Struggles Around Transgenderism in Hungarian Feminism: An Autoethnographic Account

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I am using my personal experiences as data to examine the inextricable personal, political, social, and cultural aspects of one of the most decisive ruptures in Hungarian “progressive” activism of the second half of the 2010s. In the mid-2010s, I was part of an informal collective of women that started to outline a feminist approach critical of mainstream individualistic renditions of women’s rights as social progress, thereby diverging fundamentally from the country’s institutionalised feminism. As I and the circle of women I worked with focused on women’s reproductive autonomy, we encountered central feminist questions about sex and “gender” and soon faced serious backlash from political networks that felt their agenda threatened by our approach. Even though we did not intend to deal with the question of transgenderism, this question became the issue along which the feminist scene came to be divided. Through my experiences, I examine the role of institutions, the combative style of mainstream gender activists, and the co-optation strategies that eventually absorbed and defused the critique of “gender identity.” From this wider perspective, I look at how I made sense of the events, the scene, and its actors, as well as my own possible “place” in the processes