Alex Shmik stood in the court chancery of the Russian town of Mirny, staring in disbelief at the three pieces of paper delivering the judge’s verdict. After four years in bureaucratic limbo, he would be able to officially leave behind his life as Alexandra and change the gender marker on his passport to male. One question kept repeating itself in his mind: Will I be able to live as a normal person now?
Normality is a sought-after commodity among many transgender Russians. Misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history, members of this minority are accustomed to facing a hostile environment. In today’s Russia, their breathing space is shrinking at an accelerating rate, as they become increasingly vulnerable to hate crimes and outright opposition by the authorities. The Russian government has shown little interest in solving the problems affecting transgender Russians; in fact, a number of lawmakers have proposed transphobic legislation in recent years. Meanwhile, there are few trained professionals that can address trans people’s medical needs, and legal barriers prevent them from undergoing gender reassignment surgery and changing the gender marker on their official documents. Without a strong activist network to campaign for social change, unemployment, poverty, and discrimination push many to find a way out—some through self-imposed exile, other through suicide.
In recent years, the Russian government has become the target of much criticism from the West for its treatment of the Russian LGBT community, particularly following the introduction of the 2013 “gay propaganda law,” which forbids the promotion of a “nontraditional” lifestyle among minors. And even though the Soviet Union’s first successful gender-reassignment surgeries took place in the early 1970s, transphobia, homophobia, and discrimination have afflicted queer Russians throughout history. Russian sexologist Igor S. Kon documented in his book The Sexual Revolution in Russia how persecution and discrimination in the Soviet Union pushed many “blues” (the belittling term Russians use to refer to the country’s queer population) to conceal their identity, while Russian LGBT expert Brian Baer said that the lack of a clear distinction between gender and sex in Russian culture has often compromised people’s ability to comprehend the difference between sexual orientation and gender identification.
As nationalistic and conservative ideas gained a foothold following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained anchored to its misconceptions. Even in the liberal 1990s most Russians considered queerness a phenomenon foreign to their culture, particularly given the role of Western organizations in the development of an LGBT activist network within the country, Baer notes. “Unfortunately, this reinforced in a lot of Russian eyes that [queerness] was a Western import and didn’t really have a natural place in Russia,” he explains.