MPs approve law banning gender reassignment

2023-06-14 17:34:20

It is a new stone in the ultra-conservative edifice of the Kremlin. This Wednesday, the deputies russian approved in first reading a law prohibiting the change of sex surgically or civilly in Russiaannounced the lower house of the Russian parliament.

“The draft law which establishes a ban (…) on medical interventions aimed at sex change and on the registration of sex changes without medical interventions in the civil status register has been approved,” the Duma announced in a statement. 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.

Defend “traditional family values”

These exceptional medical operations will however have to be validated at the government level, according to the bill. “Currently, there is a developed sex reassignment industry in Russia that includes dishonest doctors, psychologists, a network of organizations and activists LGBT the MPs said in a letter seeking to defend their bill.

“They carry out their destructive activity against adolescents and youth,” they added, echoing the rhetoric of stigmatization of LGBT+ circles widespread 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 “.

The fight against homosexual “propaganda”

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] 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, legislation Russian prohibits homosexual “propaganda”, a vague term that gives the authorities a wide scope of application.