As President Vladimir Putin campaigned to extend his rule at the start of the time, he offered his own explanation of why some Russians who had fled to the West in opposition of his invasion of Ukraine are now returning with the phrase” shared restrooms for boys and girls.” Immediately, the Russian internet exploded with memes of several “gender- natural” toilets, then known as outhouses, which are common across provincial parts of the country.
Similar standard sentiments were reinforced earlier this month when Russia de facto criminalized the whole LGBTQ+ area, including the vaguely worded “LGBT Action” on its list of extremist and terrorist businesses, meaning that gay and transgender individuals are now equivalent to al Qaeda and Alexei Navalny’s partners, according to the Kremlin.
The move followed a Supreme Court ruling in November, which has already led to penalties against people for displaying rainbow- colored items. A woman was fined for Instagraming a rainbow in February, and a different woman received jail time for wearing rainbow earrings. On March 20, two nightclub workers in southwestern Russia were arrested in the country’s first LGBTQ+ “extremism” case. They were taken into custody and now face ten years in prison.
The ban on any queer identity, real or perceived, is essential to the rapid, violent transformation that Russia must undergo to achieve victory in Ukraine, according to the Kremlin architects of this process and their obedient lawmakers and judges. It is also a result of Putin’s efforts to reshape Russia into a pitifully authoritarian society, which he claimed to do this month in a predetermined vote. And while Russia advertises itself to the right and left in the West as some sort of “anti- woke” Elysium — as evidenced by the pro- Kremlin propaganda apparatus that gave American conservative pundit Tucker Carlson access to Putin in an interview earlier this year — the debate inside Russia, fueled by Western ideological tropes, is a departure from the tone and content of previous discussions.
In the deadliest terror attack in the Russian capital in over 20 years, the Islamic State group’s Khorasan Province wing killed over 130 people in Moscow on Friday as a reminder of what real threats look like.
On July 14, 2023, the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, reviewed a bill that sought to completely ban any and all forms of gender- affirming care and revoke the legal right of transgender Russians to complete their transition and change their identity papers. It was unanimously approved and without discussion at the first reading. There were no dissents on the floor. The head of the Russian Health Ministry, Mikhail Murashko, was the only one to object to the hearing because it failed to match up their medically verified gender identity with their official documents. But Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin demanded that the ministry not introduce any amendments aimed at softening the bill’s effect, which would be a pointless nuisance on their path, as he put it, to “eradicating all this smut”, by which Volodin meant a smorgasbord of claimed outrages such as the “fully satanic practice” of pumping American children full of hormones from the age of 8. The executive branch abruptly withdrew.
The bill was designed to pass, any token resistance notwithstanding. This was demonstrated by the fact that it was” co-sponsored” by almost the entire Duma, including Volodin and United Russia’s ruling party leaders and nominal opposition parties. One of the bill’s most vocal co- sponsors, Pyotr Tolstoy ( great- great- grandson of Leo ) of the ruling United Russia party, explicitly connected the bill’s importance to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine— so that “our boys defending their motherland with arms”, he said, referring to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, can return to a Russia that is different “from the one before the special operation”.
Ilya Budraitskis, a Russian author who fled to exile following the invasion of Ukraine, refutes the claim that a tiny minority poses an existential threat in the larger context of the” spiritual war” Russia and its allies are engaging in against the West. The Kremlin presents itself as the defender of” traditional values” against the anarchy of the West, in which individuals freely choose their own identities.
The Kremlin’s alternative theory views freedom as destiny. If you were born a Russian man, Budraitskis explains, then that is your fate. It might make you want to fight on the front lines and make you sacrifice your life. But this choice is made for you, simply based on your birth in this country with its history”. Budraitskis notes that this idea is even embodied in the Russian Constitution, particularly in its most recent amendments, which place Russia’s current legitimacy in its” thousand-year history” and “memory of our ancestors” The state’s suppression of the rights of trans Russians is thus a battle line in a war to assert the immutability of one’s identity, says Budraitskis, author of the book” Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post- Soviet Russia”.
However, there is a significant impediment to the proposed national transformation: According to the statistics Tolstoy presented to support his argument, about 3, 000 Russians have been undergoing gender-affirming surgery and changing their identity papers annually.
Before this new law, these procedures were regulated by the state and available only to legally competent adults who had to obtain a special permit before starting on surgeries, hormone therapy and applying for a legal change of name and new identity documents. It was a difficult and lengthy bureaucratic journey that involved being diagnosed with” transsexualism,” an outdated idea that was incorporated into the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases ( ICD-10 ), which Russia still uses, and refusing to update later ICD revisions because of their incompatibilities with Russia’s alleged” traditional values.”
Only a few clinics, in the largest of Russia’s metropolises, held such panels and had the surgeons and endocrinologists trained and equipped specifically to cater to trans patients. Only a few hundred people each year reportedly embarked on this journey, according to Russian Interior Ministry data despite the pervasive claims made by pundits on Russian state media, which echo those of some Western conservatives.
This is a truly minuscule number, about two- thousandths of 1 % of Russia’s population. Additionally, there was never a situation in Russia that would allow for such a comprehensive ban. The first- ever full female- to- male surgical transition in the world was completed by a Soviet doctor in 1972 — a Latvian known for creating penile prosthetics — and modern Russians have been able to transition and change their identity papers for almost three decades without it ever becoming a national issue. It was never addressed by Putin or anyone else until after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which serves as both the source and the end goal of Russia’s alleged” spiritual” transformation. It was never mentioned in campaign promises or speeches.
” You take an issue which is not particularly important, or a collection of people who are not particularly significant in the population, but they symbolize something that you want to focus on”, explains Jenny Mathers, a Russia scholar and senior lecturer at Aberystwyth University in the U. K. She described the anti- trans bill as part of a moral panic: an imagined or exaggerated sense — often whipped up by the media and exploited by politicians — that your society is under threat from a nefarious group of people. Trans people in this situation represent a breakdown of society’s conceited hierarchy, according to the statement.
Even before the ink dried on Putin’s signature under the bill’s final draft — as is required for all new laws — 10 days later, in late July 2023, many trans Russians had already braced for their lives to suddenly become even more difficult than before. Danil, a transgender man from Siberia, requested a loan of around$ 1,500 ($ three to five times the typical monthly salary in his area ) and proceed with his surgeries until the bill was passed, which he felt was necessary. Now he is burdened with debt. However, Danil claims that “being himself” was worthwhile.
The sense of urgency in the community was palpable, and not without reason: Even during the final bureaucratic steps before the bill came into effect, one of the very few medical clinics in Moscow that hosted medical panels for approving gender reassignment procedures announced that it would no longer be taking new patients. People like Danil, who hoped to make last-minute appointments before the curtain fell, would miss out on the trip. Rika, a trans woman who managed to change her identity papers and undergo hormone therapy but missed the deadline for completing her surgeries, is now stuck in Russia. She is reluctantly considering applying for refugee status because she lacks the means to immigrate to a nation that would accept her.
This comes with its own costs. Some EU member states, like Germany, announced in December of last year that they would accept refugees from the Russian LGBTQ+ community, calling them politically persecuted. But this means such refugees would still have to spend months, if not years, in legal limbo in camps, with scant access to even basic psychological support. A 24-year-old queer Russian refugee, Mikhail, committed suicide in a Dutch refugee camp, according to LGBT World Beside, an Amsterdam-based organization that assists asylum seekers from Russia and other nations with large numbers of Russian speakers. It was the third suicide by a Russian LGBTQ+ asylum- seeker in the Netherlands that year.
Due to the fact that these organizations do not exist in Russia, the session was closed without the “representatives” of the defendant being heard from. Immediately after the ruling, the few remaining LGBTQ+- friendly organizations left in the country, like Delo LGBT ( LGBT Mission ), announced that they would be ceasing all activity in Russia indefinitely. A number of LGBTQ+-friendly bars and clubs in Russia, including some of the oldest ones like Tsentralnaya Stantsiya ( Central Station ) in St. Petersburg, either shut down or were forced to close due to pressure from the authorities to revoke their leases. When asked by New Lines for comment, the Supreme Court’s press office said it does not discuss the details of closed- door proceedings. Tolstoy refused to respond to a request for an interview.
Trans Russians, being an especially small community, had an unimposing political profile even before the full- scale repression began. Whatever small advocacy organizations, including Tsentr T ( Center T), were quickly shut down, and their activist founders were forced to flee the country under the threat of having severe repercussions. As Mediazona, an independent Russian news website in exile, reported in January 2024, several trans Russians have been summoned by the police, who have accused them of forging their ID papers — essentially pressuring them to detransition.
According to Mathers, such excessively harsh policing can be explained by observing trans Russians as the most extreme example of something that goes against the norms of society, such as how the family should function, who should be married, who should be in a family, and what men and women’s roles are. ” When you have someone who says, actually no, I can step outside all of those because I was a man and now I’m woman, or I’m neither of those two things, I’m something else”, she says,” That raises the questions about, well, then what is society based on, after all, if people can step outside these kinds of norms about gender roles”?
Queer Russian activists and their allies tried to warn Russian society that the state would not halt after finding such a simple target in them. Reproductive rights and personal liberties would be next, medical professionals such as Anastasia Shimanova, a psychiatrist at a private mental health clinic in Moscow, said in an interview with Russian magazine Afisha on the eve of the law’s passing — but the warnings went unheeded. The “LGBT movement” has no chance of getting much airtime or any other form of solidarity in a society that has been brutally oppressed and where most forms of protest are effectively outlawed.
New and more expansive bans and clampdowns soon followed, beginning with a steady onslaught on Russian women’s reproductive rights: By late 2023, local parliaments in some Russian regions, as well as occupied Crimea, introduced legislation restricting abortions to government- owned clinics, while others have been targeting medical professionals first by fining them for “inciting” women into performing abortions.
Any public displays of sexuality, no matter how innocent, are now automatically suspect, as guests of the now-infamous” Almost Nude” party in Moscow learned last year. Just days before the new year, scantily clad Russian celebrities and socialites gathered to party in a Moscow nightclub. However, in the new wartime environment, loyalist media and blogs quickly targeted and humiliated them in a vicious smear campaign, leading to the release of tearful messages of regret. For wearing, for example, nothing but a penis- covering sock, some suffered legal consequences and punishments such as being drafted into the army.
Additionally, common Russians were targeted. In Volgograd, an anchor at a local TV network wore a” sexy nun” costume to a New Year’s Eve party, it cost her, and two of her colleagues in similar attire, their jobs. Any private gatherings that feature cross-dressing, revealing outfits, or anything else a nebulous “morality police” — including the numerous pro-Kremlin channels naming, shaming, harassing anyone from national celebrities to random guests at a private party — find it to be outrageous. Last month, masked riot police stormed a private party in a cottage in the St. Petersburg region, where they beat up revelers and detained them in stress positions for hours, on the grounds that there were gay people in attendance. The pro-Kremlin channel REN TV referred to the incident as an “LGBT party” opposed to Russian military operations in Ukraine in its coverage of it. From now on, parties will operate more underground and hold invitation- only events which are not publicized, wrote the St. Petersburg journalist Anastasiya Chastitsynax, who chronicles Russia’s glamorous nightlife scene in her blog.
The most intriguing aspect of this relentless assault on fundamental rights, with an emphasis on outlawing “undesirable” communities, is how much of it has been inspired by right-wing religious forces in the West, primarily in the United States. Consider, for example, the recent proposal from a conservative Orthodox archpriest of promoting” chastity pledges” among Russian teenagers, ostensibly to reinforce their” traditional values” against Western sin. These pledges, which were popularized by Christian organizations in the United States in the early 1990s, lack any support in Orthodox or Russian customs.
They do, however, in the United States. In general, Russia’s push to outlaw trans people roughly coincides with a rise in anti-trans bills in various local American legislatures, which increased from 174 introduced to 26 passed in 2022 to 600 and 87, respectively, in 2023. In his speeches and public statements, Putin has repeated claims made by American advocates of restricting gay and trans rights, such as hints at the supposed existence of a powerful secret cabal indoctrinating children in immoral Western societies into “gender ideology”. Putin made the claim at his annual press conference in December 2023 that Russians were morally immune to” Western gender-based bigotry” and that his main concerns were the alleged unfairness of trans women in sports and a rapist allegedly claiming to be a trans woman who was transferred to a women’s prison, both of which were shared with American conservatives.
As if to drive the point home further, Russian Supreme Court Judge Oleg Nefedov, who signed the ruling banning the LGBTQ+ movement, apparently borrowed a peculiarly worded passage from the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The question was removed from Scalia’s dissented opinion in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, in which the conservative jurist criticized “homosexual activists” whose actions are “directed to eliminate the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. The passage is found in Nefedov’s ruling in a slightly clumsy word-for-word translation into Russian. The Russian version, however, pins the blame for the supposed degeneration of moral values on “foreign policy pressure” exerted upon Russia.
The independent Russian news outlet Meduza, which first reported this in January 2024, claims that it was the result of a ChatGPT request that used Scalia’s assault on gay rights as a prompt in its response.
Whether by accident or design, Putin’s great pivot toward ( largely invented )” traditional values” has been consistently inspired by some of the most conservative Western, and specifically American, religious activists. According to Budraitskis, this demonstrates Putin’s elites ‘ colonial Western-centrism, who seek recognition from the West and not from China or Iran, which they have ties to but do not consider to be equals.
Russia has a long history, predating Putin’s rule, of building links with the Western far right. Take into account the pro-war, ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, for instance. Although he has been dubbed” Putin’s brain”, the exact nature of his relationship with the Russian leader and the Kremlin remains a mystery — but his fascistic politics, once fringe, have been visibly seeping into the Russian mainstream. In the” Black International” alliance of far-right parties and movements, Dugin made an effort to enlist Russia in the 1990s and the early 2000s. One of the most vocal outlets supporting the anti- trans bill is Tsargrad TV, an ultraconservative television network co- founded by a former Fox News executive and funded by the U. S. sanctioned” Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev, another power player on the Russian far right. Email leaks that revealed Malofeev’s extensive network of contacts with right-wing extremists have previously been covered by New Lines.
Until the early 2010s, these forces lurked in obscure corners of Russian politics, while the Russian mainstream embraced a deceptively liberal, pro- Western course. However, according to the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar in his book” All the Kremlin’s Men,” Putin announced that he would be running for president again in 2011. The Arab Spring, and particularly Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, appears to have spooked him. Dmitry Medvedev, the only other president Russia has known in the past 24 years, was humiliatingly pushed aside as a mere seat- warmer ( at the time, Russia’s constitution only allowed two consecutive terms ). Putin took back control of the presidency in 2012 and made a sharp U-turn toward religious conservatism.
Then, the existing links between the Russian Orthodox Church’s influential flock in Putin’s circles and American religious conservatives came in handy.
In contrast, institutionalized homophobia is imposed top-down in Russia without any real organic cultural connection, according to Budraitskis. In the U.S., such rhetoric is aimed at very specific groups of voters — conservative evangelicals— and is part of their extensive religious worldview. There is, he says, a popular prison- inspired mindset in which homosexuals are considered untouchables. There is no political party or social movement that advances this view, but it has cultural influence in Russia. The Putin regime is attempting to combine mass but unorganized homophobic prejudices with ideological framing borrowed from American conservatism.
There is compelling empirical evidence to refute the claim that these episodes are not just a string of coincidences, despite the few, if any, Kremlin-friendly ideologues who have publicly acknowledged this. The victims of this game of smoke and mirrors are members of one of the most persecuted and invisible minorities in Russia. People like Rika and Danil are essentially without recourse because they are ensnared in a vicious state that actively demonizes and persecutes them for who they are, burdened by their rapid transitions and frequently rejected by their families.
” Struggle” is how Danil describes his life between the passing of the anti- trans law and the time of this writing. It’s difficult to reconcile the fact that Danil admits that your country does n’t consider you to be fully human.
” I’d rather just be a normal 21- year- old guy”, he says.
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