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Monika Magaşaj is a warrior. The 52-year-old transgender woman lives in Hungary, a country that has been ruled since 2010 by Viktor Orbán’s nationalist party, Fidesz.
For the transgender community, the situation is “getting worse and worse and, unfortunately, it’s a hopeless situation right now in Hungary,” she told DW. The government seems to be trying to portray transgender people as pedophiles and criminals and uses every opportunity to discriminate against them, she said.
The struggle of coming out led Magashazi to try to commit suicide at one point. “I got to a point where I had to decide how I was going to live my life,” she said. Thinking about her children saved her life.
“I said I would survive and try to live as a transgender woman and as a father to my children, or the second attempt would be successful and I would die, and my children would miss their father,” she said.
Magashazi said at the time, out of respect for her children, she decided “to survive too.”
She has undergone surgery and hormone replacement therapy. “I present myself as a woman in front of society,” the activist said. “But I can’t prove my identity in the same way. You can imagine how stressful this situation is.”
Being forced to identify as transgender
In 2020, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that effectively bans transgender people from legally changing their gender. The bill changed the gender classification on official documents to “sex at birth.” Once determined, this classification cannot be changed.
The Hungarian government said the law was intended to end legal uncertainty but “does not affect the right of men and women to freely experience and exercise their identity as they wish.”
But rights groups have criticised the law, saying transgender people risk harassment and discrimination as they will be forced to identify themselves as transgender every time they need to show a driver’s licence or passport.
“Imagine being called in for an exam and an assistant shouting out your dead name – your birth name – in the hallway. We face this situation many times every day,” Magashaj said.
Italy’s Far-Right Fears
Magaşaj fears the rise of the far right in the European elections, and her message to all other parties is: “Look at Hungarian society and the Hungarian transgender community. Look at me. If you follow this path, this will be your country.”
A similar message is echoed by Vanessa Santamaria and Laura Magnarin, a same-sex couple living in Italy who told DW they are one of more than 30 families who have had their children’s birth certificates challenged, after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government last year ordered local authorities to stop registering children of same-sex parents under both parents’ names.
Santamaria described it as a “very sad moment” because she is not the biological mother and said that if she and her partner lose their appeal in court, which is due to hand down a ruling later this month, they “will lose not only all rights but also all obligations towards the child”.
“This is not just a formality,” Santamaria said. She thinks it’s outrageous that Meloni and her party claim to want to protect the rights of families. “We are a family, and we believe we have exactly the same rights as every other family.”
Santamaria and her partner feel they have been discriminated against by Italian authorities, accusing the Meloni government of “discrediting our children and treating them as second-class children.” But the Italian government says there is “no discrimination against children” as children of same-sex couples have the same access to schools and health services as children with only one surviving parent.
Don’t “go back into the closet”
Santamaria and Magnarin fear the government’s aim is to wage a hate campaign against the LGBTQ+ community: “We fought for our visibility and our rights, and now the government is asking us to go back in the closet.”
That is why the two mothers have spoken out against any normalisation or cooperation with far-right parties such as Meloni’s Italian Brothers party, which has neo-fascist roots.
Mr. Meloni has emerged as a potential kingmaker with a major say on key EU policy after the European elections, courted by both the far-right and center-right European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In Brussels, some officials have said he is “not as bad as we first thought.”
“Don’t make friends with the bad guys”
“Our real message is that she is such a bad person and you can never trust a word she says,” Santamaria said, arguing that Meloni has mastered the strategy of telling people only what they want to hear while lying about her true intentions.
Bart Staszewski, a prominent Polish LGBTQ+ activist, said European political leaders needed to make smart choices about who they were willing to work with, even if it meant “difficult choices”.
Staszewski told DW that under Poland’s previous nationalist, conservative government, he and his fellow activists faced targeted attacks from politicians, the media and the courts, making them feel like “second-class citizens.”
It was a gradual process, and “neither we nor the people around us realised what was actually happening until it was too late, and until a third of Poland was an LGBT-free zone,” Staszewski said.
Now that a new government has been formed, Staszewski is hopeful that things will change dramatically in his country.
But he stressed the importance of not forgetting the lessons learned over the past few years, saying he sees himself and his fellow activists as “soldiers fighting for democracy.”
His message ahead of the European elections is: “Don’t make alliances with the bad guys.”
Editor: Rob Mudge
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