ST. PETERSBURG, May 10. /TASS/. A bill banning the change of gender in passports and other documents in Russia will be introduced soon, Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko told a plenary session of the youth St. Petersburg International Legal forum on Wednesday.
"In the near future, we should come up with a bill on banning all this [gender change]. The only debate will be whether to ban the medical aspect, or limit it to the legal side of things," Chuychenko said.
"But in my view, given that such a medical problem is not widespread and there are only isolated cases where we can talk about the person having a real illness, I would suggest not to pay attention to this and just focus on treating these people not so that they change their gender, but to improve their psychological condition," the minister said.
In his words, over the past four years, there have been more than 2,700 documented cases of gender change in Russia, and nearly 190 marriages were registered after the gender change.
"We haven’t gotten the chance to see if there were any adoptions, but we believe that these people have also adopted children," he noted.
Earlier, the justice minister said in an interview with TASS that one of the first steps towards enshrining family values in Russian legislation could be revoking the possibility of changing one's gender in passports or other documents without a sex reassignment surgery.