Legalizing Anti-Gender Ideology and Civil Society Resistance in Turkey

Abstract

This study investigates how feminist, LGBTQI+, labour, and human rights organisations in Turkey frame and negotiate the legal institutionalisation of anti-gender ideology and how these processes generate strategic yet fragile cross-movement alliances. Drawing on Benford and Snow's framing theory and Yuval-Davis's transversal politics, the analysis is based on semi-structured interviews conducted with activists from ten organisations between April and June 2025 and organisational documents. The study conceptualises anti-gender politics in Turkey not as a societal backlash but as a state-driven, multi-layered project of "masculinist entrenchment (Yetis, & O<spacing diaeresis>zd & uuml;zen, 2024)" that restructures legal, ideological, and affective arenas. The findings demonstrate that activists increasingly reframe anti-gender assaults as systemic attacks on democracy, rights, and equality, producing a shift from issue-based coordination to what this article terms "strategic coexistence", a hybrid alliance formed across previously distant ideological and organisational positions. Diagnostic framing identifies anti-gender reforms as an existential threat, prognostic framing centres on alliance-building, movement memory, and inclusive organisational practices and motivational framing foregrounds shared destiny, solidarity, and the symbolic significance of LGBTQI+ rights. The analysis reveals that while this recontextualisation widens the basis for coalition, the resulting alliance remains structurally unbalanced and fragile. Hierarchical power relations, uneven exposure to political risk, and selective silence, particularly regarding LGBTQI+ concerns, limit the depth and durability of alliances. In this context, LGBTQI+ rights serve both as a catalyst for broad-based mobilisation and as a litmus test for democratic commitment, disclosing the limitations of transversal solidarity under authoritarian regimes.