Putin outlaws sex change in Russia

Russia has outlawed sex change. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the law on Monday that prohibits operations related to transgender transition and denies adoption or even custody to all those who have changed the gender marker in official documents.. The transsexual groups fear that the repression will increase and the only way out for them is going into exile.

On July 14, the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, approved in its third and final reading this law that prohibits gender transition.. The text was approved unanimously and last Friday received the approval of the upper house. The country has witnessed a multiplication of conservative measures since the offensive in Ukraine.

The law includes the prohibition of transition surgery and restricts hormones. The bill was amended to prohibit people who have changed their gender marker on official documents from adopting children. They also decided to stipulate that marriages in which a member has changed their gender markers would be annulled.. Russian Deputy Health Minister Oleg Salagai said the government will cancel its statutes regulating gender transition, TASS reports. Hormone therapy will also be prohibited.

The Center-T is one of the main collectives of trans people in Russia. Throughout the country, the trans collective has reacted, explains to EL MUNDO Yan Dvorkin, director of this entity, “with a great level of anxiety and panic.”. Personally, Yan experiences it “as a very scary and difficult moment”. Russia has been experiencing an ultra-conservative drift since 2013. First was the outlawing of LGBT propaganda. Then, a 2020 constitutional reform introduced into Russia the concept that marriage is a union between a man and a woman exclusively.. Vladimir Putin promised that as long as he is president, there will be no gay marriage in Russia.

The new law also prohibits changing the gender on official documents, which had been allowed since 1997, although the person concerned was not required to undergo an operation to be able to introduce this change.

Between 2018 and last year, more than 2,700 Russians changed their sex in their documents, which led to almost 200 marriages, reports Efe. Maxim, a transsexual who works with Centro T, now has “plans to emigrate to Spain” because “Russia is degrading.”

This new law was introduced in the State Duma at the end of May. The deputies believe that the new legal norm “will preserve Russia for posterity, with its cultural and family values, traditional patterns, putting a barrier against the irruption of Western ideology against the family”. Some lawmakers argued that several young men were using sex change to avoid mandatory military service.

One of the main people responsible for drafting the document is the legislator Piotr Tolstoy, co-author of the project. He himself maintained that Russia must be “protected with its values, cultural and family traditions, and stop the infiltration of Western ideology against the family.”. The legislator took the opportunity to refer to the war in Ukraine: “I want our boys, who are currently defending the honor of Russia at the cost of their lives, to be able to return and see what the country is like, that their sacrifice was not in vain.”

The 2013 rule prohibits any reference in public spaces to “non-traditional sexual relations”, and was tightened last year to cover almost all public spaces and all age groups.

This time the Duma also adopted a resolution with recommendations to the Russian government to recognize “sexual preference disorders, including transsexualism, cross-dressing and pedophilia, as a disease.”. The T Center issued a statement calling for no surrender: “The darkest hour is always before dawn. It is impossible for this cannibalism to continue forever.”