Hostages of gender and government 

Sasha is 20. He has a pleasant voice and colourful hair. We talked over the phone about the State Duma new insane initiative: this time, lawmakers have decided to defend the country’s “national interests” by stripping a whole social group of basic constitutional rights and banning gender transitioning.

The bill, adopted by the lower house earlier today, forbids trans persons from changing the gender marker in their documents and bans gender-affirming surgery and hormone therapy for the purpose of “sex change”. 

The bill now has two amendments which were absent in the initial draft — the ban on child adoption and on marriage for trans persons. The second amendment, which will be retroactive, states that “sex change” by one or both spouses is grounds for annulling the marriage. 

Sasha is trying to change his documents now, while there is still some time left. He has been on hormone therapy for several years, and his family and friends have accepted his masculine identity. But Sasha hadn’t planned to change his documents for several more years, fearing complications at university and not wanting to worry his parents with whom he had only just found common ground.

This part of the law is not retroactive, so those who have applied in time will likely have their documents changed, law experts say.

On the day I spoke to Sasha, he had just submitted such an application. Two days ago, he told me that his application had been considered and he had already managed to get a new birth certificate.

Childhood 

“As children, we used to joke that everyone dreams of living in cities with a double name, like Los Angeles or St. Petersburg, but we ended up in Anzhero-Sudzhensk,” Sasha laughs. Indeed, the small Siberian town doesn’t really look like the centre of the world. It is nice, but there is not much to do.

Sasha is an only child. His father is a miner, and his mother teaches biology. Sasha recalls only good things about his childhood and adolescence, although he admits that there are some episodes which he remembers vaguely or has forgotten altogether — “as if something was simply erased from memory”.

Sasha’s parents encouraged the child’s development, buying him encyclopaedias and enrolling him at the best school in town at the age of six. “In other schools, there were all these stories of students beating each other up, but we had no such incidents,” Sasha recalls.

Sasha began to experience his first “inner doubts” at the age of 11. The year was 2014, and there was not much information available online in Russian about LGBT. 

Sasha recalls.

In those years, homophobic sentiments began to flare up in Russia, leading to hate crimes and even brutal murders. In May 2013, three men tortured 22-year-old Vladislav Tornovoy to death because of his homosexuality. They broke his ribs, shoved two glass beer bottles up his anus, and smashed his head with a huge boulder. One of the torturers — Tornovoy’s former schoolmate who is now serving a 21-year sentence — recounted in his testimony that Tornovoy had told his friends about his homosexuality and that this was the reason for his murder.

The murder shocked the public and especially the LGBT community. Despite this, a month later Putin signed the law “banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors”.

‘Mum thought it wouldn’t go any further’

Sasha did not tell his parents about the doubts he was having. At the age of 13, he wrote himself a small note saying that he “did not feel like a girl” and left it in his trouser pocket, where it was soon found by his mother.

After that, Sasha and his mother had many conversations, which often turned into arguments with crying and screaming. “There was a kind of rejection or even disgust on my mum’s part,” he shares. Sasha’s father was not aware of this at the time. He says they never properly talked: his dad did not really take part in his upbringing, limiting his input to driving Sasha to and from school. 

At school, Sasha didn’t have much trouble with his peers on the grounds of identity, but neither did he have any close friends. He found true support and acceptance in art school. It was the friendships he made there that kept Sasha going till graduation.

Moving out

Like many Russian teenagers, Sasha dreamed of studying in St. Petersburg. However, he was attracted less by the partying and the prestigious universities and more by the opportunity to start his transition. At 17, after finishing school, Sasha entered university and left for St. Petersburg.

In Russia, to get a prescription for certain types of hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery, (such as mammoplasty or vaginoplasty), you need to be diagnosed with “transsexualism” (ICD-10 Code F 64.0). The diagnosis is made by a psychiatrist, and then a special board of three doctors — a clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a sexologist — conducts its own examination, as a result of which it may choose to issue a gender reassignment certificate. This certificate allows you to change your birth certificate and other documents.

Both of these things — access to medical care and the right to change documents — Russian lawmakers are now seeking to ban. This will essentially outlaw transgender people. They will still be able to get diagnosed with “transsexualism” but will lose their guaranteed right to medical care.

***

The ban on transitioning is a radical move that completely goes against the previously existing legislation. It may come as a surprise, but the Russian legal procedure for changing the gender marker was previously considered by the trans community to be one of the simplest and most humane worldwide — all you had to do was set up an appointment with the medical board and get a certificate. In many European countries, including Bulgaria, Romania, and Latvia, as well as in some US states, changing gender in documents requires prior surgical intervention or even sterilisation.

In Russia, on the other hand, it was possible to first change one’s documents and only then decide whether or not to change one’s body. The only problem is that there are not many certified medical boards, meaning that the process can drag on for months. Not surprisingly, most certified clinics are located in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

It is not very easy to find information about trans people, transitioning, medical boards, and legal issues, but it is possible. In recent years, organisations have emerged that publish guidelines and share experiences, but this information is often blocked and removed from search results under the pretext of “protection from propaganda”.

You had to talk to strangers in chat rooms, to seek out trans-friendly doctors. Nowadays, everything is much easier, in some clinics you can even set an appointment with the medical board online,” he says.

Sasha went to his medical board appointment in St. Petersburg. He claims the process was not overly rigorous. He was given a lot of tests on his identity and psycho-emotional state, some of which had to be done on the spot and some at home. “I don’t think these tests are difficult as long as you are confident and understand yourself well,” Sasha says.

In addition to the tests, the doctors asked questions about future plans, relationships with friends and parents, and whether he had savings for a rainy day. Sasha says they were trying to determine if he risked “falling out of society” after transitioning.

Though they all have the same set of doctors, the boards differ from one another. Sasha’s acquaintances told him that in Moscow it can be a little harder to get the desired certificate. Sasha himself perceives the phenomenon of such boards favourably and is not sure that changing gender in documents is something that you should be able to do quickly.

“This is a serious decision. There should be an examination. Without overdoing it, sure, but you should be able to sign up, pay the money, and get everything you need,” Sasha believes.

‘People will despise you’

After moving away from home, Sasha had his first “proper and serious” conversation with his parents: he told them about his plans to pass the medical board examination and start hormone therapy. It seemed at the time that the family reacted with understanding, saying that doctors know what is best.

But once Sasha passed the examination, his parents abruptly changed their tune. “They started saying things like: ‘This is a medical error! This can’t be true! We will never have this in our family’,” Sasha recalls. To keep things at bay and meet his parents halfway, Sasha agreed to delay changing the gender marker in his ID. But he did not refuse hormone therapy.

At the start of his sophomore year, Sasha got his first prescription for masculinising hormones and began taking them. His parents, naturally, noticed the changes when he visited them for the holidays. His voice became lower, and his body was changing shape. “I’m a terrible gaslighter,” Sasha laughs. “I told my mum she was just imagining it.”

For a couple of years Sasha successfully managed to fend off the occasional attacks from his parents. Living in another city helped. 

“They got all indignant once again. Told me that I would ruin my life and people would despise and hate me. Quite the optimists, aren’t they,” Sasha recalls.

What next?

Sasha had not planned to change his documents until several years later because he did not want complications at university, but Russian lawmakers intervened. “I thought I had a quiet life. I thought I’d start earning money, become independent, and that would solve everything. Whereas now I am forced to leave my comfort zone. I realise that I will face a lot of difficulties at university and in the dorm. I don’t know how people around me will feel about it. That’s something that I’m really anxious about,” Sasha says.

He has already applied to change his birth certificate, so by law he should not have any trouble since that part of the bill is not retroactive. But those trans people who, for various reasons, fail to change their documents in time, will face difficulties.

***

In the international trans community, many advocate against the “medicalisation” of transness, proposing to give people the right to change their name, gender marker, and body at will without any medical requirements and diagnoses.

In Russia, people had no such right. And the amendments approved by the State Duma on Thursday will deprive people of the right to decide what to do with their own bodies even within what is a recognised medical diagnosis. Sasha says that previously it was even sometimes possible for trans people to receive free medical care, including some surgeries, through the state healthcare system.

Doctors who, despite the restrictions, will continue to perform gender-affirming surgeries risk losing their licence, says a lawyer of the Coming Out LGBT group.

The lawyer, who wished to remain anonymous, believes that doctors may still have leeway to perform such surgeries, but only those that involve removing genitals and not creating new ones.

she explains.

Even before the law, not many doctors in Russia understood the specifics of trans health. The all-encompassing new restrictions, including the ban on “LGBT propaganda”, which can be applied to virtually anything, will likely affect trans people’s access to considerate medical specialists.

Sasha, for instance, is wary of disclosing his hormone treatment and how that may affect his health to just any doctor: “If I get sick, I can’t just go to the hospital and tell them everything about myself. And doctors will diagnose me with something that an understanding doctor would have immediately ruled out.”

Sasha admits that, for a long time, he tried to turn a blind eye to the actions of the authorities and simply live his life. “Now I realise that this is the fate of many. When I was 14-15, I had some hope. You vaguely knew that you had to go to a big city and they would help you here. Now, there’s nothing left.”