‘Leave our Kids Alone.’ Child Protection, Sex Education, LGBT+ Rights and Anti-Gender Politics in Hungary

Controlling women’s, children’s and LGBT+ people’s sexuality has been part of exercising state power in different political regimes. In Hungary, the autocratisation process, which started in 2010, has been accompanied by anti-gender rhetoric and the implementation of anti-gender policy and legislative measures. In 2019 LGBT+ people and advocacy organisations became the target of government propaganda, constituting LGBT+ people as ‘the enemy’, from whom children should be protected. This chapter seeks to explore the intersections of autocratisation and far-right populism, anti-gender movements, childhood sexuality and education policy, with the aim to map how anti-gender politics is deployed by an increasingly authoritarian political leadership in an attempt to control and regulate children and young people’s sexualities in Hungary. The chapter argues that children and the notion of the ‘innocent child to be protected’ are a central pillar of the workings of the anti-gender rhetoric in its restorative ideological project. Recent examples of homo- and transphobic school curricula, laws, government politicians’ public communications and media discourse are discussed, in order to demonstrate how exercising control over children and young people’s sexualities work via education contents; governmental communication about childhood and sexuality; and restricting children’s/youth’s access to information about sexuality.