The Duma paved the way for a law that prohibits the change of sex by surgical operation. The measure also seeks to make it impossible to change gender on identity documents and other official certificates. Its approval would constitute an additional blow against the Russian LGBTQI+ community, which has received increasing pressure from the Government of Vladimir Putin for more than a decade, under the argument of wanting to “protect” “traditional and family” values.
The Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, approved on Wednesday a law that prohibits gender transition procedures, something legal in the country since 1997.
“Medical personnel are prohibited from performing interventions aimed at changing the sex of the person, including the formation of the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of another sex,” the text of the bill states.
The exception will be operations to correct “abnormalities in the formation of the sex of children” and must even be approved by federal health institutions.
The law also aims to prohibit gender change on identity documents and other official certificates. The text could be definitively approved in the coming weeks.
According to lawmaker Pyotr Tolstoy, the goal is to “protect Russia with its cultural and family values and traditions and stop the infiltration of Western anti-family ideology.”
“A person gets up in the morning and decides that he is no longer a man, but a woman, or a woman, and not a man. He goes to a private clinic (…), receives a certificate and goes to the civil registry, to the department of identity documents, to change their surname, first name and patronymic (…) and the following can happen: they get married and, God forbid, adopt a child,” Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said.
The Duma speaker called the gender transition “pure satanism” as he began voting on Wednesday.
“We don’t want this to happen in our country. Let such evil policy be carried out in the United States,” Volodin added.
But for Kyle Knight, a researcher at Human Rights Watch’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program, “Russian politicians are hurting transgender and intersex people by continuing to deploy cynical ‘family values’ rhetoric to defend regressive ideas about gender and sexuality, while attacking the informed consent rights of adults and children”.
To justify the new bill, legislators argued that several young people would be using gender change to avoid mandatory military service.
Currently, as stated ‘The country’a person at least 18 years old who wishes to change gender You must “obtain a medical certificate” that certifies “your transsexuality (although transsexuality has not been considered a disease since 2018, when the WHO decided to remove it from the list of pathologies)”.
Unlike other countries, hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery is not required to obtain this certificate. Afterwards, the person can go to a state registry office and obtain a new birth certificate, and then a new passport and other documents. In total, the procedure takes anywhere from several weeks to two years to complete.
According to Maxim, an activist with the trans rights group Center T, who changed her gender marker three years ago, it is a “long and expensive” process. However, he points out that Russia also provides good gender-affirming medical care and has good surgeons and endocrinologists who advise on hormone therapy. Conditions that could now change.
A “nefarious” law according to the LGBTQI+ community
In recent months, faced with the fear of such a bill, the demands for gender change have increased in the country. It is feared that the passing of the law will trigger suicides among members of Russia’s trans community, who have described the project as “disastrous”.
Those under 18 years of age, in particular, who want to transition are seeing this possibility recede.
Lyubov, the mother of a 17-year-old trans youth and a therapist who works with trans adolescents, told the AP that “the vast majority of them lived with the hope and illusion of turning 18.”
“Our children are between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, social pressure and, on the other, the lack of hope that when they turn 18 something will change,” he said.
“I see the future quite sad,” added Lyubov. Trans people will not be able to “change their lives according to their gender identity” and, in parallel, they will have to face a society that paints them as “not healthy, not normal, without the right to live.”
According to human rights lawyer Max Olenichev, people who want to change their sex or gender within the legal framework will have to go abroad. “Neither the medical nor the legal transition will be possible without changing the country of residence,” he concluded.
A decade of repression against the LGBTQI+ community
Russia has exerted increasing pressure on the LGBTQI+ population, especially in the last decade, both to preserve “traditional values” and, as Moscow has pointed out, to counteract the aging of the population.
In 2013, the Kremlin passed a law restricting LGBTQ+ rights, known as the ‘gay propaganda’ law, which prohibits any reference in public space to “non-traditional sexual relations”. LGBTQI+ people can no longer be portrayed in a neutral or positive way in film, literature or the media.
In 2020, Putin pushed through a reform to outlaw same-sex marriage. “Homosexual marriages do not produce children,” said the head of the Kremlin.
With EFE and AP
