The Hate Review

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 2.78 / 4  ·  Impact 1.45 / 4

The anti-gender movement has operated on two asymmetric tracks over the past decades. On abortion, it has been broadly successful: sustained Church-led and civil society mobilisation has maintained an exceptionally restrictive framework and beaten back the one attempt at meaningful liberalisation in 2022. On the rights of LGBTIQ+ people, it has been largely ineffective, failing to prevent successive waves of reform under Labour governments from 2013 onwards. The movement has nonetheless evolved: from an early phase dominated by the Catholic Church and the Nationalist Party, to a second phase from around 2017 in which new actors — evangelical networks, Pro Malta Christiana and small Christian conservative parties — adopted a sharper ideological vocabulary drawn from international anti-gender networks. Its successful campaigns against the Equality Bill and against the 2022 abortion proposal show that sustained pressure can decisively shape legislation.