Across the world, democratic backsliding has a gendered face. Autocratising regimes do not simply roll back women’s rights as a side effect of their political projects — they strategically deploy opposition to gender equality as a core mechanism of democratic erosion. Drawing on a decade of collaborative research, we show how autocratic-leaning leaders mobilise a distinctive repertoire of gendered repression: limiting women’s bodily autonomy and public roles, dismantling feminist policy infrastructures, selectively closing civic space to silence critical organisations while sponsoring regime-aligned ones, and suppressing the production of critical gender knowledge through attacks on academic freedom and gender studies programmes. Misogyny, in other words, is not incidental to these regimes — it is constitutive of them. Next, we turn to the mechanism that sits at the heart of this dynamic: violence. We argue that gendered political violence is not merely a symptom of autocratisation but one of its key driving forces. Autocratising regimes deploy the state in a double movement — as a weapon targeting politically active women, LGBTQIA+ people, and feminist civil society with harassment, intimidation, and legal persecution; and as a shield, extending impunity to perpetrators and dismantling protective frameworks by deliberate design. Violence thereby shifts from a structural background condition of gender inequality to an overtly instrumentalized tool of regime consolidation.