When the expression “gender theory” emerged for the first time during the debate on marriage equality in Slovenia in 2012, it sounded like an unfortunate and accidental combination of two words without a specific meaning. However, the continuous repetition of the expression, the ambiguity of its meaning, combined with a clear negative connotation, hinted that something more structured was in the making. What looked like a linguistic lapsus at first soon turned out to be a well-thought-out strategy, a new populist buzzword that came to represent “the enemy”.
Since then, anti-gender activists have initiated controversies around public schools claiming that children had been exposed to “gender theory”. They succeeded in preventing a bill on gender equality from entering into further parliamentary procedures, arguing that it would institute “gender theory” as the official ideology of the state. They also – although unsuccessfully – urged the Slovenian government not to ratify the Istanbul Convention, as it requires the introduction of the “extreme ideas of gender theory”2 into national legislation and school curricula. Finally, they staged 40 days of prayers outside of the gynecological clinic in Ljubljana, and they continuously screened a prolife movie for one week 24/7 on the outside walls of the Franciscan Church in the center of Ljubljana, hoping that these actions would prevent women from aborting. While the targets of the Slovenian anti-gender movement increasingly include women’s reproductive rights, most of their activities so far have been organized around the two referendums on marriage equality, which they successfully called for in 2012 and 2015.
There are numerous resemblances between the Slovenian anti-gender movement and similar movements across Europe, particularly its essentializing discourse and self-victimizing position in relation to allegedly corrupt elites. Both features, which are an indispensable “toolkit of … populist rhetoric” (Wodak 2015, 4), have significantly contributed to its success in Slovenia, which cannot be explained without paying attention to the specific political and cultural context in which the movement emerged. I argue therefore in this chapter that the success of the Slovenian anti-gender movement results from the strategic exploration of opportunities offered by the government’s proposal on marriage equality in 2009 and 2015. This opened up political space for organized counter-movement against the government’s intervention into naturalistic hegemonic ideas and values about nuclear family and marriage, which aimed to go beyond the heteronormative suppositions of both institutions. The anti-gender movement seized these opportunities – which emerged during severe economic crisis and mass protests against (corrupt) economic and political elites in Slovenia – and build up a “politics of fear” (Wodak 2015) that manifested in self-victimization (i.e. victim-perpetrator reversal) as a strategic approach to address “silenced majority”.
The movement has also succeeded in presenting itself as a non-confessional movement of concerned citizens. Ironically, this has been achieved thanks to the extensive support of the Slovenian Catholic Church. In fact, as I will show, such a mode of cooperation was already envisaged in the action plan of the Church in the early 2000s, when the Church adopted its own policy document on the new evangelization of Slovenia for the twenty-first century. This action plan intersected with the broader Vatican’s anti-gender strategy, which had been in the making since the mid-1990s (Buss 1998, 2004; Paternotte 2014, 2017). It must also be mentioned that, in 2010, the Slovenian Catholic Church faced a considerable financial scandal. Due to poor financial investments the Church ended up with 70 million euro in debt. Hence, it used debates on marriage equality as a convenient opportunity to shift public attention and to reestablish itself as a moral authority.
This chapter documents the emergence and the development of the anti-gender movement in Slovenia from its beginnings in 2009 to its announced entrance into party politics in 2015. It first highlights the context in which the anti-gender movement emerged, its modes of action and its successes. Then it examines the connections of the Catholic Church to the movement and studies the Church’s action plan to foster lay people’s civil initiatives, such as the one that emerged during the first referendum on marriage equality. In the third part, it analyses the ways “gender theory” is explained and framed in the Slovenian context. Finally, it discusses the reasons why the anti-gender movement has been successful and has managed to mobilize thousands of people who voted against the equal rights of same-sex couples in both referendums.
The Slovenian anti-gender movement emerged in 2009, when the Slovenian government presented the reform of the Family Code. This new code, which replaced the previous one from 1976, introduced numerous innovations, including an inclusive definition of the family encompassing all forms of biological and social parenting, marriage equality and the right of same-sex couples to joint adoption. These changes were the bone of public contention for three years. The Family Code was finally adopted in parliament in 2011, but was repealed in 2012, after a public referendum initiated by the newly established coalition of “concerned citizens” Civilna iniciativa za družino in pravice otrok (Civil Initiative for the Family and the Rights of Children, CIDPO).
In 2015, the Slovenian parliament adopted amendments to the Marriage and Family Relations Act, introducing marriage equality into Slovenian legislation for the second time. However, the same initiative of “concerned citizens” – this time renamed into Za otroke gre (Children Are at Stake, ZOG) – petitioned again for a referendum. They managed to collect over 80,000 signatures – twice the required number for a referendum to be called by the parliament. In December 2015, the majority of the electorate voted against marriage equality.
Aleš Primc, a philosophy graduate who is no stranger to conservative groups in Slovenia, was the leading person of the CIDPO and a co-leader of the ZOG. In 2001, he actively participated in the referendum campaign against the right of single women to in vitro fertilization (Hrženjak 2001).3 He also opposed the decriminalization of prostitution in Slovenia in 2003, but failed to collect enough signatures to initiate a public referendum (Pajnik 2003).4 He used to be an active member of the conservative People’s Party, but now he mostly presents himself as a concerned father.
The new figure in the movement, Metka Zevnik, who came into the media spotlight during the second referendum campaign, also describes her political engagement through her family role as a grandparent of six and a mother of three. A former teacher and education expert, she is now the president of the association of grandparents of Slovenia Glas starih staršev (The Voice of Grandparents), which was established in 2014. The association is closely connected to the ZOG and claims that Slovenian legislation ousts grandparents from families by not recognizing their educational and caring roles.5
Like other anti-gender movements in Europe, the CIDPO used the silhouette of a “normal family” as its visual trademark. However, its trademark colours are not pink and blue, which were typically used in the anti-gender rallies in countries like France, Italy, Croatia or Slovakia, but yellow.6 During the second referendum campaign, the ZOG retained the now-recognizable yellow colour, but changed the silhouette of a “normal family” into a drawing of a boy and a girl, hiding behind a hand, which will stop the devastating “gender theory”. The shift from the nuclear family to a boy and a girl hiding behind a hand might be connected to the increased focus of the movement on grandparents and extended families, although the protection of nuclear family and particularly children remains its main goal.
The anti-gender movement applied different strategies to spread its message, including online petitions, e-mail chains, roundtable debates, public rallies and, similarly to Italy (Garbagnoli in this volume), the organization of the Family Day as an antidote to the Pride Parade. It also used its website to collect signatures against the Family Code. Although these signatures did not have any legal validity, collecting them was used strategically, as the leader of the campaign showed hundreds of pages of signatures to television cameras each time he was given a chance to speak.
Similarly to the online platform CitizenGO or European Dignity Watch (Hodžić and Bijelić 2014), the CIDPO used the tactic of e-mail chains to spread its message among “unsuspecting citizens”, and e-bombarded politicians, scientists and other public figures who talked in favour of marriage equality. The latter have received hundreds of identical e-mails every hour, which in some cases led to a total blockage of their mailboxes.7
Both initiatives, the CIDPO and the ZOG, were targeting primarily “concerned parents” and, in 2015, also grandparents, who constitute a vast pool of potential voters who are typically more conservative.8 Unlike the CIDPO, which started to refer to “gender theory” during the last phase of the public debate on the Family Code in 2012, ZOG’s references to this concept were much clearer and appeared earlier in the campaign.
During the first referendum campaign, the emerging anti-gender movement obtained its first momentum. The second referendum provided the movement with another opportunity to establish itself as a relevant political actor. Therefore, it came as no surprise that the leader of the anti-gender movement Aleš Primc, who renamed his initiative into Gibanje za otroke in družine (Movement for Children and Families) in 2016, announced its entrance into party politics. In May 2016, the Gibanje za otroke in družine presented its political program called Deklaracija upanja za otroke in družine (Declaration of hope for children and families).9 This declaration is an interesting mixture of ideas, addressing numerous topics – from support for workers’ rights and a better welfare state to the reintroduction of compulsory military service for men – but its major framework is the promotion of fertility (women should have three children on average), a strong anti-abortion standpoint, the protection of motherhood and fatherhood, social benefits for big families and a binary understanding of gender. It explicitly states that “there is a male and a female gender” and that “gender theory, radical sexual education, esoteric praxis, paedophile literature” do not belong to preschools and schools.
In the past two decades, the Slovenian Catholic Church has been increasingly confronted with secularization. According to a 2000 study, about 60% of Slovenian citizens are not religious or express extremely low levels of belief in notions such as the soul, God or the resurrection (Toš 2000). Furthermore, a majority of Slovenian citizens – nearly 70% – assume that the Church is not entitled to deal with issues such as marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights (Ančić and Zrinščak 2012).
Nevertheless, the Slovenian Catholic Church – since its rehabilitation after the change of the political system in the early 1990s – tries to regain the social position it used to hold before Socialism: that of a “collective intellectual” that offers solutions to important social and political issues (Kerševan 1996). The anti-gender movement seems to be one of its main vehicles to reestablish itself as a moral authority and for its doctrine on gender and sexuality to become part of the state’s legal norms.
Furthermore, the debate on marriage equality and particularly the 2012 referendum coincided with a period during which the Slovenian Church dealt with the devastating effects of economic scandals which erupted in late 2010. The collapse of the Church’s investment holding had incurred 800 million euros in losses. Nearly 60,000 people, who had invested in this holding, stayed empty-handed and the Maribor archdiocese ended up bankrupted. All this resulted in the deposition of three Slovenian bishops by the Holy See and in the lowest level of trust into Church ever recorded since the Slovenian independence in 1991. In 2011, the Slovenian Public Opinion Poll, which is part of the World Value Survey, indicated that less than 25% of respondents express high or relatively high levels of trust into Church, compared to 34% in 2005 or 39% in 1992 (Smrke 2014, 2016). In this context, marriage equality – which was opposed by a majority of citizens – could be conveniently used by the Church to shift public’s attention.
The links between the anti-gender movement and the Catholic Church in Slovenia are very clear, despite the fact that this cooperation was initially denied. The leading clerical anti-gender actor is Franciscan monk Tadej Strehovec, the secretary general of the Slovenian Bishops’ Conference. A teaching assistant of moral theology and applied ethics, he also chairs the Zavod za družino in kulturo življenja (the Institute for Family and the Culture of Living), which was established soon after the government announced the reform of the Family Code in 2009. The website of Strehovec’s Institute for Family and the Culture of Living functions as the official website of the Slovenian anti-gender movement. As the Church’s moral position was weakened by the scandals (Smrke 2016) and a discourse based on the scriptures had lost mobilizing effectiveness (Kuhar 2015), working primarily in the background of Primc’s civil initiatives of “concerned citizens” seemed an effective solution for the Church to restore its compromised public image.
Although Strehovec claims that the Institute is his private initiative and is not connected to the Catholic Church, it is located at the same address as one of Ljubljana’s parishes and its website was initially hosted on the official server of the Slovenian Catholic Church.
The Institute aims at promoting “fundamental values: human life, human rights, family, solidarity, democracy, freedom and active citizenship”. This is a typical framing of numerous anti-gender initiatives: They focus on the appropriation of the concept of human rights – particularly those of children – in order to promote their value system. It was therefore not surprising that the “innocent child” was in the forefront of both referendum campaigns.
In close collaboration with the Catholic Church, the anti-gender movement’s messages were read during Sunday masses or made available on local parishes’ websites. While the movement was collecting the required 40,000 signatures to initiate a public referendum on marriage equality, Strehovec sent out a letter to all priests in Slovenia urging them to invite parishioners to sign for the referendum during the Sunday mass and to direct them to the Institute’s website for additional information. Priests were also instructed to organize transport (such as private cars or buses) to municipality offices for their flocks.10
The prosperous cooperation between the anti-gender activists and the Catholic Church has been foreseen as a mode of operation long before anti-gender movements started to emerge in Europe. In 2002, the Slovenian Catholic Church issued a comprehensive action plan entitled Choose Life, the concluding document of the Plenary Assembly of the Church in Slovenia. The document reads like a very detailed, more than 120-page long description of an action plan for a “new evangelization” for the twenty-first century, with numerous conclusions and recommendations (Kongregacija za škofe 2002). Among others, it envisages the creation of a variety of organizations for lay people – like Primc’s civil initiative – which would help spread the message of the Church.
In many ways, Choose Life intersects with “discourses and strategies produced in the Vatican over the last twenty years” (Paternotte 2015, 135) and translates them into local actions. This document requests the establishment of an “office for legislation” at the Slovenian Bishops’ Conference, which would monitor “the creation and modification of civil legislation, particularly on the issues of freedom of religion” (Kongregacija za škofe 2002, 28), but also on other ethical issues. It also pays attention to electronic media, encourages media education for pastoral workers and supports the efforts to abolish the difference between religious and civil marriage in a way that religious marriage would have “civil legal effects” (ibid.).
In her analysis of this plan, Jogan (2008) explains that the “new evangelization” is a continuation of the process of the “re-catholization” of Slovenian society, which started in the early 1990s. It is based on the idea that the failures of communism need to be corrected and public life should be synced back with Catholic morality. Women are a central target of this process. Indeed, their economic independence and increasing social equality – first fostered by the “state feminism” (Jalušič 2002) of the socialist establishment and later continued by EU gender mainstreaming policies – pose a fundamental problem to the Church, as they contradict women’s “natural role”. For that reason, in the early 1990s, the Slovenian Catholic Church, in close cooperation with conservative (Catholic) political parties, pushed for a new legislation, which would abolish abortion, prolong maternity leave from one to three years and prevent single women from artificial insemination.
Interestingly, this plan refers to same-sex partnerships only once: “The Church has consistently advocated monogamous heterosexual family, and therefore does not accept the possibility of same-sex marriages”. It supplements this with a rather unclear instruction: “This phenomenon (i.e. same-sex marriages) should be monitored in preventive and broader educational field on a personal level” (Kongregacija za škofe 2002, 65). However, as I have shown, the Church’s opposition to marriage equality and the cooperation with lay believers’ anti-gender initiatives are part of the same process.
For the Church in the post-socialist context, “gender theory” also embodies a new scapegoat and a new tool for self-victimization. After the demise of its main oppressor, the communist regime, the Church uses “gender theory” as its substitute, which is said to be produced and fostered by the same “forces of continuation” (that is former communists). It is therefore not surprising that the Catholic Church forcefully tries to compare “gender theory” with a totalitarian ideology.
Tadej Strehovec and Branko Cestnik are the leading Slovenian anti-gender authors in the Church. The former termed “gender theory” as “Marxism 2.0”. He claims that “Marxism 2.0” shifts the class struggle towards struggle among genders: The battle no longer exists “in the relation between the bourgeoisie and the capital against the working class, but rather in the relation between men and women” (Strehovec 2013, 238). Similarly the goal of the revolution is no longer socialism, but so-called gender society. Cestnik (2013), a theologian and philosopher, explains that “gender theory” comes from the conclusions of the socialists who realized that socialism cannot be reached only through social revolution, but also through cultural revolution. Gender theory is therefore “a typical project of cultural revolution” which is aimed at changing one’s mind and thinking.
According to Cestnik (2015), the initial mistake of the Marxism lies in the “cognitive error” in which “the idea” was given priority over the “concrete experience”. In such a way the idea of socialism “ideologically colonialized” the concrete world in which all factual data showed that the material experience of the Western democracy and capitalism is much better than the material experience of socialism. “Gender theory”, he claims, functions in much the same way. However, when he tries to present a scientific argument in order to show that “gender theory” is a faulty one, he curiously refers to the non-scientific concept of “common sense”:
Contemporary new-leftists theory of gender is presented as “based on scientific research” although we know on the basis of our common sense (experiential level) that boys are boys and girls are girls and that both need for their development a man and a woman, a father and a mother, without whom – as it is generally known – they wouldn’t come to this world. (Cestnik 2015, 12)
Interestingly enough, Cestnik finds reasons for the emergence of “gender theory” also within the Catholic Church itself. He blames the Church’s patriarchal attitudes towards women as the source of inspiration for such a theory. For that reasons, he believes that issues of sexuality and women should be addressed by promoting “Catholic feminism” and preventing the “destructive feminism of the extreme left” (Cestnik 2013).
Although the roots of the anti-gender movement in Slovenia are closely connected to debates on marriage equality and the new Family Code (2009–2012), the term “teorija spola”11 – sometimes referred to also as ideologija spola (gender ideology) and rarely as genderizacija (genderization) – denotes much more than marriage equality. It is said to be the hidden agenda of radical feminists and homosexual activists who would be mounting a cultural revolution: the promotion of the fluidity of gender and a denial of the biological (i.e. natural) facts about sex complementarity. “Gender theory” is therefore constructed as a project of social engineering where men are no longer masculine and women are no longer feminine and one is free to choose one’s own gender and sexual orientation, even “several times a day” (Cestnik 2013; Debevec 2015).
When such an explanation is faced with the common-sense understanding of sex as a biological category, it creates the desired populist effects: aversion, anger and moral panic. Such framings are based on people’s deeply rooted anxieties about (homo)sexuality and the need to protect “innocent children” – either from being adopted by same-sex couples, brainwashed in schools by homosexual propaganda or – more recently – being aborted by heartless women.
As Slovenia is a post-socialist country, the anti-colonial framing of “gender theory” as an ideology that is imposed from the West and from international institutions such as the EU and the UN could increase the mobilizing power of this discourse (Graff and Korolczuk in this volume) by evoking the painful memories of the communist regime. However, the anti-gender movement in Slovenia refrains from such framings to a large extent and has rather taken over the now-mainstream interpretation that Slovenian culture has always been European (i.e. progressive and Western). Slovenians would have always belonged to (Western) Europe, if only had their true identity not been abruptly denied during the communist regime of former Yugoslavia with the imposition of the Balkan culture (that is seen as backwards and corrupt). For that reason, “gender theory” is rather framed as a new type of Marxism, which resonates and mobilizes much more effectively than any attempt at presenting it as a contemporary form of Western colonization.
Today the concept of “gender theory” is regarded as a tangible fact in social media debates, mainstream media reports and in an increasing number of books, such as the recent translations of Anatrella’s La teoria del gender e l'origine dell'omosessualità (translated as Teorija spola: Kulturni izziv [Gender Theory: A Cultural Challenge], 2015) and of the Spanish philosophers Contreras and Poole’s Nueva izquierda y cristianismo [New Left and Christianity] (2015), which equate the “old Left” with Marxism and the “new Left” with “gender theory”. Interestingly enough, none of Gabriele Kuby’s books has been translated in the Slovenian language, despite the fact that her writing is used as a key source for the explanation of “gender theory” on the official website of the anti-gender movement in Slovenia, together with translations of the French La Manif Pour Tous’ material, a translation of the Slovak Bishop’s conference letter on “gender theory”, a lecture by Croatian linguist Ivan Poljaković on “gender ideology” and the Norwegian documentary Likestillings Paradokset (The Equality Paradox).12
The articles published under the “gender theory” tab on the movement’s website do not explicitly refer to “gender theory” as a conspiracy. However, the general impression given by this website presents it as a cunning and hidden plan which was secretly constructed by (leftist) elites and is now carefully implemented through ideological penetrations of school curricula and (trans)national policy documents. According to Debevec (2015), a Catholic journalist, “gender theory” is not about “few people who have some weird ideas. It is rather a well thought-out plan”.
The recent success of the anti-gender movement in Slovenia has to be considered in the context of the two referendums on marriage equality. Both referendums generated a lot of political capital for the movement and its actors, who are now trying to invest it into the transformation of their movement into a political party, becoming an important part of the Slovenian political spectrum. The anti-gender backlash and the introduction of the made-up concept of “gender theory” were politically effective for several reasons, among which are the timing of debate, the resonance of the commonsensical naturalistic discourse and the creation of politics of fear by self-victimization.
Among all the European Union countries that had a referendum about marriage equality (Croatia in 2013 and Slovakia and Ireland in 2015), Slovenia is the only one to have had two referendums. The time difference between the first (2012) and the second referendum (2015) is one of the factors that can explain why “gender theory” was so easily introduced into public discourse and is now used as a valid concept not only by anti-gender activists, but also by politicians, journalists and even some scientists.
Primc’s CIDPO emerged soon after the Slovenian government publicly announced the reform of the Family Code in 2009. As it included marriage equality and the right for same-sex couples to adopt children, it provided the emerging movement with a deeply dividing issue that could be easily turned into a mobilizing tool. By the time the Family Code was adopted by the parliament (June 2011) and then taken to a public referendum (March 2012), Primc’s CIDPO had built a widespread network of supporters across Slovenia heavily relying on the existing Church’s and right-wing political parties’ networks.
The same networks were activated during the second referendum, which offered the movement an opportunity to sharpen its strategies based on the experiences from the first referendum. This is why grandparents were one of the newly targeted audiences during the second referendum. They were strategically approached not only because they are older people with typically more conservative standpoints and a huge social group in an aging Slovenian society, but also because the emotional references to the “innocent child” – which represents the entering point of the movement’s discourse and is featured in the movement’s logo – could play on their personal experiences with grandchildren.
By the time anti-gender movements in Europe became recognizable political actors, the Slovenian movement had already won one referendum, become politically relevant and self-confident and defined “gender theory” issues as an important site of political contestation that could mobilize thousands of people and can be won at referendums. During the first referendum, opponents to marriage equality had not yet framed their arguments with references to “gender theory”, but had already created a discursive substance, which was then developed into “gender theory” during the second referendum.
As the government’s proposal on marriage equality intervened into culturally hegemonic ideas about family and marriage as “natural institutions”, the anti-gender actors skillfully based its counter-discourse on strengthening the essentialist and naturalist frames as commonsensical, while at the same time tapping into powerful emotional undertones of the heteronormative beliefs and values about the family, children or the nation. This allowed their arguments to resonate broadly, mobilizing large crowds against the two same-sex marriage referendums.
The movement’s essentializing discourse was built upon two elements that are typical of populist approaches: anxiety and normalcy. The anxiety part addressed people’s uneasiness with anything that does not fit into the heteronormative representation of the nation and, consequently, mankind. The movement’s basic argumentative structure of all their public appearances was always the same: marriage equality represents a threat to the (traditional) family, fatherhood and motherhood, but primarily to innocent children and – by consequence – to the future of the Slovenian nation and its authentic values. It is therefore not surprising that the anti-gender movement started their referendum campaign by singing the Slovenian national anthem together with a group of like-minded people dressed in Slovenian national costumes.13 Appropriating the nationalistic sobbing about a “small Slovenian nation” which is facing a “demographic winter”, they succeeded in constructing “the homosexual” and same-sex couples and families (and more recently transgender people and pro-choice supporters) not only the Other within the nation, but also the one who is against the nation.
While the leading figures of the anti-gender movement never explicitly claimed that homosexuals would sexually abuse (their) children, they insinuated it implicitly. Because it was unspoken, it became even more effective: The implicit hints to (physical/verbal/symbolic) sexual abuse of the innocence of children triggered the “politically non-correct” (and as such unspeakable in public) imagery of unnatural and deviant homosexuals. In other words, the anti-gender populist discursive strategy was covered by the seemingly rational, even supposedly scientifically based arguments, strategically designed to address the emotions, stir fear and activate the power drawn from existing prejudices.
As already mentioned, during the second referendum grandparents were one of the key demographic group the movement tried to address. Primc was hence joined by a new co-leader Zevnik, who represented grandparents, and the movement was renamed into Za otroke gre. Primc and Zevnik claimed that according to the new law, grandparents are not given the right to adopt their grandchildren in case something happens to their parents. Instead, they claimed, these children will be adopted by same-sex couples. Despite the fact that such an interpretation was explained to be false by lawmakers, the idea had a tremendous effect and was reproduced over and over in the media. It represents a typical mechanism of the movement’s discourse, which was used also in the construction of the concept of “gender theory”: Partial facts are combined with fictitious constructions, then shaped into commonsensical claims, continuously repeated in the media and, finally, turned into a “mobilizing truth”.
Normalcy is the second element upon which the movement’s discourse is built. It refers to allegedly unquestionable biological facts about men and women in order to show that the proponents of “gender theory” are really radical in trying to change the world as it has always been (Villa; Mayer and Sauer in this volume). While there is a general agreement in the movement about the need for some kind of equality between men and women, it cannot be surpassed by “natural” gender roles. Consequently, the proponents of “gender theory” are seen as too radical in their quest for gender equality. They are constructed as being totally out of touch with experiential and unquestionable reality of the binary gender system. Consequently, the anti-gender movement is the last bastion of common sense and normalcy.
It has also been suggested that the production of knowledge is abducted by radical feminists. For this reason, anti-gender discourse is presented as scientific, while its actors have already started to work on some kind of a parallel science or give voice to (American) authors who are academically discredited in their local environments, but effectively promote their ideas outside their country of origin (Kuhar 2015; Hodžić and Štulhofer in this volume). The notorious Regnerus (2012) study, for example, was endlessly quoted during referendum campaign in Slovenia. In other words, the anti-gender movement in Slovenia is not only a struggle over the legislative frame of sexual citizenship policies, but it is also a struggle over the production of knowledge. One of the first targets of the movement was the academics who pointed to the populist abuse of scientific research by the actors of the movement.
This brings us to the last element of the anti-gender movement’s success: self-victimization. The movement emerged during the economic crisis. Strict austerity measures additionally fuelled the general dissatisfaction with the political and economic state of affairs. According to Eurobarometer 82 (2014), 58% of Slovenes believe that things in Slovenia are “not going in the right direction”. Over 10% of Slovenians were unemployed in 2013, and the unemployment rate among young people reached nearly 22% (Eurostat 2016). All this created a flammable context in which the ruling elites were faced with the largest mass protests in Slovenia since its independence. In 2012 and 2013, all major cities in Slovenia saw a spontaneous eruption of protests, which were not organized by oppositional parties or trade unions, but different social groups. Although the goal of the protests known as “Slovenian uprising” was the same – overthrown of political elites because of poverty, unemployment and deconstruction of the social state – the protesters’ perspectives ranged from moralistic to nationalistic or socially transformative (Kirn 2013). The anti-gender movement was not a visible actor in the uprising, but the general discursive frame of the protests was broad enough to reproduce one of the key messages of the anti-gender movement – that of corrupt elites. Both the Slovenian uprising and the anti-gender movement succeeded in creating the image of oppressed majority in the face of corrupt elites.
While on the surface it is surprising that the academic sounding concept of gender has been intensively used to mobilize masses, it actually helped strengthen the movement’s claim that corrupt (academic and political) elites, who are producing such ideas in the ivory towers of universities and (trans)national political structures, are entirely detached from ordinary people and have simply “gone too far”.
For that reason, the anti-gender movement provided people with the promise of a better future. The future, however, is in the past: Our society, they claim, should return to its indigenous values and to the natural order of things. It is on these two grounds (fears and dissatisfaction) that the anti-gender movement established political alliances with right-wing nationalist actors and religious authorities.
The movement introduced a two-layered self-victimizing discourse. On the one hand, it portrayed corrupt elites as a threat to “ordinary people”. The elites, however, were used as a rather fluid concept: Depending on the context, elites could represent many groups of people – from politicians and academics to non-governmental activists and journalists. On the other hand, the self-victimizing discourse specifically addressed Catholics. The movement introduced the term “christianophobia” as an antipode to homophobia in order to show that the true victims of marriage equality debate are in fact Catholics, who are labelled as homophobes just because they disagree with same-sex marriage. They would be denied the right to free speech, and are stigmatized as being backwards and as such more and more pushed to the margins of our society.
The idea about “us”, “our children” and “our nation” being endangered (by homosexuals, Muslims, radical feminists, etc.) – a typical framing of populist discourses – has been successfully seeded, strengthened during both referendums and additionally fueled by the recent migrant crisis. For that reason, the anti-gender movement’s self-victimizing discourse – also in the broader context of the rise of the radical Right in Europe (Lazaridis et al. 2016) – has been a successful strategic approach to mobilizing 279,937 voters (55%) at the first and 394,482 voters (64%) at the second referendum to vote against equal rights and everything that “gender theory” as a phantasmal theoretical category came to represent.
The policy debate on marriage equality – an issue that has been dividing Slovenian society for over a decade – facilitated the emergence of the anti-gender movement. When the new Family Code was presented in 2009, nearly 70% of Slovenian citizens disagreed with same-sex marriage and adoptions (Pečauer 2009). Despite the fact that in the following years the support for same-sex marriage increased, same-sex adoptions remained unacceptable for a majority of Slovenians. For that reason, the image of the “innocent child”, skillfully combined with the first tangible effects of the economic crisis and later with the need for the Church to reestablish itself as a moral authority after the devastating disclosure of financial scandals, provided a fertile soil for the anti-gender movement to blossom.
The simultaneous emergence of similar policy debates and referendum campaigns in Europe shows that the Slovenian protests are not something local, but rather part of a global phenomenon against corrupt elites, where “ordinary people” finally got a voice to say that enough is enough. Other anti-gender movements in Europe provided additional contexts from which the Slovenian movement could import ideas, concepts and arguments. However, the cross-loading of rhetoric and strategies was surely not unidirectional, although visible members of the Slovenian anti-gender movement do not to play an important role at the European level: For example, none of them is among the initiators of the European Citizens’ Initiative Mum, Dad and Kids.
The situation is very different at home. The Slovenian anti-gender movement has acquired significant symbolic political power over the last few years, and it has developed into a visible opposition of concerned citizens, which impacts equality and family policies. Some members of the movement are now members of governmental expert councils, such as the Expert Council for Families at the Ministry of Labor, Family, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities and the Expert Council on Aids at the Ministry of Health. The movement has also become one of the recognizable stakeholders in issues related to sexual citizenship: Its representatives are invited to parliamentary readings of the proposals of new legislation on family policy, reproductive health, anti-discrimination and gender equality.
Although Primc’s civil initiative represents the core of the anti-gender movement in Slovenia, and the Church acts as its background support, some other groups, political parties and actors occasionally join its activities. “Gender theory” represents therefore a symbolic glue (Kováts and Põim 2015), a common framework that squeezes different discourses of these groups into one big threat, which is understood either as an attack on nature, nation or normality. Elites are the source of the threat, but – unlike in some other EU countries – the focus is not on the Brussels elites, but rather on the local elites – both present (such as left-wing political and academic elites) and past (the movement together with the right-wing parties often claims that the former communist elites – the “forces of continuation” – are still operating behind the scenes). In such a constellation, they do not only aim to protest against these elites, but also wish to replace them. For this reason the decision of the movement to enter into party politics appears as a logical next step.
1.I thank David Paternotte for his comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
2.24kul.si. 2014. Zahtevajte, da poslanci ne ratificirajo kontraverzne Istambulske konvencije, http://24kul.si/zahtevajte-da-poslanci-ne-ratificirajo-kontroverzne-istambulske-konvencije (Accessed 19 July 2016).
3.All women in Slovenia have been entitled to in vitro fertilization since the 1970s. A new law was adopted in 1999 under the conservative government to limit the right to artificial insemination to women in a heterosexual relationship. Left-wing parties proposed an amendment to allow all women to access in vitro fertilization, which was rejected by the conservative majority which initiated a public referendum. Following an extensive public debate, 73% of voters rejected the amendment. The turnout was 36%.
4.Prostitution was decriminalized in 2003. This led to the emergence of a civil movement, also led by Aleš Primc, who claimed that decriminalization would contribute to the uncontrolled spread of diseases, and that prostitutes would now work openly on the streets, near schools and playgrounds.
5.24kul.si. 2014. Ustanovljen Glas starih staršev, Združenje starih staršev Slovenije, http://24kul.si/ustanovljen-glas-starih-starsev-zdruzenje-starih-starsev-slovenije (Accessed 11 August 2016).
6.Interestingly, the yellow colour was also used in the campaign in California in favour of Proposition 8. It is likely that the Slovenian movement did not use pink and blue because the La Manif pour Tous logo – which was copied by numerous national movements in Europe – did not exist yet at the time the CIDPO was established. California could therefore have provided Slovenian activists with an alternative source of inspiration.
7.STA. 2013. Informacijska pooblaščena nad nasprotnike družinskega zakonika. Dnevnik, http://www.dnevnik.si/clanek/1042418946 (Accessed 12 September 2013).
8.A public opinion poll conducted by the leading daily Delo in 2015 showed that 59% of people surveyed (N = 400) support same-sex marriage and 38% support adoptions by same-sex couples. Those who are older, male and supporters of right-wing political parties were more likely not to support same-sex marriage and adoption. Potič, Zoran. 2015. Anketa Dela: Večinska podpora istospolnim porokam, http://www.delo.si/novice/politika/anketa-dela-vecinska-podpora-istospolnim-porokam.html (Accessed 20 September 2016).
9.Deklaracija upanja za otroke in družine, http://www.zaotrokeindruzine.si/programska-deklaracija/ (Accessed 7 September 2016).
10.Ivelja, Ranka and Blaž Petkovič. 2015. Župniki – prevozniki do referenduma. Dnevnik, https://www.dnevnik.si/1042709779 (Accessed 17 March 2016).
11.There is no distinction between sex and gender in Slovenian language. Both words are translated as “spol”. Most commonly “spol” refers to (or is understood as) biological category, but “spol” can be both sex or gender. In order to avoid confusion scientific texts differentiate between biological “spol” (i.e. sex) and social “spol” (i.e. gender), but this distinction is not known among the general population. Unlike some other anti-gender movements, which use the term “gender” in its original language, the Slovenian movement mostly uses the translated term “teorija spola”. Furthermore, the term “gender theory” is more often used than “gender ideology”. The Slovenian version of Google showed (on 12 August 2016) about 188,000 results for “teorija spola”, 84,000 for “ideologija spola” and only 63 for “genderizacija”. The reasons of the prevalence of “gender theory” are not clear. One possible explanation can be linked to the initial conflict between the CIDPO and part of the Slovenian academic community in 2009, when several prominent professors accused the CIDPO of abusing scientific research. Since then, the CIDPO and later the ZAG have been trying to show that these professors are members of the “corrupt elite” and the authors of the “controversial gender theory”.
12.See gender theory tab at 24Kul, http://24kul.si/teorija-spola.
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