MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, is expected to give its first backing in a vote later on Wednesday to legislation banning gender reassignment surgery.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian lawmakers have increasingly exposed and cracked down on what they call “non-traditional” lifestyles they say are promoted by the West.
The proposed legislation would prohibit state agencies from changing a person’s gender in their personal records.
In addition to banning sex reassignment surgery, it would also ban “any medical intervention aimed at shaping a person’s primary and secondary sex characteristics”, according to a document published in the Duma database.
The only exception would be surgery “aimed at treating birth defects in children,” the bill says.
Parliament last year passed a new law which critics say effectively bans the depiction of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in public and in the media.
(Reporting by Reuters journalists; Writing by Filipp Lebedev; Editing by Andrew Osborn)