History Teaches . . . Gender/"Gender", Fascism, and the Future

A Don't-Miss Conversation with Dr. Laurie Essig on Learning from Russia, Hungary, and the other Fasc-ish Societies on the Globe Today

I recently reached out to Laurie Essig, a sociologist and writer who teaches down the road from me, at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont (I teach in Burlington, about an hour away from there). But I’d been thinking of her work, and wanting to find out what’s on her mind, since I first got a chance to breathe after the first Trump administration – when it became clear that there was something serious and disturbing happening in the relationship between today’s non- (or anti-) democratic politicians in the United States and ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality that many historians of the United States thought were relics of a bygone era.

Essig is one of our country’s GREAT experts on these questions. And she comes by this expertise honestly, from decades of experience studying and visiting Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union). Her first book, Queer in Russia [https://www.dukeupress.edu/queer-in-russia], chronicles and analyzes the time between the dissolution of the USSR and the solidification of Putin’s non- (or anti-) democratic rule in Russia. She helps readers understand what it was like for activists and thinkers to experience the relative freedom of that period even as they couldn’t help hearing the thunder in the middle distance of marginalization, demonization, and worse, which would ultimately solidify into vehement anti-queer and anti-woman/anti-feminist policies.

The start of the second Trump White House made the need for Essig’s insights that much greater. So I was comforted to learn that she and her colleagues and students at Middlebury had branched out from her home expertise on Putin’s Russia and queer people, to consider “Feminism, Fascism, and the Future” [https://sites.middlebury.edu/feminismfascismfuture/] in an ongoing podcast project that explores multiple national case studies, including ours in the United States.

Here's how its creators describe their project and its intentions: “This podcast was born out of fear of the future and out of a deep and abiding belief that feminism can save us. We are hoping these episodes will motivate you to organize and fight back as feminists for all marginalized bodies, which is to say, the bodies targeted by fascism. By connecting the dots and seeing how this fascism operates by making us the enemy, but also by trying to get us to fight one another, we hope to change the future – One feminist episode at a time.”

Essig spoke to me over the phone on March 26, 2025, about what she has seen over decades in Russia and what she sees now in the United States and across the world – plus, what she has been learning from the other experts who have spoken on the show. The transcript has been edited for length, clarity, and linguistic felicity.

New episodes of the pod drop regularly, and a bumper crop of them is coming this summer, so start listening!

Image: Graphics resembling protest signs reading, “We REFUSE to be invisible/ Libre/ Libres!” “Rage Against the Machismo,” and “Feminists ORGANIZE,” against a half-green and half-blue background. From the “Feminism, Fascism, and the Future,” website, https://sites.middlebury.edu/feminismfascismfuture/

Felicia Kornbluh: One of the big reasons I wanted to talk to you, as an expert in this area, is that I’m worried that there’s no book I can lay hands on to share with my students, no overview that crosses particular national examples, to help them – and me – understand how gender and contemporary authoritarianism fit together. Am I missing something? Because it seems like this is the thing that is shaping and structuring our lives and the material conditions under which we exist as feminist academics and students.

Laurie Essig: I don’t think I’m an expert. I am someone who has lived in 2 countries, both of which have fascistic regimes that are organizing their fascism around “gender.” And I agree with you. It struck me, too, teaching Gender Studies that if we’re not going to talk about the fact that fascistic forces are organizing against Gender as a kind of internal enemy that is akin to The Jew in Nazi Germany, then we’re not really doing our job.

If we don’t do that, then we’re not telling students how powerful and potentially explosive this work is. Some of the most powerful people in the world, from Pope Francis to Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, think that “gender” itself will destroy civilization. At least that’s what they say they believe. I think it’s a moral obligation to understand what’s going on and share what we learn.

Think about the fact that Trump’s Executive Order (the first one) [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/] makes it clear that that what we do as professors of Gender Studies is so important that we can’t do it. You can’t teach that there is such a thing as gender. If you follow that logic, you can’t even teach that sex isn’t binary.

Leaders around the world believe that what we’re doing in our research and classrooms is really powerful and really dangerous. Even if from our perspectives, so often, we see what we’re doing as building on the knowledge production about power and difference of the last 50 years.

FK: The people who wrote that Order really didn’t get the memo – not just about what the field of Gender Studies has discovered since the 1970s but also about well-established and not-particularly-recent findings in the fields of Biology, Medicine, History, and other fields.

LE: Creating a curriculum that followed the logic of that Executive Order would make all of our jobs difficult. If you’re a biologist and you teach about human embryonic development, you’d have to lie. If you’re an historian, you would have to pretend the one-sex model didn’t exist for millennia.

FK: You’d have to pretend that people who definitely existed (intersex people, trans-identified people) didn’t exist. To understand all this, can we go back to Russia and what you learned there that led to publishing your first book?

LE: I’ve been in Russia off and on since 1984. Until January 2020, the last time I was there, I was teaching at a university that had the last Gender Studies program in the country.

There was a moment in the 1990s and 2000’s when queerness and feminism were not particularly demonized. What happened is you had an anti-democratic leader who decided he wanted to come back for a 3^rd term as President. In the winter of 2011-12, you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting for democracy. He did what many leaders did, he found internal and external enemies to blame.

He found feminism, of course, but also he decided that queerness or gayness was coming from the outside in. He started to say, they’re coming for your children, they’re coming for our children, they’re going to turn our children gay.

So the anti-gay propaganda bill was passed in 2013. [On the original law and its 2022 expansion, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/24/russia-passes-law-banning-lgbt-propaganda-adults.] You could not have any display of gayness before anyone under 18. Very much like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, an early sign that things here were going to get much worse.

After the law was enacted, I gave a talk about my own research at a bookstore in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2014. My daughter was not allowed to come in because she was under 18, because I was going to say something about queer sexualities in Russia. I would be corrupting a minor, my own minor.

Putin was ahead of the game in that he understood that by blaming EVERYTHING on this imaginary figure, “the homosexual” (with the characteristics he claimed that figure possessed), he could shore up a certain base of people.

He was building on a religious movement, which had moved from conservatives in the Roman Catholic Church, like Pope Benedict and later Pope Francis, and which had spread to the Evangelical Protestant Church and then to the Orthodox church in Russia.

FK: Not to sound crazy naïve, but what was it about “the homosexual” or about “gender” that freaked them out – and galvanized at least a portion of their constituents?

LE: Something about gender presentation was extremely dangerous to the idea that there were just men and women and they existed in a hierarchical relationship.

There was also the context of domestic violence: This move heightened after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). The idea was that if we accept gender as a concept, then we will be forced to have laws against domestic violence. Religious figures and conservative figures were anxious about that. Also, the pushback against domestic and sexual violence connotated for them the presence of lesbians (and there are, actually, a lot of lesbians in that movement) – and they were anxious about that.

They started to say, and maybe also to think, that “Gender” is this demonic force and it will come after us.

I’m sure you remember that, thanks to this way of thinking, Judith Butler was attacked in Brazil in 2017. An effigy of them was burned. Ever since then, they always travel with bodyguards.

FK: I don’t remember that.

LE: They were named as the one who created gender, which isn’t fair.

FK: A lot of us did!

LE: Much of this was driven by religious fervor that Putin cleverly understood gave him an almost immediate base to shore up his power. That was 13 years ago. Since since then we have seen it used over and over by anti-democratic and even fascistic leaders. You can look, for example, at Poland, the Law and Justice movement. They created parts of the country and parts of towns that were “LGBTQ-free.” The movement was also anti-feminist.

Poland is a good place to look from the United States because they were so anti-feminist and their abortion laws were so restrictive, the feminists took to the streets and eventually recruited others who opposed the laws and wanted more democracy. In some ways their anti-gender stance was the death knell for that regime.

And look at Victor Orban, the darling of the current U.S. far right [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/us/politics/viktor-orban-cpac-republicans.html], whose policies opposing “gender” and Gender Studies as an academic field forced the Central European University to leave Hungary.

The movement is amorphous but it’s against anything that might allow for the full and equal rights of women and other feminized persons.

FK: Would you narrate briefly what happened in Russia?

LE: In the Soviet Union, no civil society was allowed, so there were no feminist groups, no gay rights groups. Of course there were and they existed throughout the 1980s and 1990s – there were amazing activists. But in theory, men could go to jail for having sex with other men and women were sometimes put into psychiatric institutions to cure their lesbianism. Things were not good, but because the regime was starting to fall apart, there was a fair amount going on. I met my first feminist group in 1986, probably around the same time I made my first gay activist friends.

The state was not fully in charge, so there was a level of possibility. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union – 1989 – a lot of possibility existed. The 1990s were both horrible because the economy was collapsing and also full of possibility. Civil society was allowed to exist, so that meant magazines, newspapers, radio shows, theater. There was queer and feminist expression and activism, really for about 20 years in Russia.

Putin came to power in 2000 but really started to shut things down in 2011-12, so it took a while for it to become the kind of regime that killed journalists, that stopped any kind of dissent.

One of the things I was surprised with the Trump regime was how quickly everything seems to have disintegrated.

Even in 2020 in Russia, I was teaching a pro seminar on gender theory. So things still existed: of course Navalny was in prison and had been poisoned, but there were still pockets of dissent from governmental and mainstream opinion.

I think one of the things we can learn from Russia is just how important resistance is. There were moments when things could have gone differently. They didn’t, but I don’t think that was pre-ordained.

One thing to remember is Pussy Riot, this feminist performance group that went into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and did this kind of prayer (also a performance and a protest). They sang, “Mother Mary, Get him out, Get Putin out.” That these feminists would question Putin on the sacred ground of the Church created all sorts of after effects, including a law against insulting Orthodoxy in any way.

Image: People in brightly colored tights, balaclava face masks, and dresses, dance, raise their arms, and sing/speak into microphones before an elaborate Eastern-style Christian backdrop. From the Pussy Riot website, page titled, “Punk Prayer, February 21, 2012,” https://pussyriot.love/2012/02/21/punk-prayer/

FK: Here’s my other moment of naïvete : Wasn’t Putin a Communist? How does someone go from “Communist” to what your podcast calls a “Fascist,” or leader with Fascist tendencies?

LE: I don’t think that many people were committed to Communism.

Russia in the 1990s was one of the most hyper-capitalist places I had ever been. It was anything you wanted, you could get, for a price. The reconstruction of Moscow and St. Petersburg were fantastical and there was no Communist ideology at all.

More than standing for a Communist vision, Putin would talk about bringing Russia off its knees, which is both a homoerotic image and a nationalist one. He tapped into a feeling of masculine insecurity and anxiety about Russia being in a subordinated position that made a lot of people support him, because he tapped into that notion that there was something about the nation – always masculine – that had been humiliated.

What we discovered in the podcast is that every strongman, every fascist dictator we look at had anxiety about masculinity. That’s true for Mussolini and Stalin, as well as the contemporary leaders we’re discussing. What we’re seeing today is not that different from what’s happened before and elsewhere. I think what’s unusual about this particular fascist movement is not just its anxiety about masculinity but it’s created this monstrous figure, “gender,” to explain the failure of masculinity

It’s no longer the Jews, it’s no longer bankers, it’s “gender.” For Donald Trump it’s this notion of “gender ideology,” this idea that we’re trying to corrupt the children. At least some of his followers and members of his administration seem to fear that we’re turning children trans. That there won’t be reproduction any more, or reproduction won’t exist in the heterosexual family.

At bottom, it can be seen as anxiety about the future, reproduction for the nation – and I guess it is feminism and everything that implies in terms of upending hierarchies.

FK: From what you’ve studied and learned on the podcast, do you think there are meaningful differences between the old enemies of feminism – and their arguments, if we can use that term – and today’s enemies of “gender” and of trans, nonbinary, queer, and intersex people?

LE: Starting in the late 1990s, gender theory, feminist theory, stopped accepting the idea that biology was both stable and binary. For a lot of reasons, including advances in the field of biology and the development of Gender Studies. We came to understand that this thing we think of as so concrete is in fact socially reproduced.

That’s why opponents of “gender” blame Judith Butler. They wrote the book Gender Trouble [https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203902752/gender-trouble-judith-butler], which forced readers to consider, “What if this thing we call sex is gender? What if it’s all performance??” That formulation really upset them, because in fairness to the Popes I do think that undermines some of the basic premises of patriarchal religions: If you don’t have that binary, then you can’t have the hierarchies that the Church(es) have set out to make “natural.” You are undermining one of the bases of patriarchal religion.

FK: M. Gessen said in the New York Times that they were somewhat surprised by the degree to which the Trump campaign in 2024, the Inaugural Address, and the policies since January 20, took aim at trans, nonbinary, and intersex people in particular. Were you surprised?

LE: With all due respect to Gessen, no. I started the podcast when I started to pay attention to Ron DeSantis in Florida. He’s been using stridently anti-gender rhetoric for 6-7 years at least. And there’s a lot of it in Project 2025. Trump had promised many times to “end this gender insanity on Day 1” and talked about “the threat to our children.” He even said about women, that he was going to protect them whether they wanted it or not – and he was going to protect them from gender ideology. So I wasn’t that surprised because I’ve been paying attention to this rhetoric and how it’s traveling and changing according to context, whether in Argentina, or Russia, or in Texas and Florida.

Every fascistic leader needs an internal and an external enemy. Trans people and those who profess “gender ideology” have become a key internal enemy.

FK: Abortion is also something Trump said he would protect us from.

LE: Putin has been very savvy about abortion, and so he has not touched it. Whatever we think about this crop of far-right leaders, they’re not idiots.

Picking on trans people is easy. A huge number of cis people don’t have any trans people in their lives. And even better, they can get a certain feminist backup on attacking trans rights. Trans populations are so vulnerable in this country. That’s why Trump is picking on them first. It’s important to look at Florida, which has gone after trans rights and in many ways gay rights as well. I assume that Trump will proceed with that if he thinks it will work.

FK: What are your messages to the feminist movement(s) in the United States – especially given what you just said about self-described feminists who are anti-trans?

LE: Trans-exclusionary feminism is not as popular here as I’ve encountered in the UK or in Mexico. It’s never coming out of gender studies departments. In part, that is because anti-trans rhetoric engages in a kind of undercutting of expertise.

I interviewed this strong feminist in Mexico who believes there are only 2 genders and only 2 sexes. She’s not on the same side but she’s mimicking the rhetoric of far-right fascist groups that would strip rights from not just trans people but gay people, feminists, and all women.

I would ask every feminist to think: “Are you mimicking that rhetoric?” And if so, “who is it benefiting?” Because I don’t think it’s benefiting women and girls. I think women and girls are being used to distract us from the rights stripping that is going on for trans people

Why not be a feminist for feminized bodies? I’m using Verónica Gago. She has a book called Feminist International: How We Change Everything [https://www.versobooks.com/products/2635-feminist-international#:~:text=At%20once%20a%20gripping%20political,of%20financial%20and%20gender%20violence%2C]. We have to create assemblies, movements, of feminized bodies. Feminized bodies are everyone who is screwed over by let’s call it capitalism, patriarchy. That means poor people, racial minorities, trans people, and others, all of whom are feminized. What if we imagined a more expansive feminism where we didn’t have to get into a debate who is and who isn’t a woman.

You can’t decide who is and isn’t a woman in an easy and logical way. But you can decide who is a feminized body. And if we can come together as a movement of all those bodies, not only can we win but we can create a much more humane society.

FK: Why do you think this politics works? It seems so crass and unsubtle. Even aside from the content (which is saying a lot!), I find it so loud, so gross. I’m so repelled by the obviousness, the total lack of originality and intellectual anything that is involved in this kind of hetero- and cisgender, ableist, white supremacist. patriarchal hierarchalization.

LE: I actually thought Fascism would be a little more aesthetically pleasing. I grew up knowing that Stalin was a clownish figure – but also a terrifying one.

They’re able to incite a kind of passion for a different world. For me, the different world I want does not yet exist. For them, it never existed but they’re told it existed. And in that world the biggest problems are trans people, feminists. Actually, those are far from our biggest problems. But they incite a passion: “We’ll get to this world where we will be safe and our children will be safe.” Here and in Russia the alternatives have not incited the same passions

These regimes are based on a lie, which is that the answer to our problems is to strip trans people of their rights, or migrants. The problem is we need to have an alternative that incites passions for something better than Joe Biden.

Most people don’t think that deporting migrants is going to solve their problems. But they are desperate for some possibility. That’s where we have failed, because I don’t think we have incited passion. I think feminism, the feminism that is utopian and imagines everyone having rights and possibilities is a movement that inspires.

Can we get movements going here that have that utopian vision – a feminism that is always already intersectional, thinking about racial justice and class justice, and PLEASURE. We can’t wait for someone to save us.

FK: Similar to my question about feminists, I wonder what you think about the analyses or responses to what we’re saying from left-wing intellectuals? Personally, I fear that they (or we) are slow to realize that what threatens us now is quite different from the threats we faced as a result of Clintonian neoliberalism, or even the combination of neoliberalism and more moderate threats to the rule of law that we saw under the War on Terror.

LE: Neoliberal politics always relies on certain fascistic elements, like mass incarceration. If fascism is a state in which some people have no rights, then this country has been fascist for most of its history.

The difference between neoliberal states and fascistic states is that with fascism, there’s nothing that will protect you from it. Your whiteness will not protect you, being a professor won’t protect you. It operates on absolute terror as people push back against it.

I’m a little frustrated by our colleagues on the left who couldn’t see that this sort of fascism is dangerous in a way that is extremely different than neoliberalism, which of course is horrible and terrible for many populations. But it seems like certain interventions can be made; you can’t get a perfect world, but you can get a less terrible one.

We actually need a more passion-inciting spirit in our politics, in our movements, because it’s hard to argue with people that neoliberalism is or was good. It’s hard to argue that this terrible system is better than fascism, because the very people who are going to suffer are the ones who would fight under neoliberalism to make things better – and they’d probably be fine under neoliberalism, or at least not disappeared in the middle of the night.

Under neoliberalism the way we have known it, large numbers of Venezuelans wouldn’t be exported to basically camps without any pretense of legality in conditions that are inhumane. I’m rather nostalgic for neoliberalism frankly

What we have now is a hyper masculine corrupt anti-democratic movement.

How can we imagine what comes next? It can’t be what we had. Obviously, these regimes cannot stand forever. What comes next?

FK: How do we get out of it?

LE: I think we get out of it by not waiting for the Democratic Party to save us, which I hope nobody is. People need to get together and create a parallel society in a way where we take care of one another, where we engage in protecting our communities.

One model lies in the assemblies that they’ve used in Argentina and Chile, in which leaders listen to what people are struggling with and what they need and find out how to move forward

I’m working with a group locally about 75 people at a meeting, organizing trans joy dances and things like that. It seems silly and meaningless but it’s the only way out, I think.

The thing you shouldn’t do is think that there’s nothing to be done because that’s what they want. Our institutions are not going to save us. Our institutions will fail; I think that every day.

When there’s no more theater in New York and no more takeout, I will just lie down in Flatbush. But that’s nihilistic.