What The Hell America!

As Trump’s second term intensifies anti-gender rhetoric, sociologist Laurie Essig draws chilling parallels between rising U.S. authoritarianism and decades of state-sponsored repression in Putin’s Russia.

This interview first appeared on Kornbluh’s Substack, “History Teaches…”

I recently reached out to Laurie Essig, a sociologist and writer who teaches down the road from me, at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt. (I teach in Burlington, Vt., about an hour’s drive 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 greatest experts on these questions. 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, 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 in an ongoing podcast project that explores multiple national case studies, including ours in the United States. (New episodes of the pod drop regularly, and a bumper crop of them is coming this summer, so start listening!) 

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 and I spoke last month 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.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Felicia Kornbluh: I wanted to talk to you, as an expert in this area, because I want to help Ms. readers, students, and myself, understand how sex, gender and contemporary authoritarianism fit together.  

Laurie Essig: I don’t think I’m an expert. I am someone who has lived in two countries, both of which have fascistic regimes that are organizing around “gender.” And 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 doing our job.  

Think about the fact that Trump’s executive order (the first one) makes it clear 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 or that sex isn’t binary. 

Leaders around the world believe that what we’re doing is powerful and dangerous—even if we see what we’re doing as building on the knowledge about power and difference of the last 50 years. 

Kornbluh: Can we go back to Russia and what you learned there?  

Essig: 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. 

In Putin, you had an anti-democratic leader who decided he wanted to come back for a third term as president. In the winter of 2011 to 2012, you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting for democracy. 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.’

The anti-gay propaganda bill was passed in 2013. [On the original law and its 2022 expansion, see this article from The Guardian.]  You could not have any display of gayness before anyone under 18—very much like the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida. 

I gave a talk about my 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 talk about queer sexualities in Russia. I would be corrupting a minor—my own minor. 

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

You could not have any display of gayness before anyone under 18—very much like the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida. 

Laurie Essig

Kornbluh: What was it about “the homosexual” or “gender” that freaked them out?  

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

This wave 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. Some religious and conservative figures were anxious about that. Also, the pushback against domestic and sexual violence connotated for them the presence of lesbians.  

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, which created parts of the country that were “LGBTQ-free.”   

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 wanted more democracy.  In some ways its anti-gender and anti-feminist stance was the death knell for that regime. 

And look at Victor Orban, the darling of the current U.S. far right, whose policies opposing “gender” and gender studies as an academic field forced the Central European University to leave Hungary. 

Kornbluh: Would you narrate briefly what happened in Russia? 

Essig: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union—1989—a lot of possibility existed. The 1990s were horrible because the economy was collapsing, and they were also full of possibility. Civil society was allowed to exist, unlike in the Soviet Union, 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 to 2012, so it took a while for it to become the kind of regime that killed journalists, that stopped any kind of dissent.

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, a 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. 

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.

Essig

Kornbluh: Wasn’t Putin a communist? How does someone go from “communist” to what your podcast calls a “fascist,” or leader with fascist tendencies?  

Essig: More than standing for a communist vision, Putin talked about bringing Russia off its knees, which is a homoerotic image and a nationalist one. He tapped into a feeling of masculine insecurity about Russia being in a subordinated position that made a lot of people support him—that there was something about the nation (always masculine) that had been humiliated.  

We discovered in the podcast that every strongman, every dictator we look at, had anxiety about masculinity. That’s true for Mussolini and Stalin, as well as contemporary leaders. Today, they’ve created this monstrous figure, “gender,” to explain the failure of masculinity. For Donald Trump it’s “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.   

Kornbluh: M. Gessen in The New York Times expressed surprise at the degree to which the Trump campaign in 2024, the inaugural address, and the policies since Jan. 20, took aim at trans, nonbinary and intersex people in particular. Were you surprised? 

Essig: 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 six or seven years at least.  And there’s a lot of it in Project 2025.  Trump 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. 

Kornbluh: What are your messages to the feminist movement(s) in the United States—especially given the self-described feminists who are anti-trans? 

Essig: I would ask every feminist to think: Are you mimicking the rhetoric of the fascistic right wing? And if so, who is it benefiting? Because I don’t think it’s benefiting women and girls. 

Why not be a feminist for feminized bodies? I’m reading Verónica Gago’s book Feminist International: How To Change Everything. Gago argues that 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?   

Kornbluh: Why do you think this politics works? Even aside from the content (which is saying a lot!), I’m repelled by the obviousness, the total lack of originality, at how loud and crass it is.   

Essig: 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. 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. 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.   

Most people don’t think that deporting migrants is going to solve their problems. But they are desperate for some possibility. That’s where opponents 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 intersectional, thinking about racial justice and class justice, and pleasure?  

Every strongman, every dictator we look at, had anxiety about masculinity.

Laurie Essig

Kornbluh: How do we get out of the political situation in the U.S.? 

Essig: I think we get out of it by not waiting for the Democratic Party to save us. 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. We’re 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.