Transgender trouble: The construction of an embodied enemy in anti-gender mobilizations in Belgium and Italy

Since the transnational emergence of anti-gender mobilizations, trans people’s rights and identities have been increasingly contested. While existing scholarship has shown how anti-gender actors mobilize around the abstract common enemy of ‘gender ideology’, less attention has been paid to recent convergences against trans rights, and to the construction of trans people as targets of mobilization. Drawing on social movement scholarship and trans studies, this article examines how trans people are constructed as enemies within contemporary anti-gender and anti-trans mobilizations. We articulate a paired comparison of Belgium and Italy – two countries characterized by distinct legislative frameworks on trans rights – and conduct a thematic analysis of 46 documents published between 2020 and 2024 by anti-gender and anti-trans actors. We examine (1) the trans-related issues addressed in these texts, (2) the strategies through which knowledge about trans issues is produced and repressed, and (3) the ways in which trans people are constructed as an enemy across contexts. Our findings show that trans people are not positioned solely as part of an abstract threat but are constructed as an embodied enemy endangering society. Through a cognitive praxis that combines strategies of knowledge production and repression, anti-gender and anti-trans actors frame trans people and their rights as a danger to children, families, free speech and, overall, cisgender people. This construction of an embodied enemy sustains the mobilizing potential of anti-gender actors and reaffirms cisness as a societal norm. By foregrounding trans perspectives, this article calls for greater attention to how cisness operates in processes of enemy construction within contemporary exclusionary politics.