Let’s start from where you look at gender issues, what is your relationship to it?
Eight years ago, I started working on the right-wing mobilisation against the concept of gender in several countries. It was strange because, although it is an abstract concept, it was something that could be addressed to people, which is why I was trying to understand what the far right was doing. That’s how I came to the point that there is something here that does need to be addressed, and that it’s not enough to talk about their creating an image of the enemy, their stigmatising. Of course, all this exists and is inhumane, but there is something else that needs to be addressed. My aim from the outset is to try to talk about this in a calm, differentiated way, not just on the basis of the ‘logic of the two camps’. In Hungary, the government started to thematise all this in 2017 in the context of the Istanbul Convention and the master’s programs in gender studies. It seemed that Fidesz was saying that the “gender madness” is eating our children, and the other side was saying that Fidesz is talking nonsense and stigmatising, that everything is fine in the West, let us be as open as the West, because it is only about minority rights when we talk about transgender people, for example.
Can you briefly say what is the main issue in trans today?
The basic dispute today is what is a woman and what is a man. And who gets to say.
And who will tell you? The opinion of the supporters of the German draft law can be summarised briefly as follows: gender self-determination is based on internal knowledge. You disagree. Why?
Because it is more complicated than that. For thousands of years, a woman was considered to be a woman if she had a woman’s body, and a man was considered to be a man if he had a man’s body. That’s what we used the terms woman and man for, people born female and male. It is this concept that is being reinterpreted, that is what these debates are about, not only in Germany, but in many European countries, on the subject of gender self-determination laws. The problem I see is that, while the supporters talk about these changes being solely about making life easier for transgender people and not having the legal process so cumbersome for them, they also want to push through a very radical statement.
Namely that we disconnect completely from the body who is a woman, who is a man, and that body has nothing to do with it.
In Germany, the most radical activists who are now in government, such as the commissioner for queer issues Sven Lehmann, say that the only person who can give information about a person’s gender is themselves. It is a completely individual act, and I have nothing to do with that. You can’t all at once say that this is just an anti-discrimination move, let’s make life easier for a minority who expect equal treatment, but don’t worry, there’s nothing to see here – while making such radical claims. I would point out that what the Germans are about to introduce is already in place in six EU countries – Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal – and some have argued that Germany is actually lagging behind on this issue.
In essence, the draft would mean that in future, no expert opinion would be required to initiate a legal gender change – and no one would have to be 18 to do so – i.e. to decide which gender (female, male, or possibly the third, the diverse) should appear on official documents. The justification given by the initiators of the law, in order to avoid the need for expert approval, was that such ‘tests’ in fact classified transgenderism as a disorder or disease. Furthermore, the people concerned reported humiliating procedures, as they had to share the most intimate parts of their lives with an unknown person. What is your assessment of the German draft law and do you have any criticisms of it?
In Germany, we have to go back to 1980, when the transsexual law was passed, which is still in force today, and which has been tweaked and tweaked a lot so far, with several passages of the law having been ruled unconstitutional by the German Constitutional Court. For example, the legal right to change sex was subject to divorce, sterilisation or surgery, but that is no longer in the law. And until now, the process of legal recognition in Germany was indeed quite bureaucratic, sometimes humiliating and expensive (€1800-2000). The social-democratic-liberal-green coalition government published the cornerstones of the new law on 30 June, a draft that surprised many because of its radical nature. Although it is already a watered-down version, and some trans organisations argue that it does not go far enough, for example by separating legal sex change from medical sex change. The latter is not addressed in the current law, and ministers outlining the main points of the law stressed that it remains subject to medical protocol, and that its reform will be the subject of another law. It is a problem that the psychologist has been removed from the process as a screener, but perhaps the most radical part of the current law – along with the parts on children and adolescents – is that it treats intersexuality in the same way as transgenderism and so-called non-binary gender identity. That is, a genetic disorder (intersexuality, which affects about two out of ten thousand people), with transgenderism, which is not identifying with your birth sex, and the completely arbitrary thing of someone saying that I don’t place myself in either of the two binary categories, i.e. I am neither female nor male (for example, queer people – ed.). Under the proposed law, these three groups are treated as one and can go to the registry office to change their gender to female, male or diverse. This confusion is an indication of what the German coalition government thinks about gender.
Are you fundamentally critical of allowing legal gender reassignment – with parental consent – under the age of 18?
And even less is said about the possibility of legal gender reassignment under the age of 14 in Germany, which will be up to the parent to decide. I see this as problematic, because in this emotionally charged environment, it is even possible for a parent to accept, out of sheer helpfulness, what a 9-10 year old child says about his or her own gender and to rewrite it because he or she wants to do him or her a good turn.
A German mother once told me that her child “announced” (offenbarte) her at the age of 3 its true gender – and since then she treats the child as belonging to that sex.
There is a sharp dividing line on this issue. On the one hand, there are many reasons why you may not feel like you belong in your body. This is also true for adults, but for children it requires particular care. This feeling alone does not make you transgender. You may have been sexually abused, you may have had a little brother or sister of the opposite sex and your parents are more attentive to them. All I’m saying is that if a child or adolescent claims to be of the opposite sex, there may not be such a strong reaction, let alone a quick reinforcement with a hormone injection. I’m just saying it might be worth waiting. I also include what some gay and lesbian organisations criticise in trans activism: it’s a bit like ‘de-gayification’. Indeed, many young people don’t know where to put their same-sex attraction in adolescence, and therefore believe that if they are attracted to girls while being girls, they must be boys inside. In many EU countries, it is possible to take puberty blockers or hormones from the age of 14, in other countries from the age of 16, giving girls testosterone and boys oestrogen, which changes their physical appearance and can have serious consequences, such as infertility. Of course, an adult should do what they want with themselves and take responsibility for it, but the situation is far less clear-cut for a person who is not of age.
What is the reason why the issues around gender have changed so much? In the mid-2010s, when we were talking about gender, we might have thought of it as an academic discipline dealing with the social aspects of gender, focusing on inequalities between the two sexes, but now we talk much more about gender transition, about non-binary people. What has changed?
When I was responsible for gender questions at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation from 2012 to 2019, it was clear that I was working on gender inequalities. It was clear that gender issues were power issues, relations between women and men. That is no longer what gender means. Gender was also defined in the Istanbul Convention of 2011, where it meant the gender role expectations that a society thinks are right for women and men.
So what is gender today?
Gender has become today more and more the felt identity; what you think about your gender identity. In the meantime, we are less and less describing the changing gender role expectations that are still hierarchical today, and gender is now about gender change. Nevertheless, I still see how we organise care for the elderly as a gender issue, and we should talk about it, because it is something that affects hundreds of thousands of people in Hungary. I also feel that, in the Hungarian public, this whole issue may seem absurd, while there is a war in the neighbourhood and inflation is sky-high. Who here has the luxury of thinking about what is a woman and what is a man? Moreover, it is quite rightly indecipherable to a layman, because we do not live in such debates, and there are words and concepts circulating here that the average person cannot be expected to follow and know precisely, and politics has also got into the act. I myself have been questioned in everyday situations when it came out that I deal with gender questions: oh you want to operate on people, don’t you? That you’re lobbying to call parent one and parent two instead of mum and dad, while who knows what gender that parent is.
What’s behind the change?
The process started when certain social theories were taken out of the university walls and into activism and mainstream politics over the last decade. These theories claim that biological sex is not a given in itself, because we have already established criteria for it, so it is already a construct on the basis of what we say that this is a male body and this is a female body. Today’s activists are putting these theories into practice, that our bodies are ‘just’ an interpretation and that in fact only the individual can know what their gender is because they have so far formulated it as they have because of social expectation. This is expressed in the language of, for example, talking about ‘sex assigned at birth’ – as if a midwife or doctor arbitrarily determines someone’s sex rather than observing it. What is also relatively new in Germany, after the conservative Merkel era, is that the German government is adopting the position one of the most radical groups. Incidentally, this group demanding rapid and radical change has become vocal in the last 5-10 years and has come close to legislation in several Western countries and lobbies very effectively at international level. For example, in a recent package of recommendations the Council of Europe also argues that the perceived gender of children should be recognised by member states. The movement part of the issue is interesting to that extent that when the same sex marriage was adopted in several countries (in the US in 2015, in UK 2014), from then on – many say – the LGBTQ movement was looking for a new flagship for itself, and the trans issue became so important then. I can’t judge whether it is true, but what is for sure, that this issue became so salient in the mid-2010s.
Why is the title of his forthcoming book, which deals mainly with the Hungarian and German gender situation, Gender crazes/ Gender madnesses?
On the one hand, the Hungarian government and the German radical right use the term gender madness. I was interested to see whether these right-wing accusations had any basis in reality. On the other hand, it shows the obsession of both right-wing actors with the issue, but also how emotionally saturated the issue is.
And did you find a “basis in reality”?
In Germany, yes, where the far right – I am thinking here of the AfD in particular – also reacts to real things. They often protest against efforts that are not only opposed by the far right, but also criticised by many on the left. For example, they strongly object to the idea that only the individual can decide what his or her own gender is. Before the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out, there was a controversy in Germany about a trans MP, Tessa Ganserer, identifying as a woman in the Bundestag, and even getting into the legislature on the women’s quota of her party, the Greens, while she did not undergo gender reassignment – not even in law, she just wears make-up and dresses in women’s clothes. An AfD representative said that he was nevertheless a man, and it became a huge scandal that he did not recognise Tessa Ganserer’s gender. Meanwhile, feminists in the critical camp were saying that it was bad enough that only the AfD was saying this and no one else. Beyond the fact that it is not very empathetic to call trans people who identify as women men, the question arises: should people who are not yet legally recognised be given the right to be called Frau Ganserer? And there is also the big question of what we can expect from each other on this issue.
What did you find?
I think you should expect to be free from violence, protected by the institutional system, and have redress if you are discriminated against. But for everyone to override their own perception of reality and their own categories because that is what the other expects of them, is beyond that. It cannot simply be expected. It’s like faith. I can accept if a person is religious or that they believe in something that I don’t believe in. But they shouldn’t expect me to behave with him as if I have the same beliefs.
Let’s translate this into an everyday situation.
For example, at the beginning of German-language Zoom meetings, it is common for participants to give their names and pronouns. Having to say or write out your pronoun is like being expected to indicate your affiliation to a belief system. If someone doesn’t believe that you alone are in control of your gender, they still have to make the gesture. But why? I don’t think this can be expected.
Let’s take a fictional example this time. A women’s changing room or toilet, where frustration, discomfort, perhaps conflict, is created between two people because one of them does not think the other is a woman. What is this scene? Is it an understandable human reaction? Lack of empathy, insensitivity? Transphobia, perhaps?
This situation highlights the implications and dimensions of this issue. The very fact that a woman might feel uncomfortable in an intimate situation with someone with a male body is perfectly understandable. Let’s not forget that women’s organisations have worked for centuries to get women’s rights recognised and to ensure that women are physically safe, or that there are women’s spaces where they can be safe at all. I am not suggesting that transgender people are potential perpetrators of violence, but it is important to see that certain reflexes can have historical roots. Meanwhile, I also understand that someone who is in transition and is wearing make up and dressed in a way that they don’t feel safe in the men’s locker room because they can be harassed or even intentionally hurt. So the question is, whose sense of safety is more important? It is a terribly difficult question. Third spaces might be a solution in this direction. Many women have experienced violence, and it can be said that in a given situation this is not justified, but neither can we ask people to build down their internal safety mechanisms. The reason for feminist rage about transactivism is that it’s like asking women: don’t take care of yourself, don’t draw boundaries, there’s no danger here, as a woman you need to understand and be empathetic. And no. It’s important to be able to say no. That is my answer to the question: that is not a transphobic reaction.
What damage, what problems is the Hungarian government causing with its policy of “gender madness”?
Fidesz is importing North American and Western European debates without context just for the purpose of mockery and shock in accordance with its own political interests, and it does not mind that minorities are stigmatized on the way. The other problem is that because of this, it is difficult to talk about the issue in a nuanced way, so as not to make minorities scapegoats, not to exclude them, but at the same time to raise questions – because these still can be better raised in Hungary – but at the same time not to be useful idiots for the government’s narrative.
I am also critical of some of the domestic non-government press for presenting events in the West out of context, or placing them solely in a framework of tolerance and acceptance. There are some journalists in the West, in the Anglo-Saxon area, who try to present the controversies a little better, for example, how certain scientific research is influenced by ideology. It is very important to talk about these things, because from Netflix through YouTube to TikTok, the subject is being spilled onto young people, but also onto everyone. I haven’t seen any research on this, I don’t know how widespread it is, but parents of adolescents tell stories of adolescents coming home from school saying that they are pansexual or non-binary: it seems to me that these ways of identification are very much present for Hungarian adolescents today, so it is important to try to think about these issues in a nuanced way.
Estimates vary as to what percentage of society is transgender and how many people might be affected by the issue of gender reassignment, but certainly few. However, many more people than this figure are concerned and emotionally moved by the issue. Why?
Because it affects fundamental categories, what is male and what is female, and it is these concepts that this debate is redefining. And the most radical claim is the complete separation of gender identity from the body. At the same time, this process also conflicts with other rights and affects different social strata: there are the rights of women, but there is also the issue of children and adolescents, and the issue of parental responsibility and parental rights. The stakes are also high, one way or another, but everyone is personally affected by this story. It is not true, therefore, that only transgender people are affected, and therefore only they can have an opinion, or that their position is the only decisive one. That is why so many people are reacting strongly to this issue, while the stakes for those affected are also huge: for example, not to be told that you are sick, but to be treated as normal. I think it is important to be empathetic to those who experience themselves as belonging to the opposite sex and to give them every opportunity to live a free life. But I stress: it is a wide leap from there that one’s gender is decided by oneself, and that is all that matters. This seems to me to be a very individualistic attitude, which comes a little from the spirit of the times, from the consumer culture that surrounds us, which tells us that everyone is now the architect of their own fortune, that they have to do everything themselves, put everything together, all the elements of their identity, from the smallest to the most basic, right down to the question of gender.
