The State Duma has prepared a bill on a complete ban on gender reassignment, Vedomosti writes.
The author of the bill, Vladislav Davankov (New People faction – NV), proposes to ban citizens of the Russian Federation from changing their gender through medical procedures if they are diagnosed with mental illness and behavioral disorders.
“We have prepared a bill that does not allow changing sex at the request of a person in the first place. And we have prepared a decision to ban sex change by medical methods,” Davankov said.
The initiator of the document also proposes to prohibit Russians who have changed their sex from making appropriate amendments to their passports and other documents without a certificate of gender change issued by a medical organization.
The bill, as the publication clarifies, has not yet been submitted to the lower house of the Russian parliament.
At the same time, it is not excluded that the final version of the document will still undergo changes, a source in the State Duma told Vedomosti. In particular, at a meeting of the lower house of parliament, it was discussed that the law should clearly define medical indications, in connection with which a person will still be able to obtain permission for a sex change operation and only after that – to replace documents.
The Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, which advocates “strict regulation in the field of sex change,” notes that it is necessary to take into account situations associated with “genetic abnormalities.”
According to psychologist Alena Vatolina, the ban on transgender transition proposed by the initiators of the bill may cause even more difficulties in the field of mental health in the group of people with transgender people, up to an increase in the number of suicides.
Currently, gender reassignment surgery is performed if the patient has a psychiatric certificate with a diagnosis of transsexualism. To replace the gender marker in the documents, you need to go through a medical examination from a sexologist, a medical psychologist and a psychiatrist. Based on the diagnosis, a “certificate of gender change” is issued, which is valid for one year and gives the right to officially change documents (first a birth certificate, then a passport and everything else).
Earlier it became known that the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation will soon begin work on introducing amendments to the legislation, excluding the possibility of changing the gender marker in the passport and other documents.
In February, Mediazona, which studied data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, estimated that Russians received 936 passports in 2022 due to gender reassignment amid the war in Ukraine, “partial mobilization” and tightening laws against LGBT people. This is a record in recent years. The leaders in changing the gender marker were Moscow with the Moscow region and St. Petersburg with the Leningrad region.
In December 2022, President Vladimir Putin signed a package of laws banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” and “propaganda of gender reassignment and pedophilia.” For violation of the law, a fine of up to 400 thousand rubles for citizens, up to 800 thousand rubles for officials and up to 5 million rubles for legal entities is provided. Foreigners, in addition, will be threatened with expulsion from Russia (Article 6.21.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
Citizens will be fined up to 200,000 rubles, officials up to 400,000, and legal entities up to 4 million for distributing “information demonstrating non-traditional sexual relations or capable of making them want to change their sex” among minors.
Life of LGBTQ+ people in Russia against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine: the rise of homophobia, propaganda of intolerance and mass emigration
