Russian Duma Plans Ban on Sex Change Without Surgery to Stop Evasion of Military Service

Russian Duma deputies are urgently working on a bill to ban sex reassignment without surgery, which is expected to be introduced to the lower house of parliament shortly.

"Amendments will soon be introduced in the State Duma to officially ban gender reassignment without surgery," Nina Ostanina, the head of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children's Affairs, told Russian Kommersant.

A source in the Duma explained to the paper that the urgency of adopting the amendments to ban gender reassignment without surgery, not only to protect what they see as family values but also because of the start of the spring conscription campaign in Russia.

"In connection with the special operation, many young people have turned to private clinics to provide a sex change to avoid conscription. The civil registry office has no problem registering the marriages of such people," the Kommersant source said.

They did not rule out that the Duma Council will consider proposals to ban sex reassignment without surgery as early as its first meeting after the holidays, on May 15.

At last week's meeting of the Council of Lawmakers, it was revealed that the Ministry of Health is also working on issues relating to gender reassignment, with the issue receiving a "hardware boost" through the efforts of the Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin.

"In recent times in our country, there have been 2,700 decisions relating to sex change," he 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,” he said.

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The Russian Ministry of Justice has already announced preparations to prevent acceptance of gender reassignment in passports. The head of the ministry, Konstantin Chuichenko, said on April 24 that such an initiative is one of the steps to enshrine traditional values in Russian law.

On December 5, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning LGBTQ ‘propaganda’. According to amendments to the Law on Information, Information Technologies, and the Protection of Information, propaganda of LGBTQ, gender reassignment, or pedophilia in social networks, media, advertisements, and films is prohibited.