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Move gender field

Gender and sexuality politics are nothing new. They've been around for a very long time. But we're starting to see currently and over the course of the past few years is the geopoliticization of these issues; the greater influence of international debates and discourses around gender and sexuality diversity, and we see this across the spectrum of gender and sexuality politics where queer politics, feminist politics and women's rights movements have internationalized. But also the very conservative and anti progressive, that oppose advances in sex and gender-based rights, are also globalizing their political agendas. There is a sense in many parts of the world that we can only move forward in our politics and that for example, now we are more equal than we were 50 years ago, which in many respects we are. However, that does not mean that we can stop fighting for our rights. Conservative ideologies that have been around for hundreds of years are not dead. They are alive and kicking and they are fighting to retain the kinds of privilege and power that have protected the power of the West, that have protected capitalism for so long. The Pro-Family movement is an international coalition of anti progressive conservative organizations who are working to counter advances in sex and gender based rights. For example, women's reproductive rights LGBTI rights, etc. So since the 1990s, this movement has really been making a serious effort to expand its agendas, its campaigns, its ideology, and its discourses around the world. You may have heard this movement also referred to as the anti gender movement, and that is because what this movement is doing, is using the idea of gender as a kind of catch all concept that captures anything that people don't like about the way that society is changing. So gender becomes a sort of symbolic glue, as some scholars have said, in terms of holding together a whole lot of different conservative interests. So while the Pro-Family movement often presents itself as being wholesome in its rhetoric about family, it is actually a deeply violent ideology that has extremely dangerous consequences for anybody who does not conform to the gender binary and to anybody who does not conform to heterosexuality. A wave of hostility towards LGBTQ people in Poland. The openly gay deputy mayor of Warsaw who compared it to the behavior of the Nazis in the Second World War. In addition to their efforts to hollow out LGBTI rights and women's reproductive rights, they are attacking forms of knowledge that have historically supported advances in reproductive justice and gender and sexuality diversity. Comprehensive Sexuality Education is a way of informing young people about their bodies and about their own development so that they're able to make their own minds up and they're able to make decisions about their futures and their own lives. Over the course of the past few years, we have been starting to see the damaging effects of the Pro-Family movement in Eastern and Southern Africa especially, and the reason we are starting to see this is because there is an increasing move in the region to adopt Comprehensive Sexuality Education or CSE as well as making sexual and reproductive health services available to young people. There's an effort to do this in the region for a number of reasons for example, combating the high levels of gender-based violence, as well as the transmission of HIV and early pregnancy. A march to stop the apparent sexual indoctrination of school children... So the Pro-Family movement has been waging a massive campaign against CSE and there's one organization in particular that has been leading this campaign. It's called Family Watch international and it's actualy based in Gilbert, Arizona. And the attacks that we are seeing against Comprehensive Sexuality Education in South Africa, for example, are very much related to the attacks that we are seeing against gender studies, academic departments and gender studies scholars in other parts of the world, and the kinds of content that we see included in Comprehensive Sexuality Education for example, draws a lot on knowledge that has been produced in the field of gender studies. They are forms of knowledge that the Pro-Family movement wants to eliminate in order to advance their own agendas. So the reason why I have been conducting research on this movement is that I have been very familiar with this movement and its effects. As a person who grew up in a queer family in the American Midwest in the 1980s, I became very familiar with this idea, and this narrative, that there is one particular kind of family that is idealized. And that is the Nuclear Family, and coming from a family that did not resemble the Nuclear Family, I always felt different because of that. I'm also a donor-conceived person which also gave me a sense of my own difference amongst many of my peers who did come from Nuclear Families. But it always perplexed me... why it is that America considers itself to be the land of the free and the principal stops when it comes to same-sex families, or it stops when it comes to the kinds of decisions that I wanted to make about my own body. Realizing that there was a real concerted effort by conservative politicians to restrict women's reproductive rights, and also criminalize and perpetuate exclusion and forms of discrimination against LGBTIQ people and their families. So as I began to peel back the layers of this movement and its ideology, I began to really see what the underlying interests at stake are within these politics. There's actually a deeper colonial history that informs the ideology and concepts that shape this movement's agendas. The Pro-Family movement's argument that is rooted in colonial history, is the idea of the Nuclear Family model being the kind of ideal for all civilizations across the globe to adhere to, and the Pro-Family movement refers to the Nuclear Family as the natural family; the idea that you need to have a father and a mother, and that there's a particular unequal power relationship between them, and also that they have their own biological children in their bounded household unit, which is separated and cut off from other nuclear families who are also isolated in their own household units. And in doing that, they render all other kinds of family formations unnatural. When we look at this history of how the gender binary and hierarchy and the idea of the Nuclear Family model have functioned as mechanisms and weapons of cultural imperialism and colonisation, that we can start to see what the underlying interests are within current Pro-Family ideology. Still today, in this movement's efforts to promote this kind of ideology around the world, that really its geopolitical interests that are at stake because this movement is a movement that is being driven by conservative and specifically anti progressive organizations in the United States. If they can enforce these concepts around the world which are their own creations, it means that they are the ones who have the knowledge, power and authority around them. And not only is it a form of ideological power they are seeking, but there's a real material power at stake. The Pro-Family movement has made a huge effort to gain alliances and to build its movement in Eastern Europe. The Prime Minister of Hungary has participated in Pro-Family events and gatherings and Hungary has been a key site of their activity. The Hungarian government effectively banned gender studies in the country. They cut funding to gender studies programs and they also stripped these programs of their national accreditation. They effectively ended gender studies in Hungary. I think one of the ways that people as individuals can respond to this movement is to do their own research, familiarize themselves with this movement so that they can also think more critically and be more aware of the global dynamics that are behind the stuff that they are seeing in their own context. I think it's important to raise awareness and also for civil society organizations and activists working in these areas, who are working to advance various kinds of sex and gender based rights across the spectrum, for example, sexual reproductive health rights and the rights of transgender people, gay rights for example, that these different advocacy groups actually come together to respond.