Russia’s State Duma unanimously adopts bill on ‘sex change’ ban in first reading

Russia’s State Duma has unanimously adopted (in the first reading) a bill that bans ID change and “medical intervention” for transgender people, as per the session’s broadcast.

This bill bans doctors from executing respective surgeries, except for cases connected with treating “innate physiological anomalies”.

The bill also bans civil registry offices from making changes into people’s documents based on medical certificates on sex realignment.

However, the bill allows “medical intervention” to treat “innate sex formation anomalies” among children, but only “by permission of a medical commission at a federal state healthcare institution”. The list of such facilities and the decision making procedure is to be defined by the government.

A total of almost 400 MPs are listed as the bill’s authors. One of them, Pyotr Tolstoy, says a major contribution to the bill was made by the inter-factional group for the protection of Christian values, vice-speakers Irina Yarovaya and Vladislav Davankov, and State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin.

“Why do we do this? For our future generations, we’re saving with its family and cultural values, traditional customs, we put a barrier in the way of the Western anti-family ideology,” Tolstoy says.