It’s getting undeniably tougher to defend SRHR and social justice in 2025. Hungary has enacted the EU’s first ban on Pride. The UK Supreme Court has effectively ruled that transgender women don’t belong in public space. ‘Foreign agents’ laws threaten to suffocate civil society from Georgia to Kazakhstan and beyond. Progressive organisations are losing funding the world over, peaceful protest is increasingly dangerous, and conservative interference is making it nearly impossible to provide comprehensive sexuality education anywhere.    For people and organisations who have not previously been much impacted by the anti-rights backlash, the current struggle against rising regression might seem undesirably novel, an abrupt chill cast by Trump and Putin’s lengthening shadows. For others, it simply represents a continuity of the repressive conditions they have already been surviving for a long time. On International Sex Workers’ Day, 50 years since the movement-defining occupation of the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, we recognise that sex workers are part of this latter group. They have always endured surveillance, marginalisation and criminalisation, and they have much to teach the rest of progressive society about resisting authoritarianism. Globally, sex workers face exclusion from public health systems, violent abuse by police and the destruction of their families. Their digital privacy is routinely invaded. They are denied access to banking services. Their migration status is used as leverage against them, and their professional status is used to deny them residency. Even within many spaces that claim to be feminist, it is seen as too politically risky to come out in support of them publicly and so they are frequently rejected as partners. In short, they endure conditions that echo life under fascist regimes while others enjoy the impression of safety in the same, supposedly functional, democracies.     The rest of the progressive universe should care about this, deeply, first and foremost because sex workers are human beings. Now, though, it is also becoming painfully obvious that what began as the targeted repression of sex workers has expanded into a wider assault on rights and freedoms across other movements. Shadowbanning sex workers on Meta’s platforms paved the way for censorship of LGTBQ+ voices, reproductive health advocates and feminist organisers. Policing sex work in online spaces has helped normalise state intrusion into every corner of our digital lives. Persistent refusal to acknowledge sex work as work has convinced the public that bodily autonomy and labour rights are in fact conditional, only to be enjoyed by certain groups. This in turn has made us more vulnerable to believing the right-wing fictions that there are good and bad abortions, or that some types of workers don’t deserve health insurance.  None of our fights are separate. They are part of the same political story about whether we get to make decisions about our own bodies and lives. Backlashes against sex worker rights, abortion rights and all other sexual and reproductive rights rest on the same tactics of repression: criminalisation dressed up as protection; narratives of victimhood instrumentalised to justify coercion; and the denial of autonomy and agency, especially for anyone who defies dominant norms. Many IPPF Member Associations and partners in Europe and Central Asia are therefore seeking to deepen their work alongside sex worker movements, learning from their leadership and recognising our struggles are all interconnected: In Poland, sex worker-led groups are connecting people to reproductive care and legal advice; In North Macedonia, cross-movement cooperation ensures self-testing for HIV and PrEP distribution are reaching communities the government has abandoned; In France and the Netherlands, sex workers are rising to the challenge of reframing public narratives about consent, labour, and dignity; And in Norway, broad new coalitions are emerging that unite sex worker rights with labour rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and the truly inclusive kind of feminist organising we need more than ever.  Examples shared at our recent IPPF EN-ESWA regional strategy meeting reaffirm that there are many tangible steps that progressive actors can take, across a broad scale of engagement, to build on this work and offer real solidarity: Raise knowledge among staff and leadership on messages from the sex work movement; Share available infrastructure, like office premises and phone lines; Hire people with lived experience of sex work across all levels, not only in outreach roles; Consider serving as fiscal sponsors for unregistered activist groups; Offer whatever staff time, training or resources we can to support sex workers to achieve data sovereignty, so they can collect and publish their own evidence about their own lives; And at every level, from local service providers to national and regional institutions, do our bit to end the criminalisation and exclusion that undermine sex workers’ health, safety and voice. It all starts with resisting the easy portrayal of sex workers as passive beneficiaries of care, and instead platforming them as organisers, experts, and co-creators.  In holding the front line before many other actors even noticed the threats encroaching on all of us, sex workers have long since demonstrated solidarity in a way that the rest of the movement for SRHR and social justice now needs to step up and repay. They are targeted because their autonomy threatens the systems we are all working to dismantle - patriarchy, white supremacy, state control over our bodies. The task now is to make sure we’re in good shape to show up together - by recognising that those most frequently seen as marginal have long been leading the way.  Words by Catherine Bailey Gluckman

High on the list of things that Viktor Orban doesn’t want you to know: homosexuality is a Hungarian invention. Before human rights campaigner Karl-Maria Kertbeny sat down to write a quiet letter to a leading German activist in 1868, the word homosexual did not exist. Neither did heterosexual. When he invented these terms, Kertbeny became the first European thinker to give queer people a neutral label for their experience, and to say it was equal to straightness. Many people continue to lay flowers at his grave in Budapest in recognition of this important Hungarian contribution to the history of LGBQ* dignity. Until recently, Hungarian society has continued in this vein, not always a pioneer but frequently showing its neighbours an example of steady advancement in the field of human rights. Homosexual sex was decriminalized there in 1961, relatively early compared to other contemporary socialist states in Europe – East Germans and Bulgarians, for example, had to wait until 1968. In the EU era, Hungary’s parliament adopted the bill to approve civil partnerships in 2007, making them accessible to their citizens substantially faster than in Croatia (2014), Greece (2015) or Italy (2016). And earlier this year, an independent poll demonstrated that the Hungarian people are still carrying on this tradition of reaching gradually for social progress: 59% of Hungarians believe that gay couples should have equal rights to adopt a child, an increase from the 42% who felt the same way in 2013. This historical trajectory is rather inconvenient to Mr Orban. He would like Hungarians to believe the European value of LGBTQI* freedom is a Western import, a foreign ‘ideology’, rather than something their country did much to realize long before the inception of the European Union. Fidesz, his ruling right-wing party, has a particular passion for victimizing LGBTQI* people, parcelling up actions that trample on trans and queer people’s human rights with measures designed to shut down intellectual life and access to education. Academic gender studies have been banned in Hungarian universities since 2018. In 2020, transgender and intersex people were robbed of their access to legal gender recognition. Summer 2021 saw the regime manoeuvring its wide-ranging package of amendments to “Child Protection” and “Family Protection” laws into place: as of July, it is illegal to share information about LGBTQI* lives with young people under the age of 18. Sexuality education that tells the truth about the range of human sexuality and gender has been banned in schools; no content relating to queer or trans people can be shown on television if a child might see it; booksellers within two hundred metres of a school or a church face prosecution for stocking literature featuring queer or trans characters. Political homophobia spreads    Hungary is of course not alone in falling victim to such deterioration. These measures are fed by, and feed into, a wave of human rights rollbacks threatening millions of Europeans. Hate against LGBTQI* people is increasingly legitimized through measures that forbid any public mention of their existence, on the pretext of shielding children from supposedly harmful knowledge. In Romania this summer, far-right party AUR felt emboldened enough by Hungary’s latest move to announce its own proposed law to “limit the representation or promotion of homosexuality and gender reassignment among minors”. While the party are not currently in government, and were likely angling for attention during a quiet period, this threat comes hot on the heels of several years of attempts to give parents the right to control what information about gender and sexuality their children receive in school, and to enshrine homophobia in the country’s constitution with a proposed amendment regarding marriage rights. Just as in Hungary, a homophobic, transphobic and anti-education bill that was presented in Poland’s parliament in 2019 was dressed up as a protection against paedophilia. It would make anyone providing comprehensive sexuality education to young people in schools a criminal. That bill is currently frozen in legislative process, neither adopted nor rejected. Recent announcements suggest that it will soon reappear in the form of a much broader, more dangerous anti-LGBTQ* law, more similar to Hungary’s, that will apply to many other settings beside schools. Since then, there has been a continuous escalation in brutal state violence committed against those protesting Poland’s shutdown of reproductive healthcare – their shocking testimonies must be read to be believed. Anyone following the situation can see how a law preventing street demonstrators even mentioning LGBTQI* rights – in case a child reads a placard - will be hugely destructive for any and all people taking a stand on these connected struggles. The paradox of conservative censorship   Thinking about public expression is key to understanding what exactly is going on here. It is, after all, categorically strange for right-wing parties to be so enthusiastic about state intervention in private life, and so violently opposed to the protection of that profoundly libertarian value: the right to say what you like. This is not a phenomenon unique to central Europe, but a trend across the continent – consider the appetite for sexuality-related censorship of far-right groups Fratelli d'Italia, VOX in Spain, and Portugal’s Chega. Certainly for those hardline conservatives who are in power, one goal is to misdirect public attention from their mishandling of economic, and latterly pandemic, issues. Framing LGBTQI* citizens as the current major threat to national stability is a smoke-and-mirrors diversion tactic, designed to disguise holes in a manifesto or deflect state accountability for preventable deaths, rocketing unemployment, and spiralling hopelessness. These leaders are exploiting multiple issues that trigger primal fears (“other” groups threatening social order, harm coming to one’s children and so on), in order to make loss of freedoms seem more palatable and therefore get away with shutting down dissent. A clear message from European leaders   The fight to win back decades of gains in human rights, sexual autonomy and self-determination depends on affected citizens participating fully and freely in national and international exchange. This is what IPPF EN seeks to facilitate. We bring together activists operating on different progressive causes in challenging European contexts to share knowledge, increase their sense of community, and help them develop their tactics. The strong stances we saw from European leaders expressed in June’s letter from the EU Council have been an encouraging sign of international solidarity, as have the Commission’s infringement procedures launched against Poland and Hungary in July, and the tabling of a wider parliamentary resolution on protecting LGBTQI* rights across Europe in the September 13th plenary. As these darkly conservative narratives play out to the same rhythm, again and again, it’s clear that such messages from European leaders must be backed up with financial support for activists if we want to combat an increasingly organized international threat. It might seem counterintuitive, but the upcoming referendum that Orban has scheduled on his offensive law should offer a glimmer of hope. The referendum questions are patently biased, written to confuse and manipulate, leaving people no way to express disagreement with the law and therefore no choice but to boycott it if they don’t support hate. We should see this as an admission of weakness. Orban fears he cannot count on a free vote to deliver a result against human rights, and so has engineered a rigged one. He knows there are plenty of people left who will resist him if they feel it is possible. It is down to the rest of us to ensure that it is. *Note: when we write LGBTQI*, we are referring to everybody who isn't straight and cis Main photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash