Inside the Anti-Gender Discourse: A Researcher’s Testimony from the CSW

Why were you at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York this year?  

I had two goals in participating in the Commission on the Status of the Women (CSW) in NY. The first one was representing the French-speaking Belgian academics for ARGO, the Belgian Advisory Council for Gender and Development. The Council is very active around CSW, because we provide official input for the Belgian negotiating position. So, I took part in the CSW to feed into the council's work and to better anticipate the strategy for the next CSW. 

Secondly, I also participated in CSW for my own research on women's rights. ARGOs work is really interesting for my research because the discussion among the members reflects the difficulties encountered in finding a consensus on women's rights. But at CSW there are also plenty of different opinions on women and gender, including anti-gender perspectives. 

CSW under Trump

Did you notice any developments in the anti-gender presence at CSW?  

I believe that the main difference this year was the new American President. the United States of America can be an important motor, if they are allies, it's easier to negotiate. But this was not the case this year.  
 
They were not able to block the political declaration, which was this year's official outcome document negotiated by all member states. But they did everything they could to block the outcome document and made it a lot harder to get to a consensus.  

I found that the presence of the anti-gender discourse was most striking in the side events. These are events organized by governments or NGOs, next to the official proceedings.  

So even NGOs that you didn’t expect to talk about anti-gender topics did? 

Yeah. Especially religious movements. 

Is that new? Would the religious movements’ events in the previous years stay away from the anti-gender narratives? 

I think it's not new. What is new is the alliances they build with other religions. I went to a joint Muslim Hindu event. These groups usually don't agree. But in this event, they agreed on an approach to women’s rights. It was very strange to witness. 

They agreed that it is not reasonable to talk about equality. According to their view men and women have different “natural” roles and we should support both of them in their specific roles. It has become a strategy in anti-gender rhetoric to push for these types of narrow definitions for gender and sex. 

The rhetoric of anti-gender movements

Did you notice any other strategies they employ?  

Speakers and audience members asking questions talked about themselves a lot more than in previous CSWs. They introduce themselves as parents and say how many children they have. It was a pattern everywhere you looked. 

They are using their personal identity, instead of their organization or expertise, to put themselves at odds with gender equality.  

As a social researcher, I believe this is normal to some extent. We have to take our own biases and opinions into account when conducting research. This might sound strange, but to some extent I agree with this approach. But they don’t do this just to point out that they are not perfectly objective. They use a lot of outdated scientific and pseudoscientific argumentation based on Freudian theories and evolutionary biology from the 80s to prove that they are right. No matter their personal biases. This is another strategy. 

For example, the ‘Holy See’ (the Vatican) side event used some very old theories from the field of porn studies. Theories that pornography is causing changes in your behavior and the relationships between men and women. They position this as a big threat to young people. But these theories have been criticized and disproven to a point where they're not considered reliable sources anymore in the mainstream research field.  

This is linked with the sociology of media in the 80s and 70s that said that if you consume some media your behavior will change. The same research was used to say that young men become aggressive when they play video games.  

Why would they use this research so much?  

They want to discredit contemporary knowledge in gender studies or sociology. This includes everything that is linked with intersectionality, especially with critical race theory. They throw false allegations around. They allege that contemporary knowledge, which is not actually so new, is not based on empirical reality. 

I feel that the battle for science is really at the center of all these movements and polarization. But maybe I'm not really objective in this regard as a social researcher. 

Do you think this is also linked to the rise in anti-intellectualism? 

Maybe. There is a fringe theory out there that can prove anything that you want. Theories are competing with each other, so why should one believe in science? It's really difficult. I think it's a very hard question because it's linked with our opinion on what science is. Some people have a narrow view that only hypotheses proven by statistics are 'real science'. This has created a movement that invalidates scientific findings that are based on qualitative methodologies. 

Do they reach their objective? 

Back to the CSW, Could you tell me like what you think they hope to achieve by engaging in this CSW space?

I think they are there to convince other parties of their discourse, to discredit some women’s rights fights. They also want to be loud and destabilize events and discussions. What we saw at the Belgian side event at the UN is a good example. At the end of the event, a young lady started sharing her own experiences. She used exactly the same strategy we saw in other events.  
First, she talked about herself and about a changing point where she finally saw the light and found religion.  

She didn't even ask a real question. She was just like, “why are you calling us fascists and Nazis?” No one in the meeting had called them fascists and Nazis. 
 
We also saw this strategy at many side events. They play on emotion and use their personal identity, very strong words to destabilize the debate. It's a rhetorical strategy, to discredit what other speakers say, without providing real evidence. 

What do you think is the impact of this rhetoric and the strategies that they're using at CSW? Is it working?  

I think yes. I'm sure that some people, when they hear these arguments, they start to rethink their own opinion. 

Because some points they present are right. I remember one event of the Holy See again, about sex-selective abortion.  

They are right in explaining that it was the first time girls are confronted with the possibility of gender-based violence in their lifetime. But they used this as a way to open the discourse on anti-abortion. 

They lure you in with a statement that makes a lot of sense and then propose their radical ideas. I'm sure some people said, okay, yeah, maybe we should think again about the right to abort.  

Insights

What is your main takeaway from visiting anti-gender side events at CSW?  

As a researcher nobody knows you and that makes it  is easy to go and listen even if you don’t agree with what is being said at an event. I spent so many hours with the anti-gender movement, and because of my role I can also talk more personally with them. 

What has stuck with me the most with these conversations is that we often agree on the problems we are facing.  

An example was an event on the role of fathers. Their arguments about what issues boys and men are facing, start out exactly the same ones we find in a gender studies book like “Boys don't cry”. However, gender studies link these issues to broader societal problems and the confines of patriarchy. The anti-gender movement never criticizes systems of oppression. They say these problems are caused by feminism. So, sometimes we agree on the problem, but the solutions are wildly different. 

We need to show why our solutions will give you better results. We need to remind them that we tried their solutions in the past and they didn’t work.