Die deutschsprachige Fassung dieses Textes erscheint in Kürze.

 

 

During the US presidential debate on 10 September 2024, Donald Trump accused his opponent Kamala Harris of holding a dangerous position: ‘Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’. The line echoed a theme that Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J. D. Vance, introduced in his campaign for the Ohio Senate seat in 2022. At the time, Vance was talking about Democrat Tim Ryan’s plans to ‘flood’ America with illegal immigrants. ‘Using American tax dollars’, Vance insisted, as if this were the final, apocalyptic turn of the Great Replacement: functional health care.

It has become a genre convention to launch critical writing on the contemporary far right with the libidinal force of such juicy anecdotes. Many liberal accounts of this rapidly emerging and increasingly violent sexual politics of the right, however, still cannot accurately explain its function. Just why exactly are fascists obsessed with trans people? In this essay, I want to assume, as I cannot help but do, that there is nothing inherently historically disruptive or even new about the mere fact of trans life. Even in a narrower modern sense, gender transition or non-binary ways of life have been a reality of bourgeois societies for more than 150 years, which is to say, for at least as long as the naturalization of assigned sex, which Emma Heaney has termed ‘cisness’. If we believe that gender transition is not only legitimate and valid but indeed possible, even ordinary, if we subscribe to Heaney’s recent formulation that cisness does not order sex,[1] it follows that the mere existence of trans people does not inherently disorder sex either. So what are Trump and Vance—and the surprisingly diverse array of lawmakers and ‘manfluencers’ who echo their rhetoric, who turn it into brutal practice—on about?

The issue, I think, lies beyond the truism that fascists simply hate gender, or really any ‘diversity’, or the demographic reality of contemporary societies that, not too long ago, was referred to under that name. In fact, as has been widely noted, far-right movements are themselves increasingly ‘diverse’, including when it comes to gender. They accommodate a wide range of temperaments, from weirdos to normies, from the terminally online incel school shooter to the professional centrist-extremist politician. Just as much as you don’t have to be white anymore to become a foot soldier or a secretary of state in this alliance, you don’t have to be straight or cis either to be rewarded with an antagonistic feeling of belonging. Alice Weidel, gazing lovingly at her wife at the AfD party congress while raging against the downfall of the traditional family, is more than a hypocrite. In fact, fascistization, on the most personal level, seems to come with its very own set of gender identifications and desires. There’s nothing too queer about pursuing a however fantastic life as a manosphere podcaster or entrepreneurial tradwife—but it is a possibility of tweaking and fixing a cisness that feels lacking.

Similarly, the concept of ‘backlash’ does not quite capture the character of aggression towards trans people. Before and after Trump’s victory in 2024, just as they did eight years earlier, media like the New York Times characterized gender as the ‘defining issue’ of the US election campaign. ‘The sad truth is that the anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory’, lamented the title of a Guardian editorial. The title of a post-election New York Times op-ed claimed that ‘Trump offered men something the Democrats never could’. Which was? ‘A regressive idea of masculinity’. Contrary to these opinion columns, however, the mobilization against trans people cannot be reduced to a rearguard battle waged by those who feel existentially unsettled by a pronoun. The far right’s fixation on ‘gender ideology’, rather than a nostalgic backlash to sexual liberation, is an opportunistic, improvisational project to develop their own gender ideology. As the neoliberal regime of cisness seems to loosen its grip on how people live gender, fascism is attempting to reinvent it by way of escalation.


Aggressive Incoherence


This far-right attack on trans life, often thinly veiled as a critique of globalization, is itself stunningly globalized. For all their differences, from Friedrich Merz, Kemi Badenoch, Giorgia Meloni, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro to Bashar al-Assad and Alice Weidel, political actors from the far centre to the far right close ranks in the fight against ‘gender ideology’. However, to suggest that there is a shared psychosocial structure driving this resentment would be to attribute unwarranted coherency to a movement whose aggressive incoherency—and almost cartoonish cruelty—are the point. The figure of gender ideology is perhaps best understood as a kind of rhetorical cohesive, substantial enough to patch together a shared transnational vocabulary yet fluid enough to massage it into a nationalist context. In this sense, the attack on trans people is fascist not merely in its motivation, anti-woke roll-back, or even a shared repressive sexual politics. It is fascist as a dynamic: as a ‘mobile synthesis’, as Alberto Toscano puts it, of formerly distinct political factions, of ‘on the one hand, a pragmatic moral conservatism and, on the other, the acceleration of modernising sexual trends in a racist and nationalist guise’.[2]

On a rhetorical level, trans life functions, for the far right, as a figure of decline. Fascists are mobilizing against the very existence of queer people as a symptom of civilizational disorder and social corrosion on an all-encompassing scale. From the more old-school eugenicist preoccupation with birthrate statistics to the manosphere’s obsession with microplastics, seed oils, and all-meat diets, the spectres of gender haunt the far right’s dreams of a good life on various scales. For the right, ‘gender ideology’ seems to threaten both the combat readiness of effeminated western armies and the bodily integrity of the trans child who supposedly forfeits their innocence. This scalar capacity of the anti-trans movement is crucial. Where the fantastic Volkskörper of historical fascism cannot be interpellated one-to-one under contemporary capitalist conditions, the spectre of gender ideology makes it possible to relate the sanctity of children’s bodies to images of martial prowess. ‘Not only’, Toscano writes, ‘does the thematization of sex-gender disorder allow for the projection of “macro” problems onto “micro” scales ... but the consolidation of a new “Fascist International” and its capacity to capture and hegemonize older conservatisms takes place largely through the lens of a planetary crisis of gender and sex norms.’[3]

Almost ten years ago, Eva von Redecker noted in the journal Radical Philosophy, ‘Anti-genderism resonates with fascist anti-liberal critiques of Weimar culture and has over the last decade fostered alliances between right-wing positions which would otherwise be incommensurate.’[4] As these alliances have been fortifying their bond, their not so anti-liberal continuities with the neoliberal gender order, however,  emerge ever more clearly. As Kay Gabriel observed, for instance, the attempt to repress teachers’ unions has significantly driven the anti-trans moral panic in the US.[5] In general, the institutions targeted by the anti-trans movement—school curricula, public toilets, sports (funding), drag readings in public libraries, for example—speak to a clear aim: to escalate, rather than roll back, the neoliberal patterns of economic domination and state power. Crucially, for example, the right frames the gender-ideological infiltration of public life and nuclear families as a symptom of world-historical decline, but it does not necessarily propose a totalitarian counter-programme.[6] Rather, the threat is to be averted and countered on a case-by-case basis, individually or even entrepreneurially, that is by parents, doctors, civil servants, courts—by ‘you’, to borrow Trump’s slogan (‘Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you’). In their mind, that’s not just necessary. It’s extremely fun, too. ‘Fun times are clearly implied in the popular idiom Prosecco Stormfront (referring to the British web forum and TERF hotbed Mumsnet).’[7] Rather than just the comfort of old-school obedience, participation in the attack on trans life promises a familiar neoliberal thrill: a creative pleasure.

This continuity is increasingly obvious on the supposedly other side, too: the side of liberalism. Now that large corporations are taking down their rainbow flags, it is becoming clear that the progress liberals are so proud of was cosmetic. (In fact, many trans people who are still too poor to access gender-affirming care wish it had been cosmetic.) Rhetorically, too, the queer and transgender liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s often mirrored the far-right image of transness as an allegory of decline. On the historic 2014 Time magazine cover announcing the ‘transgender tipping point’, a stunning Laverne Cox illustrated the claim that trans rights were ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’. Whereas fascists portray ‘gender ideology’ as the decadent symptom of a collapsing order, some liberals have, at least until recently, interpreted it as a sign of progress. Although these two angles have vastly different consequences for those who actually belong to a group burdened with so much historicity, of course, they rely on the same abstraction, or allegorization.[8] Trans people, rather than know or do, merely mean something outside of themselves. Trans women, in particular, are seen as angels of history, fallen or prophetic, rather than sexual, political, and critical, in short, ordinary, beings in history. The historical, economic, and reproductive conditions of modern trans life—the history of sex work, for example, the afterlives of slavery, or the colonial oppression of Indigenous gender orders, eugenic sexology—fall from view.

The contemporary trans allegory, then, shapes our understanding of historical fascisms as well. In the past decade, trans people, for instance, have sometimes been portrayed as the paradigmatic victims of Nazi persecution. Images of the looting of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin—the home of ‘the first’ trans milieu now idealized in everything from Netflix series to pop history as the birthplace of modern categories of gender fluidity—have become iconic illustrations of what is still called the ‘Machtergreifung’. And in turn, as historian Jules Gill-Peterson points out, the destruction of the institute has become the supposed primal scene of transphobia, blurring the colonial continuities from which it emerges. Access to cisness had been an axis of domination long before the interwar period. ‘The prototypical target of trans misogyny is not a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld, but a hijra in British India, a free Black woman living in the shadow of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States, and a Two-Spirit person facing cultural genocide in the Americas’. Zavier Nunn’s case studies show that transvestism (a central trans category of the interwar era) as an identity-political heuristic cannot be mapped one-to-one onto the dynamics of Nazi persecution.[9] Being a transvestite was in itself not always sufficient to make you a target, but it could also not be clearly distinguished from other positions, such as being a sex worker, sick, or on the left. To ask whether Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, a couple who emerged from the ‘milieu’ of Hirschfeld’s institute, had to flee from the Nazis because they were Jewish, lesbian, transvestite, or organized socialists, is to impose a coherent psychosocial logic on Nazi persecution that it did not have.

Laurie Marhoefer, too, has emphasized that societal conflict over homosexual and transvestite lifestyles only played a minor role in Nazi agitation before 1933. For Marhoefer, the burgeoning disciplines of women’s studies and sexuality studies, expanding on an earlier idea of ‘decadence’, promoted the idea of backlash in the early stages of their introduction into the academy in the 1970s and 1980s.[10] The historically specific ahistoricity of this approach still haunts our contemporary understanding of fascism.

Take Klaus Theweleit’s 1979 Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies), a tome that never quite became academically canonical, but perhaps precisely in its para-academic verve is still constantly interpellated as relevant. When it was republished in 2019, during the first Trump presidency, many reviewers saw it as an ‘unsettlingly timely’ resource, crucial to understanding the contemporary moment. Although a lot of allegorical women make striking appearances in the book, trans women do not, neither as transvestites—as the Nazis would have known them—nor as transsexuals—in the nomenclature of the 1970s that Theweleit was writing in. A short section of Männerphantasien’s ambivalent treatment of homosexuality, however, is devoted to ‘Geschlechtswechsel als geregeltes Spiel’ (translated, rather imprecisely, as ‘transsexuality as a regulated game’) in the Freikorps and later under the Nazis.[11] Here, Theweleit discovers a rare point of vulnerability: the only moment when Herman Göring felt exposed at the Nuremberg Trials, he notes, was when his occasional appearances with painted nails and lipstick were discussed. Theweleit, however, categorizes this ‘flirtation with homosexuality’ as only ‘apparently transgressive’. Why is it important for him to downplay the gender exploration that is so glaringly obvious not just in Göring’s escapades but in many scenes of Nazi culture? Because transsexuality, for Theweleit, rather than an actually existing gender formation, is merely an allegory for sexuality itself, specifically, for its liberating potential—a deregulation of norms. Imagining gay and trans Nazis, without scandalizing them, without pathologizing gayness and transness itself, would have threatened the covert sexual optimism that’s the undercurrent in Theweleit’s study of fascist gender politics.

‘Männerphantasien’, writes historian Dagmar Herzog, ‘can be read as an energetic and imaginative last-ditch attempt at an optimistic reading of the relationship between the personal and the political.’[12] She categorizes this ‘last-ditch attempt’ as part of a political mood on the left in the Federal Republic of Germany in which desire and politics increasingly seem to contradict each other. In attempting to de-essentialize feminist methodology, Theweleit anticipates some of the rhetorical figures of queer and transgender liberalism. For the many accomplishments of his work, however, this juxtaposition remains almost ridiculously diametrical: a false dichotomy between right-wing psychological structures as ‘armoured’ and ‘nicht zu Ende geboren’ (not fully born) and sexuality as ‘oceanic’, free-flowing and fluid. Whereas in other areas of sexuality studies, attempts to disengage from naive utopianism have been more productive, it seems to me that many accounts of contemporary gender politics maintain a similarly disavowed commitment to an unreconstructed sexual optimism.
 

A Materialist Account of the Attack on ­‘Gender Ideology’
 

What then would a materialist account of the right-wing attack on ‘gender ideology’ look like? One that doesn’t rely on a depoliticized faith in the inherent subversiveness of the mere fact of queer life? Disappointed with allegorical readings of gender, queer and trans criticism has recently turned explosively to materialist analyses. I can only briefly outline this perspective here, but in my mind it’s necessary to understand the syncretist nature of the sexual politics of contemporary fascism. 

Again, what unites the Trumpist and supposedly anti-fascist abstractions of gender is an obsession with its transgressive and excessive nature (even where this is supposed to be a compliment). The queer Marxist analysis I am drawing on here turns this fixation on its head, or feet—actually, it might reject such undialectical polarity altogether. Gender and sexuality, from this perspective, can only be understood as integral to capitalism.[13] Integral, here, does not describe a stable relationship of domination (e.g., of men over women, or heterosexuals over queers) to exploitation (for instance, in the context of unpaid housework or the low-paid service economy), but a deeply idiosyncratic, messy relationship. On the one hand, capital depends on the reproduction of the global working class through a gendered division of productive and unproductive labour; on the other hand, this dependence destabilizes the reproduction of the social until it becomes nothing short of impossible. From this perspective, sexual disorder is already priced into the way capital functions. And to put it very bluntly, in the current conjuncture, marked by what is sometimes called the ‘crisis of care’, the deficient character of capitalist sexuality seems to be intensifying.[14]

The far right, once more, mistakes symptoms for causes. There really is a disorder of sex, but it is not great or apocalyptic, nor is it in itself a transgressive potential hiding in plain sight. It cannot be generalized as an ahistorical nature nor reduced to a historically distinct cultural achievement or decadence. Sexual difference, queer Marxists would propose, is mediated by capital and state power: there is no natural(ized) sex before the gendered division of labour. If that’s true, it’s almost trivial to state that a period of crisis also appears in the way the gender is lived, even at its most supposedly biological level. The decline of the American empire, in times of low-growth economy, geopolitical contestation, and renewed ideological antagonism, transforms what the working class may need and want from gender—and what they need and want from gender, in turn, transforms the nature of its decline. As the family wage has long become an unachievable dream, it might not seem so attractive anymore to aim for genders like suburban mum with two kids and two jobs. The life of queerness and transsexuality might realistically be, for an increasing number of people, a much more natural, intuitive, and fun way of making the most out of the impossibility of contemporary conditions of life. The life of a mum with two jobs and two kids, who is also single-handedly waging a war on ‘gender ideology’, however, might be thrilling enough for others.

The fascist attack on trans people can be understood as an attempt to navigate this sense of disorder, not least by obscuring it. In the AfD-aligned blog Sezession, party ‘intellectual’ Ellen Kositza writes, as many of her ilk have, that if the possibility of transition had been offered to her as a child, she, too, God forbid, might have been seduced. She does not write that she dealt with her gender trouble by becoming a para-party hack. In a certain sense, the right is attacking ‘gender ideology’ because their own gender ideology—the economic escalation and sexualization of cisness—is competing with it. As Robyn Marasco writes, the sexual politics of contemporary fascism offer their own version of the neoliberal fantasy of ‘women can have it all’, updated in light of crisis: ‘where instead of the corporate career and the heterosexual reproductive family, women can have combat training, AR-15s, polyamorous sexuality, conspiracism, and, above all, a semblance of power that substitutes for the real thing. Some women want a seat at the boardroom table. Others want to be in the eye of the storm.’[15]

The conspiracy of ‘gender ideology’ gives the far right tools to consolidate their own: to develop a global grammar of decline that transcends individual nationalist vernaculars, to escalate neoliberal austerity along racial and gender lines, to build a diverse coalition that includes feminists, racialized populations, conservatives, and internet culture grifters, and to have fun with it. In this sense, the contemporary fascist battle of the sexes does not, as the Heinrich Böll Foundation puts it in a recent analysis, ‘go back to the fifties’, but rather fast-forwards into the past, plunging into a mythical tradition that flirts liberally with its own constructedness. The online subculture of the tradwife aesthetic, for example, recombines aesthetics from a variety of cultural contexts: long, Depression-era skirts, 1950s hairstyles, 1980s New Age sounds, 2010s hipster skirts. Part of what makes the historically displaced morality that fascists fight for so appealing is that it has to be pieced together from decaying traditions in the first place. ‘Family instead of gender’ was a campaign slogan of the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah. It is no secret among fascists that the family form they envision has yet to be invented in the face of economic decline and environmental crisis.
 

Messing with ‘Gender Ideology’


And on the other side? Is there any optimism to be had for all the actually existing politics that are subsumed into the right-wing abstraction of ‘gender ideology’? If not, may there be the courage to make gender ideology every bit as threatening as it already appears to the enemy. Gender ideology, in this appropriated sense, is not an inherent characteristic of our ways of life but a social formation that has to be organized and even disorganized, messed with. Reflecting, rather than obscuring, the crisis of cisness, it might then provide better conditions for a radical critique of social reproduction tout court. Where organized along lines of solidarity and class antagonism rather than noble ideas of fluidity, the fight for gender liberation has produced a vast and specific body of knowledge—a body of knowledge that’s not historically novel but increasingly relevant, emerging from Black struggle in the afterlives of slavery, against medical disenfranchisement, the criminalization of sex work, and the improvisations required to persist under regimes of scarcity. A knowledge of how, even in the face of utter impossibility, there persists a desire for more than just bare survival that is to be taken seriously in order to make advances. The crucial difference between a radical trans critique and fascist sexual politics is not that one is ‘inclusive’ and ‘expansive’ and the other ‘exclusive’ and ‘repressive’—both, in their own ways, reimagine gender. The difference is that fascist gender politics merely escalates the crisis, reorganizing reproduction to shore up domination in the face of crisis, suturing pleasure to hierarchy and improvisation to the policing of life. A radical trans critique might offer a genuine alternative: not because it is pure, but because it refuses to turn the management of decline into an excuse for tightening the noose. It knows that gender ideology can never stop at gender—and that there is always somewhere concrete to begin. This year’s Berlin internationalist pride march, where police brutalized queers and non-queers alike for standing with Palestine, made that knowledge visceral: the refusal to separate struggles, the beauty and heartbreak of living it—right now.

 

This text was first published in the reader Global Fascisms (Berlin: HKW & Archive Books, 2025), 978-3-949973-98-7. A German edition of the reader is forthcoming.  

 

[1] Emma Heaney, ‘Introduction: Sexual Difference without Cisness’, in Feminism against Cisness, ed. Emma Heaney (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024), 1–37.

[2] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism (London: Verso, 2023), 140–41.

[3] Toscano, Late Fascism, 146.

[4] Eva von Redecker, ‘Anti-Genderismus and Right-Wing Hegemony’, Radical Philosophy 198 (July/August 2016), 2.

[5] Kay Gabriel, ‘Inventing the Crisis’, in n+1, Issue 47 (Spring 2024), https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/politics/inventing-the-crisis/.

[6] This argument is made convincingly, too, in Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur, ‘Introduction’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9/3 (August 2022), 311–33.

[7] Asa Seresin and Sophie Lewis, ‘Fascist Feminisms’, in Transgender Studies Quarterly 9/3 (August 2022), 470.

[8] Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (London: Verso, 2024),

[9]  Zavier Nunn, ‘Trans Liminality and the Nazi State’, Past & Present, 260/1 (August 2023), 123–57.

[10] ‘The backlash narrative provided a path to legitimation by contending that the history of sexuality was a way to help understand one of the most important political questions in twentieth-century German history: how the Nazis came to power.’ Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German homosexual emancipation and the rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 198.

[11] Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 2: Männerkörper: zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 516. English translation: Male Fantasies 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalysis of White Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

[12] Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 247.

[13] Amy De’Ath offers an excellent account of how these analyses have been developing. Amy De’Ath, ‘Gender and Social Reproduction’, in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, eds. Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane (Los Angeles: Sage Reference, 2018), 1534–50.

[14] See, for example Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction’, American Political Science Review 119/3 (2025), 1205–18.

[15] Robyn Marasco, ‘Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism’, Historical Materialism blog (25 June 2021), https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/reconsidering-the-sexual-politics-of-fascism/.