Foreword
Russia is probably one of the most vicious countries in the world towards the LGBT community. Here, people face existential crisis for those who are identity anxious and socially marginalized because of their traditional stubbornness and instinctive mischief. By documenting the lives of ordinary transgender people, this article shows the outside world a real social environment, and the ubiquitous pain points. We try to look at this matter from a neutral perspective, sympathizing with the sufferers and expressing our helplessness to the cruel human nature. Because cruelty is everywhere.
Some time ago, the U.S. state of North Carolina introduced a “bathroom bill” that requires people to use the bathroom according to the gender on their birth certificate. This bill has caused a national debate, many companies came out publicly against it, including Google, Twitter, Apple, Facebook and other business giants.
Meanwhile, in Russia, 66% of residents say they don’t like transgender people. In a country that is famously “homophobic,” transgender people have had their civil rights undermined: companies won’t hire them, hospitals won’t give them medical care, they’re not even allowed to ride trains, and they’re sometimes even beaten.
In Russia, it usually takes more than a year to change the gender on an ID card, and there is a high risk of going to court.
A special correspondent for Meduza magazine has written an in-depth report on the situation of these people. It takes a lot of courage for these “gender-neutral” Russian transgender people to face their lives.
1
One night in June 2013, Denis and his girlfriend Ekaterina wanted to have a little drink and got drunk. Drunk, Denis confessed to his girlfriend that he wanted to become a woman.
Ekaterina did not answer, afterwards she and the reporter said: “At that time I was scared to sober up”.
The next morning, Ekaterina woke up with a start, hoping that her boyfriend was just being drunk last night, but she had the answer in mind, “I knew something was wrong with him, I just never thought it was this wrong. I didn’t want to talk to him, it was too sudden for me. This is not the future I wanted, I never thought this would happen to me.”
On that very day, there was no more Denis in the world, and Diana was born.
Russian Transgender Fact Sheet
Before coming out, Denis spent three years seriously thinking about whether to go through with it or not.
The idea first came to Denis when he was only 12 years old. He grew up in a typically homophobic Russian family, where his parents often made jokes about gay star Boris Moiseev (a Soviet singer born in prison). At the time, Denis did not know there was a world of gender change and was taught that “sexual transgression” was evil. He was always teased by his classmates, who called him a “sissy” because he didn’t like to play sports and was a bit withdrawn. On the advice of his parents, after graduating from high school Denis enrolled in the Mathematical and Scientific Faculty of the Petersburg State Technical University, and after a year he switched his studies to management.
After graduation, he worked as a manager in a supermarket chain. During the monotonous work day after day, Denis felt that his life had come to an end and he began to doubt that he was only living for others. He started to read other transgender people’s stories on the internet and considered the matter carefully.
After coming out publicly to his girlfriend, Denis began taking hormones. The drugs were purchased over the Internet and cost 4,000 rubles ($60) a month. At the same time, Denis began to declare himself as a woman and was no longer Denis, but Diana. This did not go so well, and for the next four months Diana and Ekaterina had constant arguments and tried to move out of the home they lived in together. During the last argument, Ekaterina even slapped Diana in the face.
“I realized that it was neither a disease nor a cure, only an acceptance of reality.” Ekaterina later said.
Diana and Ekaterina each confessed the truth to their parents, and Ekaterina’s parents had an easier time accepting it, “Everything has to be on the bright side, look at all the drug addicts, you’re not the worst.”
But Diana’s mother was not so calm, convinced that this was a disease and that she needed to get help from a psychiatrist.
The friends soon stopped talking to Diana, and at first, they teased her about her looks and grabbed her breasts. Due to hormonal effects, Diana’s breasts had already started to change.
One friend said, “You know you’re never going to be a real woman, right?”
In November 2013, five months after she started taking hormones, Diana’s face and breasts changed significantly; she had a waist and breasts.
“You’ve gained weight!” Ekaterina joked, “Before you were so skinny and bony that a gust of wind would have blown you apart.”
“Yes, and my face isn’t as white as a dead man’s.” Diana is quite happy with the changes she has made.
In late 2013, along with the physical changes, Diana began to actively prepare for the mental aspect. He approached Professor Dmitry Isaev at the St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical Academy, which has a committee for transgender people with psychiatrists to provide a thorough psychological assessment.
In mid-September 2015, Diana finally received his evaluation report and was given a grade of F64.0 according to the International Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). In 2013, the U.S. removed “gender dysphoria” from the mental illness category and now uses the term “gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria” is now used to describe the condition of biological and psychological gender dysphoria, and affirms that the condition is innate. In an era of LGBT activism, this terminology is obviously more “politically correct,” but it is unlikely that such a change will happen in Russia.
2
With the doctor’s report in hand, Diana was ready to change her birth certificate and passport. She went back to the internist, who gave her a certificate – that her body’s hormone endocrinology had changed.
Diana went to the local government with all the documents to change her file papers, but was denied on the grounds that she would have to have a sex change operation if she wanted to change her documents. “The crotch is no big deal to me, all I care about is how people talk to me and how I look in the mirror. If I have this surgery, what if one day I suddenly want to have kids?” Diana says.
With a body that had changed dramatically and an ID that hadn’t changed at all, Diana soon felt the malice of a life full of it. She never swiped her credit card when shopping because the cashier might ask for ID; she could no longer take trains or planes because those modes of transportation would also check for identification – and misogynists would be kicked off the train.
“Now, the only way to finally change your ID is to sue. First you have to go to your local government office and they will make a decision based on your paperwork and usually deny your request. Then you sue them, and if the court decides the way you want, you can go back to the government office and have them change your documents.” That’s how an employee of a Russian LGBT affirmative action organization called Way Out explained it.
“As to how long this complicated process takes to get going, it varies entirely from person to person. But I can give a rough timeline: it usually takes one month for the government to review and deny your request; one month to prepare materials to go to court to sue the government; two months for the court to accept your suit and schedule a trial; one month for the trial process; two months for the court to finally issue a judgment; one month for the court to execute the judgment; and one month for the final government agency to revise your documents, which time totals nine months, and of course that’s if everything goes well and no one is looking for a problem.”
Popular violence against the LGBT community in Russia (Photo: Meduza Magazine) Popular violence against the LGBT community in Russia (Photo: Meduza Magazine)
With the help of Way Out, Diana sued the government for refusing to change her gender. The court ruled against the government agency and ordered that the gender and name on Diana’s birth certificate be changed from a “he” to a “she”, and in May 2016, Diana received a revised passport.
Getting a new passport was not enough; Diana then had to amend her employment records, college diploma and tax card, another arduous process. But Diana is still hopeful about life and plans to travel to Romania to see Vampire Dracula’s castle.
3
Diana is not the first person to receive help with gender issues from Professor Isaev. Professor Isaev is well known in this small circle, having been the head of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical Academy for 12 years, where his main research interests are gender and sexual orientation. He has published 120 academic articles, most of them related to homosexuality, such as “Study of suicidal tendencies among young people with homosexual tendencies”.
He also founded a medical research society for gender dysphoria, which helps them to undergo psychological tests and assessments, and then provides professional advice on gender reassignment surgery and gender treatment for their psychological state.
Professor Dmitry Isaev, former head of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical Academy, has helped many Russian transgender people (Photo: Meduza Magazine)
After giving a lecture about sexually deviant people at a conference of the LGBT affirmative action organization Kids-404, Professor Isaev was targeted by a group called “LGBT Hunters”. The anti-gay group is part of the “People’s Temple” movement, a Russian social movement based on patriotic and Orthodox ideology that preaches the preservation of traditional morality and family values and whose main members include scientists, historians, politicians, lawyers, businessmen, cultural elites and the Orthodox Church. part of the group, who have publicly made the following statements on social media.
Under President Vladimir? Under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has chosen a traditional and honorable path that respects family values, and Dmitry Isaev is spreading propaganda about homosexuality and child molestation in our great homeland. This is an evil man who uses his public office to certify these rabble-rousers and allows these perverts to run amok in our country, helping them to cut off their natural organs and replace them with those evil artificial ones, which they call “sex change”. Doctors can’t change your sex, they just mutilate your flesh. These poor souls have lost their last chance to save themselves while mutilating themselves.
“Soon after the People’s Sanctuary gathered homophobic people to write a joint letter to the St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical Academy, the local prosecutor visited the university and advised its leaders to “solve this problem as soon as possible.
In July 2015, the rector ordered Professor Isaev to resign, “or we’ll get you out of your job some other way. He even threatened to bring down and stink up Professor Isaev’s reputation. The professor’s small clinic closed soon after he left the school. “The People’s Temple told Meduza magazine that they would continue their work to make sure these guys had no place in our city.
When Prof. Isaev was still in office, people from all over Russia came to him for help. His clinic was fairly priced at 1/3-1/7 of his peers (about 10,000 rubles, or about $150. (And the average industry standard is 30,000-70,000 rubles). The professor’s patients say that his clinic is considerate and attentive and that no one here laughs at them or gives them a hard time.
Professor Isaev is more inclined than his peers to recommend sex reassignment surgery and related treatments to his patients, and on average 30 people a year receive a diagnosis of sex reassignment from his clinic, compared to 10 patients in other clinics. There are rumors that Prof. Isaev will open a private clinic to continue his career, but the professor himself did not respond and he refused to talk to Meduza about it.
4
According to a survey made by the Levada Center called “The Invisible Minority: Homophobia in Russia,” 66% of Russians are homophobic.
In a 2015 report on “Violent Attacks on Transgender People in St. Petersburg” by the LGBT affirmative action organization Way Out, the Russian government lacked legal guidance on gender reassignment surgery and treatment. According to Article 70 of the Russian Civil Code, medical institutions must issue documents in accordance with the forms and procedures provided by the authorities in order for the authorities to change a citizen’s identity document.
However, the problem is that there is no official “form and procedure” for gender reassignment, so at the operational level this is not possible. The Russian Ministry of Health announced in 2005 that it was going to improve the relevant legal provisions, but two years later the legislative group was closed without any public reason and the matter was never heard from again. So far, the only way to change the gender of identity documents is to go to court.
“Many transgender people simply change their name on the document without bothering with the gender on the document to avoid legal red tape, says Way Out. But even that is difficult in many cases, and in one case in February 2015, a transgender woman asked to have her name changed to Anna on her identity documents, and the local government denied the request on the grounds that people of the male gender cannot be called Anna.
To make matters worse, being transgender in Russia makes it difficult to get an education and even more difficult to find a job.
A crowd protesting the persecution of transgender people. The sign reads “Stop the fear of deformation! No violence” (Photo: Meduza Magazine) A crowd protesting against the persecution of transgender people. The sign reads “Stop Metamorphosis Fear! No violence” (Photo: Meduza Magazine)
Egor, a male transgender man who enrolled in the Physics Department at St. Petersburg University in 2015, had been taking hormone medication for nearly 10 months when he enrolled and his body was already visibly masculine. When he registered at the university Egor used an ID card with his gender still female, he promised the university that he would change his gender on his ID card within six months and asked the university to register him under his current name, Egor, but the university refused his request.
In March 2015, Egor was threatened with expulsion from the school by the vice president because he failed to change the gender on his ID card. The school’s Registrar’s Office cancelled his final exams for non-payment of tuition, but the school’s financial office showed that he had in fact already paid the tuition in full. The department head told Egor that it was the vice principal who personally ordered his disqualification from the exam.
The matter went all the way to the principal, who replied that “this country does not recognize transgender people”. The principal then summoned the vice principal and forced Egor to sign a withdrawal statement.
However, even in this social environment, transgender people in Moscow and St. Petersburg feel fortunate that in other Russian cities, the transgender community is afraid to even leave their homes.
In the fall of 2014, in the central Russian city of Ufa, the local traffic police stopped a car driven by Angela Likina, although the name on her driver’s license was Oleg Vorobyev. The traffic police took her license for not wearing a seatbelt and put her in a police car. When Angela got out of the police car, the two police officers let out hysterical laughter. A camera in the car captured the entire incident, and the footage was streamed to the internet and now has over 84,000 views on Youtube.
Angela was brutally murdered in February 2016. There are reports that the murder was related to money for Angela’s gender reassignment surgery, which Angela had borrowed from his ex-wife, and that a friend of Angela’s ex-wife was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Sometimes transgender people make a mockery of government authorities, too. in March 2016, a transgender couple, Reid Lynn and Sophia Grozovsky, successfully registered their marriage in Moscow in the presence of friends. But that was thanks in large part to the fact that both had changed their gender on their identity documents. The day before the registration, officials asked Sophia to prove her gender in person, dressed as a proper heterosexual male.
On the day of the wedding, a large number of police officers gathered next to the marriage registration office and a police car was on site to execute mass arrests immediately if there was any disturbance at the scene. The police were afraid that the photos of the two transgender people getting married would be taken by people with “ulterior motives” to make propaganda that would harm traditional gender relations. But nothing went wrong, the registration office was closed and the two men were able to register their marriage without incident.
In Russia, gender dysphoria is often associated with depression for a variety of reasons, from chronic loneliness, to hatred of one’s own body, to social pressure.
“I couldn’t accept my body at all, I didn’t like my boobs (which were pretty big), I didn’t like my waist, my butt and my face, everything made me sit up and take notice. I want to be strong and slim, I want to wear men’s clothes, I want to do everything that men do.”
A 14-year-old anonymous sexual misconduct person wrote online about the BBS, run by the “Kids-404” LGBT affirmative action group, where LGBT people exchange ideas and help each other.
“I feel like there’s a fire in my body. Everyone around me is growing up every day, the boys are getting taller and their voices are getting thicker, and I’m jealous of them. I also want a lower voice, a rough face and a beard.” — 16-year-old member M.
“When my parents found out I had cut my hair short and put on boy’s clothes they freaked out and threatened me to get rid of them, telling me over and over again ‘But you’re a girl! Let’s go shopping, we’ll buy you whatever you want, we’ll buy flowery dresses and dress you up like a princess.’ But I didn’t even want to listen. They always tried to drag me to the store, and I said no to everyone. I didn’t like my body nor did I want to go out. No one understood me and I was always fighting with my parents.” — Mroi, 17-year-old member
5
Alexandra is always smiling, even when we talk about suicide, she keeps her smile on her face. “It’s a habit developed after years of stress.” She explained to us, “After all that I’ve been through, I realized I couldn’t take it anymore and didn’t want to live another day. Now I’m trying to find a reason to continue living.”
Russian Transgender Fact Sheet
Alexandera has been taking antidepressants for some years now. She lives alone with her cat, and every night before she goes to bed she wishes she could go to sleep forever and never wake up. She hopes to find a soul mate who is also transgender.
“I would like to find someone who understands me, just one. Someone who has similar confusions and experiences as I do, so he won’t say to me, ‘You’re a pervert, I want a normal person!'”
Alexandera blames her miserable life situation on the social system, often saying, “Our social system is a big steam turbine that constantly crushes people on the margins of society like me. Even when we are killed, people in this society don’t stop to help us. All of them believe that we are evil and that we are the enemy.”
Alexandera has also suffered from the malice of life. Simply because she didn’t like the way she looked, Alexandera was attacked at least 10 times on the street. The worst was in 2011, when she and a friend were walking around Bolshevik Street in St. Petersburg, surrounded by a crowd of people, when a group of people openly attacked them both.
Alexandr’s arm was broken and her face was covered in blood. After the attack, Alexandra filed a police report, but the police refused to take the case. “I think these guys did the right thing, I should put you in jail!” The police said.
After an attack in 2013, paramedics took Alexandera to a hospital in St. Petersburg. The emergency room doctor was upset with his colleagues: “Why did you get this guy here?” Another doctor told Alexandera directly, “We’re not going to help you, and if we admit you, we’ll have to send you to the men’s ward.” Hospital security even tried to forcibly throw her out of the hospital. Eventually the hospital admitted her, but she was discharged on her own the next day.
Another time Alexandra went to the post office to pick up her social security money. When she showed her ID card to the staff, she got this response: “Why do you look like this? Why are you wearing women’s clothes? This is a post office! We don’t give you anything.”
Like many gender dysphoric people, Alexandra discovered problems with her gender identity when she was a student. Like Diana, she was ostracized by her peers. But the main obstacle came from her mother, who didn’t come home for a long time after she told her about the fact, though she eventually accepted her.
At the age of 25, Alexandra approached Professor Isaev for help. She was scared at first, thinking that she would be the same as before, with nothing but some humiliation. Isaev’s certificate cleared the way for her gender reassignment surgery.
But when she took this certificate to the relevant agency in St. Petersburg to change her identity documents, the government people said, “Go to hell, you’re welcome here only if you’re dead.”
Alexandra then went for a sex change operation and became a woman completely. Things went pretty well after that, and at the age of 27 the gender on her identity papers was finally changed to female.
But that wasn’t the end of her troubles. First Alexandra needed to deregister from the military service. She racked her brains to convince the armed services that her situation was real and that she was neither trying to desert nor pull a prank, but the military just didn’t buy it. “We met a faggot who claimed he was a pussy.” An army doctor said. The army eventually arranged for her to have a medical examination, and despite the twists and turns of the process, Alexandra was eventually able to avoid serving in the army.
After having her ID changed, it took Alexandra two years to find a job. Alexandra graduated from St. Petersburg State Electric University with a degree in electrical engineering. At first she tried to find a job in her field, but it was so difficult that she started to lower her requirements, trying to apply for jobs like courier, cashier, bricklayer, and finally “anything and everything”.
Alexandra was not able to change all her identity documents. Her college diploma, employment information card, and tax card still show her gender as male. Every time an employer agrees to hire her, they change their mind when they see these documents. Some employers don’t look at these documents, but there are problems with the medical exam, and the scars always reveal her true identity.
Once Alexandra went to an interview for a job as a car wheel saleswoman and was honest about the fact that her gender was listed as male on her employment information card. After a brief silence, the manager fumed, “How did this happen to me!”
That wasn’t the worst of it. After being rejected for another interview, the employer called and asked if she had touched the office door handle. Another time, Alexandera applied for a position as the head of electrical engineering for a municipal construction project, and half an hour after the interview the company called and said, “Why don’t you go to hell?” And another time soon after that, the same caller said, “Listen, faggot, kill yourself!” Finally, Alexandera had to change her SIM card.
Russian transsexuals in action
Alexandera eventually found a job as an electrician in a factory where only the human resources department knew she was transgender. Now that she has been working here for more than a year, her boss learned of her transgender status during a medical checkup. The boss said to her, “We should throw grenades at people like you!” Alexandera was pretty sure she would soon be fired.
“I wish I had a million rubles (more than 100,000 yuan).” She envisions it in the stairwell of her apartment, lighting her fourth cigarette in less than an hour of interviews. “So I can forget the humiliation I’ve suffered all these years. I’m going to spend 200,000 rubles to get the operation and go live by the sea. Every day I have to prove to the people around me that I am a human being, not an animal. People like me do not exist in Russia, but unfortunately there will always be people like me. I use the word ‘unfortunately’ because our life is so difficult, but who will pity us?”
Originally published in Maduza magazine; translated by Crazy Ivan; edited and corrected by Tatar Wu.
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