On January 28, on the heels of Honduran Women’s Day (January 25), the far-right Nationalist Party–led Congress dealt a blow to feminists, LGBT people, and countless Hondurans who believe in equality and human rights. With little notice and virtually no public input, the Congress voted to amend the constitution by enshrining the “right to life at conception” and by instituting a narrow definition of marriage as “between a man and a woman.” Rushing the vote along partisan lines, normal rules of procedure were suspended, and even advocates closely following these issues were blindsided by the alacrity of the fundamental change to the nation’s most important document.

These reforms are a reflection of the Honduran right’s preoccupation with eradicating what neoconservatives around the world call “gender ideology,” a term used to propagate essentialist views of sex as defined along biological and binary lines. In this conservative framing, sexual and reproductive rights, transgender rights, and marriage equality are campaigns whipped up by ideologues that fundamentally go against human nature. The enshrining of these views in the constitution is sure to result in an increase in violence against women in a country facing one of the largest homicide rates in the world, including exorbitant evidence of gender killing. What’s more, the fact that the Congress could suspend due process to implement the constitutional amendments sets a worrying precedent.