Russian deputies approved on Wednesday at first reading a law prohibiting surgical or civil status sex change in Russia, a new sign of the conservative tension of the Kremlin in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine.
“The draft law which establishes a total ban on medical interventions aimed at sex change and on the registration of sex changes without medical intervention in the civil state has been approved”, announced the lower house of the Russian parliament, the duma, in a press release.
The text provides for exceptions allowing this type of surgical intervention in cases of “congenital anomalies” in children in the formation of their genital organs.
These exceptional medical operations will however have to be validated at the government level, according to the bill.
Barrier
“Currently, there is a developed gender reassignment industry in Russia that includes dishonest doctors, psychologists, a network of LGBT organizations and activists,” the lawmakers said in a letter seeking to defend their bill.
“They carry out their destructive activity against adolescents and youth,” they added, echoing widespread rhetoric of stigmatizing LGBTQ+ circles in Russia.
The text proposed by the leaders of the main parliamentary groups also says it is based on the Russian Constitution, which since amendments introduced in 2020 defends “traditional family values” and defines marriage only as the “union of a man and a girl. ‘a woman “.
With this law, “we preserve Russia with its cultural values, its traditional foundations for our descendants and we create a barrier to prevent the penetration of a Western anti-family ideology”, affirmed one of the authors of the project, Piotr Tolstoy, a deputy speaker of the Duma.
“I really want our guys who are currently defending Russia’s honor at the cost of their lives [en combattant en Ukraine, NDLR] can return and see that the country has changed, that their sacrifice has not been in vain”, he continued.
In parallel with the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian authorities have accelerated the promotion of a conservative policy on morals, in association with the Orthodox Church, in the name of “traditional values” in the face of Westerners presented as “decadent”.
Since 2013, Russian law has banned homosexual “propaganda,” a vague term that gives authorities a wide scope of application.