Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe

This chapter examines the mobilization against “gender” which has spread across Poland since 2012, pointing to both local specificities and links to the transnational context. As we will show, while Polish “anti-genderism” is part of a boarder transnational trend (a fact long invisible to most of Poland’s liberal defenders of gender), some aspects of this phenomenon are indeed locally embedded (Korolczuk 2014). First signs of the new right-wing strategy appeared already in 2012, but the campaign was officially inaugurated on 29 December 2013 by the Pastoral Letter of the Bishops’ Conference read in Poland’s parishes. The letter was followed by many initiatives undertaken by the Catholic Church and conservative groups to fight gender equality education and legislation, sexual and reproductive rights, as well as the very use of the term “gender” in policy documents and public discourse. Polish anti-gender campaigners claim that their aim is to protect the Polish family (especially children) against feminists and the “homosexual lobby”; to defend authentic Polish cultural values (which are equated with Catholic values) against the foreign influence of the corrupt West and liberal European Union, which has supposedly replaced the USSR as Poland’s “colonizer”. Targets include sex education, ratification of the Istanbul Convention and gender equality policies more broadly.

In the first part of this chapter, we present key developments of the Polish war on gender, its main actors, targets, strategies and themes, while the second part critically assesses existing explanatory frameworks offered by liberal commentators and scholars. We argue that the war against gender did not stem from a misunderstanding of the concept of gender, but was rather part of a larger right-wing mobilization on the local and transnational level. In Poland, anti-genderism it proved remarkably effective in political terms, as it enabled a political alliance between nationalism and religious fundamentalism, contributing to the right-wing electoral victory of 2015.

In our view, the current wave of anti-gender mobilization in Poland is not business as usual or another wave of conservative backlash, but a new ideological and political configuration, which successfully combines the local and the transnational, making possible a politically effective mass movement. In the last few years, it has managed to mobilize hundreds of people on the local grassroots level, successfully appealing to parents’ anxieties concerning the future of their families and children. We argue that the success of anti-gender mobilization can be explained by its leaders’ skilful references to ordinary people’s dignity and their identity as an oppressed majority. Anti-genderism consistently presents itself as an effort to defend authentic indigenous values against foreign forces and corrupt elites – a discourse which we interpret as a variant of right-wing appropriation of the anti-colonial frame (Snochowska-Gonzalez 2012; see also Graff and Korolczuk 2017; Pető 2015, 127). What may be construed as an Eastern European peculiarity is the strategic use and cultural resonance of the argument that gender is a “totalitarian ideology”. This tendency to discredit gender by explicitly linking it to actual totalitarian regimes which claimed millions of victims in the region is exemplified by the following statement made in 2013 by Polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek: “Gender ideology is worse than communism and Nazism put together” (Sierakowski 2014a). While the contested policies are coming from the West and are presented as Western impositions, “genderism” (a word used interchangeably with gender) is seen as a vast project of social engineering rooted in Marxism and comparable to Stalinism. This tension or ambivalence persists in many of the documents and statements examined here: gender/“genderism”/“gender ideology” are demonized as a cultural imposition, a foreign body that is Western and Eastern at the same time.

This study builds on textual analysis of pastoral letters, articles and statements published on the web pages of specific groups and organizations such as No to Gender!, media reports (also international), as well as existing research on neoconservative movements in Europe and the United States.¹ We also examine the new genre of anti-gender books, many of them written by women, speculating on the significance of this fact for the shape of anti-gender rhetoric. Finally, we refer to events which we have experienced first-hand, as participant observers of demonstrations and public debates.

KEY ACTORS AND STRATEGIES IN THE POLISH WAR ON GENDER

Mass mobilization started in 2012, and the main social actors involved in the campaign included priests, conservative politicians, journalists, bloggers but also grassroots activists, many of whom were concerned parents of young children (Fábián and Korolczuk 2017). Some of the organizations involved were established well before the anti-gender mobilization began: Fundacja Mamy i Taty (Mom and Dad Foundation) had been engaged in promoting “traditional family values” and opposing gay rights and divorce since 2010; Stowarzyszenie i Fundacja Rzecznik Praw Rodziców (Foundation Ombudsman for Parents’ Rights) was set up in 2009 with the goal of counteracting school reform. Other groups such as Inicjatywa Stop Seksualizacji Naszych Dzieci (Initiative Stop Sexualizing Our Children) and Stop Gender network came into being later (2013 and 2014) with the sole purpose of resisting what they saw as the spread of “genderism” (their specific targets were sex education, as well as access to contraception and IVF treatment).

These organizations and networks appear to be well connected to each other, as well as to influential Polish right-wing think tanks such as Instytut Kultury Prawnej Ordo Iuris (Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture) and to transnational platforms such as citizengo.com (registered in Spain but available in Polish and used by Polish groups for petition drives). This network also includes many anti-choice groups such as Stowarzyszenie Rodzin Wielodzietnych (Association of Large Families), Centrum Wspierania Inicjatyw dla Życia i Rodziny (Center for Supporting Initiatives for Life and the Family), Polska Federacja Ruchów Obrony Życia (Polish Federation of Pro-life Movements) and Koalicja Obywatelska Dla Rodziny (Civic Coalition for the Family). These organizations and alliances are instrumental in mobilizing large numbers of people, especially parents of school children, as was evident in the mass rally organized on 30 August 2015 in Warsaw with the aim of stopping changes in sex education curriculum in Polish schools. The demonstration, held under the banner “Stop depravation in education”, was organized by 26 organizations and networks and hosted both Polish and international guest speakers, mostly renowned anti-choice activists such as Antonia Tully (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, Great Britain), Antoine Renard (La Manif Pour Tous, France and the head of the European Federation of Catholic Family Associations) and Christoph Scharnweber (Demo für alle, Germany).

Strategies of the movement include petitions, demonstrations, publications, workshops and conferences as well as political initiatives in Parliament. It is remarkable how well anti-gender activists have made use of the Internet and new communication technologies: websites, social media and open platforms disseminating information and mobilizing people to sign online petitions, take part in protests and engage on the local and national level. Sometimes these digital communities are linked to a specific organization, such as stopgender.pl and stop-seksualizacji.pl, but there are also open platforms such as citizengo.org.

Practical goals the activists mobilize around include opposition to gender equality and sex education programmes in schools, sexual and reproductive rights (including not only contraception and abortion but also access to reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization), equal rights for sexual minorities, gender mainstreaming and the very use of the word “gender” in public documents, international treaties and media discourse. The stated goals focus on “saving” the children, the family and ultimately the Christian civilization from the dangers of “gender ideology”.

Among groups identified as dangerous are feminists, LGBT organizations, sex educators, state administrators. Although specific targets are local, the evil’s roots are identified as “global” and “totalitarian”. Hence, it is not a coincidence that anti-gender opposition often targets specific legal changes proposed and promoted by international institutions and organizations such as the UN or EU. Right-wing opposition to EU policies on gender equality and LGBT rights has played an important role in the anti-European propaganda and mobilizing already since the early 2000s (Graff 2009, 2010). Even before the EU accession in 2004, Eurosceptics liked to refer to the European “homolobby” and “pro-abortion lobby” as ultimate threats to the Polish national identity. This campaign was not fully successful as the level of support for EU integration in Poland was the highest among the new member states and remains so today: 68% of Poles trust EU as an institution (GUS 2014). However, mass support for modernization brought by EU funding does not necessarily translate to acceptance of cultural and social transformation associated with sexual democracy. Polish Euro-sceptics have capitalized on this gap by arguing that Poland has the right to benefit from European integration economically, but must retain its cultural integrity as a Catholic country. Arguably, the anti-gender mobilization marks a new phase of these efforts: The concept of “gender ideology” explicitly links homosexuality, abortion and the alleged threat of arbitrary sex change with the West and the European Union.

MAIN THEMES AND DEVELOPMENTS

Though it is difficult to locate the precise starting point of anti-gender mobilization, one date often mentioned is April 2012, when the then minister of justice Jarosław Gowin publicly opposed ratification of the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention), calling it a “carrier of gender ideology” (Graff 2014; Grzebalska 2015). His statements, puzzling at the time to many people, seem to have initiated the anti-gender campaign.² The rationale offered by Gowin was that the Convention is an ideological Trojan Horse: Its hidden agenda, he claimed, was undermining the traditional family. The fact that the text of the Convention includes the word “gender” was viewed as proof of its social-constructionist underpinnings. Polish feminists, sex educators as well as the then-ruling party, the liberal-conservative pro-EU Civic Platform, were portrayed as traitors, mere puppets in the hands of an international or even global conspiracy against the existing traditional gender order. A similar isolationist note could be heard in other related contexts, for example when Bishop Stanisław Stefanek, representative of the Council for Family of the Polish Episcopate, commented on government’s efforts to initiate discussion on civil unions as evidence that the ruling party “implements global directives, dressing them up in trendy words, claiming that this is what progress and freedom are about” (Kowalczyk 2012).

Another prominent theme of anti-gender debates is the issue of sexeducation, which is demonized as the “sexualization of children”. Clearly, the overarching theme of “child in danger” is not a Polish invention, as it has been used also in other countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France (Höjdestrand 2015; Kováts and Põim 2015; Strelnyk 2016). However, in Poland the focus on children may be stronger than elsewhere because the initial stage of the anti-gender campaign coincided with the surfacing of the public accusations against paedophile priests (Overbeek 2013). Consequently, attacks on “gender” were viewed by many as an effort of the Polish Episcopate to divert media attention away from the Church peadophilia scandals. On 8 October 2013 archbishop Józef Michalik made a public statement depicting child victims of paedophile clergymen as “clinging to priests”, seeking for the love they do not receive at home (Polskie Radio 2013). With this outrageous statement he attempted to shift responsibility from perpetrators to “broken families” and international institutions which “sexualize children” through sex education. While Michalik later retracted his expressions as “unfortunate”, the question of sex education remained a key theme of anti-gender mobilization.

Attacks were made on sex education programmes in kindergartens and schools, focusing mainly on WHO standards for sex education being implemented by NGOs such as the Foundation of Pre-School Education (Grzebalska 2015). One key target, consistently demonized and misrepresented as incitement to sexualization and masturbation was the handbook Równościowe przedszkole (Equality Kindergarten) published by feminist educators in 2011. Rumours were spread that sex educators forced little boys to wear dresses. These attacks on “gender” were consistently framed as efforts to protect children who are to be confused about gender roles at an early age, only to become slaves of the homo/feminist/anti-Church lobby later.

The idea that children need to be protected against exposure to allegedly corrupting sex education programmes or “sex-talk” in the media is central to conservative cultural politics in many contexts. In some ways controversies over sex education in Polish schools bear resemblance to the battle over sex education in the United States in the 1990s: In both cases, the focus was on protecting children and on parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children (Irvine 2002). Moreover, in both countries, sex education offered in public schools and kindergartens was presented as an unacceptable form of the state’s intervention into citizen’s private lives. The specificity of the Polish variant of this argument is that this intervention was then routinely compared to communists’ attempts to gain full control over people’s private and family life. In other words, sex education was disqualified as an imposition of the liberal West (UN, WHO, EU) but also as a remnant of communist practices.

Given the focus on the welfare of children, it is no surprise that the proponents of anti-genderist rhetoric have been successful in mobilizing parents. The most famous representative of the anti-gender campaign, the charismatic Father Dariusz Oko, stressed in an interview:

The seemingly politically neutral agenda of “saving the children” broadened popular appeal and ensured the support of existing parents’ groups previously engaged in other issues such as educational reform or father’s rights (Korolczuk and Hryciuk 2017). Two key parents’ organizations involved in fighting “gender ideology” in Poland were Fundacja Mamy i Taty (Mom and Dad Foundation) and Stowarzyszenie i Fundacja Rzecznik Praw Rodziców (Foundation Ombudsman for Parents’ Rights). This trend is not peculiar to Poland: In many countries, including France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, conservative parents’ rights organizations have become key actors of the anti-gender campaigns (Höjdestrand 2015; Strelnyk 2016; Fábián and Korolczuk 2017).

Not surprisingly, in the Polish context it is the Catholic Church that has become the main force behind the anti-gender campaign (Case 2011). Official religious sanction for this effort was given in the Pastoral Letter of the Bishops’ Conference of Poland, which was made public and read in churches on 29 December 2013. This document provides a useful sample of how anti-gender crusaders explain the origins of “gender ideology”, showing how in the post-communist context of Poland gender equality is disqualified through a crude parallel with Marxism and communist propaganda. In the view of Polish Episcopate:

Polish bishops stressed the danger posed by this alleged “ideology” claiming that, by negating sexual difference and gender complementarity, it erases the existing gender order and constitutes a major threat to mankind. According to this view, “gender ideology” is implemented worldwide by international institutions (especially the United Nations and the European Union) and nation states, inspired by feminists and proponents of gay rights (Buss 2004; Datta 2013; Paternotte 2014).

Though gay rights were not explicitly mentioned in the Pastoral Letter, it was soon clear that the key danger to Polish children is homosexuality, usually dubbed as “homosexual propaganda”. Father Oko, already cited above, has become one of the main figures disseminating homophobic hate speech in the public sphere. His speeches are jeremiads warning against the slippery slope that tolerating equality inevitably leads to. In a typical statement broadcast on Catholic Radio Maryja he exposed the alleged homosexual conspiracy:

Oko was a key actor of the anti-gender campaign as early as January 2014, when he appeared with a public lecture on gender in Polish Parliament. He was invited to give a speech at the lower chamber of Polish Parliament (Sejm) by the Parliamentary Committee Against Atheisation of Poland and by a group of MP’s identifying as “pro-life” with the aim of drawing public attention to the dangers of gender mainstreaming and “sexualization” of children.³ In his lecture, Oko presented gender as “a dire threat to civilization”, “a great evil, that must be spoken about”, informing the public that “genderists propagate incest, pedophilia and homosexuality” and “atheists have been the greatest criminals in human history” (Oko 2014).

Oko’s lecture was a significant event, much discussed in the media, marking the politicization of the anti-gender debate. That same month, another right-wing party Solidarna Polska (United Poland) formed the Parliamentary Committee STOP Gender Ideology headed by Beata Kempa. During the first half of 2014 alone, this body organized a conference that featured Gabrielle Kuby as a keynote speaker, as well as meetings and workshops in over a dozen of Polish cities. Kempa’s involvement in the anti-gender campaign paid off: In November 2015 she became the head of the chancellery of the prime minister in the new right-wing government. And as the new government installed itself in power, the war against gender, already inscribed in Law and Justice electoral programme, became part of governments’ official policy known as “Change for the Better”. On 17 November 2015, Jarosław Gowin, the newly appointed Minister of Science and Higher Education, announced his intention to remove unnamed “gay and lesbian studies journals” from the official rankings of academic journals. On the same day, in an interview for the Catholic weekly Niedziela, the new minister of education, Anna Zalewska stated: “School must be free from various ideologies. Children will study normal, classic subjects. We will deal with this problem without causing unnecessarily turmoil and press conferences” (Stelmasiak 2015).

Since many of the Polish organizations and networks involved in the anti-gender mobilization are linked to the national and transnational anti-choice movement, it is hardly surprising that the issue of abortion was an important theme in the war on gender in the country. This is especially relevant in the light of the later developments. Following the right-wing victory in elections 2015, the Roman Catholic Church and the anti-choice network “STOP abortion” launched a massive campaign for a total ban on abortion. In spring 2016, the initiators (many of whom were involved in anti-gender mobilization) started to gather signatures supporting citizen’s law proposal. The drafted bill included a total ban on abortion and the threat of criminal prosecution for both doctors and women (up to five years in prison).⁴

This was not the first time such a restrictive law was submitted to the Parliament, but never before had the country’s leading politicians announced their support for such a proposal. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło and the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party Jarosław Kaczyński declared that as Catholics they will support total ban on abortion. If the law was passed, it would affect not only women seeking to terminate pregnancy but also patients treated for ectopic pregnancy, cases of severe physical defects present in fetus such as spina bifida and rape survivors who would be forced by law to give birth. In retrospect, the link between anti-gender campaign and this political initiative is clear: Putting a total ban on abortion fits well with the overall goal of opposing forces which allegedly promote promiscuity, chaos in gender order and depopulation.

“ANTI-GENDERISM” AS AN INTELLECTUAL PROJECT

“Anti-genderism” is not only a political battlefield, but also a struggle over legitimacy in the academic world. Unlike the backlash of the 1990s in the United States, which presented itself as a commonsense reaction to a dubious and harmful developments caused by feminism, anti-genderism claims to be scientific. In fact, it has the ambition of becoming an alternative field of knowledge production (Duda 2016). Efforts to establish anti-genderism as a legitimate academic field and intellectual pursuit consist in translating well-known foreign authors such as Gabrielle Kuby and Marguerite A. Peeters, publishing books and articles by Polish authors, organizing academic conferences and giving lectures at public universities (e.g. Dariusz Oko lectured at University Warsaw in October 2014). Anti-genderism has evolved into a coherent world view and an area of expertise, a vast project of education aimed not only at debunking feminism and gender studies but also at developing an alternative field of knowledge and perhaps also a new public sphere (Graff and Korolczuk 2017).

Interestingly, gender matters very much in the anti-gender world: If you plan to become an anti-gender authority, it clearly helps to be a woman. While the European anti-gender scene coheres around female pundits Gabrielle Kuby and Marguerite A. Peeters, in Poland examples of women made famous by their opposition to “genderism” include the formerly unknown female politicians, Rep. Beata Kempa, who became an anti-gender celebrity and, as mentioned above, went on to a remarkable political career. Another noteworthy example is Małgorzata Terlikowska, the wife of a well-known ultraconservative publicist and mother of five, who became a household name thanks to her part in the anti-gender campaign. Three full-length anti-gender books were published in 2014, all of them authored by young female journalists associated with the right-wing press. Agnieszka Niewińska “infiltrated” the Warsaw Gender Studies programme at the Institute for Literary Studies PAN and produced a detailed Raport o gender w Polsce (Report on gender in Poland). Magdalena Żuraw published Idiotyzmy feminizmu (The idiocies of feminism) a pamphlet aimed to unmask the “inconsistencies and absurdities” of feminism by confronting them with “common sense”. Marzena Nykiel, perhaps the most ambitious of the three, authored Pułapka Gender (Gender Trap), a tract of some three hundred pages, revealing to the public the horrors of “genderism”, presented as a new form of colonialism and totalitarianism, a vast conspiracy and a dire threat to Christian civilization. The book reads like a dramatic wake-up call addressed to the faithful: Readers are urged to join the struggle to defend Christianity before it is too late; the battle going on in Poland is presented as the last hope.

Female authors of anti-gender tracts are celebrated in the conservative media as Cassandras, defenders of humanity, but also as women, defenders of true womanhood against the fake agenda of genderists and feminists. Women appear as the authentic experts of anti-genderism since they represent what is seen as experiential knowledge gained in motherhood (actual or potential). It is this claim to authenticity that elevates conservative common sense to the status of dogma. Feminism is then presented as a hoax, an absurd ideology foreign to most women’s lives, imposed on them by leftist men against their best interests. “Genderism” is said not only to hurt children and deprive men of masculinity, but also to lead women to prostitution, desperation as single mothers and deprive them of the support of men.

INTERPRETATIONS OF ANTI-GENDER MOBILIZATION: POLISH EXCEPTIONALISM RECONSIDERED

Poland may appear peculiar or even exceptional to both insiders and outsiders in regard to matters of gender equality and LGBT rights. It is not only a matter of continuing political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, but also of politicization of gender and sexuality in Poland during the pre-accession period. Since the mid-90s, governments as well as media have repeatedly presented gender conservatism as key to Poland’s uniqueness in Europe, a matter of national pride and national sovereignty in the process of EU accession (Graff 2009, 2014).

Intially most commentators, scholars and journalists in Poland have understood anti-gender mobilization as a local phenomenon, a sign of Poland’s intellectual and social provincialism and perhaps also a sign of crisis or division with in the Episcopate. Anti-genderism was viewed as a doomed effort to cover up paedophilia scandals and dubious financial transactions of the Polish Catholic Church. A vivid example of such argumentation is the article published in January 2014 in the New York Times by the well-known Polish intellectual and founder of a Left-liberal think tank Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique), Sławomir Sierakowski:

Sierakowski was not alone in attributing the anti-gender campaign to local trends (e.g. Kuisz and Wigura 2014). Another sign of this misconception was the well-meant effort to explain gender to the misinformed, undertaken by Minister Agnieszka Kozłowska-Rajewicz, at the time the government’s Plenipotentiary for Gender Equality. Assuming (or pretending to assume) that the Bishops’ Letter was the result of ignorance or an unfortunate misunderstanding, Rajewicz offered calm explanations and posted a primer in gender studies on the Ministry’s website. She explained that gender is no threat, but a staple category of social sciences and that gender mainstreaming is a EU policy and not an international plot against the family. The Ministry’s website also featured a glossary of gender-related terminology aimed to enlighten the misinformed. Yet another example of actions based on the assumption of Poland’s exceptionalism was the open letter addressed by the Congress of Polish Women (the nation’s largest women’s rights organization) to Pope Francis, alerting him to the misdoings of Polish bishops (28 November 2013):

The underlying assumption of this document was that the war on gender was a Polish invention unknown to and unsupported by the Vatican, while existing scholarship shows the opposite (Case 2011).

The early interpretations and reactions highlighted the importance of the local context but ignored broader trends that have since become more apparent to all. Also in contexts such as France, usually associated with secularism, a new wave of neoconservatism is on the rise, often rooted in religious teachings. Eric Fassin (2014) talks about “religious common sense” leading to an interesting overlap between teachings of representatives of different denominations as to the importance of Nature, heterosexual marriage and the “traditional” gender order, as the case of Baptist-burqa network discussed by Clifford Bob (2012) aptly shows. Arguably, we are dealing with a major shift in public debates globally, in which the notions of gender, nation and democracy are being redefined and reconfigured.

As the war on gender developed, so did interpretations of this phenomenon by liberal intellectuals. From the beginning it was clear to many that anti-gender mobilization partakes in a broader cultural conflict about modernity: “gender” is a stretchy category that serves as a screen for collective fears about change, loss of national identity, excessive influence of the West and its cultural expansion. A crucial source of anxiety is the rampant individualism of contemporary culture, the erosion of community and growing precariousness of everyday life. Opponents of “gender ideology” attribute these trends to the influence of feminism and the sexual revolution rather than to neoliberalism. However, anti-genderism can in fact be interpreted as a neoconservative response to neoliberal globalization (Pető 2015). Even though anti-genderists often use references to community, family and value of motherhood strategically, for example when mobilizing parents groups, they also genuinely cherish these values as central to their world view. Traditional family is to them the last frontier to be defended against the onslaught of modernity (Höjdestrand 2015; Fábián and Korolczuk 2017).

One especially vulnerable element of the traditional world view is masculinity: the authority and dignity of men which is under threat both within the family and in the public sphere. Renewed faith in the dignity of manhood and fatherhood is central to anti-genderist rhetoric. This explains why in the Polish context conservative fathers’ rights organizations, such as Brave Dad (Dzielny Tato) joined anti-gender campaign (Korolczuk and Hryciuk 2017). David Ost (2005) has long diagnosed that Poland’s cultural war is more usefully viewed as a class conflict. We believe, however, that gendered social norms and economics must be combined if we are to understand the phenomena in question. The focus on masculinity involves an economic dimension, as the ability to perform as a “breadwinner” is a central tenet of traditional manhood. It is clear to us that the aggressive masculinism and homophobia at the core of new nationalist extremism are at least partly driven by the frustration of young men lacking economic perspectives. The ideology of new manhood rooted in patriarchal values and nationalist hero-worship promises a sense of purpose and a self-respect that cannot be won in the market.

While the above observations are relevant in most cultural contexts, certain aspects of anti-genderism seem specific to Poland, a country where an ongoing nationalist revival draws heavily on a sense of victimhood and hunger for recognition and where the Catholic Church is a key political player as well as cultural influence. An important element of the local version of anti-genderism is a strong investment in authentic Polishness constructed not just as national identity but also as moral dignity, previously under attack from the East and today from the West, especially the European Union.

Brussels is often identified as the new colonizer and compared to USSR. Poland is viewed by the right wing as repeatedly betrayed and notoriously disrespected by the West. Thus, the addressee of claims to dignity and pronouncements of national pride is not just the fellow Pole, called upon to join the struggle, but also an imagined English-speaking visitor, whose arrogance is being critiqued. This explains why many banners displayed at anti-gender demonstrations are bilingual. For instance during a large anti-sex education rally held on 30 August 2015 in Warsaw, protesters held the following signs in both Polish and English: “Gender-danger”; “Gender – the ideology of spineless Westerners is not for our hardy Poles”; “Gender + Convention about so called ‘violence against the women and violence in the family’ this is the Ebola for Poland from Brussels”.

The version of Polishness these protesters want to defend against “spineless Westerners” and “ebola from Brussels” is firmly embedded in Catholicism. Feminist theologian Zuzanna Radzik (2013) has argued that the Church should not be viewed as an ideological monolith here: In fact, anti-genderism serves the conservative and nationalist wing of the Church to discipline liberal dissenters. A new version of an old polarization is at the root of the present trend: “gender”, claims Radzik, has simply replaced Jews and homosexuals in their role of the demonized enemy of the illiberal wing of the Polish Catholic Church. This analysis is useful also in pointing attention to anti-Semitic residues in the Polish anti-gender campaign. They are not central but nonetheless present, which explains why figures such as Michel Jones, an American right-wing extremist, who blames Jews for the destruction of Western culture, are welcome guests in the Polish anti-genderist circles.

Scholars have also pointed to links between anti-genderism and ongoing controversies regarding reproductive technologies, especially in vitro fertilization in Poland. Anthropologist Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz (2014) has suggested that anti-genderism is a response to anxieties caused by recent developments in biotechnology and the fundamental changes they caused in the sphere of kinship, reproduction and family (Stawiszyński 2013). Opposition towards gender constructionism is an effort to restore stability in an increasingly unstable world of human reproduction, in which the nature-culture divide has ceased to be self-evident. While this interpretation works in most cultural contexts, it is especially relevant to Poland, where biotechnology has been the object of heated political and ethical debates at least since 2007 (Radkowska-Walkowicz 2012; Gunnarsson-Payne and Korolczuk 2016).

Some commentators have emphasized the role of economic trends in the development of anti-genderism. Political scientist Dorota Szelewa (2014) suggests that attacks on gender are in fact part of a longer historical process linked to critical junctures in the economy. She claims that the antifeminism rampant in the region in the early 1990s after the collapse of state socialism provided a rationale for re-familialization of the social policy model, while the present wave of anti-genderism is linked to the global economic crisis of 2008. On this view, anti-genderism paves the way for continuation of austerity-based social policy reforms such as cuts in child care services, which results in reinforcing the traditional gender order. While we agree that the anti-gender campaign, with its focus on family values and motherhood, has the aim of strengthening the traditional family order, it does not necessarily lead to a continuation of austerity policies. On the contrary, recent policy changes often consist in substantial public spending (e.g. prolonged maternity and parental leave introduced by the then ruling Civic Platform in January 2014; and child allowance amounting to 500 PLN per child implemented by the Law and Justice government in Spring 2016).

Finally, according to some scholars, anti-genderism really is what it claims to be: a conservative reaction to EU gender mainstreaming policies, to the development and growing cultural influence of gender studies at universities and especially to gender education in schools and kindergartens (Grabowska 2014). It is true that the visibility of gender studies has substantially increased in recent years; however, feminist scholars are right to view themselves as marginal in Poland’s overwhelmingly conservative academic culture. In our view, presenting gender scholars and feminists as powerful and influential serves the purpose of constructing opposition to gender as a form of victimhood and resistance to a powerful, foreign-based enemy or cultural colonizer. However, Grabowska (2014) rightly points to the fact that since the 1990s, when religion was introduced into Polish schools, education remained a safe and unquestioned sphere for the popularization of religion and Catholic values among children. This explains why efforts to introduce equality classes in early child education were perceived as a violent imposition on national culture and children’s innocence, and why this issue has become the main battlefield the anti-gender campaign.

CONCLUSION

With its focus on national pride, its use of neoconservative “family values” rhetoric and its insistence that Christianity is in danger, the Polish anti-gender mobilization appears at the intersection of global illiberal influences and local resurgence of gendered nationalism. Initially, many commentators in Poland interpreted this mobilization as a local phenomenon, an effort to cover up emerging paedophilia scandals in the Polish Catholic Church. Even today many Polish liberals remain attached to an exceptionalist frame, viewing anti-genderism as a symptom of ignorance and obscurantism peculiar to the conservative currents of Polish Catholicism, in short, an anomaly. We are among those who challenge such a perspective as too limited. Poland’s anti-gender campaign must be linked to events taking place in Europe and beyond, for example mass mobilizations of concerned parents such as La Manif Pour Tous in France, Vatican’s statements targeting gender, as well as recent attacks on “the gender agenda” in the United States and the anti-LGBT and antifeminist backlash in Putin’s Russia, Ukraine or Georgia, as well as anti-gender mobilizations in other regions, including Africa.

Polish initiatives are part of a broader resurgence of right-wing extremism and religious fundamentalism, a coordinated transnational effort to undermine liberal values by democratic means. Part of this strategy, as we elaborate elsewhere, is the effective employment of an anti-colonial frame, whereby “genderism” is presented as a sinister global force, a new form of colonial power exercised by the UN, EU and WHO against the worlds’ poor, especially developing nations of Africa (Graff and Korolczuk 2017). Eastern Europe is accorded a special place in this geography of gender as a part of the world that was left untouched by the sexual revolution and proved resistant to Marxism, thus it is hoped to save the West from its own decadence. This sense of the region’s uniqueness and Poland’s special importance as a Catholic country permeates the local version of anti-gender rhetoric, endowing it with a peculiar tone of urgency and drama. In the eyes of Polish Catholic clergy and right-wing activists, gender studies are equivalent to totalitarian ideologies such as Stalinism and Nazism, atheists become mass murderers and sex education can be equated with “organized gang rape on the child’s soul” (zorganizowany, zbiorowy gwałt na duszy dziecka) (Oko 2014).

In retrospect, it is clear that the battles against gender served as a springboard for political careers for previously lesser known right-wing politicians, such as Beata Kempa discussed above. However, more than individual careers were at stake. It must be emphasized that the anti-gender campaign and mass mobilization around this issue have had real political consequences in Poland. This is in part due to effective appropriation of the anti-colonial narrative, where “genderists” feature in the role of colonizers, while the conservative right plays the role of defender authentic local culture. The discourse of besieged dignity, wounded pride, moral panic and righteous anger strengthened the polarization of the country’s public debate and political scene. The anti-genderism provided “a symbolic glue” (Pető 2015) facilitating an alliance between “the altar” and “the stadium”, that is between Catholic clergy, anti-choice organizations and right-wing extremists, including football fans. Due to its focus on children, the campaign also attracted many concerned parents’ groups. They all united in defence of endangered Polish children and traditional family values (equated with Catholicism) in open meetings held in parishes, during patriotic demonstrations in the streets of large Polish cities, in TV studios and increasing online. The strategic alliance forged among different conservative groups helped bring about the political triumph of the Polish right in presidential and parliamentary elections of 2015.

NOTES

1.We examined articles and reports published on websites which are key to anti-gender organizing (www.stop-seksualizacji.pl, www.stopgender.pl), Catholic and right-wing media outlets (www.fronda.pl, www.niedziela.pl, www.naszdziennik.pl, http://gosc.pl, www.wsieci.pl, www.ekai.pl, www.poloniachristiana.pl), as well as publications and debates on gender ideology in mainstream media outlets (www.rzeczpospolita.pl, www.gazeta.pl, www.tvn.pl and www.tvp.pl) throughout 2013 and 2014. We focused on materials featuring “gender”, “genderism” and “gender ideology” as key words, aiming at comprehensive analysis of key actors, arguments and developments, as well as the frames of interpretation used. Elżbieta Korolczuk wishes to acknowledge that the work on this article was assisted by grant received from the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (grant A 78/2014 “Genus och politiska kunskapskulturer i Polen, Sverige och Tyskland”).

2.The ratification process was finalized in March 2015, but the right-wing government, in power since November 2015, has announced its intention to withdraw Poland from the agreement.

3.The Parliamentary Committee against Atheisation of Poland is a body comprised exclusively of MPs from the right-wing party Law and Justice (which won elections over a year later, in fall 2015).

4.Polish law already strictly limits access to abortion, which is illegal unless one of the three exceptions occurs: when the pregnancy is the result of criminally proven rape or incest, if the woman’s life is in danger or the fetus is “seriously malformed”.

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Chapter 10

“Worse than communism and Nazism put together”: War on gender in Poland