London - Hungary's
parliament voted Tuesday to ban transgender people from changing
their gender on identity documents, in a move that LGBT+
advocates said was creating panic among trans people who feared
an increase in discrimination and attacks.
The legislature voted 133 to 57 to replace the Hungarian
word "nem", meaning sex or gender, with "sex at birth" on birth,
marriage and death certificates, which could expose trans people
to harassment if their documents do not match their appearance.
"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 said in emailed comments.
Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in power
since 2010, was re-elected in 2018 and promised to "build a new
era" with major cultural changes in the ex-communist country.
Parliament's speaker has equated gay adoption with paedophilia.
It is possible to legally change gender in all European
Union countries bar Cyprus, advocacy group Transgender Europe
says, despite growing criticism of trans rights as an attack on
traditional gender roles by far-right and religious groups.
Trans people in Hungary have been effectively unable to
change the sex on their identity documents since 2018, according
to LGBT+ rights advocates, who said there were already multiple
court cases underway challenging that.
"We have no words to describe what we feel," Tina Korlos
Orban, vice president of advocacy group Transvanilla Transgender
Association, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"People who haven't had suicidal thoughts for decades now
are having them. People are in panic, people want to escape from
Hungary to somewhere else where they can get their gender
recognised."
The government said the amendment resolved uncertainties
being faced by courts and authorities in interpreting the word
sex, which was not defined in the previous registry law.
Tamas Dombos, a board member of the Hungarian LGBT Alliance,
said activists would lobby the president, an ally of Orban's,
not to sign the bill into law.
"(The government) just doesn't care about how it impacts the
life of trans people ... they could never provide any rational
argument for why this bill is needed," said Dombos.
Advocates said they would challenge the law, which would
also affect intersex people born neither clearly male nor
female, in court in Hungary and at the European Court of Human
Rights if necessary.