In a crippling blow to Russia’s oppressed LGBTQ+ community, Russian lawmakers on Thursday, July 13, 2023, approved a toughened version of a bill that outlaws gender transitioning procedures.
The stringent bill has added clauses that annul marriages in which one person has “changed gender” and restricts transgender people from becoming foster or adoptive parents.
Lawmakers slated the third and final reading for Friday, July 14, 2023 as the bill received swift, unanimous approval of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, in its key second reading.
Amid the Kremlin’s campaign to protect what it regards as the country’s “traditional values,” the bill is sure to be adopted.
Lawmakers portray the measure as protecting Russia from “the Western anti-family ideology,” with some describing gender transitioning as “pure satanism.”
The bill bans any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person,” as well as changing one’s gender in official documents and public records.
New clauses added to the bill also amend Russia’s Family Code by listing gender change as a reason to annul a marriage and adding those “who had changed gender” to a list of people who can’t become foster or adoptive parents.
It has shaken the country’s transgender community and has drawn criticism not only from LGBTQ+ rights advocates but from the medical community as well.
The Kremlin adopted the first legislation restricting LGBTQ+ rights in 2013. Known as the “gay propaganda” law, it outlawed any public endorsement of “non-traditional sexual relations” among minors. In 2020, Putin pushed through a constitutional reform that outlawed same-sex marriage.
Last year, lawmakers moved to ban “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” among adults. That initiative was quickly approved, and by December 2022, any positive or even neutral representation of LGBTQ+ people in movies, literature or media was outlawed.
The bill to severely restrict trans rights came a few months after that.
Bill Labelled As “Misanthropic”
In an interview, Lyubov Vinogradova, Executive Director of Russia’s Independent Psychiatric Association, called the bill “misanthropic.”
Gender transitioning procedures “shouldn’t be banned entirely, because there are people for whom it is the only way to … to exist normally and find peace with themselves,” Vinogradova stated.
Vinogradova was among two dozen lawyers, activists and psychiatrists who put their names to a review of the bill that deemed it unnecessary and harmful. The document pointed that the bill goes against Russia’s existing laws, including its constitution.
Existing Russian regulations deem gender transitioning procedures as medical treatment for “transsexualism,” a psychiatric condition in accordance with the 10th version of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, a medical classification list by the World Health Organization that Russia follows.
So, according to the review, to ban gender transitioning procedures is to deprive people diagnosed with the condition of medical help which violates the constitution and other Russian laws.
Moreover, Vinogradova rejected the state narrative that gender transitioning is something imposed on Russia by the West, saying that studies of transgender issues were being conducted since the 1960s in the Soviet Union, “and it was normal, no one was concerned by it, but now, it turns out, goes against our traditional values.”
An online petition against the bill by Yana Kirey-Sitnikova, a transgender studies researcher, also cites that gender-affirming care was available in the Soviet Union since the late 1960s and that transgender people were able to change gender markers in official documents as early as the 1920s.
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