systems,[45] which in turn predicts misogyny[46] and attitudes toward transgender and non-binary people.[47] Authoritarians draw on these pervasive beliefs to justify their exercise of control over others, including those who don’t conform to this order, like queer and transgender people who are marked for marginalization or eradication from public life.[48]

The idea that gender is not a fixed or natural order threatens to upend the logical underpinnings of authoritarian power. Denial that gender is multiple and distinct from sex is a universal feature of anti-gender campaigns and the impetus behind Trump’s campaign promise to “defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders”[49] that underwrote his Day 1 Executive Order declaring that the U.S. will only recognize two “sexes,” “male and female.”[50]

Weaponizing Gender Equality to Consolidate Power

Authoritarian leaders may paradoxically draw on these same imaginaries to engage in the tactics of “autocratic genderwashing”[51] or its counterpart of Israeli innovation, “pinkwashing,”[52] by adopting limited LGBT rights or gender equality reforms to enhance their domestic and/or international legitimacy[53] and deflect criticism of their rights violations or autocratic behavior, forestalling democratization pressures and shoring up the stability of their regime. Gender quotas are a common tactic.[54] They may also endorse international gender equality initiatives—even while pulling out of international agreements[55] combating violence against women—or forge strategic alliances[56] with anti-trans feminists, as Hannah Silver analyzes[57] in this issue. Such tactics reinforce rather than challenge the gender essentialism that grounds cisheteropatriarchy and authoritarian power structures.

The authoritarian family script also orders people and power by race and nation as it intersects with gender. In the U.S. and much of Europe, this manifests as White and/or Christian ethnonationalist projects, for example in Trump’s smearing of Mexican immigrants as “rapists”[58] who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”[59] Similar dynamics manifest in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish ethnonationalist claims of India’s[60] Narendra Modi, Myanmar’s[61] junta head Min Aung Hlaing, and Israel’s[62] Benjamin Netanyahu, respectively—leaders who have incited ethnic cleansing and/or genocide against populations by fueling moral panics that portray the women of the dominant group as sexually threatened.

Anti-Gender Politics Define Contemporary Authoritarianism

Authoritarians have learned from each other[63] that, whatever their personal ideological commitments, they can strategically instrumentalize others’ fidelity to a traditionalist politics of gender and sexuality. These transactional authoritarians[64] stoke and ride the wave of moral panic to greater power. Vladimir Putin, for example, initially relied on gender equality rhetoric in the early stages of his authoritarian power grab before finding greater traction as a global innovator of anti-gender campaigns. In 2013, he banned so-called LGBT “propaganda”[65]—a tactic adapted by Ron DeSantis in Florida a decade later—before more recently criminalizing LGBT activists[66] as “terrorists” and banning “child-free propaganda,”[67] a policy intended to compel Russian women to have more children. Advised by those like American Principles Project’s Terry Schilling who found in 2020 that anti-trans messaging promised significant potential to mobilize Republican voters,[68] Trump pivoted from his 2012 position supporting transgender women in his pageants and promising LGBT Americans that he “will fight for”[69] them in 2016 to centering anti-trans politics[70] in his 2024 campaign, which he opened by promising to end “transgender insanity”[71] and closed with a blitz of attack ads scapegoating transgender people[72] as enemies within[73].

Authoritarian populist leaders and movements have adapted anti-gender campaigns as a modular tool[74] in diverse contexts around the world. What anti-gender politics offers them is a unifying framework or “symbolic glue”[75] that coheres political coalitions[76] across issues, sectors, and geopolitical blocs, redirecting status anxieties conditioned by neoliberal globalization onto scapegoats crafted as existential threats.[77] Most anti-gender movement actors have cast so-called “gender ideology”[78] as their primary villain, while some deploy variations like “wokeism” in DeSantis’ Florida—a term Argentina’s authoritarian president Javier Milei recently resurrected at the 2025 World Economic Forum. [79]

Democratic Resistance and Gender Justice

As authoritarian leaders turn to gendered hierarchies to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of women, queer and trans people, and other marginalized social groups, diverse feminist movements have fought back. These movements have played key roles in resisting[80] autocratization globally, insisting upon respect for the democratic norms and institutions that undergird their demands for gender justice. Recent examples include: Myanmar’s women-led front, which mobilized against the 2021 coup; Argentina’s Green Wave mobilizations, which helped secure the decriminalization of abortion in 2020; Mexico’s women’s strike to protest the epidemic of femicides pervading Mexico with impunity; and the U.S. Women’s March of 2017, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, which brought millions to the streets to register dissent against MAGA’s antidemocratic threat. This pattern repeats[81] from Poland to Tunisia and beyond.

If authoritarian leaders and their base frequently disparage and repress women, femme, and queer-led movements, it is because they too recognize the power of a pro-democracy feminist front in confronting and undermining their power. Authoritarians have a “strategic reason to be sexist,” as researchers Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth put it, because they know that “when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy.”[82]

To effectively resist authoritarianism, we must understand its gendered roots and cultivate a robust and intersectional front for gender justice. Only then can we achieve a more just and equitable future for all.

Endnotes

  1. Timothy Caulfield, “Why Tucker Carlson’s ‘The End of Men’ Is So Disturbing,” Men’s Health, November 21, 2022, https://www.menshealth.com/health/a42026957/tucker-carlson-end-of-men-review/.
  2. Jeet Heer, “Tucker Carlson’s Weird Spanking Fantasy Is Designed to Stir Up MAGA Misogyny,” The Nation, October 25, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tucker-carlson-spanking-fantasy-gop/.
  3. Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).
  4. Edward Helmore, “Donald Trump Vows to Be Protector of Women ‘Whether They like It or Not,’” The Guardian, October 31, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/31/donald-trump-women-protector-wisconsin-rally.
  5. Cisheteropatriarchy is a family structure and societal norm characterized by male authority over women and children and strict enforcement of cisgender and heterosexual normativity. For more see: “Cis-Heteropatriarchy,” UnLeading, York University, https://www.yorku.ca/edu/unleading/systems-of-oppression/cis-heteropatriarchy/.
  6. Alex DiBranco, “Mobilizing Misogyny,” The Public Eye (Winter 2017), March 8, 2017, https://politicalresearch.org/2017/03/08/mobilizing-misogyny.
  7. Elizabeth A Wood. “Gender Systems in the Putin Autocracy,” Frontiers in Sociology 9 (April 4, 2024), https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1327946.
  8. Conny Roggeband and Andrea Krizsán, "The Gendered Face of Democratic Backsliding," The Loop, March 6, 2023, https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-gendered-face-of-democratic-backsliding/.
  9. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
  10. V-Dem Institute, "Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot," March 7, 2024, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4774409.
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  12. Rachel Tlemçani, “Electoral Authoritarianism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 29, 2007, https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2007/05/electoral-authoritarianism?lang=en.
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  43. Rebecca Solnit, “Some Maga Men Seem to Think Women Don’t Have Rights – Starting with Their Wives,” The Guardian, November 1, 2024, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/01/maga-trump-men-supporters-womens-rights.
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  49. Danielle Kurtzleben, "Trump's executive actions curbing transgender rights focus on 'gender ideology,'" NPR, February 7, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/g-s1-46893/trump-anti-trans-rights-executive-action-gender-ideology-confusion.
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