Hungary bans transsexuals from altering their gender in official documents

The Hungarian Parliament led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s right-wing government has passed a law this week,with 133 votes to 57, preventing transsexuals from changing gender markers in their official records. The new legislation is claimed to clear ambiguities in legal order. The draft Bill submitted on March 31 provided that gender is the “biological sex based on primary sex characteristics and chromosomes” and thereby requires citizens to record only their “sex at birth” in the Civil Registry.

Multiple LGBTQ activists and organizations have stated that this will result in sheer discrimination against transsexuals in an already hostile environment that the conservative Fidesz party has led the country to. The legal gender changing process has been frozen since 2017 and almost 3 years of backlog applications will now be rejected outrightly. The critics believe that this is only a part of the huge propaganda of their intolerant government, whose representatives had earlier made multiple attempts at making transsexual lives difficult – from advocating advantages of heterosexual marriages to openly comparing homosexuality to pedophilia.

Most members of the queer community are clearly agitated that the law will be a burden for them wherever and whenever they have to produce documents like birth, death or marriage certificates because then, their appearances would not match with the gender specified in these records. This could shrink their chances of eligibility in multiple occasions like a job. Intersexual people who are often born with an anatomy that does not fit into typical male or female bodiesare also apprehending abuse and denial from the society. Therefore, it is likely that the new enactmentwill be challenged in the Courts of law.

However, the government’s communication office said that the 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.”