In what may become a landmark decision, the Veszprém Regional Court recently ruled in favour of a trans woman wanting to retire early under the government’s ‘Women 40’ programme. The programme allows women to leave the workforce and collect their old age pension after 40 years of employment, regardless of their age. (Women otherwise may retire after reaching a certain age, depending on their date of birth. The standard retirement age for women is currently 65.)
The Háttér Society, an LGBT advocacy group, took on the case of a biological man, now going by the name Elvira, who transitioned in 2013, and has had an ID card with female as the denoted gender and a female name since.
Elvira was ‘quite surprised’, as the press release by the Háttér Society put it, to learn that she is still registered as a man in the records of the local pension office, and thus is ineligible for early retirement. Elvira took the decision by the pension office to court, and in a turn that made many Hungarians quite surprised,
the regional court sided with the plaintiff.
MP Gabriella Selmeczi from the governing Fidesz party called the decision by the judge ‘outrageous’ while talking to the Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet. She then went on to state that this is proof the LGBTQ propaganda is present in Hungary. She also stressed that new amendments are needed to prevent such a case from happening again.
Women’s Interest Group Responds
In the wake of the controversial developments, Kinga Szőnyi, president of the Interest Group of Hungarian Women, went on to the news channel HírTV to discuss the issue.
She started by conceding that the court was justified in making their ruling, as the law prohibiting the change of gender in one’s birth certificate only took effect in 2020, after Elvira had already officially transitioned. However, that does not mean Szőnyi does not have an issue with the decision.
In fact, she continued by saying that she is angered by the decision, and sees it as ‘another act against the female gender’. She brought up the issue of biological men being allowed to compete in women’s sports in some Western countries.
She went on to outline the long, detrimental process that she believes this new development is a part of. Szőnyi believes ‘this all started when men and women were pinned against each other’, presumably referring to modern feminist theory becoming mainstream in Western media and academia in the mid-2010s. Then, as she continued, this was followed by the push for trans women having the same rights as biological women.
‘They too have the right to many things.
However, they do not have the right to take female rights away from us, women, who were born women’,
Szőnyi added passionately.
She went on to point out that all this is happening to appease ‘a dwarf minority’ of about 20,000 trans people in Hungary.
Szőnyi also spoke on the topic of the ‘gender spectrum’, another new idea propagated in the West which purports that there are countless other genders besides male and female. As she stated, even some in the trans minority reject this idea—so does Szőnyi, evidently. She firmly believes that there are only two genders. She added that
‘Women are people who can give birth, and men cannot give birth, no matter what Brussels says.’
The women’s interest group president also stressed that it is crucial to keep children from being exposed to LGBTQ propaganda. Many children are getting desensitised to things like trans women in women’s spaces, including her own two sons, whom she brought up as an example, and who are not nearly as outraged by these issues as she is.
Then, going back to the issue at hand, Szőnyi ended by saying that, despite her strong objections, the ruling does not have much practical impact, as it only applies to people who had changed their gender on their birth certificate before 2020. While she does not have the exact number, she believes that this is just a tiny fraction of the already small minority of trans women.
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