Hungary’s parliament has voted to do what no one even in Western journalism has dared to do: refer to human beings by their scientific, at-birth, unchangeable gender.
According to MailOnline, legislators voted on May 19 to ban transgender people from changing their gender on official identity documents. Transgender advocates have said the move is frightening trans people, who assume they will face discrimination and attacks unless everyone agrees to ignore scientific facts.
Specifically, the legislature voted to replace the Hungarian word ‘nem’, meaning gender, with “sex at birth” on birth, marriage and death certificates.
HungarIan Prime Minister Viktor Orban, first elected in 2010, was re-elected in 2018 on the promise of building “a new era’ with sweeping cultural changes in the formerly communist country. Parliament’s speaker has compared gay adoption with pedophilia.
“The state’s decision … to register children’s biological sex in their birth certificates does not affect men’s and women’s right to freely experience and exercise their identities as they wish,” the government’s communications office said.
“In no way does the relevant section of the bill that some people criticise prevent any person from exercising their fundamental rights arising from their human dignity or from living according their identity,” it explained in emailed comments.
Orban’s government has made resistance to special treatment for LGBT people part of its cultural strategy, according to The Guardian, and has placed traditional family values at the center of many of its policies.
