Hungary is expected to vote on a bill that would define gender based on one’s biological sex and ban attempts to change an individual’s gender ID marker on official documents.
The bill, which was first introduced in Parliament last month, states that gender will be defined as “biological sex based on primary sex characteristics and chromosomes,” The Guardian reports.
The first draft of the bill says an individual’s sex will be recorded in relevant legal documents “at birth.” While no specific date has been set to vote on the legislation, ongoing discussions in parliamentary committees indicate the government’s willingness to proceed, according to The Independent.
Critics of the legislation are urging the European Union to take action against the Hungarian government, arguing that the law would violate people’s human rights and amounts to discrimination against transgender-identifying individuals.
“We think it’s likely that they don’t plan to go after people who already changed [gender markers], but we just don’t know,” said Tamás Dombos, a board member of the Háttér Society, a Hungarian organization that advocates for the advancement of LGBT issues, The Guardian reports.
Hungarian President Viktor Orban, who has been in power since 2010, has taken the nation in more conservative, Christian and family oriented direction. However, he’s also been criticized for taking the country in what some have called a nationalist direction.
In early 2018, Orban said in an official state of the nation address in Budapest that Christianity was Europe’s “last hope” and he was not prepared to fall in line with the United Nations and European Union’s approach to migration. In that speech, he criticized Western European leaders for paving the way for the advance of Islam.
Hungary’s pro-family policies under Orban have become of a model for other countries looking to incentivize family growth. The country offers loans of up to $35,000 for some couples to help pay for expenses such as a mortgage, as well as several other benefits to married couples with children.
The impetus for the legislation about sex and gender comes as a growing number of Hungarians are resisting the notion of self-determined gender in law and public policy and the medicalization of gender.
In the U.K., Trade Minister Liz Truss recently announced that restrictions were coming for experimental practices such as the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and body-altering surgeries performed on youth younger than 18. A case against The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, a pediatric gender clinic in London, is ongoing. The National Health Service is reviewing the rules surrounding when youth are allowed to begin the so-called gender-transition process in addition to a medical review of puberty-blocking drugs.
In the U.S., Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed two bills into law last month that push back against transgender ideology. One law prohibits men who identify as women from participating in women’s-only sports at the collegiate and high school levels. The other law bans alterations of the sex markers on birth records and other official documents so that the state can maintain biologically-based vital statistics.
