Elis Femina, a trans woman from Kazakhstan, has been bullied and humiliated by police officers in Russia following her arrest for “disobeying” the law enforcement forces. She has also been fined for shouting “Glory to Ukraine!”, Mediazona reports.

Femina was detained in the early hours of 28 May in a Moscow club where she was celebrating her birthday. After she left the premises to walk her friend to her taxi, a security guard refused to let the woman back in. In the heat of the moment, Femina shouted out “Glory to Ukraine!”.

“Someone wanted to attack me, the security guard did as well, I started fighting back, then the security pushed me against the wall and called the police,” she said.

Femina was held at the police station the whole day, fined 50,000 rubles (€550) for “discrediting the Russian army” and sent to a detention centre for “disobeying police officers”. She rejects the police report as fabricated and pleads not guilty.

According to Femina, the police officers humiliated her following the detention: she was berated, shouted at, and requested to refer to herself with her dead name. She was also forced to undress fully in front of male police officers. The law enforcement agents then threatened to send her to the frontlines to “service our men”. Moreover, her phone was confiscated and examined, questions were asked about her private life and transitioning.

Following the arrest, Femina was fired from an architecture company where she was employed.

On 14 June, Russia’s lower house of parliament unanimously adopted a bill, banning trans people from changing gender markers in documents and undergoing “medical interventions”. The bill explicitly prohibits doctors from performing gender-affirming surgeries, except for cases of treating “congenital physiological anomalies”.