MOSCOW, July 8. /TASS/. The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, is set to decide in July on the draft law banning gender reassignment surgery, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Saturday.
"Traditional family values are of great importance for each of us," Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel. "Czech President [Petr Pavel] said yesterday that ‘if, God forbid, Russia wins, all Western values will be tarnished’."
"To sum it up, he [Czech President Pavel] voiced what Washington and Brussels are up to," Volodin said. "They aim at imposing pseudo-values, which are alien to us, to destroy the identity of our people."
"Their plans are doomed to fail… We will pass the bill banning gender reassignment in July," he added.
Lawmakers of the Russian parliament’s lower house already passed last month in the first reading the bill banning gender-affirming surgery, except for cases of treating congenital anomalies in children. According to the draft law, civil registry offices will be prohibited from making changes to any documents based on medical certificates confirming gender reassignment.
The bill was initiated in May by State Duma Speaker Volodin and the leaders of the five factions.
Thus, the law on health protections for Russian nationals will be supplemented with a provision banning "medical interventions geared to swap gender," including surgeries to change primary or secondary sex characteristics.
Medical interventions will only be permitted to treat birth abnormalities in children "upon a decision from a medical commission of a federal state-run public health institution." The list of such institutions and the procedure for issuing such decisions will be approved by the government, according to the bill.
Apart from that, the bill bans public records offices from correcting and changing documents on the basis of gender-affirmation certificates issued by medical organizations. Relevant amendments are to be made to the law on civil status acts. Under the current law, public records offices can change personal documents on the basis of a medical certificate indicating that a sex change has taken place.
The bill suggests that this practice should cease to be in force.
Russia’s Health Ministry agrees that gender-affirming surgery cannot be conducted only on the basis of the patients’ will or other illegal actions. According to Health Minister Mikhail Murashko, decisions on surgery and hormone treatment should be taken only by high-level medical commissions involving federal institutions.