Think the ‘anti-gender’ movement has nothing to do with your philanthropy? Think again

Four years ago, Elevate Children Funders Group and the Global Philanthropy Project began working together to increase philanthropic awareness of the issues facing LGBTI children and youth around the world. In the course of this collaboration, we noticed worrying trends about the harmful impacts that ‘anti-gender’ actors have had on women, children and LGBTI people.

A working group of members from both networks set out to more fully understand and document this global phenomenon to enable a better articulated and strategic shared approach. We discovered that the impact of this ‘anti-gender’ movement has reached far beyond the violation of women’s and LGBTI rights and is undermining a range of progressive priorities. In fact, according to the resulting report, Manufacturing moral panic: weaponizing children to undermine gender justice and human rights,

‘Gender restrictive groups are playing a major role in the advent of autocratic regimes in different regions around the world, with devastating consequences for human rights, gender justice, and democracy.’