Russia to fight men who change sex to 'avoid' being drafted to war in Ukraine

Konstantin Chuichenko said: “This will allow us to rule out the possibility of changing a person's gender purely according to documents” Photo: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Expected that the Russian parliament would take harsh gender reassignment measures in an apparent attempt to dissuade young men from registering as women in order to avoid being drafted.

Despite the Kremlin's aggressive stance towards LGBT and the transgender community, Russia still has rather liberal legislation in place, allowing a gender marker to be changed after a psychiatric examination and not requiring gender reassignment surgery.

The ban was lifted by an influential minister Russia's Justice Department last month said it would «take a step towards enshrining family values ​​in Russian legislation.»

«This will allow us to eliminate the possibility of changing a person's gender solely by changing documents,» Konstantin Chuichenko said in an interview with the news agency TASS.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, began pushing a conservative agenda during his third term as president in response to nationwide protests that were largely initiated by liberal citizens.

The amendments were supposed to be voted on, according to a Russian newspaper Kommersant at the beginning of next week.

It's alarming how easy it is to do

One of their most vocal supporters is speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who said at a recent parliamentary session that he was worried about how easy it was to change the gender marker in Russia.

“A person can wake up one morning and decide that he already not a man, but a woman,” he said.

Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that changing gender in Russia is alarmingly easy: «A man may wake up one morning and decide that he is no longer a man, but a woman.» Photo: RUSSIAN STATE DUMA/via Reuters

A quick visit to a private clinic and a complete examination, worth 60,000 rubles (£600), is enough for a person to go to the local registry office and apply for a sex change, according to Mr Volodin.

“These citizens will now be able to get married and, God forbid, adopt a child.”

More than 2,700 people have changed sex in Russia “recently,” he added.< /p>Avoiding being sent to Ukraine

An unnamed member of parliament told Kommersant on Wednesday that the bill was prompted by «repeated incidents» of men trying to change their gender so they would not be drafted into the army and sent to fight in Ukraine.< /p>

«Many young people turned to private clinics to sign for a sex change in order to avoid being drafted due to a special operation in Ukraine,” the deputy said.

The bill can be adopted as early as May 15. .

A loophole in the legislation

One of the key supporters of the bill confirmed that it was prompted by the war.

“Both the deputies and the Ministry of Justice have suspicions about the growing number of such changes,” said communist deputy Nina Ostanina.

“It seems that many of those who did not have time to escape to Georgia and Kazakhstan rushed to private clinics to draw up documents, and this is not only a loophole in the legislation: it is a loophole in education” .

The MP was referring to the hundreds of thousands of men who fled to neighboring countries after Putin’s mobilization in September.

Last week, Vykhod, Russia’s largest LGBT advocacy group, called for transgender people to speed up preparations for changing the gender marker, as the bill will significantly complicate this task.