Myths and facts about SOGI

This argument is usually accompanied by a reference to “traditional values,” to which modern society ought to return. Yet if we look at ancient traditional cultures, it turns out that in most of them one can find one or another expression of homosexuality or of gender variance that goes beyond notions of the “typical” male and female gender. And this is by no means limited to the civilizations that gave rise to the modern Western world.

· Perhaps the first historical mention of a same-sex couple dates to roughly 2400 BCE and comes from Ancient Egypt. The court officials Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were found in a shared tomb, on whose walls they are depicted embracing in a kiss. Ancient Egyptian history also contains references to the “sekhet” — a “third gender” alongside the male and the female.

· In the ancient civilizations of Middle America — the Aztecs, the Maya, the Quechua and others — both same-sex contact and expressions beyond the two genders were widespread phenomena for which there is abundant evidence. Their notions of sexuality and gender allowed for greater changeability and fluidity and were in a certain sense closer to what we now call “queer”. Among Native North Americans the practice still survives of shamans who call themselves “two-spirit people” — that is, those who combine a female and a male essence at the same time.

· In China, mentions of homosexuality likewise begin in the period before the common era and are not uncommon in literature. During the Han dynasty in particular, it was quite typical for emperors to have male lovers, who could receive high positions at court.

· In India, an inseparable part of the culture from roughly the start of the common era to this day is the religious caste of the “hijra” — people born male who dress and to some extent behave as women. They are considered a separate gender.

· In ancient Greece, same-sex relationships had the character of a social institution: usually these were relationships between an adult man (the erastes) and an adolescent boy (the eromenos), for whom the adult was not merely a lover but a mentor meant to teach him “men’s business.” It is from this type of relationship that the word “pederasty” comes.

· In the Arab world, despite fairly harsh laws that generally restricted sexual expression, from the 8th century onward homoerotic themes became quite widespread in literature, including in works such as “One Thousand and One Nights.” In some cases they were accompanied in the same text by a condemnation of such practices, so as to maintain formal compliance with the norms.

The tendency to condemn homosexuality is characteristic of later Christian civilizations, in whose culture one of the key concepts becomes “sin” and the perception as sinful of everything sexual and carnal that is directed solely at pleasure and thereby violates “natural law.” It was in this context that people began to be persecuted by the Inquisition for same-sex relations, and later, when its functions passed to the secular authorities, same-sex sex was written into the law of many countries as a criminal offense. The relaxation of such legislation began in individual countries in the 18th century, and more actively in the second half of the 20th.

Thus it can be stated with confidence that homosexual people have always existed throughout human history. And the fact that in recent years there seem to be more of them is a consequence not of fashion or decadence, but above all of many gay people stepping out of the shadows into the light. For once their difference stops being considered a crime or an illness, they are no longer forced to hide it.

As for being transgender, it is worth mentioning one further factor: the medical technologies for bringing gender and sex into alignment, such as hormone therapy and surgery, were refined and standardized only in the second half of the 20th century. Over the years they have become more accessible in terms of legal regulation, the availability of competent specialists, and cost. As a result, more and more people who previously could only dream of a gender transition are undergoing one.

The view of homosexuality as a mental illness is not traditional in historical perspective. Such views began to spread within the scientific community in the 19th century. To some degree this discourse was an alternative to the then-prevailing approach of criminalizing homosexuality: whereas a criminal must be punished, a sick person can be pitied and helped to recover. This position can be traced, for example, in the works of the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing and of the well-known researcher of homosexuality Magnus Hirschfeld, who at the end of the 19th century ran an entire campaign to abolish punishment for same-sex relations in Germany.

In the first half of the 20th century the approach to homosexuality as a pathology gradually became generally accepted and entered medical classifications. At times it coexisted with the criminalizing approach. A telling case here is that of the mathematician Alan Turing, convicted for same-sex relations, who was given a choice between imprisonment and treatment by chemical castration, and who soon afterward took his own life.

Various methods were used as attempts at treatment; collectively they are called conversion therapy (one may also encounter the term “reparative”). At different times and in different countries they included surgical lobotomy, hormone therapy, and psychotherapy in the form of psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, and aversion therapy using electric current. Over time, however, every one of these methods proved ineffective. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, plethysmograph studies were carried out on gay men who had supposedly changed their orientation to heterosexual, and their results showed that these men were still aroused by men. In 2001 a study by Robert Spitzer was published, ostensibly in favor of conversion therapy, but its results were criticized because the participants were mostly religious people who had an interest in reporting better outcomes than were actually the case, and their accounts could not be verified. The researcher later withdrew his own work, acknowledging the error and apologizing to the gay community. In another study, from 2002, only 3% of those who had undergone conversion therapy reported that they had changed their sexual orientation to heterosexual, while some others lost sexual desire altogether.

In the case of being transgender, essentially similar conversion therapy approaches were aimed at bringing a person’s gender identity into line with the sex assigned at birth. Such approaches were practiced in the middle of the 20th century and were ultimately also recognized as ineffective. Moreover, research in recent years shows that trans people who have experienced this kind of “therapy” more often suffer severe psychological distress and are more prone to suicide attempts. A well-known case is that of David Reimer, whom his family tried to raise as a girl in childhood even though he identified as a boy. The attempt was eventually acknowledged as a failure, and because of everything he had been through he developed depression and in the end took his own life.

Today such methods of “treatment” are condemned by many professional associations, both national and international, among them the World Psychiatric Association and the World Medical Association. Some countries — including Argentina, Brazil, Malta, Germany, Taiwan, and individual jurisdictions in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the United States — have banned conversion therapy practices in national legislation as harmful or even fraudulent.

It is worth noting that the construction of medical classifications should not, in general, be regarded as something absolutely scientifically objective. What matters for it first of all are practical considerations: which placement in the classification offers better opportunities to help the people whose condition it describes. That said, it is precisely the position that homosexuality or being transgender is a mental pathology for which scientific grounding is hard to find.

Early studies of sexuality were often conducted among patients of psychiatric clinics, which created the false impression of a correlation between homosexual orientation and mental disorders. Yet as early as the end of the 19th century the sexologist Havelock Ellis described homosexual people who, in their psychological qualities, differed in no way from heterosexuals of the same age and social standing. Later, in the 1950s, Evelyn Hooker reached similar conclusions after conducting a study on a sample of 30 homosexual and just as many heterosexual men, chosen from among people who had not sought psychiatric help. No difference that might indicate pathology or social maladjustment in the homosexual men was found. Hooker concluded that the forms of homosexuality can be just as varied as the forms of heterosexuality.

Also important in the rethinking of views on homosexuality was Alfred Kinsey’s survey, which he conducted in the 1940s among some 20,000 Americans. According to it, 37% of men and 13% of women had had at least one homosexual contact in their lives that culminated in orgasm. This pointed to a far greater prevalence of homosexual behavior than was believed at the time.

In Britain, Sir John Wolfenden’s committee conducted interviews in prisons holding people convicted of homosexual acts. As a result, the “Wolfenden Report” was published in 1957, which not only recommended repealing the criminal provision on homosexuality but also stated that “homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the sole symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects.”

All these findings proved decisive in the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders, the DSM-III, in 1973. In 1990 it was likewise removed from the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision. What is more, wording was added stating that a given sexual orientation cannot in itself be regarded as a disorder.

As for being transgender, in 1979 the forms of medical care for transgender people were for the first time set out as standards, in which the main methods of treatment were defined as hormone therapy and surgery to bring sex characteristics into line with gender identity. Subsequently a number of studies confirmed that most trans people are satisfied with the results of this approach and that their quality of life improves, while those who regret it are very few. This undercut the basis for treating being transgender as a condition requiring the attention primarily of psychiatrists.

In 2011, already in version 7 of the Standards, the WPATH organization called for distinguishing gender dysphoria — dissatisfaction with the discrepancy between the characteristics of a person’s assigned sex and their gender identity — from the diversity of gender identity and expression as such. It also cited research according to which it is precisely stigma, prejudice, and discrimination toward “nonstandard” gender expression, rather than that expression itself, that often become the source of mental health problems in transgender people.

So when the WHO was deciding where transgender diagnoses belonged in its new 11th-revision classification, the arguments above were taken into account. In the end, moving them out of the mental illness category happened not because trans people simply wished not to be considered sick, but because leaving them there would in fact have done more harm than good.

From the standpoint of which sexual relationships can be considered normal and which cannot, the key concept is consent. In this sense there is no fundamental difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality: in the case of sexual acts between adults, each person can knowingly give or withhold consent to such acts regardless of their sexual orientation. If, however, these are the acts of an adult toward a child — which is what pedophilia is — the child cannot give informed consent. The age of sexual consent, from which a person is considered capable of giving it, differs from country to country, and in Ukraine today it stands at 16; here, too, orientation is irrelevant. As for zoophilia, it is obvious that an animal, lacking developed consciousness, cannot in principle consent to sex. There are thus no logical grounds whatsoever for tying the normalization of homosexuality to pedophilia or zoophilia.

There is also a belief that a significant share of gay men are simultaneously pedophiles. This false notion has historical roots. The term “pederasty,” which is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for same-sex relationships, comes from ancient Greek traditions in which it meant specifically a relationship between a mature man and an adolescent boy. But there is no reason whatsoever to equate those traditions with the whole diversity of homosexuality in the modern world.

As research shows, some pedophiles are fixated exclusively on children and have no sexual interest in adults at all, and in that case it is incorrect to speak of their homosexual or heterosexual orientation (there is a view under which this is regarded as a separate sexual orientation altogether). Of the rest, the majority are heterosexual or bisexual men, and according to one study 90% of them are married. Moreover, their orientation and the sex of the children they target do not necessarily coincide. Finally, in yet another study, which determined the sexual orientation of child molesters, fewer than 1% turned out to be homosexual.

The manifestations of AIDS were indeed first identified and described in gay men in the early 1980s. At the time it was even proposed to call the disease “gay-related immune deficiency”. Yet within a few months it became clear that the disease was spreading far beyond gay men, and “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” was adopted as the final name.

The UN program on HIV/AIDS — UNAIDS — identifies key populations: groups with the highest risk of contracting and transmitting HIV and at the same time the least access to disease prevention services and medical care. Today these include men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drugs, sex workers and their clients, transgender women, and prisoners. According to 2018 data, MSM, regardless of their sexual orientation, accounted for only 17% of all new infections. This figure varies considerably by region: it is significantly lower in Eastern and Southern Africa and significantly higher in North America.

If we also look at the risks of transmitting HIV by different routes, then among sexual practices it is highest for anal intercourse, although even here the probability is only 138 per 10,000 contacts with an infected person. By comparison, with a blood transfusion from an infected person the probability reaches 9,250. On the overall scale, however, sexual transmission predominates because such contacts are far more frequent than transfusions.

Anal sex is often considered a purely gay male practice, but this does not correspond to reality. According to a 2011–2013 survey in the United States, 42.3% of men had had anal sex with a woman at least once in their lives, and according to 2013 data, 35% had done so within the past year. Among gay men, between 75% and 90% had experience of anal sex in their lifetime. Although the latter figures are higher, if these data are combined with data on the sexual orientation of the population (up to 4.5% of people in the United States are non-heterosexual), it becomes obvious that the number of heterosexual people who have engaged in anal practices is larger.

At the same time, substantially reducing the risk of infection does not require giving up such practices entirely. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using condoms lowers the risk by 80%, pre-exposure prophylaxis by 92%, and antiretroviral therapy for people who are infected by 96%. Finally, it is also important to get tested for HIV regularly.

Clearly, such prevention requires education about HIV and safer sex, and reaching gay people with it is far easier under conditions of their equal integration into society than under restrictions on their rights, which effectively drive them underground and complicate access to such services. The American Psychological Association points out that LGB young people who do not find acceptance are 3.4 times more likely to engage in risky sex. In light of the data from this and other studies, it directly names homophobia and discrimination among the causes of the HIV epidemic.

Although a same-sex couple indeed cannot have a child carrying genetic material equally from both partners, there are other ways in which such a couple can come to have children. For example:

· One of the partners may have a child from a previous heterosexual relationship, from before that person accepted their own homosexuality.

· The couple can use assisted reproductive technologies (ART).

· The couple can adopt a child.

In recent years a technique called “mitochondrial replacement” has appeared, by which one woman can pass on her mitochondria in addition to another woman’s egg, so that the future child will carry a certain share of genetic material from two women. Methods for the artificial creation of gametes are also being developed, which may soon allow people of the same sex to have genetically shared children (this method has already produced successful results in mice).

As for transgender people: although today a trans man cannot beget a child and a trans woman cannot give birth to one, this does not mean that they are incapable of having genetic children in principle. They can have them before beginning a gender transition, if they begin it after puberty. Later, genital surgery may become an obstacle, but today such surgeries are no longer required to complete a transition in a significant number of countries, including Ukraine, and many trans people choose not to have them. Hormone therapy, although it does affect fertility, is in most cases not irreversible, so if a person decides to become a father or a mother it can be paused and later resumed.

By now quite a few cases are known in which trans men have carried and given birth to children in this way. In addition, ART and adoption are generally available to families in which one partner is a trans person. Modern clinical guidelines explicitly recommend that trans people planning a transition consider various reproductive options before starting it.

At the same time, LGBTQI+ people are often restricted in their ability to have children at the level of legislation itself. This may take the form of a ban on, or obstruction of, access to assisted reproductive technologies and adoption. Or it may work indirectly — through the sterilization prerequisite for legal gender recognition (changing documents) for transgender people, and through the non-recognition of same-sex relationships, as a result of which the partner to whom the child is not genetically related is not recognized as its mother or father and has no corresponding rights regarding the child. So if, according to various studies, 9–16% of gay men and lesbians and 15–50% of trans people have children, compared with about 70% of cisgender heterosexual people, one can say with confidence that in the absence of restrictions these figures would be higher.

Finally, it is worth noting that among heterosexual families, too, not everyone has children and not everyone can or wants to have them. So tying family exclusively to the presence of children — especially when the subject is LGBTQI+ people — is incorrect. After all, Ukrainian law itself defines a family simply as persons “who live together, are bound by a shared household, and have mutual rights and obligations.”

By its very definition, homosexuality involves sexual as well as romantic or emotional attraction — exactly as heterosexuality does. Homosexual people can love one another, and stories of such love are known from ancient times to the present day. For instance, at this link you can read letters that well-known people such as Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde and others wrote to their same-sex beloveds. And here you can read about the relationship revealed in the correspondence of the Ukrainian writers Lesya Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska.

According to a 2017 American study, conducted two years after same-sex marriage became available throughout the United States, 10.2% of LGBTQI+ people were in such marriages. In another study, 84% named love as a very important reason for marrying. Also, 60% of the LGBTQI+ respondents were either already married or would like to marry, and 93% supported to one degree or another the very idea of legalizing such marriages.

Finally, according to the same U.S. data, 35% of LGBTQI+ people are parents (this percentage is higher for bisexual people than for homosexual ones), and of those who are not, at least 28% would like to have children someday.

These figures could be higher still were it not for the stigmatization of same-sex relationships, which persists even in countries where they are already legally equal to heterosexual ones, and because of which some LGBTQI+ people may refrain from starting families and having children. In any case, they show that such relationships cannot be reduced to sexual needs alone

Studies conducted in the last century did indeed produce fairly high figures for the number of partners among homosexual people, which indicated frequent changes of partner. In Germany, according to research by the sexologist Martin Dannecker, the average number of partners per year was 14.3 in 1971 and had fallen to 5.5 by 1987. As of 1996, 50–60% of homosexual students had had more than 10 partners over their lifetime, compared with 15% of heterosexual ones.

Even so, that spectrum included both people with a large number of rapidly changing liaisons and those who gravitated toward lasting relationships. In the United States at that same time, according to various data, 40–60% of gay men were in fairly stable couples, and roughly half of them lived together. Similar data can be found for East Germany and England.

Contemporary data, however, indicate that the stability of same-sex relationships is approaching that of heterosexual ones. A 2017 study in the United States showed that same-sex relationships are on average shorter than heterosexual ones, but that for couples who live together this duration increases. In the case of marriage the difference in the stability of couples disappears entirely, and same-sex couples even become more stable. In another study, from 2016, no substantial difference in the stability of same-sex and different-sex couples was found. Finally, a 2019 study, which attempted to take the results of previous ones into account, showed that for couples who live together, whether same-sex or different-sex, the risk of the relationship ending is practically the same, and that registering the relationship helps to reduce it.

This dynamic shows that things are in fact the other way around: as long as homosexual people face society’s condemnation of their relationships and have no opportunity to formalize them, casual encounters in a few specific venues are simpler than maintaining stable relationships that have to be concealed. But once society and the state allow same-sex couples to live under the same conditions as heterosexual ones, the difference in their stability comes to nothing.

Human rights as such are indeed the same for everyone. At the most basic level they are set out in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which draws no distinction by sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). In the countries of the Council of Europe — that is, almost all European countries — a document similar in substance is also in force, the European Convention on Human Rights, which makes it possible to defend one’s rights before the European Court of Human Rights.

But when the question arises of people’s practical ability to exercise all of their rights, it is impossible to ignore that people differ along many characteristics, and that achieving genuine equality for them may accordingly require different measures.

For example, when a transgender person transitions, the data in their identity documents cease to match the name they actually go by, their gender, and their appearance as well. The person periodically has to explain this discrepancy, in all likelihood disclosing the fact that they are transgender — private information they might prefer to keep to themselves. Their right to privacy is violated in this way. To avoid it, legislation is needed that would establish a quick and accessible procedure for changing identity documents.

Or, when people of the same legal sex decide to form a family, they may want the associated civil rights, such as joint ownership of property, raising children, inheritance and so on. These rights are usually conferred by marriage, but if marriage is defined as being contracted between a man and a woman, same-sex couples are deprived of them. So to achieve genuine equality the law must be changed so as to extend to them the ability to exercise the right to marry.

As we can see, in these cases special mentions of SOGI or LGBTQI+ are not even necessary — it is enough to word the laws so that people of any orientation and identity can make use of them. Not everything, however, can be solved by such wording, because there is also the problem of discrimination on the grounds of SOGI.

LGBTQI+ people more often encounter prejudiced treatment, which can take the form of an unwillingness to hire them or to rent them housing, the denial of proper medical care, problems while traveling and crossing borders, and so on. LGBTQI+ people also more often become victims of violence, when they are attacked, beaten and harassed — again because of their orientation or identity. That is why including SOGI grounds in anti-discrimination and hate crime legislation, as well as in dedicated policies that spell out measures for countering and preventing such acts, helps to fight these phenomena and reduce them to nothing. Of course, in an ideal world where the treatment of LGBTQI+ people would on average not differ from the treatment of cisgender heterosexual people, such measures would cease to be needed — but that is still a long way off

It should be noted that the very phrasing about a “bad influence,” and the fear of it, points to a perception of homosexuality and being transgender as a priori “abnormal,” undesirable phenomena, whereas today they are regarded as part of human diversity. Nevertheless, setting value judgments aside, let us look at the influence of LGBTQI+ parents on children as such.

By now a fair number of studies have been conducted on the situation of children in same-sex families. In a 2005 review of such studies, the American Psychiatric Association pointed to the absence of data suggesting that the percentage of homosexual people among such children is supposedly higher than average — most of them grow up entirely heterosexual. Nor were any particular features of gender identity or gender role observed in them. In its “Resolution on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity (SOGI), Parents and Their Children,” updated in 2020, the same APA repeats this position, with the qualification, based on several studies, that the children of LGBTQI+ people showed greater flexibility and less stereotyping in their gender expression. It also notes that in the development of such children — in terms of health, behavioral traits and relationships with peers — no differences were observed compared with children raised by heterosexual parents.

As for transgender parents, in 2014 the Williams Institute produced an analysis of the research on this topic. Here, too, no effect of a parent’s trans status on the children’s sexual orientation and gender identity was found. It further notes that the greatest stress factor for children is not a parent’s transition as such, but the tension in the parents’ relationship that arises against its background, especially when it comes to divorce.

Those who worry about the situation of children in same-sex families often cite Mark Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study”. Conducted in 2012, it supposedly showed that children from such families have a worse quality of life — in particular with regard to level of education, employment, susceptibility to depression and substance use. This study, however, has methodological problems: only 2 of the children examined in it had actually lived in a same-sex family throughout their childhood, while for the others one of the parents had merely had experience of a same-sex relationship during some period of life. Some of the children studied had also gone through their parents’ divorce after a heterosexual marriage, which affects a child’s well-being for the worse regardless of sexual orientation.

In 2015 researchers attempted to reanalyze Regnerus’s data, correcting his errors, and arrived at a fundamentally different result: the difference between children raised by heterosexual couples and by gay men or lesbians is minimal. This is confirmed by many other studies as well, and some even indicate that children in same-sex families are slightly happier and healthier. On the whole, one can already speak of a scientific consensus that there is no difference in the physical and mental condition of children raised by same-sex and different-sex couples.

“Propaganda” would have to mean that public figures and activists from the LGBTQI+ community call on others to enter same-sex relationships or to have sex with people of their own sex. Nothing of the kind actually happens.

In fact, such claims involve a substitution of meaning, in which things that are not propaganda at all are labeled as such. For instance, when the presentation of diverse expressions of sexuality and gender as variants of the norm is called propaganda. But positioning something as normal is not encouragement to do it, and does not in itself lead other people to change their preferences. If different people like different foods, different films, different literary genres, each of them may talk about what they prefer, but others are hardly going to change their tastes as a result.

Sometimes “propaganda” is also taken to mean any LGBTQI+ visibility at all — whether as characters in a feature film, or a public display of symbols, or open expressions of affection between two girls or two boys. In that case, however, one would have to admit that there is incomparably more heterosexual propaganda in our world. The whole of culture is saturated with it, since most of its plots, if they do not make heterosexual relationships their central theme, at least mention them. Every time a person tells someone how they met, went on a date, took a vacation and so on with someone of the opposite sex, this can be counted as heterosexual propaganda. Everything to do with family life in the conventional sense belongs here too. And the quintessence of such propaganda would be wedding ceremonies with their traditional rituals.

Thus the influence on society of isolated instances of visible homosexuality or transgender identity does not come close to the level that heterosexuality has. The opposite impression can arise only because of the cognitive bias effect of observational selection, in which people are more inclined to notice the things they think about more. So if someone sees LGBTQI+ propaganda everywhere, that may say more than anything else about that person’s own fixation on LGBTQI+ subject matter.

“Parades,” in turn, are the quintessence of visibility for LGBTQI+ people. In mostly Western countries, where they have already largely achieved equality, including the right to marry, the annual Pride parades have the character of a celebration, often with elements of a carnival procession that cisgender heterosexual people gladly join without any worry about their own orientation. In countries where a significant portion of rights still has to be fought for, Ukraine among them, Prides (rather than parades) take place more in the form of a human rights march with slogans and political demands addressed to the authorities. Even so, they can have festive elements too — for some participants this is the one day of the year on which they can freely come out and declare themselves. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that.

People tend to define another person’s orientation on the basis of the present moment. So if, say, a woman is in a relationship with another woman, she will be identified as a lesbian, and if she is with a man, as heterosexual. And if her previous relationships are known to have been with a person of a different sex than her current partner, those may be perceived as a stage preceding her “making up her mind,” or people will expect that she will make up her mind later on. Her bisexuality thus becomes invisible, especially if she does not declare it herself.

In reality, bisexuality as a trait has to do not with what relationship a person is in right now, but with their very capacity to fall in love, form relationships and enjoy sex with people of both female and male sex or gender. And just as a heterosexual person in a relationship has not necessarily settled on wanting to spend the rest of their life with that particular person, a bisexual person has not necessarily settled on exclusively women or exclusively men for the future. Nor are they obliged to settle.

Sometimes the demand to “make up your mind” comes from homosexual people, born of the fear that if someone can move like that from same-sex to different-sex relationships, then they too might be forced to do so. It is important to understand here that every person’s sexual preferences are individual, and that one person’s particular choices must under no circumstances become grounds for forcing the same on someone else.

On the other hand, bisexuality does not mean that such a person wants relationships with people of both sexes at the same time, as is sometimes assumed. Sometimes the conclusion is also drawn that if sex does not matter to a person, then it does not matter to them who their partner is at all. This is not true: survey data show that most bisexual people are in monogamous relationships and have had no experience of simultaneous relationships with a woman and a man.

In reality, things work the same way for bisexual people as for heterosexual and homosexual ones: while the latter’s choice of a partner is limited to a particular sex, that does not mean they are ready to copulate with any person of that sex. In the same way, a bisexual person will be attracted not to just anyone but to a specific person — it is simply that in one period of life this may be a person of one sex, and in another, of the other.

Such ideas are generated by the stereotypical notion of relationships as heterosexual by default, in which a man and a woman are opposites embodying masculinity and femininity. In that paradigm, if a man is attracted to other men, then he will try to reproduce in his appearance and behavior an image close to that of a woman, and a woman who is attracted to women, the image of a man.

This stereotype falls apart on the very logic on which it is built. For if, say, two lesbians form a couple in which one plays the role of the man, then the other must accordingly be in the role of the “feminine woman,” who will be no different from ordinary women. The same goes for two gay men.

This does happen. Gay men and lesbians, growing up in society within the same gender-binary system, are not entirely free of its attitudes. So some of them, when building relationships, try to reproduce in sex — and to some degree in life — the “top – bottom” model, where the active role may be associated with the traditional male one and the passive with the female one. Yet in a count of profiles on an American gay portal in the early 2010s, for example, only slightly more than half of the users clearly indicated their role, and there it refers by default only to preferences in sex.

Broadly speaking, LGBTQI+ subculture produced a good number of models to emulate over the last century. There are, for instance, “camp gays,” who in their manner of speech, movement and particular details of dress reproduce elements of femininity — sometimes in an exaggerated, somewhat grotesque form — and who may at times refer to themselves in the feminine. In some gay circles such behavior is not welcomed, so one can even speak of the existence of a phobia toward it. On the other hand, there are “bears” — burly men, often with a beard and thick body hair, who cultivate a rough masculinity in this way. Among lesbians, the division into “butch” and “femme” — masculine and feminine women respectively — was widespread for a long time; the latter, because of their typically feminine appearance, are often not perceived as “real” lesbians.

Features of appearance that make it different from the conventionally female and male can also serve as markers by which gay men and lesbians more easily recognize “their own” — in particular when forming new relationships. This is exactly what the phenomenon of “gaydar”, that is, “gay radar,” is based on. It can misfire, however, for example on metrosexuals — men who pay a great deal of attention to fashion and style — or on feminists who reject beauty practices generated by patriarchy. In addition, some homosexual people, on the contrary, avoid this kind of outward difference, because in a not very tolerant society it increases their risk of encountering stigma and violence.

So the LGBTQI+ community as a whole is far from being sortable into categories tied to appearance and expression. In the 21st century, as the ideas of feminism and queer theory increasingly undermine gender binarism, blurring its narrow frame and ultimately changing not only homosexual but also heterosexual milieus, such divisions are becoming less and less relevant.

People tend to associate sex primarily with primary sex characteristics, that is, with the external genitals, since it is the difference between them that seems most obvious. In reality, sex is a structure made up of many components, some of which cannot be changed, while changing others does not necessarily involve surgery. More specifically:

· Sex chromosomes. As of today there is no means of changing a chromosome set from XX to XY or vice versa (or from or to some other set, if we remember the existence of intersex people with chromosomal variations).

· Sex glands — the gonads. These can be removed surgically: orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), or in the course of more complex operations. Their function can also be suppressed without surgery, through hormone therapy. At the same time, there are as of today no methods for creating the gonads of the other sex.

· Sex hormones. Their levels in the body can be adjusted by taking hormonal medications; a course with an appropriately chosen dosage is able to create a hormonal profile matching the one typical of the other sex.

· Primary sex characteristics — the genitals. Through surgery they can be both removed and newly formed. The latter is not a matter of “sewing on” but of complex techniques for constructing new genitals using material from the old ones and, in some cases, other body tissues. Visually they may be indistinguishable from the genitals of cisgender people, but because of the absence of gonads they are not fully functional. People who have undergone such operations are unable to conceive children, and their sexual function, especially in trans men, may be limited to some degree.

· Secondary sex characteristics. Changing them is achieved by various means. In particular, hormone therapy changes the structure of the skin: in trans women it becomes smoother, in trans men coarser. Trans women grow breasts, which they can enlarge further through breast augmentation if they wish. In trans men hormones do not affect breast size, and they can have their breasts removed through mastectomy. Hormones also increase body and facial hair growth in trans men. In trans women body hair becomes sparser, but facial hair can only be removed by resorting to hair removal.

· Legal sex — the “sex” field in documents. Depending on the legislation of a particular country, changing it may or may not require certain medical interventions as a prerequisite. In Ukraine today, that prerequisite is undergoing a medical intervention to change (correct) one’s sex, which may be either surgery or hormone therapy, and which in turn requires a diagnosis of “transsexualism.”

Moreover, the change in appearance by which people usually perceive someone as a “girl” or a “boy” is in fact a change in secondary sex characteristics, which, as the description above shows, is achieved primarily through hormones and does not depend on genital surgery. Unlike operations, such changes are usually not very fast: they happen gradually, and the time it takes for a person to begin being perceived by most people as belonging to the other sex can range from a few months to a couple of years.

What is more, many trans people conclude that they do not need genital surgery and limit themselves to hormone therapy. And in recent years — in Sweden, for example — they have even been winning compensation for such operations, which for a long time were a mandatory condition for obtaining legal gender recognition (that is, a change of legal sex). The practice of such demands by the state is now called “forced sterilization,” and with each passing year more countries are abandoning it, as Ukraine did when it changed its transition procedure in 2016.

In closing, it is worth noting that, in light of the list above, the term “sex change” itself is incorrect. It is better to specify which components of sex are being changed in any given case.

The question of transgender people’s — above all trans women’s — access to gender-segregated facilities has come up for especially active discussion in recent years. This was largely driven by the so-called “bathroom bills” — legislative initiatives promoted by conservative politicians mostly in various U.S. states, aimed at restricting access to restrooms, showers and the like according to the sex assigned to a person at birth. The declared purpose of such laws is to protect privacy and to keep women and children in particular safe from violence.

Meanwhile, measures for the legal gender recognition of transgender people — that is, the ability to change identity documents — as well as anti-discrimination measures that to some degree allow trans people to be recognized in accordance with their gender identity even independently of documents, have been in force in many countries for years now. This makes it possible to assess how they actually affect the situation in terms of safety. In 2015, for instance, a survey was made of 17 school districts in 12 U.S. states where legislation protecting against discrimination on the grounds of gender identity had already been in effect for some time. No incidents caused by trans students, including in restrooms, were found. And in 2018, also in the United States, a study was conducted in various facilities in the state of Massachusetts, taking into account whether an inclusive policy toward trans people was in place there. The results showed no difference in rates of sex crimes in public restrooms or locker rooms between facilities where such a policy is in effect and those where it is not.

Although isolated incidents involving, for example, the spying on women in locker rooms by trans women as well as by men posing as them have indeed occurred, these are rare cases against the general background of sex crimes committed against women by men. They give no grounds whatsoever for concluding that making legal gender recognition easier changes the situation for the worse in any way. The same can be said with regard to prisons and shelters.

It is worth noting that in most cases no permanent access control to facilities such as restrooms or locker rooms is provided for at all — so if a male abuser wants to get in, he usually does not even need to pose as a trans woman. At the same time, control methods such as checking a passport at the entrance, to say nothing of genital checks, smack of totalitarianism and would be unwelcome not only to transgender people but to most cisgender people as well. Most safety problems and concerns can instead be resolved by individual stalls with no gender marking at all, which do, however, lock securely.

In spaces of long-term stay, such as prisons and shelters, entry control is in fact important and appropriate. And it should not be reduced solely to a formal check of sex or gender, but made more individual, determining where and with whom a particular person can or cannot be placed depending on their personal characteristics, among which being transgender should not be the sole determining one. This is already being done, for example, in the prisons of New Zealand and Scotland.

In 1966 Harry Benjamin — an endocrinologist and sexologist who devoted a significant part of his life to studying the phenomenon of being transgender — published in his book “The Transsexual Phenomenon” a classification of transgender presentations that later became known as the “Benjamin scale”. In it, one of the attributes of “true transsexualism” in its strongest form, when a person with an assigned male sex feels themselves to be a woman and seeks to bring their body as close as possible to a female one, was defined by him as a sexual orientation directed specifically toward men.

From that time on, psychiatrists often relied directly or indirectly on the Benjamin scale in diagnosing transsexualism — or more precisely, in determining who could and could not be allowed to transition. As time went on, however, the limitations and arbitrariness of this scale became increasingly clear. Trans people themselves, knowing what standard they had to meet in order to obtain permission, adjusted their life stories to it when telling them to doctors. This included aspects of sexuality, if its expressions did not fit the model of “authenticity.”

Today it can be stated with confidence that there is no direct connection between being transgender and sexual orientation. This is confirmed, in particular, by sociological studies in which trans people were asked, among other things, about their orientation. In one such study, conducted in 2015 in the United States, an equal 23% of trans respondents each defined their orientation as heterosexual and as homosexual, while the others named bisexual, queer or some other orientation.

As for gay men and lesbians assigned male and female at birth respectively, the only thing that can lead them to thoughts of “changing” that sex is a situation in which homosexuality is condemned by society far more harshly than a gender transition is. A vivid example of this today is demonstrated by Iran. There, sexual relations between people of the same sex are punishable up to and including the death penalty. Gender transition, on the other hand, is quite accessible and is funded by the state. Homosexual people are thereby indirectly encouraged to transition so that their relationships become heterosexual — then they escape punishment and acquire the status of recognized, law-abiding citizens. As a result, Iran ranks second in the world for the number of sex characteristic surgeries performed. This would hardly be the case were it not for the state’s repressive policy toward homosexual people.

At first glance one might see a certain correlation in the fact that in countries where homosexuality is condemned by society and prosecuted, and where gender transition is hard to access and entirely unregulated — primarily the Islamic countries of Asia and Africa — the population is for the most part growing rapidly, while in Western countries that are liberal toward LGBTQI+ people population growth is small or absent altogether. But the birth rate is influenced by many factors, which should be considered together.

Factors that contribute to a rising birth rate include the desire to have children, women’s orientation toward family and children, religiosity, social support, living in rural areas, state family support programs, social pressure to have children and so on. A falling birth rate is associated with high income, a high level of education, state demographic policies restricting births, the use of contraception, the involvement of women in the labor force and others.

Looking at this list, it is easy to see that a significant part of the second half of these factors is characteristic precisely of economically developed Western countries, while some from the first half belong to “third world” countries. One could say that in developed countries what becomes more important is not the size of the population but its quality: having a child is not necessarily a priority for a family, but once such a decision is made, the family tries to give the child everything of the best.

At the same time, according to survey data, in Europe 5.9% of the population — from 1.5% to 7.9% in different countries — identify as LGBTQI+ (which includes both homosexual and transgender people), and in the United States the figure is 4.5%. Even if we imagine that none of these people leave any offspring behind, this is still a small enough share of the total population that it could not significantly affect the country’s birth rate as a whole. But the assumption that they have no offspring is also untrue: according to various data, 9–16% of homosexual and 15–50% of transgender people have children. And what often limits their ability to become parents is not their own wishes but the state and society, which make access to assisted reproductive technologies, adoption and parental rights difficult or impossible.

Finally, if we look at the data on population and its growth in different countries over time, we can see that countries with liberal legislation on LGBTQI+ issues mostly show small but nonetheless positive growth. Population decline is currently occurring in countries such as Italy, Poland, Romania and Japan, and also in Ukraine, where today there is neither legalization of same-sex marriage nor a simple self-determination-based procedure for gender transition