The State Duma gathered to ban sex change: it will not work to get rid of the draft

Expert: “Collisions can occur at every step”

The bill “on the ban on transgender people”, which made a splash last week, was submitted to the State Duma. There is rare unity in parliament around opposition to gender reassignment operations in adults – the draft law led by Vyacheslav Volodin is supported by the leaders of all five parliamentary factions. If we summarize the multi-page legal work, then it is about the prohibition of “transitional” sex-change operations, unless it concerns some kind of congenital anomalies in children. The decision to conduct such an operation will be made by special commissions based on federal medical centers. According to the draft new law, it is forbidden to change gender identity in official documents “on a certificate”.

Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, faction leaders Gennady Zyuganov (KPRF), Sergei Mironov (Fair Russia), Leonid Slutsky (LDPR), Sergei Neverov (United Russia), deputy speaker of the chamber Anna Kuznetsova and others prepared a bill for consideration by the State Duma deputies.

Rumors are circulating in the Duma lobby that the law is being discussed and introduced so unanimously because they consider it as part of the fight against LGBT propaganda. It is possible that both initiatives will even be united – the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, is allegedly busying himself with this. And that law, “against LGBT”, has already unanimously passed the first reading.

In addition to the ban on medical operations at a conscious age, transgender people are, in fact, taken out of the legal field. This is evidenced by the “veto” proposed by the same bill for the registry offices – it will no longer be possible to make any changes to the documents in connection with the change of sex. You cannot change a person’s first and last name from male to female or from female to male, etc. As you know, documents about birth, marriage, death are registered in the registry office, original and repeated certificates are issued. “One of the first steps to consolidate family values ​​in Russian legislation may be the abolition of the possibility of changing sex in a passport and other documents,” said Russian Minister of Justice Konstantin Chuichenko. And the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, focuses on another facet of the problem – a “fake” sex change in order to avoid conscription.

– It is clear that it will be necessary to revise a lot of federal laws and by-laws – from the law “On the Fundamentals of Health Care” to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, – lawyer Stanislav Popov believes. – “Family Code”, for example. After all, people who have changed sex create families too. In general, it is still difficult for me to evaluate the innovation. If such a law is adopted, it will create conflicts “at every turn.”

The group of lawmakers led by Volodin motivates the initiative to “ban transgender people” by fighting for healthy family values. In the explanatory note, the authors indicate that “no “intermediate” and “additional” variants of sexes or genders” will be provided for by the law of the Russian Federation. As well as the possibility of a conscious sex change and the notorious “parent number 1” and “parent number 2”.

“Indeed, now many people do not even imagine the difference between a transsexual and a transgender (the first one underwent a transition operation, completely biologically changing the sex, and the second does not), – says social psychologist Valery Raushinsky. – There is “gender dysphoria” in the international classification system ICD-11. This is when a person’s biological sex does not match their gender identity. Scientists argue about the frequency of such cases, but they are at least 0.4% in the population. By the way, in the former ICD-10 there was a “gender disorder”, but now they write more loyally, “gender inconsistency”. I can add to this that in terms of queer culture, which began to develop rapidly in the West since the 2000s, there are more than 20 options for “sexes”, or genders. To comprehend this is quite difficult for an unprepared person.

Sex reassignment surgery is completely banned in countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Yemen. With reservations, transgenderness with or without operations is accepted in Singapore, Korea, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Israel.