MOSCOW (LifeSiteNews) — Russian President Vladimir Putin signed legislation on Monday banning any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person” except for surgery to treat reproductive organ deformities in children.
The new law prohibits the amendment of official documents and public records to reflect a gender “transition” and forbids people who have attempted to surgically change their sex from becoming adoptive parents or guardians.
It also provides for the ability to annul a marriage if either spouse “changes” their sex, RT reported.
The law’s wording appears to legally exclude the administration of cross-sex hormones in addition to “transgender” surgeries. The legislation takes effect immediately.
Russian lawmakers seek to avoid mirroring recent gender trends in the West, which has seen an explosion in gender transition surgeries within the past decade. Such operations have increased by 50 times over the past 10 years in the U.S., according to State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.
“This is the path leading to the degradation of a nation,” said Volodin, explaining that Russian lawmakers aim to prevent such a culture.
Russia has had its own rising share of attempted sex “changes.” Over 2,000 people in the country legally “transitioned” their sex between 2018 and 2022.
Lawmakers were also concerned about an “increasing number of cases” of Russian men using “gender reassignment certificates to avoid being drafted into the military” and sent to Ukraine, according to the Kommersant business daily, which cited a source in the State Duma.
According to top Russian senator Valentina Matvienko, the law has been greeted with “many positive responses from European nations,” according to RT.
While Russian lawmakers have celebrated the bill as protecting their country from “Western anti-family ideology,” critics see the law as a violation of the “rights” of persons who identify as the opposite sex and warn that it will create a black market for trans surgeries and hormones, reported The Moscow Times.
While pro-transgender activists argue that trans surgical and hormonal interventions are necessary to prevent severe mental health issues, the largest existing study on gender “transitions,” according to JAMA, was corrected in 2020 to conclude that there is “no mental health benefit from gender-affirming surgery after comparison with a control group of [gender-confused] people who had not yet undergone surgery.”
In fact, according to research that surveilled actual outcomes spanning three decades, people who obtained so-called “gender-affirming surgeries” were “19 times more likely to kill themselves” than the general population.
In December 2022, Russia expanded a ban on pro-LGBT material for children to outlaw all “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations, gender reassignment and pedophilia” regardless of age.
For years, Putin has sought to position Russia as a staunch defender of “traditional values” in opposition to a decadent West.
Last year, Putin condemned the adoption by Western nations of “attitudes that are directly leading to degeneration and degradation because they are contrary to human nature.”