Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. (Photo courtesy of the Russian government/Duma)
A bill that would outlaw gender transitioning procedures in Russia passed through its first legislative procedure June 14 with 400 lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament voting in favor and zero votes against.
State Duma [Parliament] Deputy Speaker Pytor Tolstoy, a co-sponsor of the legislation, echoed the sentiments expressed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during political rallies last fall to bolster public support for his war in Ukraine, referring to transgender people in a highly transphobic way.
“Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of ‘mum’ and ‘dad,’ to have ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ ‘No. 3?’ Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want … it drilled into children in our schools … that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and [children to be] offered the chance to undergo sex change operations? … We have a different future, our own future,” Putin said.
Tolstoy pointed out that banning the “practice of transgenderism” was in the interest of national security. The diagnosis of “transsexualism,” he added, refers to gender identity disorders and is the basis for recognizing a citizen as unfit for military service. In addition, “we must not forget that by changing the sex of one of the partners, a homosexual couple gets the right to adopt a child. Unfortunately, there are already such cases in Russia,” he said.
Tolstoy stressed that the legislation, originally introduced in April, was to “protect Russia with its cultural and family values and traditions and to stop the infiltration of the Western anti-family ideology.”
In his floor speech prior to the vote Tolstoy blamed the West for what he deemed a profitable medical industry:
“The Western transgender industry is trying in this way to seep into our country, to break through a window for its multi-billion dollar business,” Tolstoy said. Then he claimed there is already a developed network of clinics in Russia, “it includes trans-friendly doctors and psychologists, and all this operates with the active support of LGBT organizations. However, in the past six months they have changed their names to more, perhaps harmless ones,” he said inferring that the recent expansion of the country’s law banning LGBT propaganda was somehow responsible for those changes.
According to Tolstoy, gender reassignment surgery is “a very profitable area of medical services. And it’s understandable why a number of doctors defend this area so fiercely, hiding behind academic knowledge, including those obtained abroad while studying in the United States and other countries,” he said, “running into” Western medical education.
Health Minister Mikhail Murashko argued that while the ministry generally supports the inadmissibility of gender reassignment only on the basis of the patient’s desire, he cautioned that toughening of decision-making on surgical or hormonal treatment should be based “only on the basis of high-level consultations with qualified physicians, and federal health agencies should be involved in this.”
When pressed for medical exclusions as laid out in the parameters of the legislation, Murashko noted: “There are disorders that are associated specifically with the formation of sex — congenital, hereditary and endocrine diseases. This frequency occurs in one in 4,000 newborns, therefore, within this framework, you need to move. For this category of patients, the medical solution regarding endocrine disorders, genetic, is what is prescribed in the legislation — in the proposed bill and is supported, ” he said.
Tolstoy argued the only exceptions should be on corrective surgery for minors n the cases of intersex births. “We are talking about something else. If we leave at least one loophole for an adult, crowds of those homosexuals who want to adopt children, avoid military service and so on will go into this loophole. Therefore, either a complete ban for adults and the ability to correct anomalies for children, or nothing!”
The Associated Press noted that independent news outlet Mediazona reported in February that the number of passports issued due to “gender change” has more than doubled in 2022 compared with two years earlier — from 428 in 2020 to 936 last year, according to Russia’s Interior Ministry.
In justifying the new bill, lawmakers cited concerns that men are using the relatively simple procedure of changing gender in official documents to dodge the military draft.
Another point was raised by a lawmaker who asked what to do with the 3,000-plus trans people who have already managed to change their gender and documents. Tolstoy responded noted that the law does not have retroactive effect.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, called gender transitioning “pure satanism.”
“Look at what is happening now in the United States of America, where all these new pseudo-values are being propagated,” Volodin said then added: “The proportion of transgender people in the United States among adolescents is already three times higher than among the adult population. This is the result of propaganda. The number of children receiving hormone therapy has more than doubled in five years. Moreover, they start pumping hormones into children from the age of eight! In five years, from 2017 to 2021, more than 2,000 gender reassignment surgeries have been performed. It is operations in children aged 13 to 17 years. We do not want this to happen in our country. Let the diabolical policy be carried out in the USA.”
The legislation will need to have three more readings along with accompanying public debates in the lower house and then sent to the upper house before it can be passed and sent on to Putin for his signature to become law.
The only option for those seeking to transition through medical care or changing their gender in documents would be to leave the country, human rights lawyer Max Olenichev, who works with the Russian LGBTQ community, said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Neither medical, nor legal transitioning will be possible without changing the country of residence.”
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