(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Russia set to pass bill banning gender-affirming care. It's even worse than Florida's [1] [] Date: 2023-06-16 Vladimir Putin has written the staff playbook for Republican lawmakers when it comes to restricting LGBTQ+ rights. On Wednesday, Russia’s State Duma passed the first reading of an anti-trans bill to ban legal and surgical gender changes. All 365 deputies present at the meeting supported the bill. The bill is expected to easily pass the required second and third reading in the Duma, as well as a single reading in the upper-house Federation Council. Then Putin will be able to sign the bill into law. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a package of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that included a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. A federal judge in Florida temporarily blocked the ban from going into effect in a narrow ruling allowing three transgender children to continue receiving puberty blockers. Elsewhere, at least 19 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming treatment for minors. The anti-trans law before the Russian parliament goes even further than the laws enacted in Florida and other Republican-controlled states: It would cover adults as well as minors. RELATED STORY: DeSantis is learning that attacking LGBTQ Americans is bad for a campaign State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin almost sounded as if he could be a spokesperson for DeSantis. Volodin said: “In the United States, where these new pseudo-values are promoted, the proportion of transgender people among teenagers is already three times higher than among adults. This is the result of propaganda.” The bill bans "medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person," including hormone therapy, and "the state registration of a change of gender without an operation.” Russian human rights lawyer Max Olenichev, who works with the LGBTQ+ community, told the Associated Press that once the new law goes into effect, the only option for those seeking to transition through medical care or changing their gender in documents would be to leave the country. “Neither medical, nor legal transitioning will be possible without changing the country of residence,” Olenichev said. x please help spreading information about the anti-trans law in Russia the law will make illegal all gender reassignment procedures (ID change and medical care) and it is going to be accepted in the coming month a thread: pic.twitter.com/x11Q9zGRMF — Arte Jõgi (@ArteJogi) June 15, 2023 Human Rights Watch pointed to a cruel aspect of the bill that allows unnecessary surgeries to be carried out on intersex children—those born with variations in their sex characteristics—to “normalize” their healthy bodies. “The hypocrisy of not allowing adults to make decisions about their bodies while allowing irreversible, unnecessary, and high-risk operations to be carried out on children is not unique to Russia, but rather part of a cynical and exploitative anti-rights tilt politicians around the world are taking,” Human Rights Watch said. The bill has left transgender men and women in Russia concerned that their future is being taken away from them. A 24-year-old transgender man identified only as Nate told the independent Russian news outlet Meduza, which is now operating in Latvia: “The law against trans people is genocide. It will make [society] fear and hate trans people more. This will cause the number of people who die by suicide to rise, despite it already being massive.” Nate also told Meduza that transgender men like himself were hesitant to change the gender marker from female to male in their passports because of the threat of military conscription. Marena, a 19-year-old transgender woman, told Meduza: “The bill [against trans people] is very scary. It’s a violation of people’s human rights. I want to get a vaginoplasty, but if the law is passed, that will become impossible. In the future, I plan to emigrate.” The anti-trans bill is the latest move in a widening crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights that has been underway since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. It’s part of a broader campaign to suppress human rights, free speech, and dissent. In November, Russia expanded its own notorious 2013 “Don’t Say Gay” law, which banned “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” among minors. The new law banned LGBTQ+ ‘”propaganda” among all adults, levying penalties for “the imposition of information” that might arouse interest in “sex reassignment” and homosexual relationships. It applies to films, books, advertising, television, social media, and more. That law has the full support of the Russian Orthodox Church, according to the website Church Times. Under Patriarch Kiriil, Russia’s dominant church has also fully supported Russia’s war against Ukraine. “The Church has always supported banning not just the LGBT agenda, but any agenda promoting sin in the public space,” Vakhtang Kipshidze, deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for Church Relations with Society and Media, said. “Any sin injures the public consciousness, and we therefore consider it completely unacceptable to promote sin if we seek a society based on true values of marriage, family, fidelity, sacrificial service, and patriotism.” Putin has sounded like many Republican politicians in the U.S. when railing against gay rights. He has tried to justify the war against Ukraine as an existential fight against Western liberal values that pose a threat to Russia, including LGBTQ+ freedoms. In his Sept. 30 speech announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian territories, Putin said: “Do we want children from elementary school to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want them to be taught that instead of men and women, there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex-change surgeries? This is unacceptable to us; we have a different future.” The Duma’s deputy speaker, Piotr Tolstoy, a co-sponsor of the anti-trans legislation, echoed Putin’s sentiments. He said the bill would help “preserve Russia for posterity, with its cultural and family values, with its traditional ways, by placing a barrier in the way of the Western anti-family ideology,” Meduza reported. The Moscow Times, an independent Russian news source now based in Armenia, quoted Tolstoy as saying on Telegram: "I really want the guys who are now defending Russia's honor at the cost of their lives to return home and see that the country has changed. That we are all fighting for a new sovereign Russia, as a united front free from Western influence." Tolstoy also said that banning the “practice of transgenderism” was a matter of national security because gender identity disorders are a basis for recognizing a citizen as unfit for military service in Ukraine, The Los Angeles Blade reported. Russia’s Kommersant newspaper said a source in the Duma stated legislators were concerned not only about family values, but about the increasing number of young people using gender reassignment certificates to avoid being drafted into military service. "In recent times in our country, there have been 2,700 decisions relating to sex change," Volodin, the Duma Speaker, told a meeting of the Council of Lawmakers. “A man gets up in the morning and decides he is no longer a man, but a woman.” . Maxim, a 29-year-old transgender activist who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns, told the Associated Press that the lawmakers’ concerns are exaggerated because the gender-changing process “is lengthy, costly, and for [transgender] people it is humiliating.” He said the spike in numbers is likely due to fears about the bill and people rushing to complete the procedures before the ban is enacted. But the anti-gay laws that Putin has introduced over the past decade also lead growing numbers of LGBTQ+ Russians to leave the country. Meduza reported that this trend has intensified since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; many have settled in Turkey as a first stop. There is also a community of Russian LGBTQ+ people who have emigrated to the United States. They now see a similar pattern to what happened in Putin’s Russia to what is going on in the U.S., with Republican-controlled state legislatures passing a growing number of anti-gay and anti-trans laws. Maxim Ibadov, who grew up in Russia and emigrated to the U.S. almost a decade ago, is the national coordinator for RUSA LGBTQ+, an organization that works with asylum seekers from Russian-speaking countries. Ibadov told Newsweek: "This kind of notion that we have to protect children from the influences of LGBTQ people, that's literally the anti-gay propaganda law that was passed on the federal level in Russia," Ibadov said. "The ideas that LGBTQ folks are groomers and pedophiles, that's also straight out of Putin's playbook." [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/16/2175719/-Russia-set-to-pass-bill-banning-gender-affirming-care-It-s-even-worse-than-Florida-s Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/