A Pride parade in Budapest (PETER KOHALMI/AFP via Getty Images)
Last week in Hungary, I experienced two very different sides to lesbian activism in the age of Orbán. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
First, I attended the “EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Conference (EL*C)”. It was international in its participant list, lavishly funded, and linguistically and aesthetically indistinguishable from any other modern LGBT event. There were pronoun declarations and safe space policies. There were wild dye-jobs and big specs. There were workshops on how to undermine women’s sport. There was the robotically impersonal ejection of a heretical wrongthinker on the eve of the conference. In other words, it was business as usual for Queer Inc. — albeit with some more local stuff about Roma and Ukrainian lesbians thrown in.
A second group of mostly young activists, who I met in a Budapest bar, were homegrown Hungarian, cash-strapped, defiantly female-only, and fairly punk in their aesthetic. And they were very cool. We smoked hookahs, got drunk, took selfies in the toilet, and talked about how stupid everything had got. They gave me homemade badges in Hungarian saying “Lesbian not queer” and “Nobody is born in the wrong body.” They solicited drunken soundbites from me for a podcast about how great being a lesbian is. They exhibited a frankly staggering general knowledge of happenings on “Terf Island”, otherwise known as the UK.
Some of this second group worked for organisations dealing with the aftermath of violence against women. They told me how wealthy Western funders, attempting to prop up embattled women’s services against the incursions of Orbán’s anti-feminist manoeuvres, would make their donations conditional on the insistence that organisations be “inclusive”, and so include males. The recipients simply could not afford to say no.
This brand of cultural colonialism — you know, the one that dare not speak its name and everyone’s fine with — was also in evidence at the EL*C conference, where it was quietly whispered that at least €1 million had been awarded to organisers by the European Commission and other private Western funders, partly on the condition that males who identified as women be included too. Despite the name of the organisation, the official focus of the conference was now “LBTI” people — lesbian, bi, trans, and intersex.
Predictably, with this widening of scope came a narrowing of what you could permissibly say at the conference. The result was a change in subject matter, away from boring old women who love and have sex with women towards something more soothingly generic, and the usual blanket denial that there had been any change in subject matter at all. Oceania had never been at war with Eurasia, and lesbians had never needed to politically organise away from males, just for themselves. The fact that only a few years prior, the EL*C had aimed to do exactly that seemed to have been memory-holed.
Officially, the story from the stage was that the rainbow coalition needed to stick together like glue against the anti-gender backlash currently being waged by Orbán, Putin, Erdogan and others: no queer left behind! For these self-styled strongmen, “gender”, vaguely defined, is a strategically useful symbol for everything terrible about the decadent West.
The original political target of Orbán Fidesz’s party was liberal feminism and gay rights. But with the official addition of the T to the LGB internationally in the last decade, and the sudden Western shift towards extreme policies such as self-ID and the medicalisation of trans-identified youth, not to mention the Western presentation of transactivism as a logical extension of feminism, a golden opportunity emerged to give added plausibility to Fidesz’s tale of crazy identity politics and moral corruption. Now they could juice up their disparagement of “gender” with tales of young girls being made to believe they were boys, and predatory males in women’s changing rooms. These days, I was told, the biggest focus of Orbán’s anti-gender campaign is extreme transactivist demands imported from the West and their consequences.
Inevitably a polarised situation has emerged, with both sides insisting the T be lumped together with the LG and B, for good or ill. On one side, Fidesz use the extremes of Western transactivism to justify incursions on the rights of women, gays, and the sex-non-conforming generally. And on the other, in the name of solidarity, Hungarian and Western progressives insist there is no difference between these extreme demands and more staid requests like being able to teach schoolchildren about homosexuality or demanding the right to gay marriage.
Reading between the lines, testimonies at the EL*C suggested that a similar dynamic is taking place elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc. A charismatic Albanian lesbian activist, Xheni Karaj, told the conference that she had visited the UK and worked in some capacity with Stonewall towards a campaign for greater acceptance of LGBT+ parenting. Going back to Albania, the idea had got out that she wished to replace the words “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”. In a highly conservative country such as Albania, this notion caused a huge scandal, and Karaj became the subject of severe abuse and harassment because of it.
Karaj was clear on stage that she had never intended to suggest replacing the word “mother” with anything else. I believed her. But what she didn’t also say was that, only last year, Stonewall suggested doing precisely this in the UK. The idea was incendiary enough to many when made over here — let alone in a context like Albania, where religious leaders have a large influence, the family is venerated, and homophobia and misogyny is entrenched.
And Albania is not the only place where the creative projects of bored rainbow bureaucrats from North London are being used to make mischief. In his annexation speech last week, Putin said “no more Parent 1 and Parent 2, only mother and father”. A few days earlier, a 2019 speech by the new Italian leader Georgia Meloni went viral on Twitter — and was retweeted not just by conservatives but also by some gender-critical feminists who seemed to assume they had found a fellow traveller. “I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother,” she complained. “No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2. I must be a number.” Sound familiar?
Left-wing gender-critical lesbians like those I met in that Budapest bar are stuck in the middle of all this, a means to everyone else’s ends. The state paints them as deviant and anti-family to bash the liberals, while progressives in Hungary and their Western supporters demand that they pretend that their interests perfectly align with the rest of the rainbow. If lesbians nonetheless insist, perfectly sensibly, that female biology makes a difference to their political interests as lesbians, they are treated as somehow in league with the far-Right. And, in terms of optics, matters are not helped by the fact that Fidesz-supporting publishing houses are now buying up gender-critical titles to translate into Hungarian. Indeed, I discovered on my trip that the would-be Hungarian publisher for my own book was an Orbán think tank. (Since I got home, I have pulled out of the deal.)
In the febrile climate of UK gender politics, there is a tendency for those fed up with biology-denial to fall gratefully upon anything which looks like it asserts the primacy of material reality in a more sensible way. But feminists should beware strongmen and women bearing gifts. The international rejection of extreme trans ideology will be a pyrrhic victory if it is accompanied by a raft of measures against women, gays, and sex-non-conforming people. And the futures of young lesbians like those I met in the Budapest bar will be all the poorer for it.
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Subscribe“Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them…”
They are, and I’d really like to know why. Every single poll shows that the majority of the public – which means most voters – are rationalists who understand that men can’t be women (or vice versa). So why not align with the majority on this issue?
Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?
I agree, but can a Prime Minister be “cancelled”?* It’s a huge shame that he doesn’t have the cojones to find out.
*other than by electoral means.
We’ve created this vast swamp of NGOs and activist orgs that have an outsized influence on politicians. I can only speculate that elected leaders simply don’t interact enough with everyday people – that even their social circles are dominated by people with divergent opinions.
“Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?”
It’s very simple. Leading politicians are ruled not by their voters, but by powerful financial interests. Wealthy NGOs and corporations have a vested interest in backing the trans lobby, making it disproportionately powerful compared to its constituent base. Despite being a supposedly oppressed minority trans rights activists are backed by some of the wealthiest and powerful organisations on Earth, such as Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Arcus Foundation etc. etc. Rishi Sunak fears them over you.
See https://archive.ph/9vaRd – the now deleted from Medium article ‘Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science’ from 2018 which gives a great overview of how fake all of this nonsense is.
Thanks for the link! Another aspect of this madness is that it provides an opportunity for intra-elite vetting and selection of “useful idiots” and a way for elites to compete and weed out people who may not be “loyal” to the cause of the .1%.
Conversion is changing one set of beliefs for another. The vast majority of people don’t care what others believe as long as the beliefs do not negatively impact on their lives. People generally tend to be live and let live. They have busy lives and don’t have time to stay up to date on current trends. It is the trans activists who have been infiltrating the government, the civil service, schools, not for profits, businesses, etc. to spread their doctrine and are using the power of the law to force their beliefs on the majority and silence objections by having all objections classified as hate speech. Using the power of the law to attempt to force beliefs upon the people should be illegal.
Yes, quite. The ‘infiltration’ has been cleverly orchestrated. Everyone has paid Stonewall to ‘train’ them (with our money, tbh) and to give them brownie points for being good, inclusive organisations. One way to comply was to bring in EDI experts (trans advocates – has anyone heard them advocating loudly for disabled employees?) Jobs for the boys – all those ‘gender’ graduates, with one world view, brought in at management level to devastate women’s rights in industry and government. There aren’t that many of them, but they punch above their weight, because they’re not brought in as office juniors.
Quite an effective tactic, it turns out, and massively difficult to undo.
Transgenderism is an occult movement with billions of dollars behind it. It’s a Trojan horse for those with nefarious intentions toward children and provides a convenient path through which the state can circumnavigate parental protections in order to indoctrinate children.
Politicians are not scared of trans activists but those financially backing them.
Do the Tories ever actually want to win again? Being 5% less radical than the radical left seems like a strategy for party annihilation. At what point do the actual conservatives and moderates in the party jump ship?
Who would they vote for? Increasingly moderate and conservative views are being literally banned. Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about women, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t care about the Conservative Party, and doesn’t care about the next election, because he knows he will lose anyway. He’s just focussed on his own employability after that happens.
Rishi Sunak just fancied being prime minister of a country. He had no loyalty to the U.K. as demonstrated by the US green card scandal. The position will have profited him greatly and enhanced his global profile.
In fact, that probably explains why Rishi Sunak has crumbled. He cares most about his position amongst the global elites, especially if he does not expect to win the next election, and they are mostly behind the the indoctrination of the masses with woke ideology.
How about Farage?
I don’t think they want to be elected and I don’t blame them. The next administration will only be issuing WEF directives to usher in Agenda 2030. This is why we are about to have a member of the Trilateral Commission installed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see several members of the next parliament assassinated as people finally wake up to what’s been done to them.
I think the current Tory ‘elite’ are not Conservatives and have no interest whatsoever in those who elected them.
I do wonder if some of the problem here is the tortuous language used by the radical trans lot.
Is conversion therapy what the GIDS at the Tavistock were doing or is conversion therapy talking to a worried teen about their feelings?
If the NHS gives clinical advice on child development, then why are these politicians contradicting medical experts?
They are all, without exception, sinister ideologues pursuing the same neoliberal transhuman creed.
Politics in the UK are getting increasingly surreal. For Mr. Sunak ‘it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”. Presumably this is election jitters, not wanting to disturb the trans lobby wasps’ nest.
Meanwhile, here in Scotland, Mr Youseless plans to SCRAP the current conversion therapy ban, not because Mr Youseless thinks this is a good thing, but in order to save the SNP’s skin at the next election.
So both Mr Sunak and Mr Youseless are doing synchronised volte-faces, but in the opposite direction, both hoping to avoid political oblivion.
It’s crazy. The Tories might even win against the odds if they went full berserker against gender bullish*t – and in fact the whole DEI. They are not conservatives basically. Woke-LITE.
Have you considered running for leadership of the Tory party? I’m pretty sure “full beserker” is exactly what they are going for now!
Bonne chance, cherie!
People can never change sexes. But it seems politicians will always change positions, if it’s perceived to serve their interests.
It’s maddening that — at a time when popular sentiment (even in the United States!) seems to slowly be awakening to the delusion of gender ideology — spineless politicians still kow-tow to transactivism rather than standing for the real and pressing needs of women.
Keir Starmer has been having another of his moments about gender self-identification. But who cares what this creature thinks? It is a war crime to aid or abet a war crime, so that without ever having been a Minister, or even an MP for the governing party, Starmer is already a war criminal, thereby matching his foreign policies to his domestic policies. He is the Kid Starver of Gaza and Gospel Oak, and his White Phosphorus Party would privatise the hospitals at home having already bombed them abroad.
More broadly, with its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, Thatcherism has inevitably ended up as gender self-identification, which was unknown in 2010, and which has therefore arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.
Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.
And if this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 46, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned the England of 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing, into the England of 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to give statutory effect to the rhetoric of Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman, which is pointedly never quite echoed by Rishi Sunak, whose choice of words to the Conservative Party Conference was very careful indeed.
Does everyone get put into moderation, or is it just me? I pay for this. Do you?
I do. Every time. Sometimes it takes hours for my comments to appear. I have emailed numerous times and asked for an explanation but have never received one.
This comment took about ten minutes to appear.
My latest has now been waiting an hour.
You must be considered more threatening/ dangerous than I am.
It no longer even appears as “awaiting for approval”. Hey, ho. See here.
Happens way too often.
“Awaiting for approval.” Pidgin English.
We no longer have proper political representation we have a uni party interested only in promoting the globalist agenda. US is exactly the same.
“People pride themselves on “speaking truth to power” – leaders, big shots. In a democracy, this is easy to do. Usually, you get nothing but applause for it. What is hard is speaking truth to “the people” – for in a democracy, that’s where the power lies.”
Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review, “Cooper’s Union”
“The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy… induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own opinions when opposed to those of the mass… A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch shrinks from opposing an entire community.”
James Fenimore Cooper in “The American Democrat” c. 1835