“Nikolai”, a 21-year-old transgender man, says he does not know how he can keep living in Russia after lawmakers moved to outlaw gender transitions.
The bill, which passed its second reading on Thursday, is part of an ultra-conservative, anti-Western drive that has intensified since the start of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.
“I feel total despair,” said Nikolai — not his real name — who spoke on condition that his identity not be revealed.
“If this law enters into force, even hormone therapy will be banned,” he said.
The new legislation forbids transition surgery, with the exception of children with congenital defects, and outlaws people changing the registration of their gender in official documents.
Following the liberalisation of Russian society in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, some gender transition procedures became possible in Russia.
But trans people are still stigmatised.
Nikolai, who was assigned female at birth, said he attempted suicide several times before realising his trans identity.
“My psychological state has improved after the start of my hormone therapy,” said Nikolai.
“I have accepted myself as a transgender person and I have started socialising,” he said, adding that he had recovered the will to live.
Nikolai said that he had begun the procedure to change his sex in official documents, but it has become a race against time as it will no longer be possible once the law comes into force.
– ‘Enemies of the people’ –
Since the start of its offensive in Ukraine, Russia has adopted a series of conservative measures, particularly against the LGBTQ community, aiming to clamp down on behaviour authorities consider deviant and Western-influenced.
“We are preserving Russia and its cultural values, its traditional foundations,” said Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy speaker of parliament’s lower house, and one of the authors of the bill.
“I really want our people who are now defending Russia’s honour with their lives (in Ukraine) to come back and see how this country has changed,” he said.
But Yan Dvorkin, a 32-year-old psychologist who heads up a Russian NGO helping transgender people called “Centre T”, is concerned about a possible rise in suicides when the legislation is enacted.
It will be “difficult for people to hear that the state thinks of them as ‘enemies of the people’, takes away their rights, …and puts them beyond the law,” he said.
