just days before the anniversary of activist mary ellen franco's assassination in brazil prosecutors their charge to form a police officers with a murder the arrests may provide a partial answer to the question of who killed her but many other questions like who ordered  worldwide then we take a look at one demonstration in new york to remember franco and the struggles she brought to the world's attention that's all coming up on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are gender ideology as delegates to the u n meeting of the commission on the status of women well know a mysterious term has started cropping up in human rights debates it's the assertion that replacing the word sex with gender is part of a global feminist conspiracy to destroy the family ruin societies steal your kids and who knows what else gender ideology is something that the reactionary right is keen to stir alarm about and it's having an effect costing feminists and their friends as enemies of the state and influencing elections like last years in brazil where a new president gyre balsa naro has promised to remove l g b t q content from the high school curriculum as part of a greater p of what he calls marxist rubbish what is the u s role in all of this and what are in country groups doing to fight back a woman with a front seat to what's going on is if i can she's the executive director of madre which partners with grassroots women lead groups from nicaragua and haiti to kenya palestine and iraq old friend of mine a fat welcome to the program it's been a while before we dive into the gloom and doom of what you're up against i think it is also worth taking a moment to reflect on what you think's been accomplished over these years moderates what thirty five years old is thirty five years old in some ways doing exactly what the founders set out to do in the one nine hundred eighty s the world has changed strategies have changed principles have remained rock solid which i think is what the organization is its success to and i think that the success of murder is the success of of radical social movements all around the world and and that we are seeing especially in this moment a real kind of flowering and you know i think many of us who are in this work for have a sort of you know best of time work worst of times kind of feeling about where we are in the world into the middle of it flies this new term but it's sort of familiar scenario something scary being talked about that puts a lot of that work at risk gender ideology when did you stop hearing about it you know i think that it's good to locate the beginnings of gender ideology way way back in like one thousand nine hundred ninety five and those two years being the un conference in cairo on population and development and the year after being the beijing women's world conference and i say that because i think that those two moments represented kind of a watershed in feminist movements winning feminist women movements winning a kind of mainstreaming of what they had been what they've been claiming all along and starting to see that reflected in women's rights or human rights reproductive justice ideas t is part of this whole story and so what now is being called gender ideology really started way back then and it began on the part of the vatican and other you know kind of groups that play an extremist role inside the u n system i think though it's important understand why we're talking about it now right which is as you said it has a kind of new lease on life this sort of shape shifting term it's really just a container for anything that the religious right doesn't want to see happening and and it is as you said a really important galvanizing term right now and really has a lot of utility for authoritarianism and that's why we're seeing it strong reemerge how are you seeing it play out in the places that you work maybe in the groups that you work with or ones that work with well i mean a give you just sort of an anecdotal example we were recently talking to a partner of ours a group of indigenous women in guatemala who are doing amazing amazing work reclaiming areas of land where their parents and families were massacred in the one nine hundred eighty s under the watch of the likes of elliott abrams and those women communities of women are dealing with the generational trauma by doing my in ceremonies on these pieces of the land and then doing incredible things like building playgrounds and protecting them into soccer fields and food gardens and that work of indigenous women in guatemala very recently was designated as witchcraft by an evangelical church and guatemala what we know is that overwhelmingly both in latin america and in africa a lot of the right wing religious organizations churches in those in the communities of our partner groups are funded and receiving marching orders from us based evangelicals and religious right wingers and when i say marching orders i mean things like they will get grant money from a church in the u s on the condition that they disassociate from progressive in brazil we heard i had a chance to interview the leader of the opposition and he described the statistics they had a they had uncovered who voted something like one in three of the voters in the presidential election that country last year had been mobilized by a pentecostal church most of them with relationships of the united states and this language of gender ideology being bandied about constantly how do you deck tackle and how do the people you work with tackle it i mean i think there's a few layers of what we're how we respond and the first layer is protect people who are under attack absolutely and it's the same thing that we're doing in the u s right now right what what are the circles of support that we need to be we need to be building and the frontline thing is making sure that people whose lives and communities literally are under attack are receiving protection but also as we are generating that kind of resistance always always remembering that we can only be resisting right we have to hold on to like what is the vision that we're trying to create and that is of a society where there is space for feminist ideas about you know how we want to live in what our family should look like and what is the role of government and how what is the responsibility of government to a diversity of citizenship all you know that whole gamut of questions i think we have to keep as kind of like a north star of like we're not just reacting against the reaction of the right wing right and i think that we know that that the way that that gender has has functioned so far has been you know one of the most powerful tools of patriarchy which is to keep you know to keep women subservient to say that there is no role in this world for people who are gender diverse or who have a sexual orientation that's not had her own normative the right as something around things saying in advance of the u n meeting for example where real women and girls need to stand up against those who are trying to hijack our issues with their transgender gender that's right that's right and i think that you know in the lead up to the c s w i think one of the things that we are on alert for is a real concerted attack specifically against transfer will and we're seeing that right now in the u s it's almost like an existential kind of attack right like we're just going to erase the category of trans in you know on the part of the state and that's certainly true in brazil and in other places and we're looking for to see how that's going to play out at the u n but we're expecting it because they are the right wing is going after what they perceive to be the sort of weakest link of the feminist and l g b t q you know sort of movements  and i think it's a real call for people to rally around that community in solidarity if i can thank you so much for joining us if it is the executive director of madre about which you can find out more through our we are here at my home with a very special guest who's just in town from brazil for a few days her name is k k voted that she and she heads up the l a fund the largest women's foundation in brazil they're up against it in that country these days but a lot of what they're facing will not be so unfamiliar to those of us in social movements here in the u s tell us a little bit about what the l f fund does let's start there well  also trying to break this is stereotype that young girls cannot believe that they don't know very well what they are doing you know so all of this all of this work i'm sure brought you into close contact with someone we think about deeply at this time of the year around the world i think mariella franco she was assassinated a year ago in brazil tell us a little bit about her how you knew her and the significance of that assassination a close friend but i would like to say about the the the the the trauma that it was it was for social movements you know she was representing human rights movements in general so when she got assassinated we couldn't see from our government action you know and they actually it felt for some social movements like a straight mass against those voices these people cannot be participating in policy so much you know in politics or so it was really traumatic so fast forward to the fall of last year six months after the assassination of mariel franco city council member city of rio we have the elections and we have the election of both on our own what can you tell us about him and the relationship between those two  events or whether really after her assassination we start to listen in in social medias and around society in general a lot of hate speech hate went even worse because once he was elected somehow these people who are spreading hate speech they felt in their confortable way you know they what's it like for you just on the streets and then in your work i mean it was complicated because we were wrists i mean there was something so crazy about this hate speech and fake news i know you you movements led by women you know dollars aloes asking for support you know in many ways so we know in this country that our media tend to patrol a hate speech online and aggression against no show show movements as sort of a naturally occurring phenomenon how do you explain it other visible sources of this aggression towards your groups meaning organized sources or is it just random individuals well i would say that our main concern of all this is how the is hate speech or  women's ministry we no longer half it was meek ft together women's ministry and human rights ministry and then they have added as family minister and then they say for example that to put all these together means that human rights are no longer for minorities now is a broader perspective human rights for everybody i don't want to think about h we fear a lot because is that the fact is that the previous understanding of human rights was was like just for a few people or something like this actually is not like that and and also there is this family concept coming up you know like what they understand my family is this very narrow perspective of a family is just  man in the woman and their children all other sorts of families are no family is at all so you're hearing much of the same things that we hear here the response to black lives matter is when all lives matter police lives matter the response to people asking for their families that have always been excluded to be recognized is to say all families should be recognized by shedding differences you miss the discrimination that's happened and you seems that you are representing a political party you and they say this is so they say that this is a specific group in the all oji and that is the single understanding of that we stand to believe that men and women are different but they are not you know that everything is fine that we should not they all are boys and girls that they can choose their gender for example because they think they need to understand all the whole idea of human rights and gender equality it sounds very much like what we saw in the states in the early ninety's where right wing organizations especially media organizations released videos and programs about the gay agenda which was their take on l g b t people asking for any rights any equality there was a insidious dangerous scary seeming gay agenda that's what gender ideology sounds like to me sort of scary a gender coming out of feminism or an attempt to fo x orientation sexual diversity you cannot have even race they versity you cannot have those terms anymore and it's all under this big flag of war against gender the all too what do you do and how have social movements in brazil been responding in the my next question is how can we help our consortium movements in the states perhaps help brazil very interested in staying in rising some international solidarity and i believe that the case of money early from calls assassination is of opinions so i think it is an opportunity for us to engage i think with international support we definitely can get more answers for this assassination so bring us back to the streets of brazil today and how you are maintaining your spirits to do this work what is it like for you in the streets and will it be safe for people to be protesting have been repressed in any way so one of the main needs of of women's movement these days would be for security for improving security  those security or even physical security is some of our concerns probably you know all that out brazil has a very experienced and vivid women's movement very much better society relies on now our social movements rely on those women's movements and what we have was to be in the alliance and strengthening our our fight thank you so much it's been wonderful talking thank you we followed some of the protests that took place on the anniversary of the mariella franco assassination and this is what we saw want one of the leaders of the defend democracy in brazil communities that we found the three years ago before the coup that that happened in brazil two thousand and sixteen we brought together friends and people to