Gender studies professors in Central Europe have blasted criticism of their research field after politicians branded it “pseudoscience” and destructive.

“There are certain political forces that are using gender to mobilise hate,” said Hungary’s first professor of gender studies Andrea Peto. She slammed claims that the field of research is “a force that is destroying the nation”.

The professor is based at Budapest’s Central European University, an institution founded by globalist billionaire George Soros which is under threat of closure from new legislation devised to create a level playing field for foreign universities operating in the country.

Times Higher Education reports the battle over gender studies, which generally asserts that differences in male and female behaviour are socially constructed, “is being fiercely fought in Hungary”, where politicians have likened it to Marxism-Leninism.

“[Gender studies] deny what we think about natural human existence,” said Bence Rétvári, parliamentary state secretary at Hungary’s Ministry of Human Capacities, responding to news that Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd Science University — a public institution — plans to create a master’s degree in gender studies.

He described the field of research as “not science but ideology” and argued that it goes against human nature, in a television appearance in May.

Speaking on ATV about a new ‘family science’ degree launched by Corvinus University, also in Budapest, Rétvári said he believes there is a demand for education on family life and values.

Doctoral student Weronika Grzebalska, who looks at “nationalism and right-wing politics from a gender perspective” at the Polish Academy of Sciences, complained that gender studies as a field of research has also been criticised in Poland.

“While gender studies have never had a strong position in the region, both in terms of institutionalisation and funding, it has not been the target of comparable attacks by government officials before,” she told THE, slamming comments by Poland’s minister of science and higher education Jarosław Gowin.

The minister had bemoaned that public money, particularly from European Union sources, was spent on such “pseudoscience”.

Breitbart London reported last year that, despite years of research documenting biological differences between men and women, a senior sociologist found only 5 per cent of the most cited gender sociology papers acknowledge differences exist.

Charlotta Stern, deputy chair of Stockholm University’s sociology department, said her findings show gender sociologists exist in “insular communities of highly dubious sacred beliefs and causes”.