State Duma to consider healthcare bill banning gender-affirming surgeries and legal gender changes
A group of 400 State Duma deputies have backed a package of amendments to Russia’s healthcare and public-records laws, designed to ban gender-affirming surgeries and legal gender changes in Russia.
If passed, the amendments will make it only possible to have a gender-affirming surgery in cases involving “congenital physiological anomalies.” Surgeries will have to be approved by a committee of specialists from the state healthcare system.
The same proposal also seeks to ban legal name and gender changes in the public records and official documents.
Deputy Pyotr Tolstoy, one of the bill’s champions, claims that legal gender changes have often been filed by gay couples who want to marry and adopt children, as well as people trying to dodge the draft. “This contradicts our values and the principles of our Constitution,” said the legislator.
“Why are we doing this? We’re preserving 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,” said the deputy.
