The European Parliament voted 340 to 141 to recognise trans women as women — just as the US and Hungary move to erase them. A tale of two arithmetics.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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The hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg has the acoustics of a cathedral and the lighting of a hospital ward. On the afternoon of 12 February, under that flat, institutional glare, 549 members of the European Parliament cast their votes on a resolution that would, among other things, recommend that the European Union affirm the full recognition of transgender women as women. The tally appeared on the electronic board with the dispassionate clarity such boards are designed for: 340 in favour, 141 against, 68 abstentions. A few members applauded. Most gathered their papers.
What the numbers did not show — what no tally can — was the distance this sentence had travelled to arrive at an official document of a supranational legislature: that the inclusion of trans women “is essential for the effectiveness of any gender-equality and anti-violence policies.” Item (y) of the resolution, tucked among recommendations on abortion access, online hate speech, and funding for feminist civil society. A sub-clause, almost. Yet one that placed the European Parliament in direct, explicit contradiction with the two largest Anglophone democracies on the question of who counts as a woman in law.
The resolution was adopted as part of the EU’s negotiating position ahead of the 70th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which convenes in New York next month. It is, in formal terms, non-binding. But the word “non-binding” is a piece of institutional shorthand that obscures more than it reveals. Non-binding resolutions establish the Parliament’s political posture; they travel as signals — to the Council of the European Union, which will finalise the bloc’s actual negotiating stance, and to the Parliament’s own delegation heading to New York on 9 March. The signal, in this case, was unmistakable.
What made the vote remarkable was not only the margin but the coalition behind it. Support came, predictably, from the Socialists & Democrats and the Greens. Less predictably, it came from the majority of the European People’s Party, the Parliament’s largest centre-right grouping — the political family of Ursula von der Leyen, of Angela Merkel, of the cautious, technocratic centre that has governed the EU for much of its existence. That the EPP voted to recognise trans women as women, even in the soft language of a non-binding recommendation, suggests that a line has been drawn not merely between left and right, but between the European mainstream and the forces now arrayed against it.
Those forces were vocal. The Patriots for Europe group, the hard-right faction that includes Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, denounced the resolution and complained of being excluded from prior negotiations. CitizenGO, a Madrid-based conservative advocacy network, declared the text part of a “gender ideology” agenda and vowed to campaign against it at the UN. Cristian Terhes, a Romanian MEP aligned with the European Conservatives and Reformists, accused the Parliament of undermining “the very essence of our civilisation.” The rhetoric was familiar — the apocalyptic register deployed whenever the existence of trans people is acknowledged by an institution with a letterhead.
On a direct collision course: that was the phrase used by the independent journalist Erin Reed, describing the vote’s implications for the upcoming UN session. She was referring to the United States, which will also attend the commission in New York, and whose federal government now operates under an executive order declaring it “official policy” that only two genders exist. Since returning to office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has signed a cascade of executive orders targeting trans Americans — banning them from military service, directing federal agencies to define sex strictly by biology, and withdrawing protections in schools, prisons, and healthcare. The collision Reed described is not hypothetical. It will take place in a conference room at UN headquarters, between delegations carrying incompatible definitions of womanhood.
Nor is the United Kingdom a comfortable ally. In April 2025, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of “woman” under the Equality Act referred to biological sex, Prime Minister Keir Starmer reversed his previous position. Asked whether he still believed trans women were women, a Downing Street spokesman said simply: “No.” This is from a leader who, in 2020, had told PinkNews that “trans rights are human rights” and pledged to introduce self-identification. His equalities minister subsequently advised trans women to use male facilities. The trajectory — from self-ID to “a woman is an adult female” in five years — is a case study in how rapidly the liberal consensus can collapse when a court provides political cover.
The European Parliament’s resolution, then, falls into a landscape of contraction. It is an assertion made against the current, and the current is strong.
To understand what is at stake, it helps to leave Strasbourg and travel southeast — to Budapest, where a different kind of arithmetic is being tabulated.
On 18 March 2025, the Hungarian Parliament voted to ban any public assembly deemed to violate the country’s “child protection” law — the 2021 legislation that prohibits the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to minors and which, in its amended form, effectively criminalised Pride marches. Organisers face up to one year in prison. Participants face fines of up to €500. The law authorised police to deploy facial recognition technology to identify those who attend. It was, by any measure, the most severe anti-LGBTQ+ legislation enacted in an EU member state in the bloc’s history.
What happened next was not capitulation. In the weeks following the ban, protests erupted across Hungary — in Budapest, in Pécs, in Szeged, in cities whose names rarely appear in Western European newspapers. The independent MP Ákos Hadházy organised weekly demonstrations from late March through to mid-July. Tens of thousands turned out, not only in solidarity with sexual minorities but in defence of the right to gather, to walk, to be visible.
And then, on 28 June, Gergely Karácsony — the liberal mayor of Budapest — announced that the city would hold its Pride march regardless. He reframed it as a municipal event, arguing that the city council had the authority to organise gatherings on its own public spaces without police approval. The police banned it anyway, on 19 June. Karácsony did not appeal. He simply went ahead.
Between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people walked that day, from City Hall Park in the fifth district to the university quays on the Buda side of the river. Members of the European Parliament joined. Foreign mayors and ambassadors attended. It was the largest Pride event in Hungarian history — and it was, in the eyes of the state, a criminal act.
On 28 January 2026, prosecutors formally charged Karácsony with violating the freedom of association and assembly. They proposed a fine to be imposed without trial. The charge sheet noted that the mayor had been informed of the police ban and had neither appealed nor complied.
Karácsony responded on social media with the poise of a man who had already calculated the cost. “I have gone from being a proud suspect to a proud defendant,” he wrote. “It seems that this is the price we pay in this country when we stand up for our own freedom and that of others.”
He is not alone. In Pécs, the only rural Hungarian city with an annual Pride, organisers also defied the ban. Géza Buzás-Hábel, who led the 2025 Pécs Pride, now faces criminal charges carrying up to a year’s imprisonment — the first known case in the European Union of a human rights defender facing prison for organising a peaceful march. The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, has demanded that the charges be dropped. The Hungarian government has not indicate that they will be.
This, then, is the arithmetic that the European Parliament’s vote on 12 February enters into. Three hundred and forty votes in Strasbourg. One hundred thousand bodies on the streets of Budapest. One mayor in the dock for the crime of walking.
The resolution will travel to the Council of the European Union, where diplomats will weigh its language against the political sensitivities of twenty-seven member states — including Hungary, which retains its veto on certain matters and whose prime minister faces parliamentary elections in April trailing in the polls against a former ally turned rival, Péter Magyar of the Tisza Party. It will travel to New York, where EU negotiators will sit across the table from an American delegation whose government has declared that trans people, in effect, do not exist. It will arrive at a moment when the very category of “recognition” — who is seen, who is named, who is counted — has become the central battleground of democratic politics in the West.
Non-binding, the procedural language insists. But nothing about recognition has ever been merely procedural. The vote in Strasbourg was a sentence in a legal document. The march in Budapest was a sentence of a different kind — spoken by feet on pavement, in a city where walking together had been made illegal. What connects them is not their enforceability but their refusal: the refusal to accept that the question of who is a woman, who is a citizen, who is permitted to be visible, can be settled by executive order or constitutional amendment or police decree.
Karácsony understood this. That is why he walked. That is why he is standing trial. And that is why 340 members of the European Parliament, under the flat white light of the hemicycle, pressed the button marked pour.
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