When Social Change Feels Threatening: Multiple Pathways to Reactionary Politicized Identification and Collective Action

Efforts to recognize gender diversity have become sites of political conflict, mobilizing progressive support and reactionary resistance. Understanding this resistance requires identifying which grievances arise during social change and explaining how they correlate with reactionary politicized identities and collective action. We argue that societal change becomes psychologically consequential through multiple identity‐related threats. Study 1 ( N = 1160) demonstrates that perceived threats to identity‐relevant aspects of social change—changes to gender and sexuality categories, one's gender identity and the societal order—uniquely correlate with stronger identification as an opponent of gender diversity, which mediates their associations with collective action against gender‐inclusive language. Study 2 ( N = 619) replicates these results, controlling for perceived aesthetic quality of gender‐inclusive language, and extends them to identification as an opponent of the queer movement and opposition to transgender inclusion. These findings highlight multiple identity‐related pathways linking social change to reactionary politicized identification and collective action.