MOSCOW (LifeSiteNews) — Russia’s lower house of parliament on Friday passed a bill banning any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person” as part of a batch of laws aimed at combating LGBTQ propaganda.

The thrice-reviewed bill, which must still be approved by the upper chamber, the Federation Council, and signed by President Vladimir Putin to take effect, only permits gender “reassignment” surgery to treat congenital physical abnormalities in children.

The law also bans people who have attempted to surgically change their sex from becoming adoptive parents or guardians and provides for the ability to annul a marriage if either spouse “changes” their sex and “update[s] their civil status records,” according to CNN.

It additionally prohibits the amendment of official documents and public records to reflect a gender “transition.”

The bill is expected to become law. The Federation Council typically approves legislation passed by the Duma (lower house) and Putin is known for promoting policies in favor of traditional families and against LGBTQ ideology. The law had unanimous support in the Duma.

Russian lawmakers have celebrated the bill as protecting Russia from “the Western anti-family ideology,” with some decrying gender “transitions” as “pure satanism,” according to Fox News.

Meanwhile, proponents of “sex changes” in Russia are lamenting the bill’s progress. The country’s first “transgender” politician, who goes by the name Yulia Alyoshina, accused the bill of being “discriminatory” and even “genocid[al]” toward people with gender dysphoria.

The largest existing study on gender “transitions,” according to JAMA, has been 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.

“Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, ‘parent number one, parent number two and parent number three’ (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father?” Putin asked in a September 30 speech commemorating the accession of four Ukrainian regions into Russia.