By Aleksandr Voronov | Executive director
During the last few months Russian LGBTQ+ communities have faced discrimination and legislative changes they’d never seen before, terrifying even in Russian context comparing to all we’d seen before. In July the new anti-transgender legislation was adopted that banned all kinds of transgender transition in Russia: there are no chance to change documents, make affirmative surgeries, and even to get necessary hormones for transgender persons in a process of medical transition (the last is still possible, though, but much more difficult than before). In November the Supreme Court approved the request from the Ministry of Justice to consider “the international LGBT-movement” as an extremist. There is no any clarity on how this legislation can be used in the future.
At the same time “ongoing” repressions toward civil society have been continuing, as well as persecution of those who is against the war and the regime. All that entailed incredible amount of stress in the life of community members, a few new waves of migration of queer persons from Russia, and especially activists who now are in the risk of being persecuted for being “extremist”.
These changes didn’t affect the work of Coming Out too much, because a major part of the team members are outside of Russia, and we had restructured our work the previous year. But we faced the unbelievable number of requests for support from the community members, and were able to provide all the necessary support, and to continue all the other work.
During last few months we provided 200 free legal consultations for Russian LGBTQ+, >800 free psychological consultations, and 53 peer-to-peer consultations for transgender people.
Unfortunately, because of the last legislative changes we are not able to provide any photos right now. We are in a process of understanding how considering "LGBT-movement" as extremist in Russia will work for those who ever was in contact with us.
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