"Regarding how the political debate on applying the parental pin is represented through discourses, we observed polarised positions, with posts on X containing the central hashtag #parentalpin modulated with secondary hashtags that give it one ideological meaning or another", explains Alícia Villar, lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Valencia (UV) and expert in Sociology of Education and Sociology of Gender.

The study also identifies Vox, the political party that created the parental pin proposal, as the main participant in its dissemination with the hashtag #parentalpin, accounting for 74.66% of the main messages disseminated among those selected. Other entities that have used it include “organisations with a clear ideological stance that can function as think tanks for some parties”, and are, as cited in the article, Hazte Oir, Abogados Cristianos and the Spanish Episcopal Conference, listed in descending order of prevalence.

The #parentalpin hashtag has also been spread by media outlets sympathetic to the initiative and prominent figures and influencers within this political space, such as Pablo Casado, former leader of the People’s Party in Spain; Alvise Pérez, currently a member of the European Parliament; and the political party Vox. The account @igualdadlgbt and the politician Irene Montero have also contributed to the broader spread of the hashtag, but with a different ideological sense. According to sources from 2022, Alvise Pérez posted a now-suspended message reading: “Muslim children can avoid certain school curricula, object to ‘offensive’ terms like ‘ham’, or get a ‘halal menu’ in cafeterias... but Spaniards ask for a #ParentalPin so that leftist nutcases from outside the school don’t preach to our children, and it’s an ‘outrage’”.

Another key conclusion from Villar and Venegas’ research is that the five key elements of the anti-gender discourse – indoctrination, freedom, equality, gender ideology and sex education – “have made it possible to identify the shifts in meaning, which is a strategy often employed by extreme right-wing groups that adopt terms and slogans traditionally associated with opposite positions and spread them rapidly through digital culture techniques such as remixes or manipulative use of slogans and images”.

The study analysed messages on X, formerly tweets, from a selection of 241 posts from both identifiable and anonymous accounts. The data extraction used the qualitative software ATLAS.ti 8, widely used in qualitative data analysis and capable of importing data from X. The sample covers posts made between 4 September 2018 and 31 January 2020, and the number of followers of individuals and organisations were updated to November 2023.

Article reference: Villar-Aguilés, A., & Venegas, M. (2024). El discurso anti-género en educación en España: Un análisis del #pinparental. Revista Prisma Social, (46), 359–384. Retrieved from https://revistaprismasocial.es/article/view/5388