In this text, “transgender” and “trans” people are used as an umbrella definition that includes trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and anyone who identifies with the term.
If we try to answer the question of transgender people’s experiences in today’s Russia, the most accurate answer would be that their experiences all differ. All too often activists and human rights defenders have to answer this question in such a way as to convince a lukewarm audience that trans people need help and support. For me, as a transgender person, this leads to objectifying and simplifying the picture, the implication being that we can only talk about ourselves as victims of violence and discrimination.
This is not to say that trans people in Russia are doing well. Trans people have been hit hard by the intensification of repressive policies targeting the LGBT+ community after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ban on gender transitioning in the summer of 2023. “There was a rush on the eve of the ban, everyone was trying to get appointments with [medical] committees while they were still operating, to pass examinations, to change documents, because it was so unclear what to expect. The feeling was apocalyptic,” says N., an anonymous trans activist from a Russian metropolis. “Many were desperate because they didn’t have the opportunity to deal with these things in the moment: some because they didn’t have the money, others because they were underage. Some said they would commit suicide because they used to have hope and then everything collapsed.”
For the authorities, banning trans people was not enough. In 2023, the Russian Supreme Court declared the LGBT+ community an “extremist organization” outlawed in Russia. This ruling opened a new era of criminalization: even the criminal “sodomy” law in the USSR, abolished in 1993, was arguably less cruel, because its maximum penalty was five years in prison. Ties to an “extremist organization,” now, however, are punishable by up to ten years. There are already people who have been prosecuted on “extremist charges”: several have been fined and arrested for such “manifestations of extremism” as rainbow earrings and photos with a rainbow flag, and three employees of the queer bar Pose in Orenburg have been held in pretrial detention for six months on charges of “organizing an extremist organization” because drag artists performed in the bar.
Repressive legislation enables violence and hatred. Politicians increasingly talk about “perverts who want to change children’s sex” and reiterate transmisogynistic narratives about “men who pretend to be women.” Such statements have been spread by Vladimir Putin and the propagandistic media. The official discourse is emboldening right-wing groups, and has led to increased aggression and a worsening problem of domestic violence.
And yet, even in dark times, people continue to live everyday life, no matter how far from the norm it may be. In this everyday life, all kinds of feelings and situations are present: from pain, fear, and despair, to joy, strength, resistance, and intimacy.
Life in the semi-underground
Discussions about the experiences of trans people in Russia in recent years often focus on emigration. There are no statistics on how many transgender people have left the country, but anecdotal evidence observed by activists suggests that many have emigrated after February 24, 2022 or plan to do so in the near future. Yet, of course, not everyone is in a position to emigrate. According to estimates (based on studies claiming that about 1–3% of people in the world may be transgender), there are about 1.5 million trans people living in Russia. It is impossible to move all of them to other countries, even less so at a time of an already existing international refugee crisis.
Besides, transgender people are not an “exhaustible resource.” Almost all of us grew up in ordinary cisgender and heterosexual families, and despite the ban on “propaganda,” trans people will continue to be born in Russia. Transgender people are also a group that is systematically discriminated against and under-resourced. In recent years, several transgender and queer refugees have committed suicide in refugee camps in the Netherlands due to the hardship of emigration.
Many trans people therefore stay in the country and keep on doing activist and volunteer work in the community. Like some other activists, I believe that now is not the best time to detail the situation of Russian trans activism and trans medicine in the media. The fragile mutual support systems that allow some transgender people to get help are too vulnerable in a repressive police state. Exposing what is happening could further complicate the situation; I cannot predict which details are riskier to uncover, so this text will not contain any specific details on this subject.
That the current situation cannot be openly discussed is in itself quite telling of where things stand. After 2023, the transgender community in Russia went underground. Many spaces where trans people could communicate closed down, and service organizations that supported people to find trans-friendly services disappeared. Activists who remain in the country maintain anonymity. N. recounts: “It is as if we have rolled back a couple of decades. Back then, too, things could only be discussed in secret, on anonymous forums. This is morally difficult, because in the few years before the war there was a small but still open community, people were doing blogs and spoke publicly at events. This has shrunk dramatically, many initiatives having deleted their pages and publications from open access so as not to expose anyone.”
K., a trans woman who lives in one of Russia’s ethnic minority regions, says that her biggest problem is isolation. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, she attended protests and as a result was detained and given an administrative arrest. K. then left the country for several months, but eventually had to return, first to deal with paperwork issues and then to help ailing family members. “I live in a small city, and, as a trans lesbian girl, it is extremely difficult to even find friendship, let alone a romantic relationship. Interestingly, I encounter transphobia much more often from young people, from people my age, than from older folks. My elderly neighbors know I am a trans person, but there is no hostility. Recently I was applying for a job, and I had to pass a medical examination. They sent me to a gynecologist. There was no aggression from the doctors either, only surprise and some questions. Moreover, some doctors expressed dissatisfaction with the ban on transition in Russia. At the same time, younger people can be transphobic and aggressive; once I was beaten up by a group of young people here.”
How trans people are supported and persecuted in Russia
N. says: “I think that your environment determines the kind of life you can have in Russia. I stay here largely because I am surrounded by very nice people. And I know other trans persons who have wonderful families, who are supported by their colleagues at work. It’s not true that everyone is our enemy now, luckily many have remained humane. It does take some luck. If you have it, living becomes much easier, because without social connections, without protection, you can’t cope at all.”
Acceptance from loved ones means a lot to us today. K. says, “My mom supports me. At first, when I came out, she was in denial. But then we went on a trip together when I still had my male ID. We were checking into a hostel, and she saw and heard how I was spoken to, how people treated me as a curiosity. It affected her and she accepted me. She stands up for me. The way she sees it now is: I had a son, now I have a daughter, and it’s not that big of a deal.”
It is much more difficult living without family acceptance. Sadly, in some cases, rejection can take extreme forms of violence. S., who volunteers for an activist group helping trans people, says: “I know that my picture is somewhat skewed, because people who are doing fine don’t come to us. Those who do are trans people who have suffered violence, usually either from relatives or from transphobes who leaked their names and data online. Trans people in this situation are very vulnerable, they have no way to protect themselves. Often they need the most basic things: to find temporary housing or to buy food because their parents kicked them out of the house, or because they were fired from their job after being outed, or everything at once.”
In 2022, authorities expanded the “propaganda law” that had previously banned “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” among minors. The law now includes a ban on “propaganda of sex change” among people of all ages. The first victim was a transgender sex worker from Moscow, fined 100,000 rubles (about 1,000€). Police are now actively enforcing the law against transgender migrant sex workers who come to Russia to work from Central Asian countries. Police officers find the girls through online ads and arrest them, while courts issue “propaganda” fines and deportation orders.
Due to criminalization and repression, trans people can easily find themselves in danger from family, society, and the state all at once. Against the backdrop of the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state is making “enemies of the people” out of transgender people, using trans people’s understandable reluctance to support the Russian regime. According to S., “it also often happens that people ask for help because they have been charged with administrative or criminal offenses, usually for ‘LGBT propaganda,’ and this is often accompanied by ‘discrediting the army’. This is because it is often easy to find anti-war statements and criticisms of Russia on the social media pages of politically active trans people. The police routinely do so in smaller cities: it helps them to ramp up their crime-solving statistics without much effort. We help people with political cases to leave the country if possible.”
Another practice that has become widespread due to the repressive laws is the use of punitive psychiatry on trans people. S. says: “Trans people who come to us are often either threatened with compulsory treatment or have already been subjected to it. Ordering compulsory treatment is a popular choice among the judges. The court can almost indefinitely extend the terms of such ‘treatment,’ and it’s pretty hard to get out. The worst thing is when it happens to minors who get committed by their families. We receive such requests, but there is almost nothing we can do. According to the law, parents can act as they see fit in such situations, and we are unable to help until the person turns 18.”
Ada, a transgender journalist and one of the few people who managed to escape from doctors, described her experience of conversion therapy in several media outlets last year. S. estimates that currently, dozens of transgender people are being held in psychiatric facilities across the country and cannot get out. “If the family or the court so wish, and with the connivance of the staff of psychiatric institutions in Russia, it is quite easy to recognize a person as incapacitated and have them placed into an asylum. There are, of course, different institutions and different employees, and some do not want to get involved in something like this; but others agree. Sometimes relatives pay bribes to have a person committed. The person is then locked up and completely controlled; in the worst cases they can be beaten, force-fed or injected with heavy medications, leading to various health issues and mental disorders.”
The risk level depends on where the person lives. According to a study by the Sphere Foundation and LGBT group Vyhod (Coming Out), which surveyed over six thousand LGBT+ people in 2022, living in the North Caucasus and the Far East correlates with a greater likelihood of experiencing violence, poverty, and discrimination. At the same time, most LGBT+ people who left Russia were from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Russia’s hyper-centralization is reflected in the fact that LGBT+ people from the biggest cities have more opportunities, both in terms of jobs and access to support systems. Many activists note that it is easier to help a trans person in distress from central Russia than a trans person from the “national republics” and northern regions. The North Caucasus regions, which have suffered from the Russian-Chechen wars and Russian colonization, occupy a special place on this list. Ramzan Kadyrov’s Moscow-backed rule in Chechnya encourages homophobia and transphobia, while colonial attitudes toward the North Caucasus remain unreflected among many activists.
Who is behind the spread of hatred toward transgender people?
Despite all the talk about Russia’s uniqueness, our country is following the global trend of hatred toward trans people. In the last few years, trans people, especially transgender women and transfeminine people, have become the target of right-wing populism across the world. In the USA and Europe, conservative politicians have fueled hatred by spreading bogus stories about trans people seeking to “convert” children and teens into being transgender. Members of the State Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament) cited these myths at a parliament session in June before voting in favor of the discriminatory law.
Radical right-wing rhetoric has long used the “child protection” narrative in any context according to its needs. But where did the “protecting children from transgenderism” trend come from? Some believe that this current trend can be traced back to a landmark event in June 2015, when a new issue of the popular lifestyle magazine TIME was released in the United States. For the first time in history, a transgender woman, actress Laverne Cox, was on the cover. The cover story, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” talked about how trans people were no longer invisible in society and their stories were appearing in the media. In the years that followed, optimism was replaced by the understanding that visibility does not protect against violence. Wibke Straube, a researcher of queer media and film from Sweden, writes: “The ‘transgender tipping point’ is […] not only a step into the cultural spotlight with its beauty of visibility and its promise of recognition, but also a step in a direction in which many lives, more than ever before, may be threatened and possibly taken.” The visibility of transgender people has come to be used by conservative politicians around the world to shift blame and rally conservative audiences.
The subject of transgender children and adolescents is especially important to Western politicians. A complete ban on medical care for trans teens is one of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pillars. “My plan is to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth,” Trump said in a campaign video message. He was echoed by a number of European politicians. During his presidency, Andrzej Duda, member of the Polish right-wing Law and Justice Party, sought to “protect the children” by vetoing a law that would make it easier for trans people to change their documents. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, leader of the conservative Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Alliance and Putin’s main European ally in the war against Ukraine, banned gender transitions in the country three years ago. Bulgaria did the same last year. Former British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, leader of the Conservative Party, cited concerns for children’s “safety” earlier this year to explain the ban on mentioning gender identity in schools.
Sadly, “child protection” rhetoric is hitting transgender children and teens. In early 2023 in Britain, sixteen-year-old transgender girl Brianna Ghey was found in a park with more than twenty stab wounds; she died before the ambulance arrived. Two fifteen-year-olds received life in prison for the murder; in their text chat, which was recovered and presented in court, one of them said that he wanted to hear if the victim would “scream like a man or a girl.” It is far from an isolated incident: between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023, at least 321 transgender people were killed worldwide.
Hate crimes also occur in Russia but remain mostly unknown to the public because trans people there are more likely to hide their identity. In 2020, a transgender man, Alexander, was brutally murdered by his neighbors in Chelyabinsk, a story made public by his widow. The same year, in St. Petersburg, producer Yuri Yankovsky killed Tamara Khatamjonova, a transgender sex worker from Uzbekistan—Yankovsky was sentenced to 1 year and 10 months in prison but was released for time served.
Hatred of transgender people in the West is enabled by the ideology of Christian nationalism and Christian democracy. These movements, under the guise of religion, oppose feminism and the rights of LGBT+ people. Their ideas are spread by influential organizations, such as the American World Congress of Families, which was founded in 1997. The World Congress of Families is a Christian interfaith community where conservative politicians from around the world meet to discuss strategies to consolidate power. The star of the anti-LGBT+ movement in Russia, politician Yelena Mizulina, is known for attending World Congress of Families events discussing “protection of traditional values.” The extent to which Western organizations interfere in the politics of other countries can be gauged from an investigation that found that Christian groups have spent $20 million USD to promote anti-LGBT+ legislation in African countries. Christian organizations are funded by Trump and other billionaires and also receive support from corporations. For example, Google has provided free advertising space to the anti-abortion and anti-LGBT+ Alliance Defending Freedom since 2020.
One of the pioneers in the fight against “LGBT propaganda” in Russia was Christian politician Alexander Chuev, who proposed a bill banning “propaganda of homosexuality” in the State Duma in 2003. Chuev’s curriculum vitae includes working with international organizations, such as the Robert Schuman Institute in Budapest, in the 1990s. The institute’s website says that it promotes “the idea of a united Europe and the basic values of Christian democracy.” Chuev copied the notion of “propaganda” from the British Section 28” of Margaret Thatcher’s era, which for many years promoted discrimination against LGBT+ people in the UK. Now the “propaganda” ban is spreading further through Russia’s colonial influence: a similar bill has been adopted in Kyrgyzstan and is also about to be adopted in Belarus, where mass repression against queer people is already underway.
The transgender community and war
Russia is embedded in the global anti-transgender political trend and participates in the process of cultural exchange between conservatives and right-wing radicals around the world. This is especially important at the moment because Russia’s support of Western right-wing radicals allows it to continue to wage war in Ukraine.
Treating LGBT+ people as collateral damage in foreign policy is not a new strategy. According to researchers, the 1993 repealing of the “sodomy” law occurred solely because Russia wanted to join international organizations. In the 2000s, as the pseudo-lesbian Russian duo t.A.T.u. toured around the world and a queer renaissance was unfolding in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country sought to improve its international reputation against the backdrop of the Russian-Chechen war. t.A.T.u. made several remarkable anti-war statements at the time: a song about the bombing of Yugoslavia; the slogan “Fuck the war!” against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the progressive duo did not comment on the Russian-Chechen war, probably because the collective’s producers knew very well that protests by LGBT artists would be tolerated in some directions but not the others.
Hatred of transgender people has now become part of Russian military propaganda. Fake stories about transgender people are popular content in the Telegram channels of Russian military bloggers who tell their subscribers about trans people in the Ukrainian and American army, worry about “discrimination against women” in the context of hypothetical participation of trans athletes in competitions; they have notably even mastered more advanced terminology such as non-binary.
It is important to note that one of the main “unrussian” images used in propaganda is that of transgender women or transfeminine people. This is in step with the West. Transmisogyny, the intersection of transphobia and misogyny directed at transwomen, is one of the main propaganda tools of Western conservatives.
What happens next?
The trans people I spoke to for this article are reluctant to make predictions about the future of Russia. N. says: “It scares me that even if Russia loses the war and there is a change of power, everything will have to be started over. Even if all the discriminatory laws are repealed, how much damage has already been done? And the repealing of these laws is not a given, because as they always say, ‘there are bigger problems’.”
In 2023, when the State Duma was debating a ban on transitioning, many queer users reached out to Russian opposition politicians on Twitter, asking them to speak out in favor of transgender people. In many cases, this simple request was met with an ambivalent response. Lyubov Sobol dodged the issue, saying: “Let’s not forget that the top priority on the agenda is regime change.” Vladimir Milov blocked activists who demanded the discriminatory law be condemned. Maxim Katz responded to the calls by saying: “I am not speaking out now on Russian domestic issues that are being contested.”
The lack of coverage of the anti-transgender agenda by opposition leaders led to the creation of an “Open Letter in Support of Queer People.” The original of this document, which was signed by several hundred people, is no longer available, but the text has been preserved: “Queer people have always been a low-profile but active force within the opposition and have supported it. They work in human rights organizations, the media, on election campaigns; they have organized columns at rallies, donated money and written about the work of opposition leaders. […] You can’t beat Putin in populism, so stop flirting with the homophobic agenda for the sake of outreach: if the opposition does not reconsider its ideological and social values, the current situation will never end; freedom and human rights are inseparable.” In the letter, the activists called on democratic organizations and politicians to openly support LGBT+ people.
Many signatories accompanied their names under the letter with more or less playful self-descriptions like “trans person, election observer,” “non-binary lawyer,” “queer, collected signatures for election campaigns,” “they/them, served time for protests.” Hundreds of these signatures have themselves become a political act, a demonstration of the political agency of transgender and queer people. But realizing this agency has a long way to go, as our own history shows.
In 1974, when the Soviet Union had its “sodomy” law, Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov served a second sentence in a high-security camp on those charges. As queer researcher Dan Healey writes in his book Sexual and Gender Dissidence in Revolutionary Russia, at this time the famous Italian gay activist Angelo Pezzana came to Moscow and asked academic and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov to speak out in support of Parajanov and Soviet gay men more generally. In his autobiography, Pezzana quotes his response from memory: “I won’t be able to help you. If I did, if I expressed myself on a topic such as homosexuality, it would discredit my image. They would immediately accuse me of being homosexual, and I, who for all my life have fought for civil rights in this unfortunate country, would lose credibility.” The Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta published an article mocking Pezzana’s visit and his activities in support for Parajanov. The author ridiculed the activist, pointing out that the “fighter for the right to sexual perversion” is not supported by Amnesty International or Sakharov. Pezzana, who was initially outraged by the dissident’s response, years later calls his fear “justified.”
After the decriminalization of “sodomy” in 1993, no one cared to release the seventy-three men who, Healey points out, remained imprisoned. LGBT+ people who suffered Soviet-era repression have not been recognized as political prisoners and have not been rehabilitated to this day. In 2008, GayNews.ru wrote about an initiative to recognize Soviet LGBT+ people as victims of political repression: “About 250,000 people were convicted under Article 121 in Soviet Russia. Additionally, thousands of men and women were subjected to forced psychiatric ‘treatment’ for ‘homosexualism’.” Needless to say, the initiative was never accomplished.
K. says: “I still hope to leave the country in the spring, although it is unlikely that I will leave for good: I will have to travel back and forth, because my mother is not in a good health and needs help here. And the future is a tricky question… After the hypothetical collapse of the regime and the hypothetical collapse of Russia, I don’t think anything will change quickly for the better, only very slowly. I think that everything will, by default, remain the same for a long time.”
