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This article suggests that it no longer makes sense to conceive, or pursue, mainstreaming in relation to gender alone. If mainstreaming processes are to adequately address the full range of equality concerns of the eu and its member states they will inevitably need to engage with multiple equalities, and their intersections. Given the manner in which mainstreaming has tended to be implemented the attempt to apply it to other equality strands in addition to gender is currently conceived as an additive technical process rather than a more genuinely integrated approach to intersectionality. This paper articulates a conception of diversity mainstreaming that draws on the insights of both gender mainstreaming and intersectionality debates. It proposes a participative-democratic rather than an expert-bureaucratic model of mainstreaming, and a transversal rather than an additive notion of intersectionality, and links these via practices of deliberative democratic exchange.