Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the development of policies related to legal gender recognition (LGR) for transgender people in post-Soviet countries. Over the past three years three countries in the region have significantly altered their procedures of LGR - Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in 2017, Russia in 2018. Currently the procedure is being revised in Kazakhstan as well. I argue that this timing is no coincidental and reflects the growing capacity of local, national and international trans movements to influence state actors. In Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine the drafting process for the new regulations included direct consultations between officials from the Ministries of Health and trans activists; in Russia it was less transparent, although input from the activists was taken into account. This is in marked contrast with the pre-existing procedures in the region which had been adopted at the initiative of doctors and medical beaurocracies when the trans movement was non-existent. The resulting procedures in all three countries include obtaining a psychiatric diagnosis ("transsexualism" or the like) but require no compulsory surgeries thus representing a compromise between the traditional definition of a "woman" and a "man" based on one's genitalia and other biological markers (which is supported by medical authorities) and the activists' insistance that legal gender should be assigned on the basis of self-determination (without surgeries or diagnosis). Moreover, these opposing views are a reflection of tensions between Western-emanating ideas about gender (borrowed by post-Soviet trans activists) and those rooted in Soviet medical tradition. What is interesting is that the resulting procedures of LGR are far more liberal than the societal attitudes towards trans people in respective countries, which is perhaps the result of trans issues being less visible than the widely discussed "LGBT" issues as a whole. The study is based on the interviews with key individuals familiar with the process; for Russia, this is supplemented by author's personal involvement in advocacy leading to the adoption of the new procedure.