Power, Gender and Tyranny in Our Time

While writing my monograph On Tyranny and the Global Legal Order, the frequent appearance of gender struck me. But, more startling, how little remarked upon it was. From the earliest iterations in Greece, women were often blamed for the descent into tyranny. Because women could be in the public sphere, because they were not fulfilling their natural roles, because they were corrupting men, distracting them from their roles in running the state. Women in power were tyrants. Tyrannicide when it’s a woman is fine, because well their place in power in always illegitimate.  Also, the easiest way to slander a tyrant was to suggest there was something queer about them, some effeminate quality that leaked into their masculinity, often part of their madness and incapacity to be a ruler.

What was also clear was that if you want to begin the path to tyranny, start with doing some gender stuff. Tyranny always involves gender. But gendered domination rarely counts as tyrannical. No matter that there are myriad examples, like, for instance, Arcangela Tarabotti in the 1600s describing it in just those terms. Or as the CINDLE project argues, ‘[f]eminist, queer and critical race scholars have long warned that liberal democracy was built upon systems of exclusion. From the beginning, it was designed to protect the rights and freedoms of a privileged few.’ So, early signs of a coming tyranny go unnoticed. Women, LGBTQ+ people point it out, shout about it. But gendered domination doesn’t count on its own. We know that well.

The Trump administration is all over this, and it started in the first term but has accelerated at an incredible pace. If you think back to all the noise about Trans people in the US during that first administration, the ban on Trans people serving in the military or claims that human rights law does not stretch to gay people, these early warning signs are clear.

Project 2025 is all over this. Setting out a manifesto for the Trump administration on its road to tyranny, which some observers suggest is nearly halfway to full implementation. Its rhetoric is clear, from promoting fertility awareness to rescinding ‘guidance that requires hospitals to perform an abortion to save a woman’s life.’

Recently Trump, in a speech, declared that ‘fights’ between husbands and wives should not be counted as crimes. Russia has decriminalised domestic violence; Turkey has withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention. Tyrannies do not see violence against women as crimes, as notable. As Catherine MacKinnon has remarked, women are not human when it comes to counting violence.

There are any number of examples of tyrannies undertaking gendered acts as their first steps. The ‘traditional’ family is often paramount. One of the Nazi’s first acts was to roll out Kinder, Kϋche, Kirche where women were removed from the public sphere, from roles as teachers, as lawyers, as civil servants. Abortion was outlawed, contraception hard to access but sterilisation for ‘undesirables’ rolled out. We know full well what the Nazis did to gay men and Trans people.

There are plentiful other examples. For instance, 19^th Century imperialism often used ‘women’ as a pretext for oppression, all the while extending Western gendered ideologies that suppressed matrilineal practices.

Abortion is the obvious place to start. In the US, the Dobbs case overturned Roe v Wade. Since the Dobbs case was decided many laws were and are being introduced to severely restrict or ban abortion access across the US. That the Trump administration is now categorising contraception as an abortifacient should surprise nobody. That was always where this was going.

The Trump administration also lays to rest the idea that merely appointing women and mixing them into a governance structure is sufficient. This is true of women, or indeed any marginalised group. Trump appoints women to roles, none of them are feminists. In Rwanda, a country under evermore authoritarian control, women are widely represented in Parliament, but that does not give women power when otherwise it is a tyranny. It is easy to have women in a legislature when that legislature has no power.

Feminists, meanwhile, are fired. While women and other marginalised groups are systematically removed from histories and websites. Words like Black, disability, discrimination, diversity, equal opportunity, equity, female, females, feminism, gender, hate speech, Hispanic minority, inclusion, Latinx, LGBTQ, mental health, minority, multicultural, Native American, pregnant person, race, sex, social justice, transgender, tribal, under represented, victims and women cannot be used. It becomes impossible to point to gendered tyranny if these words cannot be used.

The lives of Trans people in the UK. Meanwhile. is taking a nosedive. A twist of language is apparent. It is not that Trans people lost rights but that their rights need ‘correcting’. No. Rights are being taken away. It is retrogression of rights. This is starkly reminiscent of the argument that rights did not stretch to gay people in the first Trump administration, when over the previous decade, they had. The CINDLE project evidences how ‘movements aim to re-engineer society based on a white, cisheteropatriarchal fantasy of what’s “normal” — a fantasy that frames pluralism as a threat and sees gendered, queer, and racialized people as outsiders to “the people” or the nation.’

Trans people are being removed from the public sphere. And this is how you start. You are “protecting” women. But you do this by reducing women to a set of biological facts. We all know where that leads. In the US they are already there. The weaponisation of women’s rights or protecting women to marginalise and hurt another group, be they Trans people, immigrants or anyone else, is never feminist. Rather, it’s one of the first steps to tyranny. And it is far from new.

Gendered tyranny is the canary in the coalmine. First because gendered domination has never actually gone away, but second because the gendered reassertion of injustices, taking away rights, restricting access to the public sphere, the bringing back of the patriarchal family as the centre of the state is always the path to tyranny.