Swedish Women's Lobby

The Swedish Women's Lobby (Swedish: Sveriges Kvinnoorganisationer; formerly Sveriges Kvinnolobby) (SWL) is a Swedish gender-critical organization. It describes itself as a non-partisan and non-denominational independent umbrella organization for the Swedish women’s movement. Since the late 2010s it has increasingly represented what academics describe as gender-critical, anti-gender and trans-exclusionary positions, and in 2025 it launched the international NGO Women's Platform for Action International (WoPAI) to promote "sex-based rights" and oppose what they call a "queer agenda," a "pro-gender movement" in academia and NGOs, and "non-legal and not agreed upon by the international community concepts of 'gender identity.'" WoPAI is described as a far-right anti-transgender organization. WoPAI is hosted by SWL and shares its address; SWL's secretary-general Susannah Sjöberg is also the inaugural secretary-general of WoPAI, while former SWL chair Gertrud Åström was its inaugural chair. In August 2025, SWL also founded the anti-gender network MOTERIS Protecting the Civic Space of Women and Girls, which states that it promotes "sex-based rights" and which includes other gender-critical and anti-gender organizations. MOTERIS states that it works for "material reality" and that "women’s existence as a sex-based political class" is being denied by "pseudo-progressive currents."

In a joint statement, SWL and WoPAI opposed the inclusion of trans women—whom they referred to as "males who do not wish to be treated in law and practice as men"—in analyses of violence against women. In May 2025, WoPAI board member Anna Kerr presented her lecture "Did Freemasonry have a role in the roots of the trans movement?," which promoted Masonic conspiracy theories. WoPAI said in September 2025 that "trans ideology has been a pernicious threat to women's safety and freedom," and WoPAI asserted in 2025 that "queer activists" are waging a "war on women," with "the direct participation of powerful industries, UN bodies, global governments and philanthropic corporations." The Report on violence and pathways to violence in anti-gender campaigns, published by the European Commission, identified several of SWL's member organizations as part of a growing anti-gender landscape in Sweden, and noted that Sweden has seen a rise of anti-gender rhetoric since the mid 2010s. Women's Declaration International, that is described by SPLC as a central node in an international "anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network," is a member of both SWL itself and its international umbrella groups.

Gender studies scholars Karlberg, Korolczuk and Sältenberg situate SWL within the broader landscape of anti-gender politics in Sweden, arguing that the rise of gender-critical and anti-trans rhetoric, including that promoted by SWL, is part of a wider process of "insidious de-democratization," which they describe as a set of discourses and practices that erode liberal democracy by marginalizing already vulnerable groups. In 2020, the magazine Ottar published an exposé on what it described as an "unholy alliance" of right-wing Christians and radical feminists working to undermine trans rights. The article reported that in 2018, SWL had worked with the anti-trans group Genid, and it identified 2020 as the point when organized anti-trans mobilization gained momentum in Sweden. Daniel Poohl, publisher of Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo, wrote that "radical feminists, right-wing Christians, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists have found each other in an unholy alliance that has made transgender people the new target of the far right's hatred," while nearly a thousand priests of the Church of Sweden condemned trans-exclusionary radical feminism as indistinguishable from the far right. Jon Voss argued in QX in 2023 that "the Sweden Democrats and the Swedish Women's Lobby sound frighteningly similar to Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, and DeSantis in their ways of arguing by belittling transgender people."