It has become one of the rallying cries of the world's reactionary and populist leaders. At his inauguration, on January 20, Donald Trump declared that the United States would henceforth recognize "only two genders: male and female," as defined at birth. Three days later, at Davos, Argentine President Javier Milei used "gender ideology" as the leitmotif of his attacks against the "mental virus of the woke ideology." Likewise, Vladimir Putin has regularly condemned the "so-called gender freedoms" of the West, which he judged to be "decadent."

Before becoming a flagship issue for illiberal governments, the concept of gender is, first and foremost, an analytical tool, commonly used in social sciences. Conceived of in the 1950s, within American psychological and medical circles, "it aimed to distinguish, within the context of clinical medicine for intersex and transsexual individuals, biological phenomena (sex) from the social roles attributed to them (gender), and to account for the psychological gap that can exist between the two," explained philosopher Pauline Clochec, author of Après l'Identité ("After Identity").

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