You can fight those who threaten you or those who you think threaten you. If you are a mobster in a lawless environment, you can fight using mob methods, just as Lenin fought against the tsarists, the bourgeoisie, and other perceived enemies of the proletarian revolution.

You can fight the powerful, even if they are not hostile. What if they decide to use their power against you?

You can fight your competitors. Comrade Stalin, for example, killed every single one of them. What was I to do, he would have said in his defence. Had I not killed them, they would have killed me.

But what is the point of fighting transgender people? They do not threaten anyone, are few in number, and have so many problems that most of them could not care less about the bigwigs’ political games. The same goes for the rest of the LGBT crowd: they are mostly non-political people who have it tough all over the world, and especially under such a regime as Russia’s.

So, Russian authorities launch an anti-LGBT campaign in the midst of war. But that is not enough for them: step by step, they are taking action against gender reassignment. And they have almost succeeded. The Russian parliament has passed in first reading a law that forbids LGBT people to change their physiological and social status to match their identity.

In many cases, transgender people are forced to go through hell just to be themselves. They feel they are a woman, but have male genitalia and are specified as male in their ID. Or vice versa. Sometimes it’s possible to get out of this hell even without much effort, for instance without resorting to reassignment surgery. Until recently, our laws allowed it. Now you are not allowed anything — neither medically nor bureaucratically.

Think about it: the law forbids a person from doing things with their body that concern only the person in question and in no way infringe on the rights and interests of others. You are not free, as you had thought, you are a serf, a slave! This unanimously (!) passed law will condemn people to eternal suffering. Suicide rates will go up — unfortunately, it is often seen as the only way out. Some will leave Russia, of course, but not all.

All of this, of course, violates every possible written and unwritten law. But almost everything our authorities have been doing in recent years violates both laws and morals — nothing new here. So that is not my point. My point is, why? Why persecute those who do not bother anyone?

And there is a reason! Do not think of it as pointless sadism. Those who do it — who give the orders and take great pleasure in following — have quite a (pseudo-)rational intention.

Firstly, they are always looking for something to do that will both please the crowd and be harmless for them — something that won’t, for example, funnel the money they planned to keep for themselves into some nonsense like pensions. The best option is to bully someone that the public has a prejudice against. But you can’t go against big business or the generals — they might fight back. Whereas gay and transgender people do not pose a risk: they differ too much from the general public, so very few people will sympathise with them.

So the authorities tell the general public:

And it doesn’t matter that you live in poverty while our toilets are made of gold. The main thing is that we stand together against those people. And we stand against them not just out of spite, but by virtue of our shared moral superiority. Then all we’ll have to do will be to bring back corporal punishment in schools, and everything will be as bequeathed by our ancestors.

Secondly — and most importantly, I find — this law and others like it pursue the very goal for which the war against Ukraine is being fought, for the sake of which democratic institutions have been destroyed and people have been jailed: to make everyone march in line and be the same. Any step aside is treason. People need to be simple, modest, and live by the rules. If you don’t know how to do it, we’ll teach you, if you don’t want to do it, we’ll force you.

Anything that breaks the rules as they understand them — in dress, in lifestyle, in family planning — has to be corrected, medicated, and destroyed. A man must be a man — with the appropriate sexual orientation, a love of weapons, an innate crudeness, and all his masculine sins. And a woman should be a woman. Everyone should know their place and love it.

We are not villains, they will tell you, we are ready to cure these homos and trannies, and we’ll even create a special institute to study — and fix! — LGBT people. They’ll be better off this way and they’ll thank us later. Like the Ukrainians, when we finally liberate them.

There is also a pragmatic aspect to the new law.

And, what’s even more horrifying, this will turn some homosexual couples into heterosexual couples, meaning they will be able to adopt children! So it’s not really “gender reassignment” that they want — they just want to cheat their government, but we won’t let them.

I think, however, that the pragmatic aspect is secondary. What matters is the aesthetics of the system, the ban on deciding one’s own fate. To each their own, according to their kinds.

At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, it took several attempts to start a new Lada car. This came as no surprise — this has been the state of affairs for a while by now. This is because progress — not the progress from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, but the progress from Homer to Goethe and from Mendel to modern genetics — is inextricable from the expansion of freedoms and the liberation from the idea of predestination. Predestination by birthplace and parental religion, class, and race. Predestination by gender.

In theory, be you born female or male, you can choose any career and even change your gender if you wish to. Nobody will do it unless it’s necessary, but there’s always the opportunity. Places where human freedom is put first — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance — give birth to such phenomena like the Silicon Valley, a tiny patch of land that creates half of all innovation on the planet. Meanwhile, in places that are strongholds of “traditional values” as understood by the authorities, where feminism is deemed extremist, cars don’t start, tanks don’t function, and people don’t live long enough to retire. Not that they could survive on what the government pays them as pensions anyway.

Our authorities’ desire for a “proper” world with feminine women and masculine men, for a universal faith, for archaicism in its various manifestations, from obsolete school subjects to the ideas of Eurasianism, is sincere and voluntary. Look at how the Russian parliament discussed the law banning gender reassignment: joyfully and jocularly, with contempt for all the smart alecs who tried to talk sense into them during committee meetings. They like their new religion. The time of the triumphant bastards has come.

It is not sadism. They are simply building their world, in which there is no place not only for transgender people, but for all of us.