An Enemy of Whom? Analyzing “Gender Ideology” Discourse in U.S. News, 2010-2025

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Open Call Paper Session-Gender, Media, and Power: Representation, Resistance, and Ideology

Abstract

In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order No. 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order states that “gender ideology” replaces the biological definition of sex with “an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.” It also dictates that federal funding shall not be used to “promote gender ideology,” commanding all agencies to remove statements and policies that “inculcate” it. But what exactly does “gender ideology” mean? Why is it portrayed as a type of extremism and viewed as a threatening, even destructive, enemy? When did it become a catchall phrase capable of absorbing a variety of fears, anxieties, and moral panics? To borrow from the title of Judith Butler’s most recent book – Who is afraid of gender? Drawing on countermovement theory and the concept of empty signifiers, the present study examines how “gender ideology” has been invoked and discussed in U.S. mainstream news coverage from 2010 to 2025. I collected over 1,000 articles from seven major newspapers and employed a mixed-methods design that combines computational text analysis with qualitative deep reading. Structural topic modeling (STM) identifies ten distinct topics under which the term is articulated and contested, ranging from gender-affirming care and transgender athletes to electoral politics, schools and book bans, international right-wing movements, and the Catholic Church. Covariate analyses further demonstrate that topic prevalence varies by time periods and publication outlets. Preliminary qualitative analysis reveals several key discursive strategies through which "gender ideology" is framed. Overall, the findings suggest that “gender ideology” functions as a flexible yet vacuous label deployed across diverse contexts and institutional domains through various discursive devices.

Author

• Yunlin Li, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill