Cisheteronormative violence

Introduction. Defining the key concepts

The concept of “gender-based violence,” although widely used at the international level, still has no single, generally accepted definition. In some cases it is equated with violence against women – that is, violence committed against women on the basis of gender – proceeding from a gender order in which men are the dominant class and women the oppressed one. In other cases a broader definition is taken as the basis: this is violence directed against any person on the grounds of gender, gender identity, or gender expression, or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately. In the documents of international organizations one can also find an explicitly formulated definition of violence on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and/or sex characteristics as a form of gender-based violence.

In my view, the very fact that this definition is sometimes narrowed is a consequence of the binary model of gender and of the cisheteronormativity bound up with it. Of course, there is no arguing with the fact that it is predominantly women who suffer from gender-based violence. At the same time, the material on violence in the relationships of LGBTQI+ people has already shown the considerable role that gender norms and expressions play in it. And if we look at other spheres of social interaction, cases of gender-driven violence against LGBTQI+ people can be seen there as well.

Thus, in the broadest possible sense, gender-based violence can be defined as violence whose commission is grounded in the gender order of society. And if in the case of women it is conditioned by their lower status in the gender hierarchy, in the case of LGBTQI+ people it is conditioned by the fact that through their expression, their behavior, and even their very existence they challenge that hierarchy as such, with its fixed statuses and the norms attached to them.

A more detailed elaboration of this last thesis should begin with an explanation of the concept of cisheteronormativity already mentioned above.

The word “cisheteronormativity” itself was formed as a combination of two others: cisnormativity and heteronormativity. English-language literature also contains their combination in the reverse order: hetero-cis-normativity. The concept of heteronormativity is historically older and denotes a system of views and beliefs in which only heterosexuality is recognized as the norm, while any other expressions of sexuality are deviations that require either correction to the norm or the imposition of certain restrictions on them, but in any case cannot be regarded as equal to heterosexual orientation. Cisnormativity, by analogy, likewise defines cisgender identity as the norm and transgender identity as the deviation.

Most often both of these “normativities” coexist, together forming cisheteronormativity. This happens because both of them are grounded in the gender-binary system. It rests on propositions that are in effect accepted as postulates requiring no proof and admitting of no doubt:

• human beings have only two sexes: male and female;
• the sexes are fundamentally different, “opposite,” and therefore, in particular, any person’s sex can be determined unambiguously;

• gender differences are a continuation of sex differences, are grounded in biological factors, and hence there are likewise two genders and all people are firmly assigned to them (this claim is separately known as “gender essentialism”).

Heteronormativity, taking this set of basic postulates, adds to it the idea that intimate relationships – both romantic and sexual – can exist only between people of different sexes, that is, a man and a woman. This means, in particular, that heteronormative culture seeks to reproduce and celebrate precisely this kind of relationship with the expressions proper to it, and to pass over any others in silence. Accordingly, if a person is looking for a relationship or mentions their relationship, it is automatically assumed that it is a relationship with a person of the “opposite sex.”

Cisnormativity, in turn, goes further in tying gender to sex, effectively excluding the concept of gender identity as superfluous, since within this paradigm it is not supposed to differ from sex. Likewise, cisnormative culture passes over the lived experience of trans people and of gender transition in silence, and within it every person is automatically perceived as cisgender.

Since cisheteronormativity arose in a world of patriarchy, it is often combined with patriarchal attitudes. In particular, this is how the concept of “traditional values” became widespread – originally in the form of “traditional family values,” but eventually used more and more often in an extended sense – a concept favored by adherents of precisely this picture of the world. Despite the name, it has very little in common with the actual traditions of any given era, referring instead to a certain mythical past, an imagined “golden age” to which humanity, or the society of a particular country, is supposedly obliged to return, having cast off “perversions.” In addition to the propositions already named, traditional values usually presuppose the following:

• strict adherence to male and female gender roles in accordance with one’s sex;
• an active, leading position for the man and a passive, receptive position for the woman in a relationship;

• the creation by a man and a woman of a family, sealed by marriage, as the culmination of a relationship, with the subsequent goal of having children;

• condemnation of any measures and means perceived as artificial interference in natural reproductive processes, such as abortion or contraceptives;

• raising children from an early age according to the gender norms for their sex while at the same time isolating them from information about sex and sexuality;

• condemnation of any departure from these norms, along with the pathologization of such departures and/or the provision of punishment for them.

It is in fact this last point that brings us to the subject of this text. Clearly, LGBTQI+ people do not fit traditionalist norms simply by virtue of who they are. And the more deeply cisheteronormativity permeates a society and is integrated into it, the more condemnation they experience and the more they suffer from violence, which becomes a means of punishment for failing to conform to society’s gender attitudes and expectations.

From here on I will also use the term “cisheteronormative violence” to describe this.

Four levels of social circles and their influence on violence against LGBTQI+ people

Cisheteronormative violence can manifest itself at various levels, which can be generalized into two main ones: the social and the institutional. While at the social level its source is rather informal social norms and rules – and those who are guided by them – at the institutional level it is already a matter of certain formalized and legalized social structures.

Both of these levels can in turn be divided into two circles each, and thus the whole takes the shape of a system with an LGBTQI+ person at the center and, around them, everything that exerts an influence on them which may take violent forms.

• The circle of close people – those who are most significant to a person: family, partners, close relatives, friends, and housemates.
• The circle of the social environment – everyone a person communicates and crosses paths with in one way or another: classmates and fellow students, colleagues, neighbors, professionals, clients, fellow travelers.
• The circle of social institutions – any associations, organizations, or institutions that may have an influence on a person’s life: churches and religious organizations, civic and professional associations.
• The circle of the state – state regulation of the rights of LGBTQI+ people as such: legislation and subordinate normative acts, as well as the state institutions that adopt them and are responsible for their enforcement.

On the one hand, the closer a circle is to a person, the more directly it affects their life; on the other, the nesting of these circles shows that a wider circle also has an influence on the narrower ones contained within it. Everything is thus interconnected, and yet for each of these circles it is possible to single out the particular ways in which cisheteronormative violence manifests itself.

The immediate circle

Family and other close people are the circle in which it is most important for anyone to feel acceptance, including acceptance of the expressions of their sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and/or sex characteristics (SOGIESC). It is in this circle above all that LGBTQI+ people want and try to come out. Unfortunately, it is also here that they often encounter homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia instead, which spills over into rejection and violence.

Since the previous text was devoted in depth to violence against LGBTQI+ people on the part of an intimate partner, I will not dwell on it here. However, if we take the family circle and the immediate circle in a broader sense, LGBTQI+ people often encounter certain manifestations of gender-based violence there as well. These may take the form of attempts to punish a person for departing from heterosexuality or cisgender identity and/or to force them into cisheteronormative behavior. In particular, this may take the form of:

• physical violence of any kind as a direct means of punishment;
• the imposition of prohibitions and restrictions. For example, when parents find out that their daughter is dating another girl and forbid her to see her; or, similarly, forbid a transgender person to take hormones. Such a prohibition may be accompanied by the threat of punishment if it is broken;

• the imposition of a particular behavior and way of life. For example, how to dress, where to spend one’s free time, with whom to build relationships – up to forced marriage in the extreme case;

• control over behavior. This may take the form of demands for regular reporting (where you were, whom you saw, whom you called) as well as of surveillance of a person’s actions – in person, with the help of gadgets, or by involving third parties;

• moral pressure. For example, shaming, appeals to “normality,” the treatment of expressions of non-heterosexuality and transgender identity as sin;

• the restriction of contact and support. When an LGBTQI+ relative stops being invited to family events, is excluded from the family’s shared circle of communication, is refused support (including material support); the extreme case is when parents disown them and cut off contact;

• attempts at the forced “correction” of SOGIESC. This may involve turning to various “specialists” who practice so-called conversion therapy, as well as more intuitive and “folk” methods – up to corrective rape and, in the extreme case, so-called honor killings.

A decisive factor of influence is often the high level of social isolation of LGBTQI+ people. Because of it they find themselves in greater dependence on their family and other close people, and are sometimes forced to accept their conditions in order to secure the very possibility of existence. This may take the form of an explicit or implicit bargain in which an LGBTQI+ person limits the expression of their SOGIESC (entirely, or to a degree sufficient for it to go unnoticed) and in exchange retains a certain level of family support. For homosexual people this may mean giving up relationships with a person of the same gender or concealing them. For trans people it may mean giving up gender transition or carrying it out to a limited extent that leaves room to play a role corresponding to the gender that matches the sex assigned at birth (for example, without legal gender recognition).

The social environment

Everyone has not only a circle of close people but is also embedded in society at large in one way or another. A person studies or works, communicates with neighbors, with like-minded people who share their interests, with doctors and salespeople – and may themselves be a professional in one field or another with clients, superiors, and subordinates. Accordingly, any of these environments may be friendly to the free expression of SOGIESC – or not.

Compared with the immediate circle, in the wider one a person can, first, refrain from revealing themselves as deeply as a personality, maintaining a certain formality and distance in communication. Second, while one does not choose one’s relatives, one’s social environment can be changed by changing jobs, transferring to another educational institution or finishing one’s studies, or, finally, moving to another place or even another country.

At the same time, if a person remains in a particular environment for a long time, concealing their SOGIESC means concealing a substantial part of their life, of their “self.” If others, for example, speak freely about their heterosexual relationships, a homosexual person is placed in an unequal position, forced either to stay silent about this part of life or to lie about it in order to avoid homophobia. Not to mention trans people who are transitioning – in this case even silence may not help, since at a certain stage the changes become obvious. Likewise, the need to change one’s environment solely because of its homophobia or transphobia is a marker of inequality. This is not always easy to do, and such changes can entail material and career losses. Finally, it makes sense at all only if the new environment will not be just as homophobic or transphobic, the likelihood of which increases when cisheteronormative views dominate in the society of the country.

Turning to the manifestations of violence at this level, it is worth noting the determining factors that shape them:

While in the immediate circle an LGBTQI+ person’s dependence is often indirect and may lie more in the psychological and emotional plane, in the wider social circle it is sometimes built into the very nature of the interaction, where one person holds power over another. In particular, these may be relationships of the “student – teacher,” “employee – boss,” “patient – doctor,” “client – professional,” “tenant – landlord” type. In all of the pairs named, the LGBTQI+ person, who occupies the position on the left, depends in one way or another on the person on the right, who has the authority to make certain decisions concerning them.

If we return to the forms of violence listed for cases of close relationships, here, from a position of power, physical violence is used less often. Instead, various methods of pressure are possible in the form of direct orders, conditions, and ultimatums – where, for example, failure to comply may entail certain disciplinary punishments, dismissal, or a refusal to provide services. Compliance with such conditions has nothing to do with the obligations that such relationships generally imply, so there are no grounds other than homophobia, biphobia, or transphobia for imposing them. In effect, violence here borders on discrimination – that is, on unequal treatment, in this case on the grounds of SOGIESC.

Besides vertical relationships, there are also horizontal ones with people who are formally in the same conditions as the LGBTQI+ person: work colleagues, classmates, neighbors, and so on. On the one hand, they usually have no direct dependence on any of them. On the other, if these people act as a collective, this creates a different dynamic, in which that very collective, a group of people, becomes the source of violence against the LGBTQI+ person.

Collectivity gives rise to a certain sense of impunity, since responsibility for what is done is, as it were, distributed among all the participants while at the same time resting on no one personally. This gives rise to the following forms of violence:

• harassment in the form of bullying or mobbing;
• isolation, the exclusion of a person from circles of communication, the ignoring of their needs and requests;

• collective beating, rape, murder.

The most dangerous cases are those where the factors of hierarchy and collectivity combine – that is, where a manager initiates or supports violence that the majority of the collective then joins in, thereby receiving, as it were, an indulgence for it. The more vulnerable and dependent on this collective an LGBTQI+ person is, the harder it may be for them to resist such violence, and the more dangerous the consequences it will have for them.

SOGIESC — sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, or sex characteristics

Social institutions

If the previous level was about informal collectives, this one is already about formalized ones – but ones that are not part of the state and are not directly governed by its policy. At the same time, they may have their own policies and positions, including on questions of gender, SOGIESC, and LGBTQI+ people. Such positions may generally range from friendly and inclusive to openly hostile.

If a person is voluntarily a member of a particular association, they are naturally expected to share its values. At the same time, if an association has influence in a particular region, in particular social circles or spheres of life, a person need not be part of it to feel that influence on their life directly or indirectly.

In the context of SOGIESC issues, the following types of associations are worth noting above all:

• religious;
• civic;

• professional.

Religious teachings and churches are a source of moral and ethical guidance for a significant part of society. At the same time, relying on texts that are hundreds and thousands of years old, they rally around themselves above all the most conservative part of society. Of course, they too change over time, adapting to the positions and demands of the social majority, but far more slowly than any other component of society. Churches, moreover, usually regulate the categories of gender and sexuality quite rigidly, prescribing norms for the behavior of men and women, and thus constitute the pillars on which cisheteronormativity rests most firmly in society. This is especially true of the Abrahamic religions, which include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

It is worth noting here that the texts of scripture are often formulated in such a way as to allow different interpretations – in particular, different fragments of them sometimes directly contradict one another. On the one hand, this allows progressive religious figures and churches to take the position of supporting LGBTQI+ people and their rights, including same-sex marriage. On the other hand, homophobic representatives of the church and believers can find arguments in favor of their position even where there are in fact none.

A textbook example here is the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah – cities that suffered divine punishment for debauchery and for hostility toward guests, if we go by the text; yet in the popular imagination it often surfaces as a model of punishment for expressions of homosexuality.

On the whole, the theme of sin and of potential punishment for it is central to many religions. Accordingly, homosexual behavior and violations of gender norms, including transgender identity, are declared sinful. And although religious doctrines usually presuppose free will and punishment for sins in the afterlife, in practice the church itself often takes on the punitive function. This may be carried out by direct methods – for example, when a priest pressures an LGBTQI+ person, intimidates them, refuses them support, or contributes to their social isolation. Or by indirect ones, when a person’s social environment, guided by religious motives, uses violence against them – ranging, again, from psychological pressure to physical violence and ending in honor killings.

In this case it would be fair to say that responsibility for such crimes lies not only with those who directly commit them, but also with the religious community by whose values and precepts they are guided in doing so.

Civic associations whose agenda includes SOGIESC issues may range from organizations of LGBTQI+ people themselves fighting for their rights to ones whose activity is built directly on homophobic and transphobic ideology and on opposition to LGBTQI+ people. Since it is the latter that concern us in this material – and, more broadly, those guided in their activity by cisheteronormativity – it can be noted that they belong to the right-wing, often far-right (also known as the ultra-right) part of the political spectrum.

Such civic organizations are usually built around the concept of “traditional values,” which combines conservative religiosity with rigidly regulated gender roles. They are often supported by the same churches or by political parties with an analogous position, while formally being simply associations of citizens, with a lower level of publicity and accountability and greater freedom of action. In this way they sometimes become a “combat wing” for religious and political figures, one that can resort to methods the church or party itself would not adopt – in particular, to systematic violence against LGBTQI+ people and their allies. Such organizations are usually called right-wing radical.

At the same time, while religions place the accent above all on the “sinfulness” of LGBTQI+ people, right-wing movements, which also draw secular citizens into their ranks, place it more on “unnaturalness.” Only relationships between a person with a female reproductive system and a person with a male reproductive system, as a result of which conception and the birth of children are possible, are considered natural. The fact that nature itself offers a mass of examples of homosexual interaction is ignored. In general, right-wing politicians tend to argue for the need to raise the birth rate for the sake of “preserving and increasing the nation.” Yet they approach the question superficially, condemning such things as abortion and homosexual relationships, which in their view lower it, while ignoring other factors, such as economic ones, that are in fact decisive. From this follows the conclusion that this goal is for them rather declarative, whereas the real one is control over people through their sexual and reproductive sphere, with a readiness to use violence wherever that control is lost.

Professional associations in the context of the subject described may be associations of doctors, psychological professionals, and other specialists who work with LGBTQI+ people. In the general case they are supposed to be guided in their work by professional standards for their field, which in turn usually rely on international ones – such as the International Classification of Diseases, in which, beginning with the 10th revision, homosexuality is defined as a normal variant of human sexuality, and in the latest, 11th revision, diagnoses related to transgender identity are no longer classified as mental illnesses. Yet sometimes such associations adhere to homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic approaches, relying on outdated notions and dubious research. Accordingly, they promote the ideas that homosexuality or transgender identity are illnesses of which a person can supposedly be cured through various methods that go under the loose collective name of “conversion therapy.”

It is worth noting that in cases involving not associations but individual specialists – sexologists, psychiatrists, and so on – who apply methods based on cisheteronormative views on their own initiative, they nevertheless act not as private individuals but as professionals backed by the institution where they work. And if that institution permits them such a practice, at a minimum turning a blind eye to it, then their position and their violent methods toward the LGBTQI+ people who turn to them for help are just as institutional.

Sometimes conversion therapy is practiced by specialists who began their careers when it was still considered generally accepted and who continue to hold the same views, rejecting contemporary standards and approaches. Some such practitioners enjoy a certain authority and have their own school with followers. Sometimes such specialists or their associations are directly or indirectly associated with religious organizations, being their direct representatives and receiving material or informational support, or clients for “healing,” from them.

So, to sum up, it often happens that different kinds of social associations, consciously or not, support one another in reinforcing cisheteronormativity and in opposing everything that undermines it. The church forms the very foundation of this narrative and helps spread it. Right-wing radical groups take on the mission of punishing those who depart from it. Conservative specialists, for their part, offer them help in returning to the “natural,” “righteous” path of cisheterosexual life.

State regulation

The state level stands above all the others and in one way or another influences them all. Even if a particular LGBTQI+ person does not interact with the state directly in the context of their SOGIESC, they still feel that influence indirectly. It may also be mediated, when the state sets the tone for civic associations, and those in turn shape public attitudes, which then affect the situation of particular LGBTQI+ people.

In general, the following main modes of influence can be named:

• formal – through legislative acts and other normative documents from state bodies that regulate certain aspects of the lives of LGBTQI+ people specifically in the context of their SOGIESC;
• informal – through the voicing of political positions on LGBTQI+ people by various state figures, institutions, and ruling parties, positions that in themselves do not have the force of law but influence a certain part of society for which these politicians are authorities;

• covert – through non-public actions on the part of state figures and institutions.

An example of the last may be politicians lobbying for bills whose content runs counter to those politicians’ public image. These may be indirect attempts to advance more liberal legislation on LGBTQI+ people when such things are not supported in public discourse, or the reverse – playing along with religious conservatives under the mask of a liberal politician. The informal mode here does not differ fundamentally from what was examined at the level of social institutions – with the difference that the state level, as a rule, means influence on a wider audience. Let us dwell on the formal one in more detail.

I would note that the mere absence of any mention of SOGIESC in a state’s legislation cannot serve as a sign of its neutral attitude toward LGBTQI+ people. For it means that they are unprotected and that their rights are unregulated, in particular the right to a family, and, for trans people, the impossibility of legal gender recognition. So this supposed “neutrality” in fact already points to homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia – possibly unconscious – on the part of state figures, and yet in itself is not yet violence.

State violence arises where the normative acts of the state directly restrict the rights of LGBTQI+ people. These may be:

• Restrictions on presence in public space. For example, laws banning “homosexual propaganda” or SOGI topics in educational materials.
• Restrictions that extend to private space as well. For example, a statutory ban on homosexual relationships as such, or on wearing “clothing of the opposite sex.”

• Violent requirements for certain categories of LGBTQI+ people. For example, forced corrective surgeries for intersex people, forced sterilization for trans people.

Liability for violating restrictive laws may range from a small fine to the death penalty in extreme cases.

Of course, such extremes do not arise in a state out of nowhere. They are a consequence of the rigid dominance of cisheteronormative discourse in society, fed by those same religious institutions, a discourse that permeates effectively everything – from the family to the highest bodies of power. So when we say that the state influences everything, it is worth remembering that this connection is two-way, and that changes in society, if they are consistent and sustained, likewise entail changes at the state level as well.

Manifestations of cisheteronormative violence against LGBTQI+ people

Cisheteronormative violence can manifest itself at various levels, which can be generalized into two main ones: the social and the institutional. While at the social level its source is rather informal social norms and rules – and those who are guided by them – at the institutional level it is already a matter of certain formalized and legalized social structures.

Both of these levels can in turn be divided into two circles each, and thus the whole takes the shape of a system with an LGBTQI+ person at the center and, around them, everything that exerts an influence on them which may take violent forms.

Let us examine in more detail some forms of violence that have already been mentioned in the previous section and that are fairly typical. Some of them are not necessarily directed at LGBTQI+ people, yet are widespread against them and have their own specific manifestations in that case. Others, on the contrary, are by their very essence directed precisely against SOGIESC that differ from the cisheterosexual one.

This list does not constitute an exhaustive classification – it does not cover, in particular, cases where violence on the grounds of SOGIESC is situational and spontaneous. Nor does it examine violence in relationships, to which a separate text has already been devoted.

For each such form of violence, the ways of countering it and examples of doing so are also examined. The text could not accommodate the whole range of them, so I have focused on those approaches that have been breakthroughs or that set trends, as well as on cases that played a key role in drawing attention to the problem and prompted the search for a systemic solution to it. In addition, the situation in Ukraine with regard to the corresponding manifestations of violence is analyzed.

Those ways of countering cisheteronormative violence that go beyond specific manifestations and are to one degree or another universal and system-forming are described separately in the next section.

Forced marriages

Forced marriages are most often mentioned in the context of violence against women and mean marriage without the consent of at least one of the parties. Such practices are widespread above all in the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa, where the patriarchal order is preserved in its harshest forms. The Istanbul Convention – the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence – singles out this type of violence among those that must be criminalized.

At the same time, LGBTQI+ people of any gender can also be subjected to forced marriages, and lately they have begun to be mentioned as a risk group for this type of violence. It is important to distinguish forced marriage from arranged marriage. In the case of LGBTQI+ people, the latter may take the form of a sham marriage – for example, when a gay man and a lesbian portray a heterosexual family while each maintains their own separate relationships hidden from those around them, which allows them to avoid manifestations of homophobia from that environment. Of course, such a situation is not a truly voluntary choice either – a lower level of homophobia in society and the possibility of entering into same-sex marriages or at least partnerships would make it avoidable. At the same time, it does not involve direct coercion into a marriage, which is entered into by mutual consent.

Most often it is parents who force their children into marriage, and those children may well be adults. Marriage here serves as a means of “normalizing” not so much their sexual orientation in itself as the social unit that their family constitutes overall; of protecting the so-called honor of the family, so that it conforms to notions of “traditional family values.” Moreover, if an LGBTQI+ child refuses the marriage, threats may be used against them, and in especially harsh cases – abduction, torture, and rape.

In the United Kingdom in 2012, 22 cases of forced marriage out of 1485 in total were recorded in which the injured parties were LGBTQI+ people. This seems like a small percentage, but in a study presented this year, LGBTQI+ people are mentioned alongside people with disabilities as the most vulnerable to forced marriage. Such cases most often occurred in communities of migrants from the countries of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as Ireland, Nigeria, and Somalia.

Since 2005 the United Kingdom has had a “Forced Marriage Unit,” jointly subordinated to the foreign and home ministries. It maintains a helpline for those being coerced into such marriages, and its website also contains informational materials that help distinguish cases in which a marriage is specifically forced in character and give advice on how one can act in them. The unit can also intervene directly in situations where someone is trying to take a victim of forced marriage out of the country, or help repatriate them if they have ended up abroad against their will. One of the published materials is devoted directly to forced marriages involving LGBTQI+ people and contains examples of specific cases in which the unit was able to help.

While direct coercion into marriage is more widespread in traditionalist religious communities, social pressure inclining people toward marriage is present in any cisheteronormative society at all. Most often it again comes from the family circle. Moreover, if an LGBTQI+ person is not yet sure of their identity or has internalized homophobia, biphobia, or transphobia, they may agree to it more readily and even hope that they will thereby “convert” to cisheterosexuality. Trans people, in particular, in agreeing to such a marriage give up gender transition, hoping that family life will reconcile them with the sex assigned to them and with the gender role imposed accordingly. In practice, however, this is not achieved, and after some time it usually leads only to greater suffering, to the realization that such a decision was mistaken, and often to the breakup of the family.

In Ukraine no systematic study of forced marriages has been conducted – perhaps the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which took place last year, will give impetus in this direction. And although the “harsh” varieties of such marriages do not, by all appearances, seem to be widespread in our country, cases similar to the one described in the last paragraph are not isolated.

Corrective rape

The term “corrective rape” emerged in the Republic of South Africa at the beginning of the 21st century to designate cases where sexual violence is used with the aim of “correcting” a person’s sexual orientation, of making it heterosexual. In 2015, the UNAIDS program proposed using the term “homophobic rape” instead, which more accurately describes the essence of this crime. Indeed, not only is the correction of sexual orientation impossible, but the very use of this word presupposes that there is a “correct” orientation and that there are those that must be corrected to match it.

Yet if we discard the attitudes imposed by heteronormativity, no sexual orientation is more correct or better than any other. This text uses the term “corrective rape” because of how widespread it is, but to underscore its falsity it is placed in quotation marks.

It is believed that such acts of violence are most often directed against lesbians, yet individual studies have shown that the cases in which gay men, trans people, and intersex people became their victims may be almost as numerous. Such acts are often presented as a kind of lesson that the rapists want the victim to learn. If toward lesbians it is often formulated as “they should feel what they have deprived themselves of,” in the case of gay men it is “they should experience the passive sexual role as one they will never want to repeat.” Such crimes are often committed by people personally acquainted with the victim. At the same time, their causes cannot be reduced solely to the dynamics of a relationship, to the personal motives of those who commit them – for behind them stand the social processes and attitudes that normalize them, that turn a crime into a means of “healing,” “instruction,” “defense of honor,” and so on.

In 2008 in South Africa a tragic case occurred involving Eudy Simelane, who was a well-known soccer player and also an openly lesbian advocate for the rights of LGBTQI+ people. It was precisely because of this openness that a group of men raped her and then beat her to death. Her body was found in a suburb of Johannesburg The following year one of the criminals was sentenced to 32 years’ imprisonment and another to life, but two others were acquitted. The crime was widely covered in the press, and people began to speak of it not as an isolated case but as part of the systemic problem of “corrective rape,” which often goes unpunished. Soon afterward, in 2011, the Ministry of Justice created a National Task Team whose mandate was to counter hate crimes against LGBTQI+ people.

In South Africa the problem of “corrective rape” is examined most in systemic terms, although one can argue whether this is because it is most widespread there or because it is there that greater attention has been paid to it. By approximate estimates, every week in this country about 10 lesbians are subjected to “corrective rape,” and over a year – more than 500.

It is worth noting that South Africa has fairly progressive legislation on SOGI – including a constitutional ban on discrimination on these grounds and marriage equality (currently the only such country in Africa). At the same time, traditionalist and homophobic views remain strong – in particular, homosexual relationships are sometimes regarded as something “un-African.” Lesbians are also perceived as challenging masculinity and, by their very existence, as diminishing it and the power men are accustomed to holding in a patriarchal society. One indirect consequence of “corrective rape” is the spread of HIV, which has the character of an epidemic in South Africa – a significant proportion of HIV-positive lesbians were probably infected precisely by rapists.

In India, crimes of “corrective rape” are often committed with the direct blessing of parents. A common case is when they arrange matters with a daughter’s brother or cousin, who then commits the act with her in order to “cure” her and return her “to the right path.” Sometimes she is then married off to the cousin, which in some regions of India is a widespread practice. The reason for such actions is usually the family’s belonging to a religious community with a negative attitude toward homosexuality, and the desire to preserve its reputation in that community.

Cases of “corrective rape” have been recorded in other countries as well, even if they are not regarded there as a systemic phenomenon. In the United States of America there is the well-known story of Brandon Teena – a trans man who in 1993 was raped by acquaintances who had learned of his transgender identity, and later killed. It formed the basis of the film “Boys Don’t Cry.”

Survivors of such crimes rarely turn to the police for help, fearing – often quite justifiably – that they will encounter the same homophobia there, and that the police, instead of performing their direct duties, will side with the abusers. This only confirms that the root of the problem lies in the cisheteronormative order, which sanctions any actions that fit heterosexual behavioral templates, turning the notions of crime and punishment upside down.

In Ukraine the situation regarding corrective rape has not been studied, but such cases are known, and LGBTQI+ activists note the relevance of the problem above all with respect to lesbians and transgender people.

Honor killings

So-called “honor killings” are defined as killings committed with the aim of “protecting the honor of the family” against another member of the family or against an outside person who is believed to have violated it through certain actions. Such practices exist mostly in cultures with the religious traditions of the countries of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia – Muslim ones above all – as well as in the diaspora communities from these regions in Western countries. What is perceived as an encroachment on honor here are actions that violate the corresponding traditions and that often concern precisely those expressions of sexuality which are strictly regulated in such societies.

It is believed that women most often become the victims of “honor killings.” For it is female sexuality that is most subject to control in traditionalist societies, where a woman often cannot decide for herself whom to have a relationship with, whom and when to marry, when and how many children to bear – so any exercise of her own will in such matters that contradicts the family’s wishes can already be regarded as an encroachment on the family’s honor. Some sources therefore reduce “honor killings” to killings of women specifically, which, however, lowers the visibility of those cases in which people of any gender become the victims of such killings because they belong to the LGBTQI+ community.

According to data from the United Kingdom for the period 2015–2016, in almost a quarter of the cases of violence under the pretext of “defending honor” in which the gender of the injured person was recorded, they were men. For “honor killings” this is already a third of cases. In almost all such cases the victims came from the countries of South Asia.

In 2008 in Turkey the murder of a gay student, Ahmet Yıldız, drew wide publicity. Over the course of a year he had received threats from his family because of his homosexuality, and in the end he was shot dead by his own father. This case became the first publicly known “honor killing” on the grounds of homosexuality in Turkey. The Turkish authorities, meanwhile, were in no hurry to take measures to arrest the killer and establish justice, and to this day the hearing of the case in court is still ongoing. In the view of human rights defenders, this is because such actions would strengthen the position of LGBTQI+ activists and undermine the position of the authorities, who rely in part on a homophobic majority. In 2012 the film “Zenne Dancer” (“zenne” in Turkish means a man who dances in women’s clothing) was released, shot by Yıldız’s friends and based on his story, and it won awards at a number of festivals. In this way it drew additional attention to the problem of “honor killings” on the grounds of sexual orientation and also contributed to the slow liberalization of views on SOGI issues in Turkish society.

Tellingly, in many other cases those who have committed such crimes do not even try to hide from the police, being convinced that the truth is on their side. Unfortunately, in practice this is often how it turns out, since in many countries of Asia and Africa where such violence is widespread it is homosexual behavior, and sometimes cross-dressing, that constitutes a criminal offense. In certain countries, such as Iran, homosexuality is even punishable by death. Yet although gender transition is officially permitted there – and is even encouraged for gay men as an alternative to punishment – trans people likewise become victims of “honor killings.” This can be interpreted to mean that traditionalist society normalizes transition, in effect, only as a form of punishment, and not as a choice a person is free to make on their own.

In general, in the context of SOGIESC, the pretext for violence may be either same-sex relationships that have become known or any behavior that goes beyond what is normative for the corresponding gender: for example, the wearing of women’s clothing by a person perceived as a man. This can therefore affect both homosexual and transgender people. In effect, depending on the environment and the circumstances, such violence can culminate in the already mentioned coercion into marriage, “corrective rape,” or murder. Sometimes the victim is directly presented with an alternative: to be married against their own will, raped, or killed.

As can be seen, what these types of crimes have in common is that they are usually committed within the family or the immediate circle more broadly, and that “defending the honor of the family” figures among the arguments for committing violence in them. They are also almost always committed in a deeply religious environment where sexuality and gender expression are rigidly regulated and controlled. Countering this must obviously be comprehensive. It must include educational measures to raise general awareness of gender, sexuality, human rights, and the inadmissibility of violence. At the same time, measures are needed at the legislative level in order, first, to abolish criminal liability for expressions of SOGIESC where it exists, and second, to ensure an appropriate level of liability for crimes on the grounds of SOGIESC, which must be classified as hate crimes.

As for Ukraine, it can be assumed that, since the religious traditions described are not widespread here, the problem of “honor killings” is not characteristic of our country, at least at a systemic level. However, there is currently insufficient data for more concrete conclusions on this question.

Bullying

Bullying, in the general sense, is a form of violence that takes the shape of repeated aggressive behavior intended to dominate or intimidate through force, coercion, taunting, or threats. Bullying is also characterized by an imbalance of power, formal or otherwise – the side that bullies another has, by definition, more power. In the case of bullying against LGBTQI+ people, this refers above all to the discursive power that the cisgender heterosexual majority holds over people of other SOGIESC because of its normalized social position relative to them.

Individual harassment carried out by one person is usually called bullying, while its collective form is called mobbing. The line between them can be quite blurred, however, since the former can turn into the latter – especially in cases where the harassment targets someone for belonging to a minority that social norms do not approve of, such as LGBTQI+. If, for example, someone in a group bullies such a person and others in that same group learn about the situation, those very norms push them to side with the one doing the bullying rather than with the victim. So in practice, bullying is often used as a synonym for harassment in general.

As for the types of bullying, the main ones usually identified are physical and psychological, which are distinguished in the same way as physical and psychological violence in general.

Social bullying (relational bullying; the Ukrainian term is not well established) is sometimes singled out as well, aimed at undermining a person’s reputation, social status, and relationships. For an LGBTQI+ person in a homophobic environment, for instance, it can be carried out through outing or gossiping about their sexual relationships (such things also happen to heterosexual people, when others try to disgrace their reputation by spreading rumors about invented homosexual affairs). Another form of social bullying is when people try to isolate someone by avoiding interaction with them, not inviting them to group events, and encouraging others to do the same.

In recent years, cyberbullying has also been discussed separately: bullying carried out over the internet. Its distinctive feature is that online, abusers can hide behind a degree of anonymity that gives them a sense of impunity. On top of that, they can be at any distance from the victim, which makes it possible to draw more bystanders into the bullying. This can also happen indirectly: for example, when people share posts containing bullying on social media not because they were told to, but simply out of an uncritical attitude toward information. In this way network technologies also help to perpetuate harmful information, since it becomes almost impossible to trace all of its paths and delete it accordingly. But cyberbullying becomes most dangerous when it is carried out by organized groups that deliberately exploit these technological features to bully their victims. In particular, it is used by transphobic and homophobic far-right groups in their persecution of openly LGBTQI+ people.

The consequences of cyberbullying
– anger
– isolation
– depression
– illness
– humiliation

Bullying of LGBTQI+ people is most widespread in educational institutions, where it is usually carried out by classmates or fellow students and often happens with the tacit consent of teachers or lecturers – and in the worst cases, they even support it. It can take the following forms, specific to the SOGIESC context:

• comments about a person’s gender and sexuality that make them uncomfortable;
• name-calling and taunting using abusive and offensive words for concepts related to SOGIESC;

• hitting, kicking, shoving, and other acts of physical harm inflicted on a person on the pretext of their belonging to LGBTQI+;

• inappropriate comments and gestures of a sexual nature;

• refusal to cooperate or interact with a person because of their SOGIESC;

• mocking a person or parodying their behavior with an emphasis on their SOGIESC, presented in caricatured form;

• any of the above done online.

There are also less obvious behaviors on the part of teachers and lecturers that enable bullying. They carry no direct negativity aimed at specific LGBTQI+ students, yet at the same time they sustain a discourse in which LGBTQI+ people are treated as inferior:

• assuming that certain activities and subjects are more or less suitable for students depending on their SOGIESC (for example, that science suits heterosexual people while theater suits gay people);
• taking for granted that the opinions of cisgender heterosexual students should count for more than those of students with other SOGIESC;

• reinforcing stereotypical ideas about SOGIESC in teaching materials and during classes;

• ignoring the existence of LGBTQI+ students in the rules and regulations of educational institutions.

In 2006, ILGA-Europe and IGLYO jointly released a publication summarizing the facts known at the time about the social exclusion of LGBT young people in European countries. One of its chapters is devoted to bullying at school, and it mentions that gender-nonconforming behavior, character traits, or appearance are often the pretext for it. This is linked to the rigidly separated sets of gender expressions strictly enforced among peers, where insufficient conformity to expected gender roles leads to suspicion of homosexuality. In the words of one of the study’s respondents, LGBTQI+ people “represent chaos, which is a perversion,” disrupting the notions of “correct gender roles” and “correct sexualities” that are absorbed in the process of socialization. It is noted that heterosexual people can just as easily become targets of persecution if their behavior does not fit what gender norms lead people to expect. All of this can be described as a “heterosexual matrix” built on the opposition of asymmetrically distributed feminine and masculine traits, and within it the basis for bullying becomes an “insufficient degree” of femininity or masculinity. Ultimately, what matters is not so much the actual sexual orientation of the victims of bullying as how the perpetrator perceives it through internalized gender norms. Clearly, this is another way of describing that same heteronormativity.

The bullying of LGBTQI+ school and university students has been researched many times. The results of such research give a sense of its scale and consequences not only in general terms but also in figures. In 2018, the Council of Europe published the report “Safe at school: Education sector responses to violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or sex characteristics in Europe,” which summarizes data from various European countries. In particular:

• on average, almost half of LGBTI students encounter violence based on SOGIESC, including in Belgium – 47%, in Ireland – 48%, in Slovenia – 43%;
• significantly more LGBTQI+ students experience bullying than cisgender heterosexual ones: in the Netherlands, for example, it is 1 in 4 compared with 1 in 10;

• trans students and gay male students are bullied more often, probably because intimacy between girls is to some extent perceived as part of the norm; in Ireland, for example, 46% of LGBTI students were bullied overall, among them 52% of transgender, 75% of intersex, and 59% of gay students; 9% of trans students in Britain received death threats;

• bullying affects both LGBTI students themselves and those who are perceived as such;

• cases of bullying often go unreported: in the United Kingdom, 45% of students told no one at all; in France, 82% did not report it to anyone in the administration.

In the United Kingdom, the “Stonewall” foundation carried out research in 2007, 2012, and 2017, which also made it possible to trace certain trends over time:

• overall, about 65% of LGBT students encountered bullying at school in 2007, 55% in 2012, and 45% in 2017; in that last year, 64% of trans students did;
• 52% of LGBT students heard homophobic rhetoric at school more or less often in 2017 (68% – in 2012 and 71% – in 2007), 36% – biphobic rhetoric and 46% – transphobic.

In addition:

• 40% of students encountered homo/bi/transphobic harassment online, and almost all of them (97%) encountered homo/bi/transphobic content there;
• 22% of LGB students and 45% of trans students had attempted suicide, and 70% and 90% respectively had thought about it;

• 52% of students admitted that bullying had a negative effect on their further plans for education.

Here we can see that the figures decline over the years – this can be attributed both to broader social change gradually normalizing the various expressions of SOGI and to measures countering homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. At the same time, these numbers are still far too high – especially those concerning transgender students.

A study on risk behavior conducted in the United States in 2021 found that 23% of LGB students were bullied on school grounds and 27% were cyberbullied. By comparison, for heterosexual students these figures are 7% and 13% respectively. According to the same study, twice as many LGB students as heterosexual ones (14% and 7%) skipped classes out of concern for their own safety.

Some further studies have shown how bullying affects mental health and education:

• LGBT young people are more than twice as likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs;
• only 37% of LGBT young people feel happy, compared with 67% of cisgender heterosexual young people, and about half of them believe they have to move somewhere else in order to become happy;

• the risk of self-harm is 2.5 times higher for LGBT young people;

• the risk of suicide is 4 times higher;

• LGBT young people who suffer harassment at school usually have lower grades;

• 60% of LGBT students do not report the incidents they suffer to school staff. In a third of the cases that were reported, staff did not respond at all.

All of these data confirm just how much bullying on SOGIESC grounds is a problem that requires a systemic response.

In the United States there is the well-known case of Jamie Nabozny, who for several years was bullied at his school in the state of Wisconsin – at first because of a certain femininity, and later as a gay student, once his orientation became known. Jamie was regularly called names and later beaten as well. School administrators failed to take appropriate action and even shifted the blame onto the student himself for being open about his sexual orientation. In 1995, Nabozny went to court with the support of the organization “Lambda Legal.” The first ruling was in the school’s favor, but the appellate court found that the school leadership had violated the right to equal protection against discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation. Nabozny received compensation, but the larger consequence was that in 1997 the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance on the application of “Title IX” – the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools – stating that schools are obliged to provide students with an environment free from harassment, and that this extends to gay men and lesbians as well.

In general, countering bullying depends on policies and guidelines for educational institutions aimed at protecting and including LGBTQI+ school and university students. In schools where such policies are in place, students are more likely to report cases of bullying and harassment, and teachers are more likely to respond to them effectively as well as to take preventive measures. According to Council of Europe data on its member states, as of 2017:

– 32 countries explicitly prohibit discrimination in education on the grounds of sexual orientation, 24 – of gender identity, 2 – of sex characteristics;

– 18 countries explicitly prohibit violence on the grounds of SOGIE and 1 (Malta) – on the grounds of sex characteristics.

Some countries (Portugal and Spain, for example) include such prohibitions in general education legislation, while others (Belgium and France, for example) place them in national plans and strategies dealing specifically with LGBTQI+ issues.

National-level policies set the direction for the whole country, but at the same time they can be fairly abstract and therefore not effective enough on the ground. An alternative is for national legislation to require educational institutions themselves to develop specific policies against violence toward LGBTQI+ people, as is the case in Montenegro, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Data from the latter show that having a policy on homophobic bullying at a school lowers its likelihood from 51% to 42% and raises the willingness to report bullying from 48% to 60%.

The following can be cited as examples of good practice in implementing policies that protect LGBTQI+ students:

• In Ireland in 2013, the Department of Education and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs jointly launched the Action Plan on Bullying, which explicitly addressed homophobic and transphobic bullying. The plan included a set of procedures directed against it and required all 4000 schools in the country to take measures to prevent and counter it. Schools were also required to document their strategies for tackling violence, including violence on SOGIE grounds. The procedures also contained guidance for school staff on preventing and countering bullying, and staff were offered a program of continuing professional development.
• In Malta in 2015, the government developed a comprehensive policy on transgender, gender-variant, and intersex children in education. It provides for special approaches to protecting students’ privacy (for example, in cases where a legal name does not match a person’s gender identity or expression), the use of gender-neutral facilities, counseling and information on relevant topics, and the use of inclusive language. The policy includes guidance on how to act in cases of coming out and gender transition, and it requires schools to develop detailed mechanisms for supporting trans students.

UNESCO, too, in a publication devoted to responding to violence on SOGIESC grounds in education, names 7 general principles that effective approaches to countering such violence should meet. They should be:

• grounded in human rights;
• inclusive and learner-centered;

• participatory;

• gender-sensitive and gender-transformative;

• evidence-based;

• age-appropriate;

• sensitive to context and cultural specifics.

Ukraine is no exception: many LGBTQI+ people testify that they were bullied because of their SOGI in childhood and adolescence, at school and among peers in general. During the 2016/2017 school year, the organization “Tochka Opory” conducted the first National Survey of the School Environment in Ukraine among LGBTQI+ teenagers with an average age of 16, in order to assess the quality of their school life. It found that:

• 48.7% of respondents feel unsafe because of their sexual orientation, 31.5% – because of their gender expression;
• 88.5% experienced verbal bullying at school, including 62.9% because of sexual orientation and 64.7% because of gender expression;

• 53.5% were subjected to physical abuse (26.5% – because of sexual orientation and 24.5% – because of gender expression);

• 13.9% were physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation and 13.4% – because of their gender expression;

• 47.2% became victims of cyberbullying;

• 47% were subjected to abuse of a sexual nature;

• 94.7% heard homophobic remarks and 88.8% – transphobic ones, with 72.8% and 88.8% respectively hearing them from school staff;

• 65.8% of the victims of violence did not report it to school employees, and 55.3% of those who did report it were told to pay no attention to it;

• those subjected to high levels of bullying skipped school more often and have lower academic performance and lower self-esteem.

Infographic from the national survey of the school environment in Ukraine, 2019/2020 school year

Three years later, in the 2019/2020 school year, the “TERGO Parents’ Initiative” conducted a second national survey of this kind in order to find out how the situation had changed. It covered almost three times as many teenagers – 1743 – from various regions of Ukraine. The results were as follows:

• 44% felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, 28.0% – because of their gender expression;
• 50.5% heard homophobic or transphobic comments from other students, and 66.8% – from teachers or school employees;

• 47.1% experienced physical bullying, including 29.4% – because of sexual orientation and 28.8 – because of gender expression;

• 13.2% were attacked because of their sexual orientation and 12.5% – because of their gender expression;

• 45.2% experienced cyberbullying;

• 48.9% experienced sexual harassment and violence;

• 44.7% of students reported bullying to school staff, and in 55.8% of cases the answer they got was to pay no attention to it;

The researchers conclude from these data that the situation has not become any better. I can agree with that only in part – the figures do show some decline in the level of hate speech, for instance. Overall, though, it is clear that the problem of bullying against LGBTQI+ teenagers remains serious.

Since 2019, Ukraine has had a law “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine on Countering Bullying (Harassment),” which introduced the relevant amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses and the law on education. The law defines the very concept of bullying, establishes liability for it in the form of fines or community service, and also sets out mechanisms for countering it:

• the head of an educational institution approving and publishing a plan of measures aimed at preventing and countering bullying;
• reviewing reports of bullying incidents and issuing a decision to open an investigation;

• open access on educational institutions’ websites to the student rules, the plan of measures aimed at preventing and countering bullying, and the procedure for submitting and reviewing reports of bullying incidents;

• verification by the Education Ombudsman (an office that has also existed in Ukraine since 2019) of reports of bullying incidents at an educational institution and of the completeness and timeliness of the response to such incidents.

Unfortunately, neither this law nor the Education Ombudsman’s website mentions LGBTQI+ students as vulnerable to bullying in any way, and without that the effectiveness of these measures in the SOGIESC context becomes very low. Instead, it is civil society organizations that are trying to tackle the problem as best they can. In particular, the aforementioned “TERGO” initiative has prepared the course “School for Everyone: A Safe School Environment”, which teaches how to spot the bullying of LGBTQI+ students, build trusting relationships with them and, indeed, create a safe environment for them at school. An educational resource for parents, teachers, and school psychologists on the topic of SOGI-based bullying was also created by Insight NGO.

It is not only LGBTQI+ children and teenagers in educational institutions who suffer from bullying. In recent years, as the subject of LGBTQI+ people serving in the army has come into the public eye, people have also begun talking about the homophobia and transphobia they encounter there. A study conducted in 2019 by the association “Ukrainian LGBTQI+ Military for Equal Rights” notes that harsher homophobia in the form of physical violence, threats, and cyberbullying is directed above all at public LGBTQI+ service members who appear in the media, while those who are not public figures encounter purely verbal forms. A mini-study carried out in early 2022 noted a high level of homophobia that can spill over into threats of dismissal, beatings, and driving people to suicide. As for trans people, there are known individual cases of an out trans man and an out trans woman who faced physical and sexual violence. Other trans service members preferred to stay completely closeted in order to avoid the same, which sometimes effectively means giving up on gender transition.

Public LGBTQI+ figures, and activists especially, have also repeatedly been cyberbullied in the form of threats sent in private messages and posted in homophobic online groups, hate speech on social media, stalking, and the publication of personal data. Surges of such homophobic and transphobic hatred often occur against the background of media triggers created, among other things, by large public LGBTQI+ events and legislative initiatives concerning SOGIESC issues.

Organized violence

Organized violence here means violence committed by organized groups against LGBTQI+ people on a systematic basis. The forms such violence takes can vary – from bullying to murder. What makes it worth setting apart as a separate subtype, in my view, is precisely its organized character.

Most often, such violence is committed by far-right groups whose ideology includes xenophobia built on ideas of the purity and superiority of a particular race, nation, and so on, and directed against any minorities that are accordingly regarded as inferior, LGBTQI+ people among them. Far-right activists tend to act from a position of “might makes right,” trying to impose their point of view by force and to suppress those who disagree with it.

In general, far-right ideology in relation to the diversity of SOGIESC often includes religious motifs and attempts to rationalize its xenophobia, which may rest on arguments that are pseudoscientific and absurd to varying degrees:

• the unnaturalness of homosexuality and transgender identity;
• homosexuality and transgender identity as illnesses;

• homosexuality and transgender identity as sin;

• the HIV/AIDS epidemic as punishment for homosexuality;

• homosexuality as the cause of disasters such as the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, or the COVID-19 pandemic, which is likewise framed as punishment for sin;

• homosexuality and transgender identity as a lifestyle deemed socially unacceptable;

• homosexuality as a phenomenon purely of Western civilization, supposedly alien to Eastern countries, which they must protect themselves from (similar rhetoric about “gayropa” is also used in russia);

• linking homosexuality to pedophilia;

• transgender identity as deception, masquerade, a game, a concealment of one’s “real” sex;

• transgender people as a threat to women in gendered spaces (restrooms are mentioned most often);

• homosexual and transgender propaganda, which supposedly draws more and more people into the LGBTQI+ community and must therefore be countered;

• the “gay lobby” and the “gay mafia,” which supposedly exist in the highest circles of government and business and use the levers available to them to promote “LGBTQI+ ideology.”

This text does not set out to dissect these arguments, so I refer readers interested in that to a publication in which most of them are analyzed and debunked as myths.

As this list shows, opponents of LGBTQI+ people often see them not merely as people with certain traits they consider unacceptable, but as adherents of a hostile ideology that has to be fought. The umbrella term “gender ideology” is sometimes used as well, bringing together any movements whose work involves breaking traditional gender roles and norms: feminism, LGBTQI+ activism, queer movements, human rights movements for gender equality – in effect, all those that in one way or another challenge cisheteronormativity. So the far right primarily targets not simply LGBTQI+ people, but activists and public figures – including those who do not belong to the LGBTQI+ community themselves but support it in some way.

Sometimes far-right organizations frame their position as though they had nothing against LGBTQI+ people as such, provided that they “do it quietly at home” and “do not promote their ideology.” This once again marks anything other than cisgender heterosexuality as lower in status – as something that, if it has any right to exist at all, may exist only in a closed private space. Accordingly, the primary targets of the far right become public LGBTQI+ events – such as Prides. In countries with strong homophobia, threats alone are often enough for the authorities to ban a Pride, or for the police to break it up instead of protecting it.

The following cases from the past decade are worth recalling:

• In 2015 in Istanbul, the authorities banned for the first time the annual Pride, arguing that it coincided with the month of Ramadan and that for “certain groups” this could become a reason to react. In practice, the march was broken up by police using water cannons. After that, the authorities banned Pride every following year, usually explaining it by “security considerations.”
• In 2016 in Chișinău, during Pride, a column of Orthodox activists came out to meet its column head-on. The police took no measures to let the Pride participants march safely, and instead evacuated them to avoid clashes.
• In 2021 in Tbilisi, members of ultraconservative organizations came out onto the avenue where Pride was due to take place. They ransacked the march organizers’ office and attacked journalists, some of whom sustained serious injuries. The police did not counter them, limiting themselves to helping escort the journalists out of the perimeter. The organization “Tbilisi Pride” was forced to cancel the event. A few days later, a camera operator for a Georgian TV channel who had suffered multiple facial fractures while filming the attack died from those injuries. In 2023 a similar situation repeated itself, when the radical group “Alt-Info” disrupted an LGBT festival and the police failed to take sufficient measures to stop it.

Where public attitudes are more favorable toward LGBTQI+ people and/or event security is properly organized, opponents usually do not dare to confront them directly, but they may stage a so-called “safari” on the participants of an event, hunting them down after it has ended. Their victims can be not only LGBTQI+ activists but essentially anyone whose appearance is nonconforming enough to be read as “typical of LGBTQI+ people.”

Even where the far right voices rhetoric about only public expressions of diverse SOGIESC being unacceptable, from time to time they attack and try to disrupt the events that LGBTQI+ organizations hold at their own venues behind closed doors. So this rhetoric is rather an adaptation to moderately liberal societies where harsher forms of homophobia are no longer generally accepted. In reality, if you strip away the self-justifying rationalizations, then just as with other kinds of violence, the far right is seeking control over as many spheres of human life as possible.

As already noted in the chapter on social institutions, far-right movements rarely exist on their own; they are usually backed by religious organizations and/or political parties. It is telling, however, that the positions of the right in the broad sense shift along with general public attitudes. In countries where the diversity of SOGIESC is already sufficiently normalized, right-wing parties sometimes drop anti-LGBTQI+ positions from their platforms or considerably soften them, redirecting their xenophobia toward other groups instead – migrants, for example. This can be seen, in particular, in Sweden, while the “Alternative for Germany” party, which is called far-right, supports civil partnerships for same-sex couples despite its overall orientation toward “traditional” gender roles and family values – and one of the party’s leaders, Alice Weidel, is herself an out lesbian in such a partnership. Thus, in more liberal societies it is no longer LGBTQI+ people who are marginalized, but their aggressive opponents. This is not a one-way street, however: in the United States, after Donald Trump, with far more conservative positions than the previous administration, came to power in 2016, far-right movements became noticeably more active, and the amount of violence against LGBTQI+ people increased accordingly.

In any case, countering organized far-right violence has to be based on delegitimizing it – so that openly promoting ideas of hatred toward LGBTQI+ people becomes unacceptable, and acts of violence committed in line with them carry proper punishment. The main instrument for this is legislation providing for liability for hate crimes on SOGIESC grounds.

In 2012 in Chile, a gay man, Daniel Zamudio, was brutally beaten and later died of his injuries in hospital. Four of the attackers were linked to a neo-Nazi group and, among other things, carved swastika-like cuts into the victim. The crime, covered in the media, drew the personal attention of Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera. He called on parliament to speed up the adoption of a hate crimes law that had been stuck in review for 7 years and was meant to prohibit discrimination on a number of grounds, including SOGI.
Despite resistance from the religious opposition, the law was passed that same year, and it has been known ever since as the “Zamudio Law.” As for the killers, one of them was sentenced to life imprisonment, while the others received shorter terms.

In Ukraine, far-right movements are quite active. Some of them are the radical “direct action” wings of right-wing parties such as “Svoboda,” “Right Sector,” and “National Corps.” Others are, at least formally, independent organizations – C14, “Tradition and Order,” “Freikorps,” “Carpathian Sich,” and so on. For the most part they bring together young people with conservative views and present themselves as nationalist, but unlike purely patriotic nationalist discourse, their positions sometimes cross over into outright xenophobia and Nazism. They are also often affiliated with religious organizations, although their own religiosity mostly comes down to stereotyped manipulation of the notion of “traditional values,” including homophobic references to “Sodom and Gomorrah.” In some of these organizations, despite their declared patriotism, links to russia can be traced – at the very least through joint activity in the past, as well as shared interests at least on the basis of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.

Some far-right organizations have made countering LGBTQI+ activism one of their core lines of work, and it is on this that they build their name among audiences holding matching views. Their rhetoric is not original: it partly reproduces the talking points of Western transphobic and homophobic conservatives, and to an even greater extent the russian talking points about so-called LGBT propaganda supposedly imposed by the West, which has to be stopped.

The methods they use combine various forms of violence: harassment of and attacks on LGBTQI+ people, attacks on LGBTQI+ events with the aim of disrupting them, and cyberbullying.

Among the high-profile cases worth recalling:

• The attack on one of the first “Equality Marches” in Kyiv in 2015. The organizers tried to keep its location secret until the last moment, but – probably through connections in the police – it became known to the far right. The march began with a clash between the attackers and police officers, one of whom was seriously injured. After that, the main part of the event went relatively safely, but once it was over and participants were dispersing through the courtyards, aggressive young men were waiting there for them, chasing them and trying to beat them up. A number of other people were injured in the scuffles – marchers as well as police officers and attackers. Notably, “Right Sector” had voiced its intention to disrupt the march the day before, and the organization’s buses were spotted near the venue, yet it did not claim responsibility for the attack.
• The attack on the “Equality Festival” in Lviv in 2016. This festival, run by the LGBTQI+ organization Insight, was a regular cultural event devoted not even purely to LGBT issues, but to various minorities facing discrimination. The day before, on police advice, the organizers had already cancelled the street event planned as part of the festival, because several organizations had threatened them and had also announced a rally “in support of traditional family values” at the same location. In the end, however, the festival itself could not be held either: the hotel where it was taking place was blockaded by several hundred masked people. Soon afterward a bomb threat against the hotel came in. During the evacuation, far-right activists hurled stones and explosive packets at the buses carrying the participants. The far-right organization “Misanthropic division” later claimed responsibility for disrupting the festival, but no one was actually held accountable for it.

• The attack on the Trans March in Kyiv in 2018. Back at the approval stage, when the march for the Transgender Day of Remembrance was announced, several far-right organizations declared that they would hold their own rallies at the same location, and on police advice the location of the march was changed. Soon, however, the radicals changed their assembly point too, thereby showing that their goal was not the promotion of “family values” as such, but precisely opposition to LGBTQI+ activists. When the rally that was to precede the march began near the metro station, the far-right activists moved in there as well, and smoke bombs flew at the participants. Instead of taking the necessary security measures, the police forced the march to stop before it had even started, pushing the column of people back to the metro by force. At the same time, they did nothing to stop the far-right activists from then holding their own event in the space that had been cleared. Among the organizations that staged the attack and disrupted the march were “Katehon,” “Tradition and Order,” “Bratstvo,” and some others.

It is worth noting that after russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the activity of far-right organizations in confronting the LGBTQI+ movement dropped significantly. At present it shows up almost exclusively online, in response to high-profile news related to LGBTQI+ topics. This can be explained by a combination of reasons:

• the absence, because of the war, of public LGBTQI+ events, which such organizations built their activity on opposing;
• a reorientation of their activity, in which fighting the russian occupiers became the priority;

• reduced or lost funding.

There is also evidence that those members of far-right movements who are fighting at the front are generally less prone to homophobia than those who remain in the rear. This, in turn, can be explained by the fact that the former direct their energy at countering a real enemy and have no need to look for imaginary ones.

So it can be said that organized cisheteronormative violence has almost faded away during the full-scale war. At the same time, this does not mean that violence on SOGIESC grounds has stopped altogether. For example, on August 15, 2023, in Lviv, the transgender service member Helen Mark was beaten out of homophobic motives, and this is not the only such case. But cases like these stem from the general level of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in society and are for the most part spontaneous and situational rather than deliberately prepared.

A problem for Ukraine is that organized homophobic and transphobic groups are not held accountable for their crimes. One of the reasons for this is the high level of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia within the police themselves. In recent years the situation has improved at least in that the police have become more responsible in doing their job of protecting public LGBTQI+ events. At the same time, they still do not take sufficient measures to investigate cases of violence. A second reason is the absence of proper legislation. When cases are opened against the perpetrators, it is usually only under the article on “hooliganism,” without treating them as hate crimes. After all, at present the article of the Criminal Code that provides for enhanced liability for such crimes does not include SOGIESC grounds.

The need to draft and implement such legislation has been noted in the National Human Rights Strategy since as far back as 2016. In practice, though, a comprehensive bill covering the countering of both discrimination and hate crimes on SOGI grounds was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada only in 2021. At the time of writing, it is on the agenda of the current session of Ukraine’s parliament, but the prospects for its adoption still remain unclear.

Conversion therapy

In general, “conversion therapy” is an umbrella term for pseudoscientific practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression in order to bring it into line with the norms of heterosexuality and/or cisgenderness. Thus, the very definition already makes it clear that the existence of such practices is driven by the cisheteronormativity of the society that resorts to them.

The name “conversion therapy” is in fact a misnomer, since genuine therapy aims to improve a person’s physical or psychological condition, whereas conversion therapy brings about no positive changes and at times amounts to outright torture. In recent years the term “sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts” has been proposed as an alternative (abbreviated as SOGICE). The term “reparative therapy” was also sometimes used as a synonym in the past. This text uses the term “conversion therapy” as the most widespread one today, but with the understanding that what is meant is a “so-called therapy” that is not in fact therapy at all.

The first attempts at conversion therapy date to the end of the 19th century, when the variants and manifestations of SOGIE were only beginning to be studied systematically. They are associated with the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and later Sigmund Freud, who viewed homosexuality as a form of psychopathy, a developmental deviation, and accordingly raised the question of how to correct it. The same applies to transgender identity, although more systematic approaches to it took shape only in the middle of the 20th century — when trans people were first of all made to come to terms with the sex assigned to them at birth, and the possibility of gender transition was considered only after those attempts had failed. In both cases science eventually recognized such methods as unsound, yet they had already spread widely enough — helped along, of course, by transphobic and homophobic public discourses and conservative religious ones — that in some places they are still used and promoted, presented as supposedly scientific.

Well-known methods of conversion therapy include the following:

• Aversion therapy. It is built on making same-sex sex consistently provoke revulsion and disgust in a person. To this end, electric current was applied, as well as agents that induce nausea, while erotic images of same-sex sex were shown at the same time. The result of such methods was a general decrease in sexual sensation and arousal rather than a shift from homosexual to heterosexual.
• Brain surgery. This is primarily lobotomy, which was used as a “cure” for homosexuality by, among others, the American neurologist Walter Freeman in the middle of the 20th century. If the desired effect was achieved at all, it came at the cost of a general decline in patients’ intellect and emotional responses, and some of them later died or took their own lives. Such practices soon faded away, and in many countries they were directly banned.

• Castration, transplantation. Surgical castration was carried out as a punishment for homosexual men in Nazi Germany, as well as in a number of other countries in the early 20th century. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, chemical castration was also used — it was precisely this that the outstanding mathematician Alan Turing suffered from. In addition, in Germany experiments were conducted in transplanting testicles from heterosexual men to homosexual ones and implanting testosterone capsules; these were unsuccessful and often led to the deaths of the subjects.

• Confinement in closed institutions. This is a practice of forced “treatment,” more common in religious communities, in which, with the consent or direct involvement of an LGBTQI+ person’s relatives, they are sent to a closed clinic or camp, where a variety of methods may be used on them, from psychological pressure to physical torture, with the aim of changing their SOGI. Behind the screen of a clinic there are sometimes religious extremists.

• Hypnosis. It was used in psychotherapeutic practice starting in the time of Krafft-Ebing at the end of the 19th century. In russia, the psychotherapist Yan Goland claimed that through hypnosis sessions he had “cured” 78 gay men and 8 trans people. The method assumed that patients consented to hypnosis voluntarily. At the same time, there is testimony from people who lost sexual desire as such as a result of this kind of therapy.

• Psychotherapeutic techniques. From the outset and to this day, such methods have been the most widespread. They are simpler to carry out and are based on the belief that a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be changed in the same way as their various mental attitudes, which is precisely what psychotherapy helps with. Proponents of such methods, including Irving Bieber, Charles Socarides, and Robert Spitzer, published scholarly papers asserting their effectiveness. Later research, however, found that the results they presented were distorted. In particular, successful cases included people who had been bisexual from the start, and a change in the object of their sexual interest was passed off as a change of orientation; or else they were religious people who themselves wanted to rid themselves of homosexuality and, in trying to achieve this, took the wish for the deed. Similar approaches were practiced with regard to transgender identity — in particular, on the basis of the work of John Money, who believed that gender identity is formed through upbringing and can be changed accordingly. Although medical science today recognizes this approach as ineffective and harmful, mild forms of conversion therapy — at the level of advice and recommendations to try oneself in one role or another in keeping with the assigned gender before beginning transition — are often part of interacting with doctors in most countries where gender transition requires their approval. This is practiced especially with minors, who are advised not to rush and to “explore the range of gender expressions.” The price of this, however, may be a deepening of mental health problems caused by gender dysphoria.

• The activity of religious and “ex-gay” organizations. Religious motives are among the most common in the use of conversion therapy. At the same time, as already noted, representatives of churches and religious organizations may cooperate with specialists who offer conversion therapy, creating the appearance of unity between religion and science. One example of such cooperation is the American organization NARTH (the “National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality”), founded in 1992, which presented itself as scientific but was in fact not recognized by professional associations, while it repeatedly ran joint projects with religious ones. In particular, it supported “reparative therapy,” aimed at supposedly “repairing damage or trauma” that, in the view of the proponents of this concept, results in homosexuality. Another approach used by religious figures is to enlist people who have supposedly “been healed of homosexuality” to promote conversion therapy. In the United States, from 1976 to 2013, a large umbrella organization of such “ex-gays” operated — Exodus International. It eventually ceased to exist, and its former leaders apologized for the harm it had done to LGBTQI+ people. There are many known cases in which such “cured” gay men later admitted that they had not in fact rid themselves of same-sex attraction.

• Couples therapy. The International Classification of Diseases, up to and including the 10th revision, contained the diagnosis “Sexual relationship disorder”, which could also be interpreted to mean that it is precisely a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity that stands in the way of the relationship. This accordingly sometimes led people to turn to couples and family counselors with requests to change their SOGI, which the counselors in turn might try to fulfill. ICD-11 no longer contains such a diagnosis.

The view, widespread in the past, of homosexuality and transgender identity as illnesses subject to treatment was reflected in medical standards. Thus, in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision, published in 1977, both figured in one form or another among mental illnesses. Already in the next, 10th version, in 1990, homosexuality was removed from it and instead noted as a variant of normal sexual orientation alongside heterosexuality, as well as bisexuality. The significance of this event is underscored by the fact that May 17 — the day ICD-10 was adopted — was later proclaimed the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. With transgender identity the process moved more slowly, and it was depathologized only in the next, 11th revision of the ICD, in 2019. At the same time, since trans people do still need medical interventions in the course of transition, diagnoses related to transgender identity remained in the classification — no longer as a mental illness, however, but in the new category of “conditions related to sexual health.”

Changes to the ICD matter so much because it is the principal document of the WHO, a UN agency, and it applies to all UN member states (although they are not obliged to introduce a new version immediately, and some take advantage of this, postponing the changes for years or even decades). Even though the ICD itself does not set treatment standards for the diseases it classifies, it is obvious that such standards have to be consistent with the diagnoses listed in it. Accordingly, the presence of the diagnoses of “homosexualism” and “gender identity disorder” legitimized attempts at treatment by “correcting” SOGIE to a cisheterosexual one — that is, conversion therapy. When homosexuality and bisexuality were not merely removed from the list of illnesses but also named variants of the norm, this undermined that legitimization, and the use of conversion therapy methods began to be recognized as unacceptable.

Later, professional associations began stating outright in their position papers that conversion therapy is ineffective, harmful, and/or unethical. And whereas at first this concerned only its application to sexual orientation, such positions were later extended to gender identity as well, so in this case the changes in ICD-11 in some respects came late. As already noted, the studies that supposedly testified in favor of conversion therapy turned out to be methodologically flawed, whereas properly conducted ones show a very low percentage of successful outcomes. Further research has also demonstrated its harmfulness — even of those methods that cause no physical harm. In particular, it significantly increases the likelihood of psychological distress, depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems, including almost doubling the number of suicide attempts.

According to ILGA World, as of 2020 more than 65 professional associations at the international and national levels had in one way or another declared their position against conversion therapy, including the World Medical Association, the World Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists of the United Kingdom. Recommendations against the use of conversion therapy are also contained in the 8th version, the latest at the time of writing, of the “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People” of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most authoritative international organization on the medical aspects of transgender identity.

Some countries have gone further and banned conversion therapy at the legislative level. And whereas in some of them the ban applies specifically to its practice by medical professionals, in others it applies to anyone at all, since, as noted, such methods of “healing” are often offered by religious organizations. As of August 2023, a total of 26 countries prohibit conversion therapy in one form or another, 11 of them completely, providing for criminal liability for it, namely: Belgium, Greece, Ecuador, Iceland, Spain, Canada, Cyprus, Malta, Germany, New Zealand, and France. In Malta — one of Europe’s leading countries in terms of the overall legislative protection of LGBTQI+ people’s rights — the relevant law, passed in 2016, has the telling title “Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression Act.”

One counterargument against such a complete ban may be that a distinction can be drawn between cases in which conversion therapy is forced and therefore obvious violence, and those in which an LGBTQI+ person seeks it out themselves — supposedly by their own choice, which cannot be denied them. At the same time, the boundaries between the two are not always clear. A person often feels indirect coercion, hoping that changing their sexual orientation or gender identity will make life easier in a transphobic and homophobic environment. Moreover, from that same environment they may themselves internalize homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, while having limited access to truthful information about SOGIE. Under such circumstances, a choice in favor of conversion therapy cannot be truly free. Finally, it should not be forgotten that violence is often part of the very procedures that such “therapy” consists of.

In 2020 the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims issued a statement calling conversion therapy torture. That same year a similar statement was made by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, who also called such practices inherently discriminatory, cruel, inhuman, and degrading.

In 2020 the international LGBTQI+ organization ILGA World released a substantial publication reviewing current approaches to conversion therapy in various settings and countries. I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic in more detail.

In Ukraine, ICD-10 has been in force since 1999; it defines homosexuality and bisexuality as normal variants of sexual orientation and accordingly rules out the use of conversion therapy in relation to them, at least officially within the professional medical community. As for gender identity, the regulatory documents of the Ministry of Health that governed the gender transition procedure between 1996 and 2016 in fact directly recommended applying conversion therapy to trans people. Thus, the “Procedure for the examination of persons requiring a change (correction) of sex” contained the following provision: “Intensive psychotherapeutic work must be carried out with them [such persons — I.I.], aimed at the patient’s refusal to change (correct) their sex.”

In 2016 the procedure was completely changed, and the current “Unified clinical protocol of primary, secondary (specialized) and tertiary (highly specialized) medical care “Gender dysphoria”” no longer contains such prescriptions. What is more, it instead contains recommendations for “psychotherapy whose aim is to disrupt gender binarity in the patient’s understanding,” for helping them “realize that being transgender is an entirely normal phenomenon in human behavior,” and an entire passage stating the ineffectiveness of “reparative therapy” for changing sexual orientation.

At the same time, there are no direct bans or restrictions on conversion therapy in Ukraine, and as far as actual practice is concerned, it exists and is used quite openly. It is carried out both by religious figures and by specialists, mostly in mental health: psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and sexologists. One organization worth singling out is the “Association of Sexologists and Sexual Therapists of Ukraine”. Its very name is misleading, since it looks like the name of a professional association that would be guided by the corresponding professional standards, whereas in reality it is merely a nongovernmental organization. The association’s online resources contain a number of materials supporting cisheteronormative views, as well as narratives that present the normalization of SOGI diversity as Western “propaganda.” Some members of the organization, including its honorary president, are known for supporting approaches that pathologize homosexuality and transgender identity and, indeed, for practicing psychotherapeutic techniques aimed at “correcting” them.

According to Freedom House, which conducted a survey on conversion therapy in Ukraine in 2020, two-thirds of those who suffer from it are LGBTQI+ teenagers. The forms it most often takes are:

• religious rites, in particular exorcism — 59%;
• prayer — 54%;

• confinement in a special facility for “treatment” — 51%;

• talks with a psychologist — 46%;

• measures of physical coercion: starvation, restraint, and the like — 41%.

The survey also showed that conversion therapy is promoted above all by religious leaders (89%), by family members of the person subjected to it (75%), and by professional and traditional healers (47%). It is practiced by representatives of religious organizations (84%), practitioners of “traditional medicine” (57%), and private psychological and psychiatric facilities (45%).

As these figures show, the different approaches sometimes overlap and combine — for example, so-called specialists often offer conversion therapy as psychotherapists, proceeding from pseudoscientific justifications, while at the same time giving it a religious rationale.

Unfortunately, because Ukraine has no regulatory framework that could be applied to govern the methods falling under the definition of “conversion therapy,” there are currently no effective means of restricting such practices. About all that can be done is to publicize them and act through public pressure, as well as to invoke general criminal law in cases where there is a specific LGBTQI+ person who has suffered from conversion therapy and wants to hold those responsible to account.

Coercive requirements for gender transition

Originally the concept of gender transition based on medical intervention arose as an alternative to conversion therapy aimed at reconciling a person with the sex assigned to them at birth. Once it became commonplace in scientific circles that, unlike the latter, transition produces positive results, a need arose to standardize such interventions.

Even though one of the leading researchers and popularizers of transgender topics, Harry Benjamin, emphasized back in the 1960s that the various degrees of transgender expression cannot be clearly separated, standardization took the path of establishing criteria for who counts as a “real transgender person” and who does not. This gave rise to the following tendencies:

• gender transition was meant not so much to take account of a person’s individual needs as to bring them into maximum conformity with the sex “opposite” to the one assigned to them at birth;
• those trans people were deemed suitable for such a transition who, in their desires and self-expression, displayed the most stereotypical traits of that “opposite” sex and gender;

• suitability was to be determined by doctors, usually psychiatrists, by establishing the corresponding diagnosis;

• transition was seen as a “one-way road” that could be traveled only in full, with no possibility of return;

• this road involved several stages, in the following order: hormone therapy, surgery to change the genitals, and legal gender recognition.

The model described in these points is in fact a version of the cisnormative system slightly adapted to the phenomenon of transgender identity. It allows the border between the male and female genders to be crossed once, if living on this side of it is truly impossible — but only in order to take up a rigid and immovable position on the other side, observing all the corresponding norms and attitudes.

This approach also placed doctors — psychiatrists above all — in a position of power over trans people. Within the trans community itself they are called gatekeepers (from the English gatekeeper, one who keeps the gate), since it is up to them who will or will not be allowed through the “gate of transition.” In granting such permission, gatekeepers may proceed from their own subjective notions, and in doing so they may:

• directly or indirectly force trans people to play out stereotypical gender roles in order to improve their chances of obtaining permission;
• demand bribes to turn a blind eye to what they see as certain departures from the image of a “real trans person”;

• require them to undergo examination in closed psychiatric institutions (usually in a ward corresponding to the sex in their passport rather than to their gender identity);

• resort to humiliating procedures during the examination, including physical violence.

This dependent, vulnerable position pushes trans people to consent to abuse and violence against themselves and not to complain about such actions, accepting them as an inseparable part of the procedure.

By the end of the 20th century, transition procedures following certain variations of the model described had taken shape in practically every country in the world where gender transition was regulated at all. On top of the medical regulations, legislative restrictions were sometimes added on access to transition for certain categories of people and on certain actions after it:

• lower age limits (as a rule, for minors) and upper ones;
• being married (justified by the argument that after transition such a marriage becomes a same-sex one);

• having minor children;

• having mental illnesses (which supposedly complicate adaptation during transition, or else give rise to the desire to transition in the first place);

• a sexual orientation directed toward the sex opposite to the one assigned at birth (it was believed that a trans person had to be heterosexual after transition);

• a ban on adopting children;

• a ban on military service;

• a ban on certain professions.

It is worth noting that a significant share of these restrictions concerns the categories of sexuality and family, which refers us back to “traditional family values,” adherence to which was in this way encouraged by the state itself.

When, at the beginning of the 21st century, transgender activists and human rights defenders began to speak more loudly about the unacceptability of such restrictions, they started pointing out that not only these restrictions but the procedure as a whole contained coercive requirements — first and foremost, forced sterilization.

Historically, ideas of forced sterilization were promoted by authoritarian regimes in order to control the birth rate and the composition of the population — in particular with regard to ethnic minorities and people with disabilities, proceeding from the ideas of eugenics and the “purity of the nation.” With regard to transgender people it was not formulated in the same way but was presented as part of the choice they themselves make in undergoing transition and giving up the genitals they had from birth, and with them their fertility. Yet if one steps away from the normative concept of “authenticity,” it turns out that different trans people have different needs as to the scope of transition — in particular, not all of them want to surgically alter their genitals, and some would explicitly like to retain the ability to have children of their own after transition. Instead, they are pushed into a choice: consent to infertility in order to receive full recognition, or give up transition altogether.

Meta-research conducted by the Williams Institute in the United States in 2014 on the basis of a number of studies of trans parenting showed that between 15% and almost 50% of trans people have children, which is not significantly lower than among cis people (about 70% according to US data). At the same time, another analysis of studies from the standpoint of the prevalence of surgical interventions showed that only 4% to 13% of trans people, again in the United States, had resorted to genital surgery, which is hardly evidence in favor of making it mandatory in the process of gender transition. In any case, the final decision on the exact scope of transition, including medical interventions, must rest with the trans person alone.

In Sweden, legislation on gender transition had been in force since 1972 that required mandatory sterilization in order to obtain legal gender recognition. After unsuccessful attempts in parliament, the sterilization requirement was struck down in 2013 by a court ruling. By that point between 600 and 700 people had been subjected to it against their will, and some of them decided not to leave it at that. A total of 160 trans people joined together and filed a class action demanding financial compensation from the state. With the support of RFSL, Sweden’s largest LGBTQI+ organization, they eventually got the government to announce and parliament, in 2018, to approve the payment of such compensation. This precedent inspired trans activists around the world, showing that a state can be made not only to make improvements in the present but also to acknowledge past mistakes and, if those cannot be put right, at least to pay compensation for them. In particular, at the time of writing a similar decision had been achieved in the Netherlands, and there is a fight for one in Germany as well.

The organization TGEU (“Transgender Europe”) runs the “Trans Rights Map” project (a map of trans rights), whose data is updated every year. It therefore makes it possible not only to look at the current situation with coercive restrictions on gender transition but also to assess the dynamics of change. In particular, in 2023 compared with 2013, among the countries of Europe and Central Asia:

• 41 compared with 34 have gender recognition procedures at all;
• 11 compared with 24 require sterilization;

• 28 compared with 34 (that is, all of them at the time) require a psychiatric diagnosis;

• 20 compared with 15 have no divorce requirement;

• 8 compared with 5 have no age restrictions.

So the overall dynamic is positive, even though individual countries show regression — such as Hungary and russia, which have recently banned legal gender recognition as such altogether. But while progress on abandoning forced sterilization is, as can be seen, faster, on moving away from mandatory psychiatric diagnosis and, especially, on the availability of transition for minors it still leaves much to be desired.

At the same time, a 2020 European Commission report on legal gender recognition in EU countries showed that more than three-quarters of trans people had not obtained it. Of these, about 60% of trans men and trans women would still like to obtain it in the future. The fact that they have not yet done so is largely connected with the complexity and limited accessibility of legal recognition procedures — in particular, with the requirements they contain that are unacceptable to those people. Of those who did go through these procedures, almost half encountered some form of disrespect and lack of understanding from medical personnel along the way, which left behind a harmful and traumatic experience.

In 2006 the Yogyakarta Principles were adopted at the UN level, establishing at the international level a definition of gender identity that includes, among other things, the possibility of changes to one’s appearance and body by free choice. And in 2010 the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted recommendation CM/Rec 2010(5) to member states, which provides for regularly reviewing legal gender recognition procedures and removing coercive requirements from them. Such procedures should also be quick, transparent, and accessible.

Although such international documents are not binding, they have nonetheless become a kind of standard that helps in advocacy for changing the regulatory framework governing the transition procedure for trans people in a given country.

In Ukraine, the gender transition procedure was governed from 1996 by Order No. 57 of the Ministry of Health, “On the provision of medical care to persons requiring a change (correction) of sex,” and later, in the period 2011–2016, by Order No. 60 of the Ministry of Health, which was a slightly modified version of it. The approach defined by these documents was practically a textbook example of the cisnormative gatekeeping model, in which permission to transition was issued by a single nationwide medical commission of fixed composition. In the final years it was in force, this procedure was, not without reason, called the worst in Europe. Its requirements included (terms are given here in quotation marks in the form in which they were used in the original):

• psychiatric examination in an inpatient facility for a minimum of 30 days;
• mandatory surgical correction of the genitals — that is, sterilization — for legal gender recognition;

• self-awareness not matching the sex assigned at birth, beginning at the age of 3–4;

• the absence of mental pathologies, “homosexualism,” “transvestism,” or “sexual disorders” that could be interpreted as a motive for a “sex change,” as well as of “sexually perverse tendencies”;

• having no minor children;

• not being married;

• the absence of severe impairments of social adaptation;

• the absence of “hermaphroditism” or “disorders of genital development.”

Beyond this list, coercive in itself, there were also implicit requirements from both individual specialists and the central commission — the expectation that a trans person should conform as closely as possible to the stereotypical image of the gender they identify with. All of this forced people to lie to the commission, giving the expected answers instead of truthful ones in order to obtain its permission — which was still not guaranteed, since someone’s subjective reservations could get in the way at any moment.

The regulatory framework that replaced it in 2016 was a significant step forward: the clinical protocol at its core is built on a fundamentally different basis and does not contain most of the restrictions listed. The single “gatekeeping” commission was also replaced by commissions organized by family doctors at any state polyclinic, which are more formal bodies issuing the necessary documents than bodies deciding on transition. At the same time, the procedure still involves:

• establishing a psychiatric diagnosis;
• two years under the observation of a psychiatrist — or, as is often used as an alternative, two weeks in a psychiatric inpatient facility;

• hormone replacement therapy as a mandatory form of medical intervention;

• age restrictions that rule out legal gender recognition for minors;

• no consideration of the needs of intersex and nonbinary people and no recognition of them.

In addition, trans people who have received a diagnosis under the procedure are subject to partial restrictions on adopting children and on serving in the army.

After 2016, activists led by Insight NGO tried to amend the current clinical protocol to improve it or to have a new one approved by the Ministry of Health, but did not succeed. At the time of writing, the Ministry of Health is already preparing to begin implementing ICD-11, in which diagnoses related to transgender identity no longer belong to the category of mental illnesses. This accordingly opens the way to a complete revision of both the medical part of the gender transition procedure and the restrictions tied to the diagnosis.

Normalizing surgeries on intersex people

With the very emergence of the concept of legal sex (that is, the one recorded in a passport or other identity documents), which was defined as male or female, infants were assigned one or the other depending on how it was determined from anatomical features. In the case of intersex variations, determining it unambiguously can be difficult, if it is possible at all, yet under a binary gender system this was still considered necessary, so sometimes sex was determined simply by the length of the genital organ. Such variations themselves, which by their very existence disrupt this system, came to be called “deviations” and “birth defects” — the first scientific and medical approaches of this kind date to the 19th century. And from the 1920s onward, methods of surgically correcting them began to develop as well.

The first operations were performed mostly on older children and adults and were to a greater extent dictated by genuine medical necessity connected with problems in the functioning of the urogenital system. But as early as the 1960s the practice of surgically correcting the genitals of infants began to spread. Behind it lay ideas promoted by the psychologist and sexologist John Money and his associates, that gender identity can be formed through upbringing. The following arguments were made in favor of early correction:

• genital surgery is less traumatic if performed at an early age, when it is not remembered;
• gender identity will be more stable if from the outset it is matched by the “correct” form of the genitals;

• parents are more inclined to have their child “fixed” at an early age;

• the tissues and organs of infants heal better, and such operations leave fewer scars behind.

Another argument, this time from purely heteronormative considerations, was that correction should promote “normal” heterosexual relations, which are supposed to involve a penis and a vagina of the appropriate shape and size. Gradually such operations became standard medical practice. In ambiguous cases the choice was more often made in favor of “making a girl” — because vaginoplasty is technically simpler, on the assumption that the corresponding female gender identity could be developed in the course of the child’s upbringing.

The falseness of the theories described above was demonstrated, in particular, by the widely known case of David Reimer in the United States. At the age of 7 months his penis was surgically damaged, after which it was decided to “make a girl” out of him, through both operations and a corresponding upbringing. The process was overseen by none other than John Money. Later, however, it became obvious that the attempt had failed, and when his parents revealed to him as a teenager what had happened to him in early childhood, David definitively adopted a male gender identity. It later also became known that in his approaches to upbringing Money used openly abusive methods — such as making the child simulate sexual intercourse with his own brother. In 1997 the sexologist Milton Diamond persuaded Reimer to tell his story publicly as an argument for surgeons against such operations on infants. His biography came out soon afterward, making the case even better known. David’s own life never came together after everything he had lived through — in 2004 he took his own life. Although David Reimer’s story did not lead to changes in the United States itself — even Money continued to defend and promote his approach — it became very widely cited in advocacy for the rights of trans and intersex people. And that advocacy, in turn, contributed to bans on normalizing surgeries on infants in some countries, as well as to changes in the standards of medical care for trans people, removing from them approaches aimed at bringing gender identity into line with sex characteristics.

In general, normalizing surgeries are problematic in the following respects:

• Informed consent. An infant simply cannot give it, since they are not yet aware of themselves or of what is happening to them. Many intersex people say that they would not have had the operations if the choice had been left to them until a later age.
• Consent to the operation is given by the parents. Apart from the fact that they cannot in principle decide for the child what will ultimately be better for them, they often do not have full information, being under the influence of medical opinion on the one hand and public opinion on the other. This pushes toward a decision in which the appearance of the genitals is given priority over their future sexual function.

• Sexual sensitivity. Studies conducted in the 1990s showed that it is lost in 20–50% of cases.

• Gender identity. It is impossible to determine in an infant, so there is a chance that, as in David Reimer’s case, surgically corrected genitals will not match it.

• Stigmatization and mental health. It is often believed that surgery will protect the child from stigma and that this will have a positive effect on their psyche. Real data, however, show that this is not the case: a sense of “strangeness” combined with problems of sexual function has negative consequences for mental well-being.

• Medical photography and examinations. The genitals of intersex children are often photographed and displayed at medical examinations, after which these photos circulate within the medical community. Such a practice is humiliating and ethically questionable.

• Withholding information. The parents whose consent the operation on the infant is performed with may then conceal it from the child — moreover, doctors themselves often advise doing so. This can have potentially negative consequences when the child grows up without knowing the truth about themselves, or learns that truth suddenly at some point.

In Germany, Christiane Völling was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and had genitals of ambiguous form, because of which she was raised as a boy. In adolescence she was found to have a practically complete set of female reproductive organs as well as a female set of chromosomes. Christiane, however, was not given this information in full, and in effect the doctors themselves decided to remove her female reproductive organs. She later transitioned as a woman and gained access to the medical records that had been hidden from her, after which, in 2008, she sued the doctors who had performed the operation. In 2011 the court found that the removal of her reproductive organs, carried out without full informed consent, had caused Völling irreparable harm, and awarded her 100,000 euros in compensation. This was the first case in which an intersex person defended their rights relating to sex characteristics in court. It has since been repeatedly cited in advocacy for intersex people’s rights, and in 2021 Germany adopted legislation banning operations on intersex children except in cases where, in the doctors’ opinion, they cannot be postponed.

Research conducted among intersex people in Lübeck in 2005–2007 showed that 81% of respondents had undergone surgery because of their intersex variations. Almost 50% of participants reported having psychological problems. Two-thirds of the adult participants linked their sexual problems to the operations they had had. Children, for their part, reported significant impairments in the areas of family life and physical well-being — that is, precisely those the operations were supposed to improve.

A survey conducted among intersex people in Australia in 2015 found, in particular, the following:

• their experience as objects of the medical system is often negative: this includes both a lack of information and unsatisfactory results of medical interventions; many also testified that institutional shaming and coercive treatment are typical approaches;
• 19% of respondents had attempted suicide, which is significantly higher than the average level in Australia;

• many of them were bullied while at school, and were also negatively affected by the fact that medical procedures coincided with puberty; as a result, many left school early.

If changes in the medical field regarding transgender identity lag behind those related to sexual orientation, for intersex variations they are slower still. Thus, in ICD-11 the corresponding diagnoses still belong to the category of “Developmental anomalies”, defining the variations themselves as a pathology. In 2016 a number of international experts released a publication in which they noted the absence of consensus in the professional field on operations on intersex people. They did, however, note a growing tendency to give priority to preserving patients’ autonomy, which means leaving the final decision on operations to the patients themselves.

At the same time, a number of international organizations — among them the Council of Europe, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, several UN committees and special rapporteurs, and the WHO itself — have called for an end to violence against intersex people and have in one form or another spoken out against operations on them that are not medically necessary.

In 2015 Malta adopted the “Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act,” which for the first time in the world banned normalizing surgeries on intersex infants. This law protects intersex people’s right to bodily integrity and physical autonomy. Only a few countries in the world so far have similar legislation: besides Malta, these are Albania, Kenya, Portugal, Uruguay, individual states of India, and, in part, the already-mentioned Germany.

The need to record a child’s sex in documents immediately after birth can in itself push toward performing an operation to bring the child’s genitals into the form typical of that sex. The Malta Declaration of the International Intersex Forum, for these reasons, calls for awareness, when assigning male or female sex to intersex infants, that as they grow their gender identity may turn out to be different. Since 2013 Germany has provided for entering an undetermined sex on the birth certificate in cases where a newborn has characteristics of both sexes — though it does so on a mandatory basis, leaving no choice. Today, 19 countries also have legislation that to one degree or another makes possible legal recognition of a gender other than male or female. Of these, 12 allow this on the basis of self-determination, while the others impose certain conditions — which may include the presence of intersex variations, as again in Germany.

In Ukraine at present, regulation that would explicitly concern intersex people is absent as such. Normalizing surgeries on infants are, on the one hand, not directly recommended, but on the other hand they are not banned either. So the question of performing them may be decided by individual doctors depending on their experience and awareness, provided that, in accordance with general medical legislation, the parents give consent.

There are no statistical data on such operations and their results in Ukraine, but such cases are known, as intersex activists also attest. Tellingly, in some instances the performance of a normalizing operation is even presented as a positive example of medical achievement, which speaks to the low awareness of this subject among both doctors and journalists.

Criminalization on the grounds of SOGIE

Criminalization here means a legislative ban on particular manifestations related to SOGIE, the violation of which entails criminal liability. In a certain sense this is the highest level of violence – because at the other levels an LGBTQI+ person subjected to it can seek protection from the state. In this case, however, it is the state itself that acts as the perpetrator; moreover, by declaring LGBTQI+ manifestations illegal, it to a certain extent legitimizes and even provokes other acts of violence against them as well.

Most often the object of criminalization is homosexual relations between men. But in some states it also extends to relations between women, and in some places to manifestations of transgender identity, which may be presented as “impersonating a person of another sex.” At the same time, trans people can also become victims of the criminalization of homosexuality as such – primarily trans women who have not obtained legal recognition and have a male gender marker in their documents while being in relationships with men, which are thus formally perceived as homosexual.

Isolated cases of legislative bans on homosexual relations are known as far back as ancient times, but such bans began to spread in the late Middle Ages in the countries of Europe, where they were promoted above all by the position of the Catholic Church. Colonization led to similar laws spreading to the colonies of European states in Africa and America, primarily the British ones, where in some places such laws survived after the respective territories gained independence – even when they had already been repealed in the former metropole. In the Muslim states of Asia and North Africa, similar legislation developed on the basis of Sharia law, which condemns certain sexual practices often associated with homosexuality, such as anal sex. Only in the second half of the 20th century did the trend reverse, when more and more countries began to repeal legislation that criminalized LGBTQI+ people.

ILGA World studies the dynamics of LGBTQI+ criminalization around the world, since 2006 regularly publishing detailed reports under the telling title “State-Sponsored Homophobia”. According to its data at the time of writing, homosexuality is criminalized in one way or another in 61 UN member states and in two more not at the legislative level but de facto. These are mostly countries of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the island countries of the Caribbean and Oceania.

The content of criminalization laws differs greatly from country to country:

• Some spell out directly which acts are prohibited, while others use phrases such as “crimes against nature,” “indecency,” “immoral acts.” Such wording leaves room for subjective interpretation and at the same time refers back to cisheteronormativity, within which it is determined what behavior is “natural” and “decent” for one gender or another.
• Some laws are directed specifically against anal sex, others also cover oral sex and mutual masturbation.

• Some laws are directed specifically against same-sex couples, while others are aimed rather at particular sexual acts that may also be performed by different-sex couples. In practice, however, both kinds are usually applied only against homosexual people anyway.

• In all cases criminalization concerns sexual activity between men, and only in two-thirds of them – also between women. This is connected with the fact that erotic expression between women in a patriarchal society, where the subject is always a man, is often not perceived as sex and therefore as something that violates their supposed heterosexuality.

All this shows that such laws are aimed at state control over the sphere of sexuality, private and family life, at regulating this sphere in accordance with the cisheteronormative system, which in turn usually rests on religious dogmas that appeal to the moral and ethical sphere.

Punishments for violating the law also vary greatly: these may be fines of a certain amount, imprisonment for a certain term (sometimes – for life), and in extreme cases – the death penalty. Today the latter is provided for in 7 countries: Brunei, Yemen, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria (the northern part), Saudi Arabia, Uganda. In addition, in Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Somalia there are militant groups that carry out extrajudicial executions. In several countries, such as Saudi Arabia, criminalization laws have a direct religious foundation, being based on Islamic criminal law.

In some countries criminalization laws concerning LGBTQI+ people exist only nominally. This is primarily the case where the legislation prohibits homosexual acts committed in private – since the question arises of proving that they took place. In some places there have been no punishments under such laws for many years now. Moderate traditionalists sometimes use this as an argument against repealing such laws, which allegedly harm no one on the one hand while, in their opinion, having a positive influence on public morality on the other. In practice, however, even in the absence of direct institutional violence resulting from the application of criminalization laws, their very existence has a number of indirect negative consequences:

• Maintaining a public discourse in which LGBTQI+ people as such are perceived as criminals, which forces them to feel fear of persecution and to conceal their SOGIE.
• An increase in the level of violence against LGBTQI+ people – assaults, robberies, rapes, murders – since they are perceived as legitimate targets for it.

• Reinforcement of the stigmatization and discrimination of LGBTQI+ people, in particular when such laws are used to justify refusing to register LGBTQI+ organizations and to restrict freedom of speech and assembly in the context of SOGIE.

• Blackmail of LGBTQI+ people over their SOGIE.

• Selective arrests and beatings by the police, in particular when homosexual expression becomes a formal pretext for dealing with political opponents, civic activists and simply people who are inconvenient for certain representatives of the authorities.

• LGBTQI+ people themselves avoid turning to the police and reporting crimes against them out of fear that they will instead end up as suspects and be subjected to even greater violence.

• A deterioration of the mental state and health of LGBTQI+ people because of the factors described above.

• The spread of the HIV epidemic, since LGBTQI+ people avoid seeking medical care and getting tested for fear of disclosing their sexual behavior.

In its 2017 survey ILGA World demonstrated a correlation between LGBTQI+ criminalization and public attitudes toward SOGIE. Thus, in countries where such criminalization exists, an average of 42% of respondents support it and 36% do not. Where there is no criminalization legislation, support for it is almost twice as low – 22%, while 56% are against it. This once again confirms the existence of a general connection between institutional and social norms.

In the past, arguments against LGBTQI+ criminalization were often based on the claim that such laws are ineffective, that legislation should not regulate questions of morality, and at one time also that homosexuality should be regarded as an illness rather than a crime. Such reasoning, however, in one way or another does not call cisheteronormativity into question and leaves homosexuality outside the norm, still treating it as something bad that is to be eradicated, only not through criminal prosecution. Contemporary approaches, by contrast, regard the various manifestations of SOGIE as a normal part of overall human diversity, and their criminalization is seen as a violation of human rights.

• In the context of criminalization laws, as well as conversion therapy, the story of Alan Turing is frequently mentioned. An outstanding British mathematician and cryptographer, one of the founders of computer science, who made an enormous contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War – in 1952 he was charged with “gross indecency” over homosexual relations. Given a choice between prison and probation, Turing chose the latter, which included hormonal interventions to reduce libido – effectively chemical castration. This made him impotent, yet did not affect his sexual orientation. The charges also effectively destroyed his scientific career. All of this ultimately led to Turing taking his own life in 1954 by ingesting cyanide. More than half a century later, in 2009, when criminalization legislation in Great Britain was no longer in force but old convictions based on it remained valid, a British programmer created a petition demanding that Alan Turing be exonerated. The movement gained momentum and eventually led to the Queen of Great Britain officially proclaiming a pardon for Turing in 2014. And in 2017 a law was adopted that is informally called the “Alan Turing law”, which likewise cleared the convictions of everyone who had ever received them under British legislation because of their homosexuality.
• In 1998 in the United States, John Lawrence Jr. was arrested together with his partner after they were found during a sexual act. In the state of Texas, where this happened, an “anti-sodomy law” was then in force, under which they were fined. With the support of the organization “Lambda Legal,” Lawrence and his partner appealed this decision, which grew into litigation against the authorities of Texas. Finally, in 2003, the US Supreme Court issued a final ruling that not only recognized the sanctions against the plaintiffs as unlawful but also struck down both the Texas “sodomy law” and similar laws in the 13 US states where they were still in force at the time – they were declared unconstitutional. One of the consequences of this ruling was the decision of the state of Massachusetts a few months later, which became the first US state to allow same-sex marriage on its territory. This thus opened the way to arriving in 2015 at recognition of marriage equality across the entire United States.

Laws that criminalize homosexuality have been recognized as violating the right to respect for private and family life in several judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as by the UN Human Rights Committee. In addition, any international instruments and positions of international organizations that point to the inadmissibility of discrimination on the grounds of SOGIESC thereby also imply the inadmissibility of criminalization. This has, in particular, been noted repeatedly by a number of UN bodies and is directly set out in its Yogyakarta Principles of 2006. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights called for the decriminalization of homosexuality in 2014, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in its 2020 decision concerning Jamaica, recognized that laws criminalizing same-sex sex violate the rights to privacy, to humane treatment and to freedom of movement, as well as the principle of legality.

When Ukraine was part of the USSR, its criminal code contained an article on sodomy between men, which provided for up to 5 years of imprisonment, and under certain aggravating circumstances – up to 8 years (in a later version – up to 1 year in prison or 3 years of exile). This article was often applied as a pretext for persecuting dissidents and those who disagreed with the Soviet authorities in general. A well-known example is the film director Serhii Paradzhanov, who protested against political arrests and the persecution of Ukrainian intellectuals, for which he was later himself prosecuted under the “homosexual” article.

After independence was gained, the question of abolishing criminal liability for homosexuality quickly appeared on the agenda, and already at the end of 1991 the Verkhovna Rada adopted amendments to the relevant Article 122, retaining liability only in cases of sodomy involving the use of violence, or committed by a group of persons, or against a minor. In 2001, with the complete overhaul of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, the article on “sodomy” was removed from it entirely.

While the criminalization of homosexual behavior in Ukraine ended there, bills proposing to introduce punishment for “propaganda of homosexualism,” and sometimes of “transgenderism” as well, are still submitted to the Verkhovna Rada from time to time. The only occasion when such a bill was passed in the first reading was in 2012, when the majority in the Rada was held by the “Party of Regions,” but it went no further. Subsequent similar bills to one degree or another imitated the law banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” that has been in force in the russian federation since 2013, but not one of them even reached the session hall.

Measures that help reduce the level of violence against LGBTQI+ people

The previous section, which discussed the specific forms and manifestations of cisheteronormative violence, also addressed measures that help counter those in particular. Here I will focus on measures of a more general nature, the application of which should reduce the amount of violence on the grounds of SOGIESC by challenging the cisheteronormative system as a whole.

Such measures belong to the institutional level, because it is there that they can be systemic, whereas at the social level only situational ones are really possible – responding to specific cases of violence in a particular environment, stopping them and/or overcoming their consequences. In general, two main types of measures can be distinguished here:

• Informational and educational: since cisheteronormative norms and attitudes are often located at a deep subconscious level as a kind of given, the first step in countering them has to be becoming aware of them and then rethinking them. This is precisely what education promotes, starting with general concepts of gender, sexuality and SOGIESC. Such measures do not in themselves establish norms and contain no means of direct influence. Instead, they are aimed at gradually changing social attitudes and trends in the direction of accepting SOGIESC diversity, which should ultimately also lower the level of violence on these grounds.
• Regulatory: establishing norms, standards, laws and so on that directly regulate social relations in the context of SOGIESC, in particular defining the inadmissibility of violence as well as liability for committing it. This may mean removing restrictive norms concerning SOGIESC or, on the contrary, adding ones that protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people. Such measures directly delegitimize cisheteronormative manifestations within their sphere of operation: from an individual institution to a professional field and an entire state.

Let us look at each of these approaches in more detail.

Informational and educational measures

Education in general can take place in any of the social circles. In the circle of close and wider social contacts it is often initiated by the LGBTQI+ person themselves, who, having come out, tries to inform those around them about the specifics of their SOGIESC. Those people in this circle who responded to them in a friendly and supportive way can in turn spread such information further, thus forming a grassroots education network. The growing accessibility of social networks and of the internet in general also potentially makes it possible for anyone to reach a broad audience – including through posts, blogs, channels and so on dealing with topics related to SOGIESC.

Such forms of education are informal and are often based on intuitive, unsystematized knowledge, whereas at the institutional level more formalized programs aimed at a particular target audience may already operate. In countries with a higher level of acceptance of LGBTQI+ people, such programs are sometimes run by the state, when a certain basic body of knowledge about SOGIESC is included in the school curriculum (including the compulsory one) and in courses at universities and other educational institutions, while professional courses contain deeper and more specialized knowledge. Where cisheteronormativity prevails, the functions of education are taken on by civil society organizations and in some places by professional associations, whose opportunities to reach a broad audience are correspondingly smaller and sometimes limited.

Two ways of conveying information can be distinguished, each of them important in its own way:

• through thematic blocks devoted specifically to questions of gender, sexuality and/or SOGIESC;
• through passing mentions of aspects of gender/sexuality/SOGIESC within flows of other information.

The first way makes it possible to present information more fully and in a more structured manner, but at the same time those who are negatively disposed toward such topics will try to avoid it. With the second way, despite the fragmentary nature of such information, it is unavoidable and implicitly works to disrupt the cisheteronormative picture of the world, bringing other SOGIESC out of the marginalized plane. Examples of the latter can be LGBTQI+ characters in films and series that are not generally devoted to LGBTQI+ topics, or mentions of the SOGIESC of historical or contemporary well-known figures whose work is again not connected with LGBTQI+ issues. The second way likewise includes mentions of SOGIESC in professional literature, when the material is not devoted specifically to this topic but when, for example, among general recommendations regarding students, patients and so on, particular ones are also given for those who belong to LGBTQI+ communities. After all, on the one hand LGBTQI+ people are present in every social group and have the same general needs, while on the other hand, in a particular context, they may also have additional specific features that it is important to take into account.

According to data for 2018 collected by the Council of Europe, 26 of its member states (that is, more than half) had one or another mention of SOGIESC in the school curriculum at the national or regional level. In particular:

• in Finland, during the period 2014–2016, the basic school curriculum was updated to take into account that students’ own gender identity and sexuality may change over the years of their schooling;
• in Iceland, the 2013 national guideline on school curricula encourages educational institutions to hold discussions on SOGI drawing on gender studies, queer theory and multicultural studies;

• in Ireland, the 2013 national guideline for primary and post-primary schools sets out the principles of the “Social, Personal and Health Education” and “Relationships and Sexuality Education” programs, which provide for discussion of SOGI issues.

At the same time, the extent to which these topics are discussed may vary, and the final decision on it is often left to individual schools or teachers. In some places, even where SOGIESC topics are not part of national school curricula, teachers find other ways to raise these issues: using information materials from civil society organizations or inviting their representatives; in the context of broader discussions on equality, non-discrimination and violence; using as occasions academic research on SOGIESC and international days related to this topic, such as the Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia on May 17.

Also, in 21 of the Council of Europe member states teachers and staff of educational institutions have the opportunity to undergo training that to one degree or another includes SOGIESC issues. As the Council of Europe report stresses, such training, including on the prevention of and response to violence, ought to be mandatory and to precede their work in educational institutions. In practice, however, preliminary training is conducted in only 9 countries.

In the United States, according to data from the organization GLSEN for 2023, 6 states have legislation on inclusive curriculum standards that provide for positive representation of LGBTQI+ people in schools. In 8 states (5 of which are on the previous list), curriculum standards with LGBTQI+-inclusive sex education are provided for at the level of law. In two more states, legislation instructs education agencies to develop models of such curricula.

Let me give examples of how the state, civil society organizations and professionals cooperate on education aimed at reducing the level of violence.

• In Belgium, in the Flanders region, the Ministry of Education has cooperated with civil society organizations on LGBTQI+ issues in schools since 1999. Its interest was prompted by studies which found that LGB youth face discrimination, including in educational institutions. Later the ministry worked with the LGBTQI+ organization “Çavaria” in order to develop, on the basis of experience and scientific data, a comprehensive approach to preventing and countering violence on the grounds of SOGI. Guidelines, teaching materials and year-long courses on the relevant topics were developed, and they enjoy great popularity. As the ministry itself noted, this approach is key for it in countering not only violence on the grounds of SOGI but also the gender roles and stereotypes that underlie it.
• In Sweden, future teachers undergo mandatory training in the prevention of discrimination and violence. The National Agency for Education also provides a professional development program that uses a norm-critical approach to questions of inclusion and representation of LGBTQI+ youth and the problems they face. The very essence of the norm-critical approach lies in discussing and challenging the norms that prevail in society – rather than those who do not fit into them. Consequently, this applies to cisheteronormativity as well, making it possible to take a critical view of the attitudes imposed from its position and to overcome them.

• In France, the Ministry of Education launched a National Expert Network on violence on the grounds of SOGIE, covering 26 academic regions. Its expertise extends both to LGBTQI+ topics and to gender-based violence, gender equality and discrimination. The experts share resources and deliver training for teachers in their regions, while themselves continuously building their own capacity on countering various forms of violence and discrimination.

• In Australia, the “Safe Schools Coalition Australia” operated from 2010, and its program is supported by the state in some states. It is an association of organizations with the shared goal of supporting the safety and well-being of LGBTQI students. The program encourages mutual support and information sharing, and also contains guidelines on non-discrimination, countering bullying and diversity-support policies for teachers and school staff, as well as books and videos for students. The program’s materials challenge the concepts of cisheteronormativity and promote acceptance of LGBTQI people. As researchers noted in 2016, gender-diverse and homosexual students in schools in the state of Victoria, where this program has been implemented, feel better than in those states where it does not exist. In 2017 the coalition broke up, giving rise to programs of similar content separately in each of the states that had belonged to it.

Many studies confirm that education on LGBTQI+ topics improves the situation in one way or another. In particular:

• it lowers the number of cases of bullying and increases the sense of safety;
• it reduces the prevalence of harmful stereotypes and homophobic comments;

• it fosters a more positive attitude toward homosexual peers;

• it reduces the manifestations of such common problems among LGBTQI+ students as depression, suicide risk, drug abuse, problems with self-esteem and with learning caused by the stress that results from discrimination;

• it helps those who have not determined their SOGI to understand themselves better.

Some data also indicate that, in general, higher levels of education and lower religiosity contribute to tolerance and acceptance of LGBTQI+ people. Finally, there is evidence that sex education covering LGBTQI+ topics benefits not only LGBTQI+ people themselves but cisheterosexual people as well, showing them diverse relationship options alongside the “traditional” patriarchal ones on which the cisheteronormative model is focused.

Education in the form of various kinds of information work on topics related to SOGIESC is often carried out by international, primarily human rights organizations. These may be organizations with a specifically LGBTQI+ profile, such as ILGA World, mentioned repeatedly in this text, and TGEU, as well as broad-profile ones – up to the level of the Council of Europe and the UN, which devote entire sections of their websites to this topic. Their materials may range from the most basic information about SOGIESC to specialized reports and campaigns drawing attention to specific cases of discrimination and violence. The advantage is that LGBTQI+ people themselves are usually involved in preparing such materials and can thus speak for themselves, from their own experience. At the same time, people who hold more cisheteronormative views usually avoid the resources of such organizations or approach them with prejudice. But the effectiveness of information work increases through cooperation between organizations of different profiles: human rights and professional ones, as well as with state structures – including in the field of education.

In Ukraine no state educational or awareness programs contain materials on LGBTQI+ topics. Even those professionals who are supposed to work with LGBTQI+ people directly – for example, doctors who provide medical care in the process of gender transition – do not cover the relevant questions in the course of state higher education. There is no point even speaking about the representation of SOGIESC in the school curriculum.

Certain changes in this trend are beginning to show – thus, in 2022 the state portal “Diia.Osvita” published a course on preventing bullying at school in two parts, for teachers and parents, although without a separate focus on LGBTQI+ students. In general, in Ukraine such education is carried out mostly by civil society organizations, primarily LGBTQI+ ones as well as those working on gender and broader human rights topics, often in cooperation with various professionals. It includes:

• creating and publishing general educational materials devoted to the topic of SOGIESC as a whole or to its individual aspects, such as coming out, human rights or, like this text, violence, aimed at a broad audience;
• holding trainings on various aspects of SOGIESC, most often in order to build the capacity in this area of professionals in a particular field – psychologists, lawyers, doctors, police officers and so on;

• creating online courses on topics related to LGBTQI+ issues, aimed at a particular audience – for example, the course “How to Write About LGBTQI+” for journalists – but at the same time available to anyone interested;

• conducting research and preparing analytical materials that shed light on the actual situation of LGBTQI+ people and help determine where changes are needed first of all;

• running information campaigns tied to particular occasions, such as dates or events related to SOGIESC, which make it possible to draw attention to the situation of LGBTQI+ people and their problems;

• maintaining online resources, which makes it possible to disseminate the materials named above and to reach different audiences;

• cooperation with the media – this also provides access to a broader audience;

• cooperation with educational institutions – at the time of writing, more at the level of engagement with youth and student associations in holding informal, extracurricular activities, while cooperation with the administrations of educational institutions and involvement in activities within the curriculum remains rather a goal for the future.

Growing awareness of LGBTQI+ issues in Ukraine can be asserted rather on the basis of indirect assessments: the increase over the years in the number of mentions of LGBTQI+ topics in the Ukrainian information space, above all in the media, and the improvement in the quality of such mentions, as correct terminology has come to be used in them more often compared with stereotypical and offensive statements and hate speech. The change in the level of violence, meanwhile, cannot be assessed unambiguously because of factors of differing direction that influence it: in particular, it may increase in absolute terms because of the greater visibility of the LGBTQI+ community, and at the same time decrease in relative terms because of various factors, including education. More thorough research is needed to study this question.

Even so, there is data based on surveys that points to an improvement in attitudes toward LGBTQI+ people in Ukraine. Thus, in 2016, 60.4% of respondents had a negative attitude toward them, in 2022 – 38.2%, and in 2023 this figure fell further to 33.9%. Equal rights for LGBTQI+ people, meanwhile, were supported in 2016 by only 33.4%, in 2022 – by almost twice as many: 63.7%, and in 2023 it was already 67.3%. It would hardly be mistaken to assume that improved attitudes and support for equal rights also correlate with a lower propensity to use violence against LGBTQI+ people.

Regulatory measures

Such measures – in the form of norms, rules, standards, and laws that, in this context, regulate certain aspects of gender, sexuality, and SOGIESC and help reduce the level of cisheteronormative violence – may include, in particular:

• Professional standards that apply to a particular field: medicine, education, law enforcement, and so on. Generally, they may be either advisory or more binding, when failure to comply with the standards leads, for example, to expulsion from the relevant professional association.
• International standards, which are created either by particular international institutions or through international treaties that are often open for other states to join. They are frequently declarations that are more a matter of “good form” than binding documents, yet a state’s ratification of a treaty usually means that the state must incorporate the treaty’s provisions into its own legislation.

• Legislation – that is, the laws and secondary regulations that are mandatory within the given state.

By what they are aimed at, such measures can be divided as follows:

• lifting restrictions, when earlier norms were violent in nature and are being revised to remove the relevant provisions – repealing laws that criminalize homosexuality, removing restrictive requirements for gender transition, and so on; measures are also taken to make the introduction of similar norms in the future impermissible;
• protection, when the norms being introduced are directly intended to counter violence – laws directed against hate crimes on SOGIESC grounds, bans on harmful practices such as conversion therapy, and so on;

• general improvement, when the recognition of certain rights of LGBTQI+ people indirectly helps reduce the level of violence against them – the depathologization of homosexuality and transgender identity, the legalization of same-sex partnerships or marriages, and so on.

While in some situations regulatory measures were introduced right away at the level of an entire country or industry, proceeding from broad trends and public sentiment, in others change followed the principle of “from the particular to the general.” In particular, when a certain case of violence draws wide attention, the media and public reactions to it can set off a chain of events that ultimately leads to change at the national level. Examples of such cases were examined in the previous section for almost every type of violence: sometimes they turn into strategic litigation that sets precedents for changing legislation, sometimes they unfold in other ways, but they bring about social change of strategic significance all the same.

Let me list several international documents, the most important ones in the field of LGBTQI+ rights, that can directly or indirectly help overcome cisheteronormativity as such and the violence it generates. Some of them are at the same time professional standards that nonetheless have influence at the international level. Some are more advisory, while others also have binding mechanisms.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is a foundational UN document adopted at the very beginning of the organization’s existence – in 1948. In keeping with its title, it contains the broadest and most general definitions of human rights in the equally general contexts of a person’s life and activity – beginning with such rights as the right to life, liberty, and security of person. It does not set out SOGIESC characteristics explicitly, providing instead that the rights it declares extend equally to all people and are the same for all social groups without exception. The Declaration is not in itself binding, but it is universally recognized as one of the foundations of international law that must be taken into account when building higher, more specific mechanisms of legal protection.

The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the European Convention on Human Rights). This is likewise a foundational document of the Council of Europe, signed by its original members in 1950 and subsequently extended to all members that join the organization. In substance it largely echoes the UN Universal Declaration, but unlike the latter, the member states of the Council of Europe undertake an obligation to comply with it. The body that determines liability for breaching such obligations is the European Court of Human Rights. Anyone can apply to it if their rights under the ECHR have been violated and, as a rule, if they have not managed to defend those rights in the courts of their own country. The Convention likewise contains no direct mention of SOGIESC, and yet it has repeatedly become a tool for LGBTQI+ people to seek not only justice for themselves but also ECtHR rulings that forced states to change their legislation on certain aspects of SOGIESC. In particular, following the intervention of the ECtHR, legal gender recognition procedures were introduced or improved in France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, and the criminalization of homosexuality was finally repealed in the United Kingdom and Ireland. And in 2023 the Ukrainian gay couple Maymulakhin and Markiv won a case against Ukraine on the grounds that the absence of any regulation of same-sex relationships in our country violates the right to respect for private and family life as well as the prohibition of discrimination.

The Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (the Yogyakarta Principles). This is again a UN document, but, as its full title shows, it is devoted to human rights specifically in the context of SOGI. It was originally created in 2006 by a UN expert group with the involvement of LGBTQI+ human rights defenders, and in 2017 a supplement, “The Yogyakarta Principles plus 10,” was released in order to better account for the diversity of identities – in particular, non-binary and intersex people. These principles consist of a set of recommendations to states on the measures they should take to ensure respect for human rights on SOGIESC grounds, but they do not oblige states to do so. At the same time, since their publication they have become the leading human rights standard for LGBTQI+ people, cited all over the world and thus contributing in one way or another to the normalization of SOGIESC diversity. I would note separately that it was the Yogyakarta Principles that standardized the concept of gender identity – the definition they contain has by now become the generally accepted one. That definition itself directly lays the basis for the right to have one’s gender identity recognized, to express it in a variety of ways, and to bring one’s own body into line with it. This also normalizes gender transition, which makes it possible to use the definition when advocating for the removal of unacceptable restrictions on it.

The International Classification of Diseases. It has already been mentioned more than once in this text as the World Health Organization document that establishes, at the very highest level, the pathologization – or the absence of it – of particular SOGIESC. In ICD-11, the most recent revision to date, all expressions of sexual orientation have been depathologized and transgender identity has been depsychopathologized, while intersex variations, unfortunately, still remain “anomalies of development.” The ICD is binding in the medical field – when a state adopts a new revision, it fully adapts its medical system to it. Adherence to its standards therefore already rules out the use of conversion therapy in a professional setting in and of itself: for homo- and bisexuality wherever at least the 10th revision has been adopted, and for transgender identity – wherever the 11th has. In Ukraine ICD-10 remains in force for now, but the processes of adopting ICD-11 had already begun at the time of writing.

The Istanbul Convention – the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. Created and opened for signature in 2011, it is the most universal instrument for countering gender-based violence across the wide spectrum of its manifestations. When a state ratifies the Convention, it thereby undertakes to bring its legislation into line with the Convention’s provisions. At the time of writing there are 37 such states, and it has also been ratified by the European Union. In the text devoted to intimate partner violence in the relationships of LGBTQI+ people, the provisions of the Istanbul Convention have already been examined in more detail. Here I will note that some of the specific manifestations of violence described above are explicitly singled out in it as ones that must be criminalized:

1. forced marriage (covers cases of non-heterosexual women and trans women);
2. female genital mutilation (covers some of the normalizing surgeries performed on intersex people);
3. forced sterilization (covers cases of trans people on whom such a requirement is imposed during transition against their will);
4. crimes committed in the name of so-called honor (covers cases of non-heterosexual women and trans women).

In Ukraine, the Istanbul Convention was ratified on June 20, 2022. Individual measures to change legislation for its implementation had begun to be carried out even earlier, but they have not yet been completed in full – in particular, so as to take SOGI grounds explicitly into account when cases of violence and discrimination are linked to them.

The UN international human rights treaties. This item brings together a number of documents created and opened for states to sign in different years, which together form the foundation of international human rights law. In the context of countering violence, the most notable are the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Behind each of these treaties stands a corresponding UN body that monitors compliance with that treaty, gathering information from all the countries where it has been ratified and publishing reports on that basis. On the ground, such monitoring is the responsibility of state institutions that deal with human rights, and civil society organizations can take part in it as well. In Ukraine this is mainly a function of the Office of the Ombudsperson – the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights. These bodies do not themselves have mechanisms for holding anyone accountable for the rights violations they identify. Instead, they can pass this information on to law enforcement agencies and, what may be even more important strategically, use the information gathered to prepare recommendations for other state institutions on the measures those institutions should take to improve the situation at a systemic level.

Among legislative regulatory measures aimed at countering cisheteronormative violence, legislation directed against crimes on SOGIESC grounds deserves particular mention. This is primarily hate crime legislation, which provides for enhanced punishment for such crimes and in which SOGIESC are explicitly present among the other characteristics by which such crimes are defined. In addition, there may also be legislation against hate speech on SOGIESC grounds, which establishes liability for such statements in the public sphere: in the media, on the part of public figures, and so on. The very existence of such laws disrupts the cisheteronormative system, since by designating diverse expressions of SOGIESC as subject to protection, it already normalizes them. And the proper enforcement of such laws goes further and delegitimizes that system. Such measures can be especially effective, as already noted, in countering organized groups that deliberately commit violence against LGBTQI+ people on a regular basis.

According to ILGA World data, as of 2020, 48 UN member states had laws providing for criminal liability for crimes whose motive is linked to sexual orientation – either as a separate type of crime or as an aggravating circumstance. In addition, 45 states prohibit incitement to hatred, violence, and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in some form – as hate speech or in other wordings, such as incitement to hatred, persecution, discrimination, intolerance, and/or segregation. The overwhelming majority of these states are in Europe and the Americas. As for the ground of gender identity, according to TGEU data, as of 2023, 23 European countries have laws against hate crimes, 19 against hate speech, and 6 also provide for other measures to counter hate speech and hate crimes directed against trans people.

As for legislation countering discrimination on SOGIESC grounds, its impact on the level of violence is more indirect, yet at the same time its existence strikes an even greater blow to cisheteronormativity as a system. After all, non-discrimination means, literally, equal treatment – in our case, on SOGIESC grounds. Sometimes protection from discrimination is provided at the general national level – it may be set out as a general anti-discrimination law or even in the constitution – and sometimes it covers particular spheres: employment, education, health care, and so on. Of course, general legislation has a greater effect when it comes to shifting the discourse, although more specialized laws, on the other hand, can be more effective within their particular fields.

As of 2020, ILGA World records 11 countries with a constitutional ban on discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and 57 that include this ground in general anti-discrimination legislation. The second list includes the first, which means that these countries in effect offer two-tier protection (and in some places even three-tier, adding sector-specific protection to it as well). As with countering hate crimes, these are mostly countries in Europe and the Americas. In the field of labor, discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is prohibited by 81 countries – that is 42% of UN member states, which is no small number. As for gender identity, according to TGEU data protection from discrimination in the field of labor is provided by 35 European countries, in health care by 27, in education by 30, in goods and services by 30, and in housing by 24. In addition, 17 countries separately provide for a ban on discrimination on the grounds of gender expression.

In Ukraine, the action plan for implementing the National Human Rights Strategy for 2015–2020, and later for 2021–2023, contained items on drafting and adopting both anti-discrimination legislation and legislation countering hate crimes on SOGI grounds – which, however, were not carried out during that time. At the time of writing, draft law No. 5488, which provides for amendments to existing legislation on both of these issues, is under consideration in the Verkhovna Rada. At the same time, discrimination on SOGI grounds in the field of labor has been prohibited in Ukraine since 2015 by the relevant article of the Labor Code. However, human rights defenders have repeatedly noted that the actual effectiveness of this ban is very low because, first, it is hard to prove that a person was refused a job or dismissed specifically because of SOGI, and second, LGBTQI+ people often do not dare to challenge such actions for fear of publicity. The “Law on Media” adopted in 2022 also prohibits disseminating statements that incite discrimination against or harassment of individuals and groups of people on grounds including SOGI.

Finally, a few words about measures for the general improvement of the situation of LGBTQI+ people and their impact on the levels of homophobia/biphobia/transphobia and violence.

One study analyzed the results of the European Social Survey, which was conducted every two years, over the period from 2002 to 2016. It identified a general trend: in countries that recognize same-sex marriage, acceptance of LGBTQI+ people grew, whereas in those countries where such relationships are not legalized, the level of homophobia grew instead.

A somewhat similar result was shown by a study in the United States that ran for more than 12 years and was published in 2019. It turned out that in states where same-sex marriage was introduced separately, the level of homophobia began to decline faster than it had before such legislation appeared. At the same time, when same-sex marriage was introduced at the federal level, those states that had had no such laws before were marked, on the contrary, by a rise in homophobia.

In my view, such results demonstrate how important it is that the various measures affecting the social system in the context of SOGIESC be carried out as a package. When society gradually changes, becoming more informed and more accepting, equality laws become, on the one hand, a natural continuation of those changes and, on the other, already normalize and catalyze them themselves. Where public hostility is still high, however, a law handed down from above, or the sight of such laws among the “neighbors,” may provoke rejection and produce rather the opposite effect. That is why legislation that gives LGBTQI+ people more equal rights is important in itself, but it cannot be a self-sufficient means of countering homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing:

• 34 countries have full marriage equality;
• 16 countries and 34 jurisdictions recognize same-sex unions in one form or another that is distinct from marriage;

• 19 countries across their entire territory and 4 in particular regions provide legal gender recognition based on self-determination;

• 19 countries provide legal recognition of a non-binary gender to one degree or another, in particular for intersex people, 12 of them on the basis of self-determination.

To sum up this section, it can be noted that the gradual normalization of SOGIESC diversity – the shift in the perception of homosexuality and transgender identity from “perversion,” “illness,” and “crime” to a variant of the norm, in other words the move away from cisheteronormativity – has been a general global trend since the middle of the 20th century. It manifests itself in one way or another in regulatory measures of every type and every direction. At the same time, these manifestations are uneven across the world: while some countries have advanced quite far along this path, others have barely moved at all.

Unfortunately, there are also individual cases in which, after some improvement, a country has experienced a rollback, in particular:

• Poland, where “LGBT-free zones” were introduced in 2020;
• Turkey, whose dispersals and bans of Pride marches have already been mentioned, and which withdrew from the Istanbul Convention in 2021;

• Hungary and russia, where the legal gender recognition procedure was abolished entirely in 2020 and 2023 respectively;

• Uganda, which in 2023 joined the countries where homosexual acts can be punishable by death.

The trend noted above cannot therefore be regarded as something unconditional that will develop of its own accord. For the world to keep moving in the direction of overcoming cisheteronormativity, constant effort is required.

In Ukraine, as can be seen from what has been said above, SOGIESC-related processes are developing and changes are taking place in parallel at both the social and the institutional levels. At the same time as public attitudes toward LGBTQI+ people are gradually changing for the better, legislative initiatives are also gaining momentum – and those that were previously rejected or ignored are improving their chances of being adopted.

This also applies to state recognition of the relationships of LGBTQI+ people. In the period from 2015 to 2020, when the National Human Rights Strategy already contained the task of legally regulating civil partnerships, including for same-sex couples in Ukraine, it was regularly marked as impossible to carry out. This was influenced above all by the position of churches and religious organizations, which opposed it as a united front. Now, however, draft law No. 9103 on registered partnerships had, at the time of writing, already received several favorable opinions from Verkhovna Rada committees, and before that the very need to recognize such partnerships was supported by the president in a response to a petition. So what seemed barely realistic just a few years ago now looks like a matter of time.

As for the gender transition and legal gender recognition procedure, as already noted, its further improvement in Ukraine now depends primarily on the adoption of ICD-11. That adoption in itself does not yet provide grounds for removing the requirement to undergo medical procedures in order to obtain legal recognition, but it can at least reduce the minimum necessary scope of such procedures – in particular, by removing psychiatric assessment from it. In addition, ICD-11 will give one more occasion to finally develop a similar procedure for intersex people, which Ukraine still lacks.

Thus, although Ukrainian society as a whole remains highly cisheteronormative on the one hand, on the other it is precisely in recent years that substantial changes have been taking place in the acceptance and normalization of LGBTQI+ people and the improvement of their situation, one of the results of which should also be a decrease in the level of violence on SOGIESC grounds. That is why it is especially important now to put effort into these changes, so that they develop in the right direction with the fullest possible regard for the needs of the LGBTQI+ community itself.

Conclusions and recommendations

Although violence on SOGIESC grounds is defined as a form of gender-based violence, it is rarely examined in precisely that context. Yet a view from this angle makes it possible to see how the various manifestations of such violence are in one way or another conditioned by cisheteronormativity – a system of beliefs in which only heterosexual orientation and cisgender identity are considered the norm, and which in turn rests on the idea of gender as a binary system. A systemic approach to the problem reveals how different forms of violence against LGBTQI+ people manifest at different social levels – from the immediate environment to the state – feeding one another; how some of these forms flow into one another, while certain institutions play their own roles in a shared cycle of violent pressure on LGBTQI+ people to make them conform to the norm those institutions impose.

The situation in the world overall is gradually changing for the better, but these changes are uneven. While in some countries attempts to forcibly change a person’s SOGI are already becoming illegal, in others expressions of homosexuality or non-conventional gender expression can still be punished. The normalization of the diversity of sexual orientation is also happening faster around the world than that of transgender identity and especially of intersex variations.

In Ukraine, some typical forms of cisheteronormative violence have not been researched, but such violence remains widespread in society as a whole and on the part of religious and far-right organizations. At the same time, the state is gradually becoming friendlier toward LGBTQI+ people, taking steps toward the legislative changes needed both to counter violence and to improve their situation in general. Below is a series of recommendations, addressed both to the state and to professionals and civil society organizations, on what could be done in Ukraine to counter cisheteronormative violence better and, in the longer term, to eradicate it.

• Carry out the legislative changes needed to counter violence against LGBTQI+ people – in particular, complete the implementation of the provisions of the Istanbul Convention and adopt legislation countering discrimination and hate crimes on SOGI grounds.
• Adopt ICD-11 and, taking it into account, update the gender transition procedure in order to remove unnecessary and violent requirements, and also develop transition and recognition procedures for intersex people.

• Review the legal framework on countering harassment (bullying, mobbing) with a view to adding provisions to it that would protect LGBTQI+ people as a vulnerable group.

• Explore the possibilities of banning or restricting the use of methods that fall under the definition of so-called conversion therapy, both at the level of individual fields and nationwide.

• Ban normalizing surgeries on intersex infants and instead develop standards of medical care for intersex people that take into account both modern medical and modern human rights approaches.

• Conduct research on particular forms of cisheteronormative violence (forced marriages, “corrective rape,” “honor killings”) in order to establish the real situation in Ukraine in this respect.

• Consider adding basic information about sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, and sex characteristics in all their diversity to the school curriculum, and more detailed information – to the programs of higher and specialized educational institutions.

• Professionals should regularly upgrade their qualifications on SOGIESC issues and violence on these grounds in general, as well as on SOGIESC-related specifics in the context of their own field.

• When working with LGBTQI+ people who have survived violence, avoid any approaches that could make them feel guilty because of their SOGIESC. Instead, provide them with every possible form of support, treating these characteristics as an inseparable part of who they are.

• Run social campaigns aimed at making diverse SOGIESC perceived as the norm and at making violence on these grounds unacceptable.

• Raise LGBTQI+ people’s awareness of their rights, of the ways available to protect them, and of the courses of action open to them when those rights are violated.

• State institutions should cooperate with LGBTQI+ civil society organizations and specialists in the relevant fields in order to exchange information about modern standards and approaches, and to take the views of LGBTQI+ people themselves into account when implementing the recommendations above.