When I was little, our small apartment became a shelter for a woman and her child. Based on the adult conversations I could eavesdrop on, her husband had been a perfect gentleman throughout their many years of courtship, only to start beating her up after she had signed her name next to his. I suspect that if she were to do an assessment of those years of dating, the woman would likely see signs that this was no white knight, even if there was no previous evidence of physical violence. But at the time, everyone was shocked and she was understandably scared.

Having them home meant that my family had to do some training with me. I remember my mum teaching me how to lie on the phone in case the abusive husband called, which he did quite often, and I would say, absent-mindedly: “Oh, I dunno. She hasn’t called in, like, forever,” while I could see her playing with her kid in the kitchen or knowing we’d all had dinner the night before. I was a very precocious child, but I did not understand at the time that the man on the phone wanted to assault his wife (or worse) for daring to leave him.

This was decades ago in the Dominican Republic. There were no shelters where women and their kids could go to. As has been happening from times immemorial and all over the world, it was ordinary women who had to support one another by offering their homes until the storm passed, more support became available and a strategy to survive was put in place.

As the women’s liberation movement became institutionalised, the role of supportive friends and family became substituted by the State or the non-profit sector. Women’s shelters and refuges became services that women could phone themselves, subsidised by taxpayers, private donors or a combination of both. In many countries in the Global South, women’s shelters and refuge provision is guaranteed exclusively by the State via their Ministries for Women, which is not nearly sufficient to meet the demand. 

That childhood experience must have had a searing impact on me because I grew up to become a frontline worker in women’s services and to work in policy development regarding shelter work at the ministry in my country. This is to say that I understand, perhaps more than most, how important these provisions are. Then why do I feel slightly pleased that Argentina’s right-wing government has shut down its Ministry for Women?

In June, Javier Milei’s government announced that it was shutting down Argentina’s Ministry for Women, Genders and Diversity. The Ministry of Justice said: 

This organization was created and used by the previous administration for political-partisan purposes, to propagate and impose an ideological agenda, hire militants and organize talks and events. The Argentine people witnessed their ideological bias in the discriminatory defense of the victims.

This was no shock to voters because Milei campaigned and won on this promise. When his government came into power in December, it downgraded the Ministry to an Undersecretariat only tasked with addressing violence against women. At this point, they conducted an audit and resolved to shut down the entire structure.

In 2023, Argentina’s budget for “gender issues” was in the millions, including the salaries of over 800 employees. How much of that budget was allocated to women’s shelters and to eradicate male violence? How much of it only served to fatten the pockets of “gender identity” campaigners who used it to proselytise about trans issues that contravened women’s rights?

President Milei has less than zero concerns for these issues. A viral campaign video saw him ripping up with wild abandon the names of ministries he would shut down if elected: “Ministry of Culture, out! Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, out! Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, out! Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, out! Ministry of Education (Indoctrination), out! Ministry of Health, out!” he jubilantly declares, oblivious to the sometimes-vital work done by the much-derided technocrats in those institutions.

With femicides at a record high, it is ghastly and dangerous for women and girls

With femicides at a record high, it is ghastly and dangerous for women and girls that Argentina now does not have a public office (with weight) to address male violence. But the writing has been on the wall for over three decades that by allowing “gender identity” policies to infiltrate and undo the good work that was once done, the feminists sponsoring this ideology were risking angering the public. Which they did.

Argentina was the first country in the world to sign up for the Yogyakarta Principles back in 1995. From that point forward, it followed that agenda hook, line and sinker. As Argentinian researcher Mará Jose Binetti has argued, countries in the Global South have been treated as an experiment to test how far “gender identity” policies could go, with the negative impact being borne on local women and girls. In 2020, Binetti wrote:

Latin America, and particularly Argentina, represents an extremely attractive and easily accessible land for queer neocolonial extractivism. There are a number of reasons. First, Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. We have masses of unemployed and impoverished women whose only capital is their own body. 

Second, the precariousness of political institutions and the lack of democratic tradition put the region at the mercy of highly charismatic and corrupt caudillos. For Latin American populist leaders, poverty is big business. Third, our cultural underdevelopment is continually captured by imported trends. In such a context, it is not a mere coincidence that the queer agenda first colonized Latin America.

The region is far from alone. Around the world, advocates for “gender identity” policies do not campaign openly as the men’s rights movement that they represent. Campaigners camouflage trans rights as simply a subset of the women’s liberation agenda. Although cynical, it should not surprise us that at a systematic level, their first steps are usually to co-op the institutions that feminists have long-fought to establish: women’s services, feminist organisations and yes, ministries of women.

For example, in the United Kingdom, it was precisely the Women and Equalities Select Committee which unleashed sex self-identification proposals to “modernise” the Gender Recognition Act 2004 which clashed with the already fragile sex-based protections included in the Equality Act 2010. It was the then Minister for Women and Equalities, Maria Miller, who dismissed feminists concerns as extraordinary bigotry belonging to the 1950’s, while showing no consideration to the consequences of placing men in female prisons, women’s shelters and sporting categories. Feminists’ experiences and analysis were not factored in what was meant to be a done deal. If the Minister for Women says that “transwomen are women,” who are you to question it? 

On this matter, one of the main differences between Argentina and the UK is that in the latter a steadfast contingency of grassroots campaigners managed to rouse its rather complicit feminist movement and claw it back from the abyss, whereas its Argentinian counterpart ignored all timely warnings and steamrolled ahead, to the detriment of women and girls. 

Today, organisations decry the high-rates of male violence while highlighting what is broadly considered to be the good work that the former Ministry of Women used to do. I asked Binetti what she thought of the closure of the institution, as an Argentinian researcher and feminist campaigner. Her response was somewhat surprising: 

I celebrate the closure of the Minister of Genders because it was an apparatus of ideological implementation to promote gender identity policies. I celebrate that this paradigm of the devaluation of women has now ended. The Ministry was the tip of the iceberg, but other programs along the same line will now become obsolete too. 

The main problem in Argentina is the Gender Identity Law (promulgated in 2012). As long as it remains in place, everything we seek to obtain for women will be a step backwards or it will backfire because the law dilutes anything meant for women, by including everyone who identifies as women. To do so, we would have to make alliances with traditional sectors; it is the only way. The feminist spaces which support sex-based rights and could campaign to repeal the law are still minimal and are less visible than hegemonic feminism. But the path forward must be to repeal the law.

As of 2022, Argentina had 34 refuges for a population of 46 million people. The government said these were funded via its now defunct Ministry. Nobody is quite sure what will happen to those shelters and the mostly women and children who depend on them to survive. Most likely, this work will still be funded but under another Ministry and repurposed to address purely male violence against women and children. 

All the refuges were mixed-sex with no single-sex provision or services for women. If a woman wants to be in a female-only environment while she heals from male abuse and violence (an overwhelming and understandable demand) then she would still need to rely on the private support of friends and family, because the institution tasked and funded to protect her did not offer that option. Then what was the purpose of the Ministry?

There are many decent, passionate and hardworking people with integrity, who work in institutions like the Ministries of Women around the world because they care deeply about human trafficking, the concerns of rural women and about the wage gap between the sexes. They have been my colleagues and have become my lifelong friends. But their concerns oftentimes become neglected and dwarfed by flashier topics, with trans issues taking precedence over everything. 

Could this news be a blessing in disguise? If we want spaces for women; be it charities, organisations, academic fields or even government institutions like Ministries of Women, then these should advance the interest of female people, not stick the knife in us while proclaiming to be for us. If they cannot meet that fairly basic criteria, then good riddance. They will not be missed.