Marking LGBT+ History Month, this week we’re looking at the battle for LGBT+ rights around the world. How great are the challenges facing rights campaigners today? And how could they be addressed?
One of the most remarkable transformations over recent decades has been the growing acceptance and celebration of LGBT+ rights. Here in the UK, for example, the proportion of respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey saying that same-sex relationships are not wrong at all has risen from just 11 per cent in 1987 to 67 per cent a generation later in 2022.
Yet recent years have seen a backlash against such advances. Self-styled ‘family values’ movements have campaigned against the so-called ‘gay lobby’ or ‘gender ideology’ in many countries, often claiming threats not just to the family, but to the nation as a whole. In the UK and elsewhere, a backlash against trans rights has been especially prominent.
We are joined by Phillip Ayoub, Professor of International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science. As well as marking LGBT+ History Month, this is a special inaugural episode for Prof Ayoub touching on his career journey and research influences.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Battle for LGBT+ Rights
[00:00:00] Alan Renwick: Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we're looking at the battle for LGBT+ rights around the world. How great are the challenges facing rights campaigners today and how could they be addressed?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
One of the most remarkable transformations over recent decades has been the growing acceptance and celebration of LGBT+ rights here in the UK. For example, the proportion of respondents to the British Social Attitudes Survey saying that same-sex relationships are not wrong at all has risen from just 11% in 1987 to 67% a generation later in 2022.
Yet recent years have seen a backlash against such advances. Self-styled ‘family values’ movements have campaigned against the so-called ‘gay lobby’ or ‘gender ideology’ in many countries, often claiming threats not just to the family, but to the nation as a whole. In the UK and elsewhere, a backlash against trans rights has been especially prominent.
Well, a book coming out later this year by my colleague Phillip Ayub and Kristina Stockl examines the global anti-LGBTI rights movement. Earlier this month, Phillip gave a sneak preview of the book's findings in his inaugural lecture as Professor of International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science. And to celebrate that inaugural lecture and to mark LGBT+ History Month, I'm delighted that Phillip joins me now to discuss the issues further.
Phillip, welcome back to UCL Uncovering Politics. And before we turn to your forthcoming book on the backlash against LGBTI rights, it'll be helpful perhaps just to put that work in the context of your earlier research on LGBT+ activism.
Now we did discuss that in detail in your previous appearance on the podcast, and listeners wanting to find out more will find that episode by scrolling down to late 2022. But do you want to give us just a quick outline of the key themes and findings of that work?
[00:02:12] Phillip Ayoub: Of course, Alan.
Well, first of all, it's wonderful to be back here with you to talk about this and thank you for dedicating another episode to this issue during LGBT History Month.
When I met Kristina, who's my co-author on the second, I was just wrapping up the first book and it was a time – I mean, we met in 2013-14 – it was a time when we're seeing quite tremendous changes happening around the world. So issues like marriage equality were happening in many different countries that we saw as surprising.
And the arguments of that book were basically that to understand what is happening, that we have so many countries moving around these issues at a similar time, we must also look to the kind of transnational and international sources of that change. Earlier work had focused a lot on issues like religion or secularism or strength of certain movements in domestic countries.
But my work was also trying to make an argument – and also the work of some other colleagues like David Paternotte or Kelly Kollman were arguing – there's also some international phenomena happening here.
So for example, there is pressure that international organisations put on states to adopt certain rights. So here you can think of the EU's Article 19, which introduced workplace anti-discrimination in all EU member states.
There's also social pressure that happens across borders. So if you think of the influence of media and seeing queer characters crossing borders in television shows that people consume in many different regions of the world, those should also have an effect on introducing new types of ideas around how to live and who is part of our societies in in different countries.
And then finally, there's a tremendous work by transnational LGBT actors across borders. This kind of work has been going on since the 1800s. There's been cross-border work by LGBT activists. A lot of those cross-border ties are kind of connected because many queer people see parts of their identity as connected to people from other countries. So Auden made this argument years ago when saying that, he might have more in common with another gay person – or a gay person might have more in common with another gay person in different country – than even with another fellow country person based on their national identity.
And so this is a quite important element of identity. Of course, there are still identities are complex and there's things that divide us, but queer activists have been working cross borders for a long time.
And they do have also long-standing organisations. I think the oldest still running one would be the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which is connecting groups across borders that come together. And they channel resources. They focus attention on certain countries when there's rights violations, and really push to introduce those kinds of changes there.
Domestic factors are still very important in that story. There's still a lot of resistance that happens. And the way that these politics play out in individual countries is quite unique. There's very different ways of framing the issue or approaching it. But there's also a transnational kind of solidarity network that is helping-
[00:05:13] Alan Renwick: So the evidence is not just that there is that network that exists, but also that it really makes a difference to outcomes.
[00:05:18] Phillip Ayoub: It does, yeah.
We see that when countries have domestic groups that are also tied to international, transnational advocacy groups that there will be a higher likelihood of adopting higher rates of LGBT rights policy.
[00:05:33] Alan Renwick: Now, one of the things that I like about when we do an episode after an inaugural lecture is that we get to explore the biography a little bit of our guests.
And in your lecture, you talked about the fact that when you started out in graduate school, you didn't actually intend to work on these kinds of themes on LGBT+ politics.
Do you want to tell us a little bit about what journey you have been on in your studies and how you've ended up in the place you are now?
[00:05:59] Phillip Ayoub: Yeah, I'd be very happy to.
Yeah, that's correct actually. I mean, I did want to work on these issues, and I had very cautiously been observing some activism as well, and a little bit dabbling in it myself before graduate school. But I wasn't very open about it, and I was really concerned about the career repercussions attached to working on LGBT rights.
I think partly today that would be a bit more unfounded, depending on what country you're working in. But it was quite relevant for me at the time given I had gone through both an MA and an undergrad in political science. And well my undergrad was international studies, but mainly with political scientists.
And I had never read a piece on LGBT people before in the field. And so the signal that sent to me as a student was just that there wasn't much space or that wouldn't be considered politics.
And thus I did apply to grad school with a project on European common foreign security policy, which I wasn't so passionate about, but I thought I could-
[00:06:52] Alan Renwick: A famously boring subject.
[00:06:54] Phillip Ayoub: It is famously boring and also famously ineffective and unsuccessful, so it would've been a tall order to make that work.
And when I got to grad school – I mean, I did get into grad school with that project and – but then when I got there I met actually many friends, young researchers, who were working on race and gender and in really innovative ways. And there was already a bit more of a path paved in race and ethnic studies and political science or women in politics and political science that were also newer topics and certainly marginalised in the field, but had a bit more of a footing than LGBT rights.
And those friends who were grappling with those ideas – so these are friends like Chris Zepeda-Millan or Julie Ajinkya – folks like that were doing innovative work and really inspiring me and thinking that, well, why can't I do this then as well?
And so I very quickly actually – already in my first term at Cornell – I realised that I just wasn't so passionate about what I was there to do. And the good thing about a US program is that it's quite long. I ended up having six years there to finish that PhD. And so I very quickly shifted gears and started focusing on LGBT rights.
My advisor and I had a meeting about it, and he was very supportive. And immediately had me start taking Polish classes, which I ended up doing for three years, because Poland was a very hot topic at the time for political homophobia.
[00:08:16] Alan Renwick: Which we will no doubt get onto later.
[00:08:18] Phillip Ayoub: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that became the focus of my studies and I'm so grateful for it. It was very risky at the time.
[00:08:25] Alan Renwick: Why?
[00:08:26] Phillip Ayoub: Well, there were… I mean there was very little published on the topic. I think Kelly Kollman had a piece that came out around 2007 that was really path breaking. But that was when I had already started graduate school. I wouldn't even discover that piece until a year later. And there was just almost nothing in the field. So the idea that you could publish in this topic was still felt high risk.
Now that's different. And I think I got very lucky by not chasing a hot topic and instead just doing what I wanted because it did become an interesting topic.
But there were surveys at the time, including one three years later when I had just defended my prospectus by Scott Barclay and Julie Novkov on LGBT issues and political science. And they surveyed hundreds of – I think almost 2000, if I remember correctly – political scientists that connected to the American Political Science Association, which is quite an international crew.
And there was quite a bit of apprehension in the study of LGBT politics, especially in international relations, which was my primary subfield. I found quite a bit of irony there attached to that, given that we were living in a moment when issues like marriage equality were diffusing through the international system at a very rapid pace that no one had expected or could explain. And so the fact that was still showing itself to be so uninteresting, where many of the IR scholars surveyed said that they found the topic inappropriate and/or they didn't know about the topic-
[00:09:53] Alan Renwick: They found it inappropriate?
[00:09:54] Phillip Ayoub: Or inappropriate for the field of international relations. So that basically the IR was focused on trade or on war, and that LGBT people was just not part – it wasn't an appropriate field of study.
Of course, that might also have something to do with just a bit of insidious bias connected to that, that might have been playing itself out. But when you're a graduate student and you're worried about the job market, you know, the idea that about half of your colleagues might not know if this is real political science is a serious concern when you're going on the job market.
And there are many other concerns. There has, I mean, to my knowledge, still never really been a job ad specifically targeting expertise on LGBT politics.
There are, of course, now many… It's a growing field with wonderful, very talented colleagues of mine before and after me that are doing great work and have gotten jobs in political science.
But it's not really seen as something where you look at the job list and the department is looking for this, even though we do know that our students want to have a lot of training in this area and are very interested in it.
But it's just something that the field has sent a lot of signals. And also in our journals, of course, you can look at top journals that have managed to go… The APSR went a full century without addressing LGBT people, despite the fact that we were deeply connected to politics, whether the innovative pre-war movements or whether the intense repression of the Second World War where many LGBT people died in concentration camps. And there was a serious political repression afterwards, and McCarthyism, and the years after the Second World War. Then there were some very innovative movements that really changed a lot of conceptions around queer people in the seventies – really took a lot of risks. Then LGBT people taught us a lot about health crises in the 1980s when a movement was really addressing the neglect of political institutions which both ignored it and exacerbated a major pandemic that would affect the lives of many queer people and also many non-queer people around the world.
And somehow the field had just got through all of those eras without… And the nineties when of course you had a social issue that would rapidly transform attitudes and rights in a very quick period as well. And we just didn't pay attention to it. And sometimes I think that's such a shame because we could have known a little more about, the COVID-19 pandemic or…
[00:12:18] Alan Renwick: And was this particular to political science or did it affect other social sciences, other disciplines? I mean, I guess we tend to think of universities as being centres of progressive thought. And there's so much thinking as you've just described taking place over several decades.
Was this absent from universities? Was it in other departments?
[00:12:35] Phillip Ayoub: Well, it was certainly… I mean, it was certainly a big issue in many departments – many disciplines, excuse me.
I was just on a panel actually at Oxford last year with actually one of my students and wonderful colleagues. Kristopher Velasco was doing a presentation on these exclusions in sociology, and then my colleague Lee Badgett in economics, and then I was representing political science.
And of course, among those three social sciences, the economists are probably a little behind political science. So I would say maybe even a little worse in economics. Sociologists have been more innovative and have been making space much earlier.
This varies a lot by field of course. Queer theory has developed in gender studies and comparative literature and various humanities in a really impressive way. Not to say that there haven't been serious exclusions in those disciplines as well. But there's quite a bit of variety. I think historians have also gone there a little bit earlier.
Political science varies across subfield with international relations showing itself to be the most conservative, usually, and political theory being the most inclusive. And so we, we see those variations within as well.
[00:13:37] Alan Renwick: And what do you think explains these patterns?
[00:13:39] Phillip Ayoub: I think you know what explains it… At least I wrote a paper called ‘Not that Niche’, and kind of the argument I made there is the perception that LGBT people's lives are kind of a niche political phenomena and thus don't have much currency for explaining broader political phenomena.
I don't think that's a correct assumption. I think it's quite flawed to think of LGBT people that way, given they're folded into major political phenomena. If we think of the current war in Ukraine where you see Vladimir Putin has used LGBT people a lot to kind of try to justify morally that invasion which of course is horrible and certainly no place that LGBT people would want to put themselves, but they fold in this way because these issues are used and attacked by multiple different actors in politics. And so I think they teach us a lot in many different levels, but they're not thought of that way because when you think of it – or when many people in the field think about of it – they think of it as a small minority in societies that can be easily dismissed.
Of course, it's also not that small of a minority. Many people identify as queer – many more than we thought. Or, at least political scientists thought not long ago. So it's actually also an important political constituency for winning elections now, which we didn't consider not long ago.
[00:14:57] Alan Renwick: And how would you characterise the state of the discipline today? Has the gap been made up? Is there still work to do there?
[00:15:03] Phillip Ayoub: There's still a lot of work to do. There's many examples for that, like, the idea that there's still not job ads around this issue, that there's still no journal in political science focuses specifically on sexuality. Presses also have few series devoted to the issue.
We just actually, Kristine and I, chose to publish with NYU Press, which is the only press we sent it to because there the political scientists have this path-breaking series that just started, edited by Susan Burgess and Heath Fogg Davis for the last years. And so that's now an example of that change.
That said, yes, there's been a lot of development in the short time that I've been part of this. I guess in the last 16, 17 years we've seen a tremendous development. There's a really fantastic, an engaged set of junior scholars that also use all sorts of methods, whether qualitative methods are very advanced kind of experimental methods. We see the full diversity of what this exciting field of political science can do by folks who are studying LGBT rights. And so that gives me a lot of hope when I see the kind of articles where they're placed.
Still we do have issues. I mean, if you look at the APSR, you could count all of the research articles related – full research articles related – to LGBT people on one hand.
So we still haven't made tremendous gains and it's still an uphill battle, but we've seen in very recent years that this is starting to shift.
There was a time, and in interviews for that one piece on exclusions, folks told me that the section at the American Political Science Association had a campaign to target the APSR with LGBT papers just because they were convinced there was a desk rejection policy on them. And indeed all of them were desk rejected. And so this was not long ago – this was I guess about 20 years ago.
But we've come a very long way since then where we do see top journals engaging with this work, slowly but surely. We do see reviewers no longer falling back to their knee-jerk reaction to say that this is only about LGBT people, so not general enough, and occasionally even considering that there might be generalist implications to an LGBT story. And so that's very great.
And the students coming out, well, the graduate students and the young professors are now joining the academy with much success. And the reason they're finding that success is because the students are demanding classes like that in many institutions – that is changing the field very much for the better.
[00:17:26] Alan Renwick: I'm fascinated by what this tells us about the nature of political science as a discipline. I mean, is it a conservative discipline? Is it characterised by a disregard for, niche subjects and a desire to kind of follow on a sort of mainstream track to a greater degree than other disciplines?
[00:17:45] Phillip Ayoub: Well, I think it's somewhere in the middle. I mean, I do think that this is, with LGBT issues, it is a topic that still comes with a lot of stigma in many parts of the world – still intense stigma right now. And in countries that we see where it has come a long way, that's all been quite recent.
So I don't know if political science, where it would fall – if it's about average or so. I think there's…
What I've always liked about political science is that it borrows a lot from other disciplines. So you have room for very innovative, really path-breaking, including queer work in certain corners. And then you also have quite a bit of resistance in other corners. And you have to find… You have to find a kind of balance.
Most of the early work in political science was, I think, not engaged in the mainstream so much as always seen a bit more at the periphery. And I think that is what's changing right now.
And I do think that my colleagues in political science are starting to embrace that change. I'm finding there's a lot of celebration of this work as well, so I don't want to be too hard on our discipline, even though it was surely too slow about it. That would be, I think, a very accurate assessment that could have happened much earlier.
[00:18:46] Alan Renwick: Remarkable story.
Let's move on to your new book – your forthcoming book. So this is about anti-LGBTI rights movements. And I guess before we get into the substance of the book, it would be interesting to hear why you felt you needed to write this book. What motivated the book in the first place?
[00:19:04] Phillip Ayoub: Yeah, well I was, I had mentioned before I met Kristina when I was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute, and she was also a postdoc there. That was a little over 10 years ago. And I was finishing this book on the positive story – the advances that the LGBT movements had achieved by using these transnational tools.
Kristina was wrapping up a book on the Russian Orthodox Church, and she was curious why they were so focused on LGBT rights lately and why they were also forming this strange new alliance with the Russian Duma to really push this issue globally as part of Putin's traditional values paradigm, which came about on the global stage more expansively in 2009-10-11, where Russia started portraying itself as defending traditional values, kind of as a way to distinguish itself from the west. And of course, many other countries do that too. It's not just Russia.
But we were talking about those issues, and I was realising that a lot of those tools were being used by conservative movements increasingly. Before we had often theorised that all these progressive things were happening in the global space using transnational tools, and then they would meet their resistance at home in the domestic sphere. But we were seeing that a lot of opposition movements were now starting to appear at the UN, at the EU, at various kind of international for a, pushing for anti-LGBT rights. Sometimes they were foiled around something else, but a lot of them had directly to do with LGBT people. And this was an observation that we saw in the real world, and then we thought we would study it.
And unfortunately, we realised it was part of the bookend to the first book in a way because there was this similar dynamic happening also by opposition movements. And we thought we should study them in connection to each other and see how they operate.
[00:20:49] Alan Renwick: And how did you go about doing that?
[00:20:50] Phillip Ayoub: Well, we applied for a big grant. Kristina was a PI on it because I ended up being in the US, but I was kind of working in the gender track of three tracks of that grant.
And Kristina, being a sociologist of religion and having a lot of cache already with groups that mobilised around religious causes and moral causes, I benefited a lot – a lot of us in the LGBT world could never talk to these opposition actors. I was able to in the first book a little bit, given that I had no name recognition at all, but with this new project, we actually scraped me from the website for the first four years just because we didn't want to seem… We just wanted to make sure that we didn't come off as not wanting to study these groups on their own terms as well.
And we did let them speak for themselves. And we went to these events. And Kristina’s team, mainly run out of Europe, went to a lot of World Congress of Families events and did a lot of interviews – over 120 interviews with various actors that we call ‘morally conservative actors’ and tried to understand why they were so interested in LGBT issues; why this was coming up so much in their work; and also trying to understand how they networked and organised.
We did network analysis of who was going to these events – where they were from globally. We'd also do content analysis to understand how the frames had changed also on the LGBT side.
And then I had done interviews with many – over a hundred – LGBT activists, and I continued those interviews to try to understand how they're responding to these movements.
And I also went to summits like one called Reclaiming Family Values, which was organised by LGBT people to think about how to counter this growing opposition. That was, as you said at the beginning, focusing on traditional values in the family and those kinds of topics.
And so that's how we did the study. We wanted to basically study both… What we think is there's two transnational advocacy movements that are engaging each other even though they're working to very, very exclusive ends. And we wanted to study both of them and try to think about both of them operating in similar spaces and how that shapes their politics.
[00:23:00] Alan Renwick: And we'll get onto the findings of this research in just a moment. But before we get there, it's really interesting… So you talked there about how you didn't have access to these anti-LGBT groups given your background in research history. And therefore Kristina was doing a lot of that work. I guess there's also a question around, I mean, how easy is it for you, given your existing convictions and positions on issues to kind of look dispassionately at these groups and try to see the world through their eyes, which I guess is what you're trying to do in a study of this?
[00:23:35] Phillip Ayoub: Yeah, this was harder for this book than before. And I've confronted that question though also with the first book because a lot of folks also perceived that I might introduce certain biases to studying the LGBT movement. And, given that I care a lot about that movement, I've been quite open about that.
But I think it's fair to say that political science does provide us ways to think analytically about questions that might remove some of that bias. I'll come back to bias in a second, but I think that we can ask questions like: why do some countries move on rights?
And the question is not: is this a good right or not? Or, why does an issue –whether a moral conservative one or an LGBT one – diffuse to space? We're not trying to analyse… There are always normative implications to this work, but there are ways to, I think, look at partly dispassionately, that work. And I do think that we did give all of the people we interviewed a fair shake to speak kind of how they feel about their work.
At the same time, I think that also this kind of idea that we can be purely objective individuals in our work as scientists, as researchers, I think is also a bit misguided in the field.
There's been a lot of work from folks like Patricia Hill Collins and many others from both feminist theory and from queer theory and also from folks working on race and ethnic politics that really says that you can have certain connections to the movement, and that also has certain benefits.
So, for example, the amount of what people might share with you, or their willingness to speak to you, might also be greater if you have some connections to the movement than if you were a fully objective absent satellite to try to learn from the actors doing this work.
And I think that's something that we do have to take into account. And so with the LGBT actors, I feel like my positionality there helped me a lot in kind of getting a fuller story. Kristina’s team and her long history of work with moral conservative actors also I think brought us quite a bit of legitimacy there. Even I think it would be fair to say that there are quite fundamental disagreements between us as researchers and between the messages that some of these actors are advocating for. Because I think, I mean, I think it really depends how you see the word ‘moral’. And I think some of the positions that some of the protagonists in our story take, I would view as immoral. And I think they firmly believe that this is moral work. And so that's a bit of a difficult conundrum when you're researching.
But it doesn't prohibit us from asking a simple story, which is: how does it work? How do they coordinate? Where and how are they effective?
And that I think is something we can answer as political scientists and then others can do with that as they will and build on that research and also tell a different angle of the story, which would be most welcome as well.
[00:26:37] Alan Renwick: And of course, it's a challenge that many political scientists face examining many different movements. It's far from unique here. Yeah.
So we've discussed the sorts of questions you're asking in this book and the methods that you use. What are the key findings?
[00:26:52] Phillip Ayoub: Well, yeah, so we… I mean there's been many alongside us in the last five or six years that have been also studying what we call moral conservative movements, so fantastic scholarship by folks like David Paternotte, Roman Kuhar, Khris Velasco, Agnieszka Graff, Elżbieta Korolczuk.
Many folks are acknowledging that there is now a movement that is operating more transnationally that is opposed to gender ideology, which loops in a set of issues. Women's reproductive rights and traditional gender roles feature centrally, but LGBT rights feature very centrally as well.
They take different constellations in different countries. A lot of countries that we see as more gay-friendly, their trans inclusive policies have been targeted very actively. We see that in the UK, of course; in other countries you might see marriage quality be targeted.
But anyways, it becomes a bundle of issues there. And so what Kristine and I tried to add to that literature is really spending time with some of these activists. That has been, I think, an innovation of this book that we've been able to observe this movement qualitatively on the ground and speak to some of these actors.
And the theoretical argument that we want to posit there for international relations theory is a couple of things. You know, there's a couple of things that I think are surprising for international relations series. So maybe I'll just say those surprises before saying one of the key theoretical arguments.
So, one, there was an assumption in the nineties at least that a lot of this transnational advocacy was kind of there for progressive groups or so, quote-unquote, good groups to do good things and change the world for the better. And I think many others have said this as well, but one of the takeaways of this book is that certainly these transnational advocacy network tools – these spiral models or boomerang models – are there to all sorts of groups, including ones that might be doing less progressive things.
Another is kind of the assumption that around work, around post secular modernity and cosmopolitanism, that things were kind of linearly getting better. And I think that's also partly misguided, that even in this post nineties world we see that also quite conservative movements are working quite actively. They have a lot of agency and their arguments resonate in many different places.
And then another puzzle, or two connected ones, is the idea that nationalism and also that different faiths could be impediments to kind of this collaborative cross-border working together. And indeed I thought that as well when I first started out because so much of the opposition to LGBT rights has a nationalist form to it because the nation, people who are nationalists, often see tradition and national identity as very fixed, and they find LGBT rights claims very fluid and destabilising.
And so nationalism has always been a huge impediment, but nationalists also used to not like working across borders that much because of their nationalism. So it seemed like an oxymoron to think that there would be this gleeful transnationalism among nationalists, which indeed we are seeing is actually possible.
There are people who have strongly held nationalist views that are quite keen to work with other nationalists together. And we see that in other politics as well when you think of this kind of populist-nationalist wave of politics we've been in in the last 10 years or so. And so this is one example of that.
And so those were surprising puzzles, and thus our research is basically arguing not… I mean, we are charting how this movement works and we're charting what the main claims are. But we also argue that the opposition to LGBT rights no longer operates in a way that we see progressive movements operating in the international space, and then they meet their resistance in the domestic space like a traditional boomerang or spiral model would expect. And so then they work against – countering – the opposition in different domestic countries.
Instead, we're seeing that they're actually meeting their opposition more and more at all different levels. And at the international level, at the national level, at the local level, this movement – the opposition movement – also has a transnational component to it.
And so for us, theoretically that we needed to rethink a little bit the spiral and boomerang model or try to add to it. I mean, we still think those are such valuable concepts, but we kind of see a bit of a double spiral in a way in that there might be two operating around a similar issue at the same time.
And thus, we actually call it the double helix model. We don't mean to imply that there's biology to it, but we do like to think of this. Helix implies depth between the two that means the frames, the way that the LGBT movement might talk about issues, might be impacted also by this other movement at the UN or at the EU or in different domestic spaces given the shape of it. And so it's not just that the opposition is being met at home. So that's kind of a key point.
And then also to use the metaphor a bit more, we like to think that these might be in balance, but the strands might also break in different places. So if one movement really gains a lot of currency in one particular country, there might be less contestation – that the other movement might be less effective there.
And then, so you might have certain contexts where both movements are really competing, and others were kind of… One of the strands is more powerful and works more kind of on its own in a given space. And so, it hits differently in different countries.
And Khristopher Velasco has done some really wonderful work also showing quantitatively that we do see actually where one strand is more competitive, that that also leads to more kind of legislation in line with that strand. So you could have a series of anti-LGBT types of policies around religious liberty, around exclusive education that doesn't mention LGBT people, or so-called anti-gender laws or so-called bans on marriage equality or trans rights, etc. Those kinds of issues that the other movement cares about might also start to enter domestic politics if they are kind of the name of the game in a given country.
[00:32:49] Alan Renwick: And can we explain why one or other strand is more or less powerful in particular contexts?
[00:32:54] Phillip Ayoub: Yeah, I mean there's there are a different set of factors there.
One, it is how receptive that country is in terms of existing attitudes, values etc.
But mainly, I think also there's an agentic story there, that there are certain countries that are much more involved in one network or another, and so. And then there's some countries that are very involved in both networks.
So where that means they have domestic organisations that are connected to the transnational advocacy group. And so if it's a country that has a lot of groups from both strands, then you might have a really contentious domestic political climate there. If it's one country that is really connected to one network, but the other network doesn't have a lot of footing there, then you might see greater strength of the other network. Yeah.
[00:33:37] Alan Renwick: And are LGBT plus rights movements kind of responding to this this backlash and adjusting their own strategies in response?
[00:33:49] Phillip Ayoub: Yes, absolutely. I mean, that's how I first learned about the existence of – the increasingly transnational existence of – the opposing movement, in that LGBT groups have been well aware of it and working against it as much as they can for the last 10+, 15 years or so.
And there are effects that it's having on their work. So a lot of like that reclaiming family values example that I gave you, which was an LGBT group movement. There is an effort to really think about… I mean LGBT people always saw themselves about the family, about children, about indigenous communities at home as well. They always saw themselves rooted in place. But since they have been charged with being foreign imposition, since they have been charged with being bad for the family or bad for children, LGBT movements have had to take on those claims much more actively.
And of course, they may have always done that in given domestic context, but now on a global level, also in different international fora, they're having to defend those kind of issues. So for example, we see an increased framing amongst LGBT movements, that focuses also on the family, on that, quote-unquote, we are the Children's Rights Movement, focusing on children who might be impacted by high rates of suicide, high rates of homelessness, etc. due to being queer. Or the children of queer parents who might face certain kind of stigma.
So there's a lot of ways that we can think about caring around rights that the LGBT movements have always been doing, but really emphasising those kind of claims.
And so we see that also in the campaigns they run. There's more kind of religious language sometimes to really emphasise in certain countries that there's a religious connection.
It’s much more national language. In the past I remember just EU flags everywhere, European protests, and a lot of global human rights, universal human rights, democratic values kind of promotion when it came to LGBT rights. That certainly still exists, but it's more inter-fused with more national symbols, where you see even national flags or sometimes church or other religious community symbols present at demonstrations and things, which we would've thought as a bit surprising 20 years ago that are now more common.
[00:35:57] Alan Renwick: And that must lead to concern among some that appealing to the centre ground leads to a dilution of certain core principles.
[00:36:03] Phillip Ayoub: It does, and it's very contentious, including at these debates among activists. Not everybody thinks this is an effective strategy. And I think there's a lot of sympathy to that.
And we saw that around marriage equality too. There were a lot of marriage equality activists that actually felt the institution was not something they wanted for themselves due to issues around the institution being connected to misogyny and other issues.
There was a big debate about: do we want to pursue this kind of a claim? And as with I think any claim the LGBT movement has ever pursued, there's been a really active debate about it and very different views on it. I think a lot of people that are also pursuing, or a lot of activists that are pursuing, these strategies to kind of counter the moral conservative movement are well aware of that.
And also, I recognise the limitations of a strategy like that. So this is certainly an ongoing debate within the movement and I think there's also elements of the movement that are still pursuing a different course and doing that quite well.
We notice that amongst younger generations as well, that still many of whom are contingent to very anti-assimilationist alt-queer politics, which is great. And that has happened despite the fact that for some LGBT people there has been more assimilationist policy policies like marriage equality in place.
So I think that this can happen simultaneously, that different people are doing different work for different audiences and different places. But the fact that on average we see a bit more of this countering of the moral conservative movement is also telling – that they are aware of this opposition and part of the movement is responding to it.
[00:37:39] Alan Renwick: So is there a lesson from your research around the most effective way of pursuing the desired policy end?
[00:37:49] Phillip Ayoub: I think the lesson from the research is that this work is an ongoing struggle and it creates, it necessitates, a lot of malleability and a lot of creativity and innovation. And so I do think that it is effective to kind of regroup and think about how to pursue rights effectively given particular audiences, be they domestic or be they temporally across time when certain new challenges arise. Like the growing influence of this transnational moral conservative movement that requires rethinking former strategies.
I think the LGBT movement is doing that very well. And I think they are very in tune and aware. And I still have a lot of optimism and hope despite a very depressing decade of research on this book with Kristina, which was also hard sometimes to think about these active, very concerted and active challenges coming the way of a movement that felt like the momentum was really high not long ago. And now that's still there, but it feels much more challenging again.
[00:38:52] Alan Renwick: Well, thank you so much, Phillip. This has been really a fascinating conversation and I've certainly learned a great deal. I hope our listeners have as well. And it's so great to have this research taking place within our department as well.
[00:39:04] Phillip Ayoub: Thank you, Alan. Great to be here.
[00:39:06] Alan Renwick: We have been discussing the forthcoming book, The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities. It's by Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl. It's due out with New York University Press in the summer, and copies are available to pre-order now.
As ever, we'll put those details in the show notes for this episode. And the show notes also provide a link to Phillip's inaugural lecture, which I really strongly recommend watching.
Now you might have noticed that our episodes have been a little less frequent than usual of late. That's been because of various winter bugs flying around UCL in the last few weeks. But we hope that we're back to our usual schedule now and, all being well, our next episode next week will be an exploration of the political theory of European integration.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hurt and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.