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Some of this second group worked for organisations dealing with the aftermath of violence against women. They told me how wealthy Western funders, attempting to prop up embattled women’s services against the incursions of Orbán’s anti-feminist manoeuvres, would make their donations conditional on the insistence that organisations be “inclusive”, and so include males. The recipients simply could not afford to say no.

This brand of cultural colonialism — you know, the one that dare not speak its name and everyone’s fine with — was also in evidence at the EL*C conference, where it was quietly whispered that at least €1 million had been awarded to organisers by the European Commission and other private Western funders, partly on the condition that males who identified as women be included too. Despite the name of the organisation, the official focus of the conference was now “LBTI” people — lesbian, bi, trans, and intersex.

Predictably, with this widening of scope came a narrowing of what you could permissibly say at the conference. The result was a change in subject matter, away from boring old women who love and have sex with women towards something more soothingly generic, and the usual blanket denial that there had been any change in subject matter at all. Oceania had never been at war with Eurasia, and lesbians had never needed to politically organise away from males, just for themselves. The fact that only a few years prior, the EL*C had aimed to do exactly that seemed to have been memory-holed.

Officially, the story from the stage was that the rainbow coalition needed to stick together like glue against the anti-gender backlash currently being waged by Orbán, Putin, Erdogan and others: no queer left behind! For these self-styled strongmen, “gender”, vaguely defined, is a strategically useful symbol for everything terrible about the decadent West.

The original political target of Orbán Fidesz’s party was liberal feminism and gay rights. But with the official addition of the T to the LGB internationally in the last decade, and the sudden Western shift towards extreme policies such as self-ID and the medicalisation of trans-identified youth, not to mention the Western presentation of transactivism as a logical extension of feminism, a golden opportunity emerged to give added plausibility to Fidesz’s tale of crazy identity politics and moral corruption. Now they could juice up their disparagement of “gender” with tales of young girls being made to believe they were boys, and predatory males in women’s changing rooms. These days, I was told, the biggest focus of Orbán’s anti-gender campaign is extreme transactivist demands imported from the West and their consequences.

Inevitably a polarised situation has emerged, with both sides insisting the T be lumped together with the LG and B, for good or ill. On one side, Fidesz use the extremes of Western transactivism to justify incursions on the rights of women, gays, and the sex-non-conforming generally. And on the other, in the name of solidarity, Hungarian and Western progressives insist there is no difference between these extreme demands and more staid requests like being able to teach schoolchildren about homosexuality or demanding the right to gay marriage.

Reading between the lines, testimonies at the EL*C suggested that a similar dynamic is taking place elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc. A charismatic Albanian lesbian activist, Xheni Karaj, told the conference that she had visited the UK and worked in some capacity with Stonewall towards a campaign for greater acceptance of LGBT+ parenting. Going back to Albania, the idea had got out that she wished to replace the words “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”.  In a highly conservative country such as Albania, this notion caused a huge scandal, and Karaj became the subject of severe abuse and harassment because of it.

Karaj was clear on stage that she had never intended to suggest replacing the word “mother” with anything else. I believed her. But what she didn’t also say was that, only last year, Stonewall suggested doing precisely this in the UK. The idea was incendiary enough to many when made over here — let alone in a context like Albania, where religious leaders have a large influence, the family is venerated, and homophobia and misogyny is entrenched.

And Albania is not the only place where the creative projects of bored rainbow bureaucrats from North London are being used to make mischief. In his annexation speech last week, Putin said “no more Parent 1 and Parent 2, only mother and father”. A few days earlier, a 2019 speech by the new Italian leader Georgia Meloni went viral on Twitter — and was retweeted not just by conservatives but also by some gender-critical feminists who seemed to assume they had found a fellow traveller. “I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother,” she complained. “No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2. I must be a number.” Sound familiar?

Left-wing gender-critical lesbians like those I met in that Budapest bar are stuck in the middle of all this, a means to everyone else’s ends. The state paints them as deviant and anti-family to bash the liberals, while progressives in Hungary and their Western supporters demand that they pretend that their interests perfectly align with the rest of the rainbow. If lesbians nonetheless insist, perfectly sensibly, that female biology makes a difference to their political interests as lesbians, they are treated as somehow in league with the far-Right. And, in terms of optics, matters are not helped by the fact that Fidesz-supporting publishing houses are now buying up gender-critical titles to translate into Hungarian. Indeed, I discovered on my trip that the would-be Hungarian publisher for my own book was an Orbán think tank. (Since I got home, I have pulled out of the deal.)

His comments come after it was revealed at least 15 children under the age of four were directed to the controversial clinic in the past two years. 

A similar number of five-year-olds were referred between 2021-2022.

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock clinic is the nation's only gender identity service for children. 

NHS documents state that, in total, over 5,000 children were referred to Tavistock's service in the past two years, over concerns they were suffering from their gender identity not matching their biological sex.

Only half of referrals were for children aged 15-plus.

The figures were detailed in NHS England's draft guidelines for how gender care will operate in two new centres due to open in the spring to replace the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust

The NHS data, unveiled among some new guidelines for how to treat children with gender dysphoria, only concerns referrals to the GIDS at Tavistock.

Not all of the patients would have been taken on for actual treatment, which can include puberty blockers and hormones that help change their bodies to align more with their gender identity.

 NHS England is cracking down on how children are referred to gender identity care in the future, in the wake of the Tavistock chaos which saw its GIDS service ruled unsafe following a review.

Other mental health issues were 'overshadowed' in favour of gender identity treatment, prompting accusations that staff rushed children onto powerful drugs.

Under current guidelines, health and social service staff, teachers, and charities can refer a child they think is suffering from gender dysphoria to specialist NHS care.

But under draft rules published this week, which could be enforced from the spring, referrals to NHS gender identity care would be restricted to GPs and health service staff.

Stella O'Malley, psychotherapist and director of campaign group Genspect said the fact children under the age of four were being referred for gender identity care, 'shocking and concerning'.

'Children up until the age of roughly seven or eight engage in magical thinking, for example they can believe that thinking about something can make it real,' she said.

'Very young kids who are gender non conforming should be free to live as they please- nobody should be responding to gender non conformity as a problem to be treated.'

The NHS estimates this change would slash referrals to gender identify care by 5 per cent, or about 250 children based on the latest data.

HOW THE TAVISTOCK SCANDAL UNFOLDED 

2005: Sue Evans, a nurse at Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), warned that youngsters were being assessed too quickly and their treatment was influenced by transgender rights groups.

2009: GIDS became a national service responsible for treating all children in England with gender and identity issues. Demand skyrocketed, with fewer than 100 patients referred to the clinic in 2010, jumping more than 2,500 by 2018.

2018: A senior member of staff told the trust's board that children were wrongly fast-tracked into changing their gender — with the mental health and social reasons behind their wishes being overlooked 

February 2019: An internal report by Dr David Bell, who was on Tavistock's board, set out how patients were suffering 'long term damage' because GIDS could not 'stand up to the pressure' from 'highly politicised' campaigners and families.

February 2019: Consultant psychotherapist Dr Marcus Evans — who had worked at the trust for decades and whose wife Sue first raised concerns about its practices in 2005 — resigned in protest at the Tavistock's response to doctors who raised the alarm.

July 2019: Dr Kirsty Entwhisle, a psychologist at GIDS Leeds hub, went public with accusations that staff misled patients and made decisions about young people's 'bodies and lives' without 'robust evidence'.

October 2019: Former GIDS nurse Sue Evans and an anonymous mother of a 15-year-old GIDS patient launched the first legal action against Tavistock. They claimed the trust should not prescribe puberty blockers to children who could not give informed consent. 

January 2020: Keira Bell, who was prescribed the drugs when she was 16-years-old, replaced Mrs Evans as lead claimant. She underwent breast-removal surgery but regretted transitioning, claiming she was given puberty blockers after 'superficial conversations' with social workers' and was receiving testosterone shots a year later'.

December 2020: In response to the claim, the High Court decided that under-16s could not give informed consent to the treatment.

2020: NHS England asks paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass to conduct a review into Tavistock.

September 2021: Tavistock appealed the decision and it was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which claimed the previous ruling was 'inappropriate' and placed patients, parents and medics in a 'very difficult position'. 

September 2021: Sonia Appleby, the trust's safeguarding lead, awarded £20,000 by tribunal after claiming trust managers tried to stop her from carrying out her role when staff raised concerns.

January 2021: The UK's health watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, gave GIDS the lowest rating it can, 'inadequate', after finding 'significant concerns' about how it operates. It demanded improvement.

March 2022: In an interim report, Dr Cass hit out at the lack of 'open discussion' at the trust about its treatment, which was not subject to quality controls. She found other mental health issues were 'overshadowed' in favour of gender identity issues when children were referred to GIDS. She called for a 'fundamentally different service model' and 'rapid' research on the use of the drugs after she found 'insufficient evidence' on their benefits.

July 2022: In a letter to the NHS, Dr Cass called for regional centres to be commissioned for gender identity treatment, with 'strong links' to mental health services and academic hubs that conduct ongoing research.