Weaponised Hate - The Hungarian State

The fascist government in Hungary has been ruling with two thirds majority in parliament since 2010, and with emergency powers since the COVID-19 pandemic began. They have full legal power to do anything they want to without cooperating with the arguably non-existent opposition, and have taken full advantage of this for their own ends. They have been using anti-queer rhetoric for years now, and there were multiple legal steps that led to the current situation, I will try to outline the main steps here, but there were many more.

In 2020 on Trans Day of Visibility a member of the governing party propsed a law which made it impossible for transgender people to change their legal sex marker between female and male (non-binary identities were never legally recognized in Hungary). In December of the same year they amended the constitution to include that "The father is male, the mother is female", which opened the gateway to discrimintation for example in disallowing adoption by homosexual couples and even single people. It also added that the state has a responsibility to protect children’s right to their assigned gender at birth, paving the way for later suppression of trans rights.

In 2021 they passed a law that marked all queer people as pedophiles, and banned the depiction of homosexuality and transness in any context where children can see it, making all queer media 18+, requiring book stores to cover up books with anything queer on the cover, and not allowing any sexual education on these topics in schools, among many other restrictions.

In January of this year, they arrested the doctors at the only clinic in the country openly providing trans healthcare, with whom a large part of the trans community in Hungary was getting their hormone treatments and surgeries. They have been under arrest for over a month now, and are being kept for another three without there being any official charges, the police is hard at work to try to gather evidence for some sort of economic crime, but it is clear that they are political prisoners and that the prosecution has a hard time framing them for anything, but it is likely they will be held for a long time and might end up serving time in prison. This effectively cut off the medical care of many trans people, with no clear legal path of attaining HRT in Hungary, and many being forced to go to private clincs in foreign countries. There will be a solidarity protest in front of the prison they are being held at this week on Saturday, organised by their former patients.

Since the new Trump administration took office in the USA, the Hungarian government has gone mask off and openly started using fascist rhetoric to the extent that it is no longer taboo for even liberal organizations to use the word fascist for them. As part of this they promised to ban the Pride march in Budapest this year, which they have been preparing with multiple legal steps. These include an amendment to the constitution that states that "Humans are male or female." and that child protection laws can overwrite all basic human rights except for the right to life (child protection laws which specifically target queer people), the legal allowance of gender identity based discrimination, and finally the modification of the law on public gatherings to disallow gatherings that go against the child protection laws, i.e. any public queer protest will be illegal after the 15th of April when this law comes into effect. This last law also authorizes the use of mass survaillence technologies for identifying protesters at disallowed gatherings and large fines for anyone who dares to do it anyway.■

Anarchista Diákmozgalom (Anarchist Student Movement)
Here we have out social media links so people can keep up with the hungarian anarchist scene: linktr.ee/anarchistadiakmozgalom
Images courtesy of Mérce.