Pseudonyms are used in this article; interviewees who asked for their real names to be used are asterisked.

In 2016, one of us (Kath) attended New Normal, a conference in London which opposed LGBT rights, including lesbian parenting and gender recognition. As a lesbian parent, I was upset by what was said – and by the way people stood to applaud speakers who warned of the dangers of parents like me, while mentioning the need to “protect children”.

Yet that conference also opened my eyes to my – and perhaps, many other people’s – lack of understanding of what it can mean to stand against the apparent state-supported, liberal consensus on such issues. On day two, the organisers appealed for help for the parents of a trans or gender-diverse child. My notes from that day read:

The parents feel they are not listened to, and are ‘encouraged by social services’ to treat ‘her’ like a boy. But social services have only known ‘her’ for six months – so they don’t know ‘her’. The parents are told if they don’t agree to a name change, it is neglectful and that she is suicidal. The mother argues: ‘We love our daughter.’

Unexpectedly and conflictually, I found myself relating to the parents’ story in some way. And I wondered how I would feel as a same-sex parent if I was ever in a situation where my child rejected their family as a “moral abomination”.

These thoughts proved a starting point for Beyond Opposition – our project which, since 2020, has been looking at the lives of people who are reticent about or object to the perceived liberalising of societies’ sexual and gender laws in Great Britain, Ireland and Canada.

The idea of this research is not to defend their positions. Nor is it to explore their politics around sexualities and genders, which we and many others do in research into anti-gender movements. Rather, we wanted to understand the experiences that might drive these politics.

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As far back as 2012, prompted by my colleague, urban geographer Catherine Nash, I (Kath) began noticing an evolution in arguments against changes like same-sex marriage, gender recognition and relationship and sexuality education in schools – an evolution that was not always fully recognised, or even noticed, by supporters of these changes. People who objected to such societal shifts were sometimes being politicised through court cases around their work and their children’s experiences at school.

For Beyond Opposition, we put a call out to people who opposed or had concerns about changing laws and policies related to gender, sexuality or abortion. As well as contacting organisations and activists who actively campaigned against these changes, we used social media to reach out to people who had no connections with these groups.

In more than 160 interviews between 2020 and 2022, we explored the daily experiences of living outside the social consensus in three countries where, at the time, there was broad legal, political and social agreement in favour of same-sex marriage, abortion, gender self-identification and related policies. The surprising diversity of positions and experiences we heard not only shed new light on how societies were changing; they painted a sometimes disturbing picture of how these shifts were being challenged and resisted.

In the 1990s in secondary school, I would have been completely open about my view on [abortion], because it was a more accepted view, I suppose … [Now] I have this view and don’t feel I can even express it [because] everyone else disagrees … I feel like I can’t even say this to anyone.

We first met Niamh in 2021, three years after Ireland’s historic referendum to repeal one of the EU’s strictest legal barriers to abortion, which led to limited access to abortion care. Where once her anti-abortion views were considered mainstream, in Ireland and many other countries where abortion is accepted legally and socially, now her views are in the minority.

Niamh was clear she did not regard herself as “conservative” and said she was strongly in favour of human rights. She told us: “If I have to categorise myself, I’d categorise myself as ‘pro-life’.” But she expressed frustration at how people assumed this position automatically predicted what she thought about other topics relating to gender and sexuality, explaining:

There’s this thing that’s like: [because] you’re against abortion, you’re against same-sex marriage or against refugees coming into the country … I struggle with it because the people in my circle on social justice issues are not usually aligned with my [anti-abortion] position. They tend to have the opposite view – [mine] tends to be seen as a really conservative stance, not a rights-based stance.

Niamh, like many of our interviewees, expressed views quite differently from the organisations opposing sexual and gender equalities that I (Kath) had encountered in earlier research. While those organisations were diverse, they were often aligned on abortion, same-sex marriage and gender recognition. This contrasted with the differences that people such as British woman Jane identified when we met her.

“I wouldn’t want to sit down in a room with somebody who said gay people were going to hell,” Jane told us. “We just wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” But she also felt it would be “impossible to have a conversation with somebody who does not believe in the existence of biological sex”.

While Jane objected to trans rights being “given primacy”, she thought of herself as different to people who are seen as anti-gender activists. Describing herself as “gender critical”, she said: “Why this is so toxic and has started to spill out into my day-to-day life is that we are all just lumped under one........

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