Putin cracks down on trangender Russians with a new law, aiming to create villains to distract from military losses.
It’s been over a decade since Putin fired a warning shot at the LGBTQ community with his law forbidding ‘promoting’ queerness to minors. Shortly after that, it became illegal to promote anything LGBTQ at all, a broad law used to force tens of thousands of people back into the closet, on pain of legal trouble or violence.
He always hammered home the point that any identity other than cis-het was a ‘Western’ corruption and that it was a deliberate attack on the traditional values of Russia, meant to hurt their children and weaken their country.
The more unpopular Putin’s war becomes, the harder he and his party go against the LGBT community.
“The war is not only on the front line, the war is going on in the minds and souls, and we want to protect our country from being destroyed from within,” Pyotr Tolstoy, a hard-line deputy speaker of Parliament, wrote on Telegram.
As with any ‘think of the children’ or ‘national security’ slippery slope, it’s now being used to directly harm children, both straight and queer.
With a new law passed this summer, all gender transition procedures are illegal, either medical or civil. The law also annuls marriages if one spouse changes gender, destroying families. And perhaps worst of all, it not only bans adoptions by gay or trans people, it dissolves existing adoptions if a parent is outed.
Queer families risk being reported by their neighbors, their own extended family, or their childrens’ teachers, which could and has resulted in children being seized from their families and put into orphanages. “Family values” is a blunt object, and it’s being used to beat the queer community in Russia to death.