A group of deputies of 368 people, headed by the speaker of the chamber Vyacheslav Volodin and the leaders of all Duma factions on Tuesday evening submitted to the State Duma a bill banning sex reassignment not related to the treatment of congenital physical anomalies. According to the interlocutor of “Kommersant” in the Duma, the text of the initiative was agreed to the last. The deputies plan to consider the document in the first reading on Thursday. The psychiatrist-sexologist called the bill “illogical” and capable of “harmful to domestic health care.” Russia’s trans community launched a petition last week asking for the bill to be dropped, warning that a ban on gender reassignment would lead to an increase in illegal surgeries and suicides.
The text of the resonant bill fit on one page and consists of only two articles. An amendment is being made to the law “On acts of civil status” to invalidate the norm that allows making changes to the record of a civil status act if a person has provided a medical certificate of gender reassignment. Also, the law “On the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens in the Russian Federation” is supplemented by a new article 45.1 “Prohibition of changing the sex of a person.”
“Medical workers are prohibited from carrying out medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person, including the formation of a person’s primary and (or) secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex,” the article says.
At the same time, medical interventions related to the treatment of congenital physiological anomalies of sex formation in children are allowed. But this will require the decision of the medical commission. The procedure for its adoption and the list of organizations that have the authority to do so is approved by the government.
In the explanatory note, the authors appeal to the Constitution, which guards “traditional family values” and protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman. “The Basic Law of the country provides only two genders – men and women, no “intermediate” and “additional” options for sexes or “genders”, categories like “parent # 1” and “parent # 2” are not provided, nor is the possibility sex change,” the authors of the initiative say. But at the same time, in Russia, “the practice of gender reassignment and informing citizens about this possibility is only gaining momentum, in parallel with this, the number of formal confirmation of gender reassignment is growing,” the explanatory note says. It also provides statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs: from 2016 to 2022, 2990 people applied for a replacement of the passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation on the basis of “sex change”, while in 2016 there were only 142, and in 2022 – 996.
Recall that on April 28, Vyacheslav Volodin instructed his deputy Vladislav Davankov (“New People”), who oversees the Duma Committee on Health Protection, to make proposals for legislative regulation of gender reassignment issues. The reason for the urgent consideration of the “sex” issue was the decision of the World Health Organization (WHO) to exclude transgender people from the list of mental disorders, after which the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation made changes to the regulations simplifying the change of sex in documents, and from the commissions that make decisions on the change of sex were psychologists are excluded. In addition, the deputies were concerned that gender reassignment was being used to evade military service for mobilization. On May 25, during the closed part of the plenary session of the Duma, Mr. Davankov reported on the preparation of the bill. After that, as a source in the Duma told Kommersant, the collection of signatures of deputies under the document began, despite the fact that at that time it was not ready. It should be noted that the fashion for bills signed by more than 300 deputies was born in the last autumn session. Then the Duma adopted three initiatives with a similar list of co-authors – on saboteurs, on a ban on LGBT propaganda, and on the possibility of transferring municipal schools to the control of regional authorities. In this (spring) session, the Duma introduced almost the entire composition of a bill to protect children from vaping.
According to the interlocutor of Kommersant, the text of the bill was agreed until the last moment.
Vyacheslav Volodin and the Ministry of Justice advocated a tougher version of the ban, the Ministry of Health insisted that the decision should be made by a medical commission. During the closed part of the meeting of the Duma on May 25, the speaker criticized the Ministry of Health for the uncertainty of its position. According to Kommersant’s information, in the draft version of the bill, only a ban on performing surgical intervention in case of a patient’s mental disorders was indicated.
The psychiatrist-sexologist Oleg Starostin draws attention to the fact that in Russia until 2025 the International Classification of Diseases of the 10th revision (ICD-10) is valid, according to which transsexualism is a diagnosis. In this sense, the bill, according to him, is illogical, because it makes it impossible to receive assistance under the current ICD-10 – “there is a diagnosis, but there is no help.” He believes that the bill will have a “very negative” impact on trans people, as well as harm public health. “Transition is about helping you find your own identity. This leads to a decrease in the risk of depression and suicide in these individuals, their drug and alcohol addiction. That is, a well-established qualified procedure makes it possible to reduce the burden on official healthcare,” says Mr. Starostin.
Russia’s trans community launched a petition last week asking them to withdraw from consideration a bill that “restricts the possibility of changing one’s civil sex and receiving medical care.” According to Yegor Burtsev, a psychologist and coordinator of the project on accessing transgender people to healthcare services, “panic and a sense of the end of normal life arose” within the community. He notes that people in such a situation “will not give up their identity”, but will start looking for ways to underground semi-legal operations, they will buy hormones in underground markets, which can greatly damage their health. “If they don’t succeed, the number of mental health problems will increase, the risk of suicide will increase,” continues Mr. Burtsev. , since they are citizens of Russia, which means this is the end. In his opinion, when adopting the bill, the authorities do not solve the problem of transgender people, but “turn a blind eye to it, but people will not go anywhere, cancel them or not.”