1 The consequences of the differing meanings of gender in policy and activism for politics by Eszter Kováts 26 November 2018 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2018/11/26/the-consequences-of-the-differing-meanings-of-gender- in-policy-and-activism-for-politics/ “If gender quota is necessary for party lists, so what if I identify as a woman, can I run then for a woman’s place? And what happens if I identify as one of those plenty of other genders?” A male politician from the Hungarian right-wing opposition party Jobbik asked me this question recently in an informal event and with this we were at one of the favorite topics of the Right when it comes to women’s rights and gender equality. The contradiction the politician wanted to present to me provocatively lies in the fact that the definition of gender in the quota policy (aiming to address the still persisting structural inequalities between men and women, i.e. in Hungary the share of women in Parliament is 12%) differs from the one necessary to address trans and genderqueer people’s political claims for recognition of their identities. This seemingly anodyne conversation is embedded in a larger context in Hungary – when the ratification of the Istanbul Convention is refused by the government and gender studies are banned from universities – and beyond Hungary. Since 2012, several European countries as well as the US have seen the rise of conservative and, in part, fundamentalist social movements against the perceived threat of ‘gender ideology’, (or ‘gender theory’), ‘political correctness’ or the ‘human rights fundamentalism’. Being opposed to women’s reproductive rights; LGBTQ issues like marriage equality or transgender rights; certain administrative policy instruments (such as gender mainstreaming); as well as the public financing of gender studies programmes, the advocates of these platforms tend to depict all political and non-governmental actors, administrative staff, and scientific researchers who focus on these issues as a single homogeneous group and an organized lobby. This is partly manifested in grassroots or religiously affiliated movements and partly in the agenda of right-wing and populist parties in opposition, or in government. The triggering factors for the surge of these movements vary across countries (Hark and Villa, 2015; Kováts and Põim, 2015; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). The simultaneity of these movements, the different triggers in countries that vary with respect to their political landscape, as well as to gender and LGBT policies implemented, indicates that rather than dealing with isolated cases, we are witnessing a transnational phenomenon. As the starting anecdote suggests, the heated political controversy around the concept of gender is complicated also because of the fact that there are different gender definitions in use in policy-making and in social justice activism, born in different times and from different ideological bases, partly disconnected from debates within gender studies, and at times also partly contradicting each other. First, in the English-speaking context gender became a substitute for biological sex, in order to avoid associations to sexual intercourse, starting from the law of discrimination, now widespread. For instance when we speak about gender pay gap, what is meant is the difference between men and women’s wages. This interchangeable use of the two terms is exemplified in the current debate about the Trump administration’s plan to define “gender as a biological, immutable condition.” Some commentators say it is a deliberate, ideology driven conflation of the two terms, see for instance here.