Gender ideology

Gender ideology is a polemical label used by movements opposing feminism, LGBTQ rights, or gender studies to portray changing ideas about gender as an ideological threat.

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Catholic Church: The worldwide Christian church led by the pope and organized around Catholic doctrine and sacramental life. Catholic leaders helped formulate and circulate early critiques of what they called gender ideology.
Moral panic: A public reaction that portrays a group or practice as a threat to society’s values and order. The label can cast changes in gender norms as a crisis threatening social stability.
Same-sex marriage: Legal marriage between partners of the same sex. Opponents have used the label to frame marriage equality as an imposed transformation of family life.
Gender studies: An interdisciplinary field examining how gender shapes identities, institutions, cultures, and power relations. The label portrays this academic field as a unified ideology rather than a diverse body of research.
Pontifical Council for the Family: A former Vatican body that promoted Catholic teaching on marriage, family, and related social issues. Its 2003 lexicon helped codify Catholic objections to gender theory.
Anti-gender movement: A loose transnational coalition opposing policies and ideas associated with gender equality and sexual diversity. The phrase is a recurring banner and organizing frame for this broader political phenomenon.
Comprehensive sexuality education: An age-appropriate approach to teaching sexuality, relationships, health, and rights using evidence-based curricula. Campaigns against such curricula often claim they indoctrinate children with gender ideology.
Gender theory: A broad set of scholarly approaches to gender, its social formation, and its relation to power. Political rhetoric often treats varied theories as one coordinated doctrine called gender ideology.
Dale O’Leary: An American Catholic writer known for criticizing feminism and gender theory. Her 1997 book helped popularize the framing of gender theory as an organized ideological project.
Gender: A set of social meanings, roles, identities, and relations associated with sex and femininity or masculinity. The label draws its contested subject matter from competing accounts of what gender means.