SOGI myths

For a long time, diverse expressions of sexuality and gender — such as homosexuality, bisexuality and being transgender — were condemned by society and, accordingly, passed over in silence. As a result, a shortage of information about these phenomena arose, and it was sometimes filled in with stereotypes and myths far removed from reality.

Today, thanks to the internet, information has become far more accessible. Yet because questions of sexual orientation and gender identity are still usually left out of broad educational programs, many myths continue to display remarkable staying power.

So we decided to gather the myths about sexual orientation and gender identity that we consider the most widespread, and to show in detail how they fail to match reality — and what that reality actually is. We hope this text will be useful to everyone who wants to work through these questions themselves, or to help others do so.

Homosexuality is unnatural.

When people speak of something being “unnatural,” they usually mean that homosexual relationships exist only in human society, whereas nature in its original state contains nothing of the kind — and that all of it therefore comes from the devil. Such claims are often backed by the thesis that the goal of any species is reproduction, which in higher animals happens sexually, so there is no place for homosexuality in them.

The factual evidence, however, shows this view to be mistaken. As far back as the end of the last century, the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl wrote in his book “Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity” that homosexual behavior is well documented in 450 animal species. Overall, it has been observed in more than 1,500 species.

Expressions of homosexuality include courtship, affection, pair bonding, sexual activity and even the raising of offspring by same-sex pairs. Examples can be given for a range of species:

• In giraffes, homosexual behavior is observed primarily among males, which first rub their necks together, court one another, and then mount each other for sexual contact. On average such cases are even more frequent than heterosexual matings — as Bagemihl notes, in one study their share reached 94%.
• In lions, same-sex relations occur both between males and between females. Males may form a “coalition” in which they jointly care for their pride, which includes the lionesses and cubs, and cement their bond through sexual contact.
• Bonobos are one of the species closest to humans, and like people they can have sex simply for pleasure. Bonobos are considered fully bisexual, with about 60% of their sexual activity consisting of contacts between females. For them sex can also serve the social functions of defusing conflict and establishing hierarchy.
• Black swans tend to form stable pairs that can stay together for years. And about 25% of those are “gay couples.” Sometimes such a pair forms a temporary alliance with a female in order to obtain eggs from her, and then drives her away and incubates the eggs themselves.
• In penguins, homosexual behavior was observed as early as the beginning of the 20th century, but at the time the information proved too shocking to be made public. In our own century a number of cases are known from zoos in which penguins formed same-sex pairs, incubated eggs and raised chicks.
• While for most animals the data speak rather of bisexuality that can be expressed situationally as heterosexual or homosexual behavior, in the case of sheep research indicates that about 8% of rams have an exclusively homosexual orientation. That is, they prefer sexual contact with other rams even when ewes in estrus are nearby.

There is still no scientific consensus explaining homosexual behavior in animals. A number of researchers hold that it serves the social function of strengthening bonds within the group. Another view is that homosexual pairs, even without offspring of their own, can still contribute to passing on genetic material indirectly, by helping to raise the offspring of their relatives. This accounts for the non-obvious evolutionary benefit of homosexuality, thanks to which it keeps reappearing in nature.

Finally, it is worth recalling that those who insist on the supposed unnaturalness of homosexuality inconsistently forget that the technological achievements of human civilization have far more claim to be called unnatural: roads, houses, computers, telephones and so on. At the same time, most of the diseases people try to treat and get rid of are perfectly natural. 

So the naturalness or unnaturalness of any given phenomenon is not in itself either good or bad, and treating it as an argument about that phenomenon’s right to exist makes no sense at all.

In nature there are only two opposite sexes: male and female.

The notion of two sexes as something mutually exclusive, something “opposite,” is tied to the concept of “sexual dimorphism.” It describes the difference between individuals of the same species of different sexes, covering both their reproductive systems directly and their secondary sex characteristics. Such dimorphism is characteristic of a large share of animals, humans included, as well as of some plants. Its existence is regarded as a consequence of the evolution of species, in which females and males perform different roles that favor more successful reproduction.

At the same time, even in sexually dimorphic biological species there are exceptions to the rule, when an organism combines the traits of both sexes or has those traits in some intermediate form. This phenomenon has the collective name “intersex,” and its prevalence among humans across all possible variations is estimated to reach as much as 1.7%. Such variations can be caused by different factors and can have different manifestations:

•         Chromosomal variations, in which, instead of a pair of sex chromosomes XX (female) or XY (male), there is only a single X chromosome (“Turner syndrome”), an XXY set (“Klinefelter syndrome”), an XXX set (“trisomy X”) and so on.
•         Mutations of the gene responsible for sexual differentiation on the Y chromosome. They result in more or less developed female genitalia alongside the male XY chromosome set.
•         Variations at the level of the formation of the sex organs. They can appear as undeveloped or partly developed gonads; as gonads of ambiguous form combining male and female features (“ovotestis”); or as genitalia of ambiguous form (“clitoromegaly” or “micropenis”).
•         Variations connected with the ways sex hormones act on the body. These include complete or partial androgen insensitivity, which leads to external female genitalia with internal organs closer to male ones; “adrenogenital syndrome,” which conversely involves an elevated level of testosterone leading to male secondary sex characteristics alongside female primary ones; and others.

In medical classifications, intersex variations are still positioned as certain “developmental anomalies.” At the same time, although some of them can give rise to specific health problems, these are connected more with the particular action of hormones than with the configuration of the sex organs as such. In some cases intersex people even retain the ability to have children of their own. On the contrary, it is precisely the attempts to “normalize” the sex organs of intersex people that often result in problems with their health, both physical and mental. And yet, even setting the health question aside, when such variations are regularly reproduced in the population by entirely natural means, it is absurd to claim that nothing of the sort exists in nature.

In general, one can say that natural sexual diversity extends far beyond dimorphism:

•         Some microorganisms and fungi have complex reproductive mechanisms in which the number of mating types — the prototypes of sex — can be considerable. In the split gill fungus, for instance, it can exceed 28,000.
•         Many plants and insects, some fish, amphibians and reptiles, and in rare cases even birds can reproduce by parthenogenesis, in which the embryo develops from an egg cell without sexual fertilization. Among them there are species for which this is the main mode of reproduction; they consist almost entirely of females, only occasionally producing males in their offspring, and those males are sterile.
•         More than 500 species of fish are known to be able to change sex in adulthood. If the male is removed from a group of bluehead wrasses consisting of one male and several females, the largest of the females soon changes her behavior and within 21 days turns completely into a male. This change is final, however, and cannot go in the opposite direction.
•         In several mole species the females have a hybrid sex organ combining ovarian and testicular tissue. This makes them stronger and more aggressive, which can matter in an underground life where it is often impossible to flee from danger.

Such examples only confirm that natural abundance is not exhausted by “two opposite sexes.”

Homosexuality and being transgender are modern fads of a decadent Western society; there was nothing of the kind before.

This line of argument is usually accompanied by a reference to “traditional values” to which modern society ought to return. Yet if one looks at ancient traditional cultures, it turns out that in most of them one can find some form of homosexuality or of gender variance that goes beyond ideas of a “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 earliest historical record of a homosexual couple dates to roughly 2400 BCE and comes from Ancient Egypt. The court officials Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were found in a shared tomb whose walls depict them embracing and kissing. Ancient Egyptian history also contains references to the “sekhet” — a “third gender” alongside male and female.
• In the ancient civilizations of Middle America — the Aztec, Maya, Quechua and others — both homosexual contacts and expressions beyond the two genders were a widespread phenomenon for which there is ample evidence. Their conceptions of sexuality and gender allowed for greater variability and fluidity and were in a certain sense closer to what we now call “queer”. Among North American Indigenous peoples the practice still survives of shamans who call themselves “two-spirit people” — that is, people who combine a female and a male essence at once.
• In China, references to homosexuality likewise begin in the period before the Common Era and are not rare in literature. During the Han dynasty, in particular, it was fairly 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 beginning 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 regarded as a separate gender.
• In ancient Greece, homosexual relationships had the character of a social institution: they were usually 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” derives.
• 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 text by a condemnation of such practices, so as to keep up formal appearances.
• Finally, in the territory of present-day Ukraine the Scythians, who appeared here in the 7th century BCE, had a distinct group corresponding roughly to transgender women — the Enarei. Born male, they felt a female soul within themselves and wore women’s clothing. And in the early Christian period, between the 10th and 16th centuries, an Orthodox rite called “adelphopoiesis” existed here; it resembled the sacrament of marriage but joined people of the same sex — mostly men.

The tendency to condemn homosexuality is characteristic of later Christian civilizations, in whose culture one of the key notions becomes “sin,” with everything sexual, carnal and aimed solely at pleasure perceived as sinful and as a violation of “natural law.” It was in exactly this context that people began to be persecuted by the Inquisition for homosexual relationships, and later, once the Inquisition’s functions passed to secular authorities, same-sex sex was written into the laws 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.

It can therefore be stated with confidence that homosexual people have always existed in 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 homosexual people stepping out of the shadows into the light. Once their difference stops being treated as a crime or an illness, they are no longer forced to hide it.

As for being transgender, it is worth adding that the technologies of medical gender- and sex-affirming procedures, such as hormone therapy and surgery, began to develop at the start of the 20th century and were systematized and standardized only in its second half. Over the years they have become more accessible in terms of legal regulation, the availability of competent specialists and financial cost. As a result, more and more people who once could only dream of a transgender transition are undertaking one.

Homosexuality and being transgender are mental illnesses that can be cured.

Viewing homosexuality as a mental illness is not traditional in historical perspective. Such views began to spread in the scientific community in the 19th century. To some extent this discourse was an alternative to the then-prevailing approach of criminalizing homosexuality: if 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 homosexual relationships in Germany.

In the first half of the 20th century the approach to homosexuality as a pathology gradually became generally accepted and entered the medical classifications. At times it coexisted with the criminalizing approach. A telling case in this respect is that of the outstanding mathematician Alan Turing, convicted of homosexual relations, who was given a choice between imprisonment and treatment by chemical castration. Having chosen the latter, he could not survive the consequences of the punishment and soon took his own life.

Various methods were used as attempts at a cure; collectively they are called conversion therapy. At different times and in different countries they included surgical lobotomy, castration, psychotherapy by means of psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, aversion therapy using electric current, and also reparative therapy supported by religious organizations. Over time, however, every method proved ineffective. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, plethysmograph studies were carried out on homosexual men who had supposedly changed their orientation to heterosexual, but the results showed that they were still aroused by men. In 2003 a study by Robert Spitzer was published, supposedly in favor of conversion therapy, but its results were criticized, since the participants were mostly religious people with an interest in reporting better outcomes than were real, and their accounts could not be verified. The researcher himself later retracted the work, admitting his mistake and apologizing to the gay community. By contrast, contemporary research shows that conversion therapy causes serious and lasting harm, contributing to depression and substance abuse and increasing the risk of suicide. In other words, it not only fails to “cure” but actually worsens a person’s mental state.

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 likewise ultimately recognized as ineffective and harmful. There is the well-known case of David Reimer, whom his family tried to raise as a girl in childhood despite the fact that he identified as a boy. The attempt was later acknowledged as a failure and stopped, but everything he had been through led to depression, and in the end he took his own life.

Today such “treatment” methods are condemned by many professional associations, both within individual countries and internationally — such as the World Psychiatric Association and the World Medical Association. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Canada, Germany, Taiwan and France, individual jurisdictions in Australia and the United States, and a number of others have banned conversion therapy practices in law as harmful or even fraudulent.

Removing homosexuality from the classification of diseases / being transgender from mental illnesses has no scientific basis; it is a purely political decision (made under pressure from the “gay lobby” / “trans lobby”).

It is worth noting that the construction of medical classifications should not, on the whole, be regarded as something absolutely scientifically objective. What matters for them is first and foremost practical considerations: which position in the classification offers better opportunities to help the people whose condition it describes. At the same time, a scientific basis is hard to find precisely for the position that homosexuality or being transgender is a mental pathology.

Early research on sexuality was often conducted among patients of psychiatric clinics, which created a 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, having conducted a study on a sample of 30 homosexual and the same number of heterosexual men, whom she selected from among people who had not sought psychiatric help. No difference that might point to pathology or social maladjustment in the homosexual men was found between them. 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 was accompanied by orgasm. This pointed to a far greater prevalence of homosexual behavior than was believed at the time.

In Britain, Sir Wolfenden’s committee conducted interviews in prisons holding people convicted of homosexual acts. Based on the results, the “Wolfenden Report” was published in 1957; it 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 only 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 in 1973 from its classification of mental disorders, the DSM-III. In 1990 it was similarly removed from the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, of the World Health Organization. Moreover, wording was added stating that a given sexual orientation cannot in itself be regarded as a disorder.

As for being transgender, in 1979 the ways of providing medical care to transgender people were formulated for the first time as international standards, in which the principal 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 undermined the basis for the position that being transgender is a condition requiring the attention of psychiatrists above all.

In 2011, in the 7th version of the Standards, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) called for distinguishing gender dysphoria — dissatisfaction with the mismatch 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 referred to research showing that it is stigma, prejudice and discrimination against “non-standard” gender expression that often become the source of mental health problems in transgender people, rather than that expression itself.

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

Homosexuality, pedophilia and zoophilia are phenomena of the same order: if one of them is called normal today, tomorrow it will be the turn of the next.

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 those 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 is 16 years, and orientation, again, is irrelevant here. 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 linking the normalization of homosexuality with pedophilia or zoophilia.

There is a belief that a large share of gay men are also pedophiles. This false notion has historical roots. The term “pederasty,” which is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for homosexual relationships, comes from ancient Greek traditions in which it meant precisely relationships between a mature man and an adolescent boy. But there is no reason at all to equate those traditions with the whole variety of expressions 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 orientation as homosexual or heterosexual (there is also a view on which this is regarded as a separate sexual orientation altogether). Of the rest, the majority are heterosexual or bisexual men, and many of them are married. Moreover, their orientation and the sex of the children they target do not necessarily coincide. Finally, in another study, which determined the sexual orientation of people who had sexually assaulted children, fewer than 1% turned out to be homosexual.

Homosexual people are the main carriers of HIV and AIDS; normalizing their relationships means helping the disease spread.

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

The UN program on HIV/AIDS — UNAIDS — defines key populations: groups with the highest risk of acquiring 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, their clients, transgender women and people in prison. According to 2022 data, MSM, regardless of their sexual orientation, accounted for only 20% of all new infections. This figure varies considerably by region: it is significantly lower in Eastern and Southern Africa than in other regions, for instance.

If we then look at the risks of transmitting HIV by different routes, the highest among sexual practices is anal intercourse — though even there the probability is only 138 per 10,000 contacts with an infected person. By comparison, with a transfusion of blood 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 in the past year. Among gay men, lifetime experience of anal sex was reported by 75% to 90%. Although the latter figures are higher in themselves, if they are combined with data on the sexual orientation of the population (in surveys from different years in the same United States it varies within a few percent, reaching 9.3% in 2025), it is clear that the number of heterosexual people who have engaged in anal practices comes out far greater.

At the same time, substantially reducing the risk of infection does not require giving up such practices entirely. Thus, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using condoms reduces 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 test for HIV regularly.

Clearly, such prevention requires education about HIV and safer sex, and reaching homosexual people with it is far easier when they are integrated into society as equals, rather than restricted in their rights in a way that drives them underground. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that LGB youth who do not find acceptance are 3.4 times more likely to engage in risky sex. Overall, homophobia keeps many LGBTQI+ people from seeking HIV prevention services and lowers the quality of those services — so it is homophobia itself, not homosexuality as such, that fuels the HIV epidemic

Homosexual and transgender people cannot have children, whereas the purpose of starting a family is precisely children — so the concept of family makes no sense for them.

Although a homosexual couple indeed cannot have a child who would carry genetic material from both partners in equal measure, 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 they accepted their own homosexuality.
• The couple can make use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART).
• The couple can adopt a child.

In recent years a technique known as “mitochondrial replacement” has appeared, through which a woman can pass on her mitochondria in addition to another woman’s egg cell, so that the future child will carry a certain share of genetic material from two women. Methods of artificially creating germ cells are also being developed, and they may soon make it possible for people of the same sex to have shared genetic children (so far the method has shown successful results in mice).

As for transgender people: although today a trans man cannot conceive and a trans woman cannot give birth, this does not mean that they are incapable of having genetic children in principle. They can have them before beginning a transition, if they start it after puberty. Later on, genital surgery may stand in the way, but today such operations are no longer required in order to complete a transition in a large share of countries, Ukraine included, 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 parent 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, families in which one partner is a trans person generally also have access to ART and adoption. Contemporary clinical guidelines explicitly recommend that trans people planning a transition consider various reproductive options before beginning it.

At the same time, LGBTQI+ people are often restricted in their ability to have children at the level of law itself. This can take the form of a ban on, or obstruction of, access to assisted reproductive technologies and adoption. Or it can happen indirectly — through the requirement of sterilization prior to legal gender recognition (a change of documents) for transgender people, and through the non-recognition of same-sex relationships, as a result of which the partner for whom the child is not genetically related is not recognized as the child’s parent and has no corresponding rights regarding them. In Ukraine, in particular, same-sex couples are denied the right to adopt, while diagnoses related to being transgender impose limits on the possibility of both adoption and access to ART. So if, according to various studies, children are present in 9–16% of gay men and lesbians and 15–50% of trans people compared with about 70% of cisgender heterosexual people, one can say with confidence that without these restrictions those figures would be higher.

Finally, it is worth noting that not all heterosexual families have children either, and not all of them can or want to. So tying family exclusively to the presence of children — all the more so when it is LGBTQI+ people who are being discussed — is incorrect. After all, even Ukrainian law defines a family simply as persons “who live together, are bound by a common household, and have mutual rights and obligations.”

Homosexual relationships are unstable and are only about sex, so homosexual people do not really need marriage.

By its very definition, homosexuality involves both sexual and romantic or emotional attraction — just as heterosexuality does. Homosexual people can love one another deeply, and stories of such love are known from ancient times to the present day. For instance, at this link you can read the letters that such well-known figures 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.

At the same time, studies conducted in the last century did indeed yield high figures for the number of partners among homosexual people, which indicated frequent changes of partner. In Germany, for example, according to the research of the sexologist Martin Dannecker, in 1971 the average number of partners per year was 14.3, and by 1987 it had fallen to 5.5. 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, this spectrum included both people with a large number of rapidly changing connections and those who gravitated toward lasting relationships. In the United States of the same period, for instance, 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 indicate that the stability of homosexual relationships is approaching that of heterosexual ones. In particular, a 2017 study in the United States found that homosexual relationships are on average shorter than heterosexual ones, but that for couples who live together this duration increases. When a marriage is entered into, the difference in the stability of couples disappears altogether, and homosexual ones even become more stable. A 2019 study that tried to take the results of previous ones into account ultimately showed that for couples who live together, whether same-sex or different-sex, the risk of the relationship ending is practically identical, and registering the relationship helps to lower it.

At the same time, in a survey conducted back in 2013, 84% of LGBTQI+ adults named love as a very important reason for getting married. Also, 60% of respondents were either already married or would like to marry, and 93% supported to some degree the very idea of legalizing such marriages. Finally, according to the same US 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.

Such data and their trends show that the truth is exactly the opposite: as long as homosexual people face condemnation of their relationships by society and have no opportunity to formalize them, casual contacts in particular dedicated venues are simpler than maintaining stable relationships, let alone starting families and having children. Once society and the state allow homosexual couples to live in the same conditions as heterosexual ones, the difference between them gradually disappears.

Legalizing homosexual relationships and simplifying gender transitions leads to falling birth rates, a demographic crisis, and the degeneration of the nation.

At first glance, one might see a certain correlation in the fact that in countries where homosexuality is condemned by society and prosecuted, and gender transitions are hard to access and entirely unregulated – primarily the Islamic countries of Asia and Africa – the population is for the most part growing rapidly, whereas in Western countries that are liberal toward LGBTQI+ people population growth is small or absent altogether. However, the birth rate is affected by many factors, which are worth considering together.

Birth rates are pushed up by such factors as the desire to have children, women’s orientation toward family and children, religiosity, the availability of social support, living in rural areas, government family-support programs, social pressure to have children, and so on. Falling birth rates are associated with high incomes, high levels of education, state demographic policies aimed at limiting births, the use of contraception, high participation of women in the labor force, and others.

Looking at this list, it is easy to see that a significant share of the second group of factors is characteristic precisely of economically developed Western countries, while some from the first group are characteristic of “third world” countries. One could say that in developed countries it is not the size of the population that becomes more important, 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 the very best.

At the same time, a survey conducted in 2023 in 30 countries showed that on average 9% of the population identify as LGBTQI+ (a 2024 survey in the United States produced similar figures, 9.3%). Even if we imagine that none of these people leave any offspring, this is still too small a share of the total population to have a substantial effect on the birth rate as a whole. The assumption that they have no offspring, however, does not correspond to reality: according to various data, 9–16% of homosexual and 15–50% of transgender people have children. What is more, their ability to become parents is often limited not by their own wishes but precisely by 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 Western countries with more liberal legislation on LGBTQI+ issues mostly show small but nonetheless positive growth. Population decline, by contrast, is happening in countries such as Italy, Moldova, Poland, and Japan, as well as China and Russia, which today have neither legalized same-sex marriage nor a simple and accessible gender transition procedure.

No legislation on sexual orientation and gender identity is needed, because LGBTQI+ people already have the same rights as everyone else.

Human rights as such really are 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 on the grounds of 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 is no longer merely declarative but makes it possible to defend one’s rights before the European Court of Human Rights. Finally, Chapter II of the Constitution of Ukraine sets out the rights guaranteed to citizens by the state.

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

For example, when a transgender person transitions, the data in their identity documents stops matching the name they actually use, their gender, and also their appearance. Such a person periodically has to explain this mismatch, in one way or another disclosing the fact that they are transgender – private information they have the right to keep to themselves. In this way their right to privacy is violated. To avoid this, 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 start a family, they may want to obtain the civil rights that come with it: joint ownership of property, raising children, inheritance, and so on. These rights are usually granted by marriage, but if marriage is defined as being concluded between a man and a woman, same-sex couples are deprived of them. So, to achieve genuine equality, legislation has to be changed in such a way as to extend to them the ability to exercise the right to marry.

In these cases it is not even necessary to mention SOGI or LGBTQI+ people specifically – 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, since there is also the problem of discrimination on the grounds of SOGI.

LGBTQI+ people more often face prejudiced treatment, which can take the form of an unwillingness to hire them or rent housing to them, the denial of proper medical care, problems while traveling and crossing borders, and so on – precisely because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQI+ people also more often become victims of violence, when they are attacked, beaten, or harassed, again because of their orientation or identity. That is why including SOGI grounds in legislation against discrimination and hate crimes, as well as in special policies that spell out measures to counter and prevent them, helps to fight these phenomena and reduce them to nothing.

Besides, such instruments provide protection not exclusively for homosexual or transgender people – in a hypothetical situation where a heterosexual person was discriminated against because of sexual orientation, they could help that person just as well. So we come back to the point that human rights are the same for everyone, but their observance has to be ensured by appropriate means.

As things stand today, according to our own analysis, in Ukraine there are at least 11 rights defined in the Constitution that LGBTQI+ people cannot exercise as freely as other citizens.

Homosexual and transgender people must not be allowed near children, because children may fall under their bad influence and become the same.

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

A fair number of studies have already been conducted on the situation of children in same-sex families. The American Psychological Association, in its 2005 review of such studies, pointed to the absence of any data suggesting that the share 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 a qualification based on several studies that showed greater flexibility and less stereotypical gender expression among the children of LGBTQI+ people. It also mentions 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 a review of the research on this topic. Here, too, no influence of a parent’s trans status on children’s sexual orientation and gender identity was found. In addition, it noted that the greatest stress factor for children is not a parent’s gender transition as such, but the tension in the parents’ relationship that arises against its backdrop, especially when it comes to divorce.

Those who worry about the situation of children in same-sex families often refer to Mark Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study”. Conducted in 2012, it supposedly showed that children from such families have a lower quality of life – in particular when it comes to levels of education, employment, propensity to depression, and the use of psychoactive substances. This study, however, has methodological problems: only two of the children it examined had actually lived in a same-sex family throughout their childhood, while for the others one of the parents had merely had experience of same-sex relationships during a certain period of life. Some of the children studied had also gone through their parents’ divorce after a heterosexual marriage, which does not affect a child’s well-being for the better regardless of the parents’ sexual orientation.

In 2015, researchers attempted to re-analyze Regnerus’s data, correcting his errors, and obtained a fundamentally different result: the difference between children raised by heterosexual couples and by gay and lesbian couples is minimal. This is consistent with the results of many other studies, and some even indicate that children in same-sex families are slightly happier and healthier. On the whole, it is already possible to 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.

There is nothing wrong with LGBTQI+ people as long as they keep quiet instead of promoting their way of life, in particular by holding parades.

“Propaganda” would have to mean that LGBTQI+ people who are out in public call on others to enter same-sex relationships, to have sex with people of their own sex, or to “change sex.” Yet nothing of the kind actually happens.

In fact, claims of this sort involve a substitution of meaning, in which things that are not propaganda at all are labeled as such. For example, 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 cause other people to change their preferences. For instance, if different people like different foods, different films, different literary genres, each of them may talk about their preferences, but others are unlikely to change their tastes as a result.

Sometimes any LGBTQI+ visibility at all is also considered “propaganda” – whether as characters in a feature film, in the public display of symbols, or in open displays 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 someone tells how they met, went on a date, or took a vacation with someone of the opposite sex, this can be treated as heterosexual propaganda. Everything relating to family life in the conventional sense belongs here just as much. And wedding ceremonies with their traditional rituals could be called the quintessence of such propaganda.

Thus, the impact on society of isolated instances of visible homosexuality or transgender identity does not come anywhere near the level that heterosexuality has. The opposite impression can arise only because of the cognitive bias of observational selection, when people are more inclined to notice the things they think about more. So if someone sees LGBTQI+ propaganda everywhere, this may above all indicate that person’s own fixation on LGBTQI+ topics.

“Parades,” in turn, are the quintessence of visibility for LGBTQI+ people. In mostly Western countries, where they have already achieved equality at least in the legal sphere, 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 fear for their orientation and gender. In countries where a large part of these 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. Still, they can have festive elements too – for some of the participants this is the only day of the year on which they can freely come out and declare themselves. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that.

Bisexual people do not really exist: they are either people who have not made up their minds yet, or perverts ready to sleep with anything that moves.

People tend to define another person’s orientation on the basis of the present moment. So if, for example, a girl is in a relationship with another girl, she is identified as a lesbian, and if with a boy – as heterosexual. And if her previous relationships are known to have been with a person of a different sex than now, they may be perceived as a stage that preceded her “making up her mind,” or people will expect that this decision is still to come. In this way her bisexuality becomes invisible – especially if she does not declare it herself.

In reality, bisexuality as a characteristic concerns not what relationships a person is in at the moment, but their very capacity to fall in love, form relationships, and enjoy sex with people of both the female and the male sex or gender. And just as a heterosexual person in a relationship has not necessarily made up their mind to spend the rest of their life with this particular person, a bisexual person has not necessarily made up their mind about being in relationships exclusively with girls or exclusively with boys in the future. Nor are they obliged to.

Sometimes the wish that someone would “make up their mind” comes from homosexual people, born of the fear that if someone can move like this from same-sex to different-sex relationships, they too could be forced to do the same. Here, however, it is important to understand that every person’s sexual preferences are individual, and one person’s particular choices should under no circumstances be grounds for forcing the same on someone else.

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

In reality, things are the same for bisexual people as for heterosexual and homosexual ones: while the latter’s choice of a partner is limited to a particular sex, this does not mean they are ready to sleep with just any person of that sex. In the same way, a bisexual person will be attracted not to just anyone, but to some 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.

Gay men are effeminate men, and lesbians are mannish women.

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

This stereotype falls apart on the very logic on which it is built. After all, if, for example, two lesbians form a couple in which one plays the role of the man, then the other must accordingly be in the role of a “feminine woman,” who will not differ from ordinary women. The same goes for two gay men.

This does indeed happen. Gay men and lesbians, growing up in the same society built on a gender-binary system, are not free from its attitudes. That is why some of them, when building relationships, try to reproduce in sex – and to a certain extent in life – the “top – bottom” model, in which the active role may be associated with the traditionally male one and the passive role with the female one. A count of profiles on an American gay portal in the early 2010s, however, found that only slightly more than half of the users clearly indicated their role, and by default it refers there only to preferences in sex.

In general, over the past century the LGBTQI+ subculture has produced various models to follow. Thus, it has its “effeminate gays,” who in their style of speech, their movements, and particular details of clothing reproduce elements of femininity – sometimes in an exaggerated, somewhat grotesque form – and may at times speak about themselves in feminine grammatical forms. 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 beards and thick body hair, who in this way cultivate a rough masculinity in their appearance. Among lesbians, a division into “butch” and “femme” – masculine and feminine women respectively – was widespread for a long time, and the latter, because of their typically feminine appearance, are often not seen 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 recognize “their own” more easily – in particular, when starting new relationships. This is exactly what a phenomenon such as “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 those feminists who reject beauty practices generated by patriarchy. Besides, some homosexual people, on the contrary, avoid such outward distinctiveness, since 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 something that can be sorted into categories tied to appearance and expression. In the 21st century, as the ideas of feminism and queer theory increasingly undermine gender binarity, blurring its narrow frames and ultimately changing not only the homosexual but also the heterosexual environment, such a division is becoming less and less relevant.

Transgender people are simply gay men and lesbians who change their sex in order to become “normal” heterosexuals.

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

Benjamin himself warned against applying his classification as an absolute yardstick. Since then, however, psychiatrists have often relied, directly or indirectly, on the Benjamin scale when diagnosing transsexualism – or more precisely, when determining who may or may not be allowed to undergo a gender transition. Yet as time went on, the limitations and arbitrariness of this scale became increasingly clear. In particular, 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 applied to aspects of sexuality as well, if the way it manifested in them did not fit the model of “authenticity.”

Today it can already be stated with confidence that there is no direct connection between being transgender and sexual orientation. This is confirmed, in particular, by sociological studies of trans people, which examined among other things the question of their orientation. Although the data point to a substantial difference in the distribution of sexual orientations among transgender people compared with cisgender ones, the key difference lies in their greater diversity among trans people. Thus, according to 2018 data from the United States, about half of trans people described their orientation as directed toward people of more than one sex or gender, while about 17% described it as exclusively heterosexual, and almost as many as homosexual. This may be due to the fact that, because of the divergence between their gender identity and their sex at birth, trans people generally reflect more on issues related to gender and sexuality and are less inclined to rely on stereotypical social attitudes when building relationships.

As for gay men and lesbians whose sex was determined at birth as male and female respectively, the only thing that can push them toward thoughts of “changing” it is a situation in which homosexuality is condemned by society far more harshly than gender transition. Today a vivid example of this is demonstrated by Iran. There, sexual relations between people of the same sex are punishable by up to the death penalty. Gender transition, on the other hand, is fairly accessible and partly financed by the state. Homosexual people are thereby indirectly encouraged to transition so that their relationships become heterosexual – in which case they escape punishment and gain recognition as law-abiding citizens. As a result, Iran ranks second in the world for the number of genital surgeries performed. This would hardly be so were it not for the repressive state policy toward homosexual people.

A “sex change” is achieved by an operation that cuts off or sews on genitals, turning a boy into a girl or the other way around.

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

• Sex chromosomes. As of today, there are no means of changing a chromosome set from XX (female) to XY (male) or the other way around (or from or to some other set, if we take into account the existence of intersex people with chromosomal variations).
• Sex glands – the gonads. They can be removed through surgery: orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), or in the course of more complex operations. Their functions can also be suppressed without surgical intervention, through hormone therapy. At the same time, there are currently 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 of which, with appropriately selected dosages, 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 the material of the old ones and, in some cases, other tissues of the body. 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 had such surgeries are unable to conceive children, and their sexual function, especially in trans men, may be limited to a certain 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 develop mammary glands and their breasts grow, and if they wish they can enlarge them further through breast augmentation. 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 be removed only by resorting to epilation.
• Legal sex – the “sex” field in identity documents. Depending on the legislation of a particular country, changing it may or may not require certain medical interventions as a precondition. In Ukraine today, under the “Fundamentals of Health Care Legislation”, this precondition is undergoing a medical intervention to change (correct) one’s sex, which may or may not include surgery but must include hormone therapy, and which in turn requires a diagnosis of “transsexualism.”

At the same time, the change in appearance by which people usually perceive someone as a “girl” or a “boy” is driven by the change in secondary sex characteristics, which, as can be seen from the description above, is achieved primarily thanks to hormones and does not depend on genital surgery. Also, unlike surgery, such changes are usually not very fast: they happen gradually, and the time it takes for a person to start 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 come to the conclusion that they do not need genital surgery, and limit themselves to hormone therapy alone. And in recent years, as for example in Sweden, they have even been seeking compensation for such operations, which they underwent against their own will because these were a mandatory requirement for obtaining legal gender recognition (that is, a change of legal sex). The practice of such requirements on the part of the state is now called “forced sterilization,” and with every passing year more and more countries are abandoning it – as Ukraine did as well, when it changed the gender transition procedure in 2016.

Finally, it is worth noting that, in light of the list above, the term “sex change” itself is not correct. It is better to specify which particular components of sex are being changed in one case or another, and to use “gender transition” as the general term.

Making gender transition easier creates a threat to women in gendered spaces – restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, and so on – because men can now easily get in there as transgender women.

The question of transgender people’s access – primarily trans women’s – to gender-segregated facilities has been discussed especially actively in recent years. This has been driven to a large extent 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 so on depending on the sex assigned to a person at birth. The declared purpose of such laws is to protect privacy and to safeguard women and children above all from violence.

Meanwhile, measures for the legal gender recognition of transgender people, that is, changes to identity documents, as well as anti-discrimination measures that to some extent allow trans people to be recognized in accordance with their gender identity even regardless 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. Thus, in 2015, 17 school districts in 12 U.S. states, where legislation protecting against discrimination on the grounds of gender identity had already been in force for some time, were surveyed. No incidents caused by transgender students, including in restrooms, were found. And in 2018, again in the United States, a study was conducted in various facilities in the state of Massachusetts, taking into account whether they had an inclusive policy toward trans people. The results showed no difference in rates of sexual offenses in public restrooms or locker rooms between the facilities where such a policy is in force and those where it is not.

Although individual incidents involving, for example, peeping at women in locker rooms by both trans women and men posing as them have indeed occurred, these are isolated cases against the general background of sexual offenses committed against women by men. They provide no grounds whatsoever for concluding that easier legal gender recognition changes the situation for the worse in any way. The same can be said about 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 there, he usually does not even need to pretend to be a trans woman. At the same time, control methods such as checking passports at the entrance, not to mention genital checks, smack of totalitarianism and would be unwelcome not only to transgender women but also to most cisgender women, whom they are supposedly meant to protect. Instead, most problems and safety concerns can be solved by separate stalls with no gender marking at all, which do, on the other hand, close tightly.

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 should be made more individualized, determining where and with whom a particular person may or may not be placed depending on their personal characteristics, among which being transgender should not be the only decisive one. As is already done, for example, in the prisons of New Zealand and Scotland.

LGBTQI+ people cannot be patriots

This point of view often comes from representatives of right-wing conservative movements and people who share their views. For them, patriotism is closely tied to so-called “traditional family values,” which allow only heterosexual relationships and families with the typical gender roles of “husband” and “wife,” and which also rule out any expression of transgender identity. Since this is part of their vision of Ukraine as a nation state, in their view LGBTQI+ people have no reason to support it. So, in particular, they cannot serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, they leave for Western countries at the first opportunity, and they may even side with Russia altogether.

But patriotism can take different forms. And there is no contradiction whatsoever in a person supporting progressive values – in particular in the social sphere, striving for equality for various forms of relationships, families, and self-expression – while at the same time loving Ukraine and wanting to see it in the future exactly like that: socially progressive.

As for active expressions of patriotism, such as defending one’s country, back in 2018 the association “Ukrainian LGBTQI+ Military Personnel and Veterans for Equal Rights” was founded. It counts more than 500 LGBTQI+ service members and veterans, only a small share of whom are open in public, while the overall number of LGBTQI+ people in the ranks of the Armed Forces may be considerably higher. In 2023, the homophobic serviceman Serhii Bondar initiated a “manifesto” claiming that LGBTQI+ people are supposedly absent from the front, but his data were based on comments without any confirmation whatsoever. In response, the association of LGBTQI+ service members compiled a list of more than 50 units in which its members serve. At the same time, some LGBTQI+ people may hesitate about military service not because they lack patriotism, but because of the high level of homophobia and transphobia in the army. For trans people there is the additional problem that the state does not provide them, for the duration of their service, with the hormonal medications they need to take on an ongoing basis.

The question of LGBTQI+ people leaving Ukraine during the full-scale Russian invasion has been raised more often by Western organizations and media – primarily with a focus on trans women, who have no possibility of leaving if their passport still lists them as male. But this does not mean that all or even most trans women, let alone LGBTQI+ people in general, wanted to leave – what is more, Ukrainian LGBTQI+ organizations continued their work, taking wartime conditions into account. And even when they find themselves abroad, Ukrainian LGBTQI+ activists try to draw attention to war-related problems and needs, in particular by calling for more weapons to be supplied to Ukraine. Thus, the slogan of the Equality March held as part of Pride in Liverpool in 2023 was “The war is not over.”

Accusations that LGBTQI+ people are sympathetic to Russia are the most absurd of all. Of course, individual LGBTQI+ people can hold any political views at all, including pro-Russian ones – just like people from any other social group. But it is worth remembering that it is the Russian Federation that is arguably the most homophobic and transphobic country in Europe, at the level of both society and state policy. In recent years it has had a ban on the propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relationships” and a ban on gender transition, and the “international LGBTQI+ public movement” has been declared an extremist organization. So it is hard to imagine an LGBTQI+ person who would want such a reality for themselves instead of an independent Ukraine. Moreover, the testimony of those Ukrainian LGBTQI+ people who found themselves in territories under Russian occupation shows that hiding their sexual orientation or transgender identity becomes a matter of survival for them, and that the best option life offers is to leave.

At the same time, some members of parliament in the Verkhovna Rada draft and promote bills very similar in content to the above-mentioned Russian law “banning LGBTQI+ propaganda.” So the question of whether such homophobic lawmakers can be patriots would look far more appropriate.

The LGBTQI+ community is like a political party with its own ideology and agenda.

People generally tend to perceive those who differ from them in certain respects as a more homogeneous group than those who resemble them in those same respects. This phenomenon was studied as early as the beginning of the 1980s, is known as the “outgroup homogeneity effect,” and can be summed up as “they are all alike, we are all different.” This cognitive bias is explained, among other things, by the fact that people usually tend to consider the differences between the “in-group” and the “out-group” more important than the individual characteristics of particular people within the “out-group.” Thus, if a person perceives LGBTQI+ people as “others,” they will most likely ascribe more similarity to them than actually exists.

At the same time, the very term “LGBTQI+ community” seems to point to some kind of commonality, and expressions such as “member/representative of the LGBTQI+ community,” which are sometimes used, may involuntarily evoke associations with something like a political party. Moreover, when a significant share of LGBTQI+ people remain invisible, it is mostly activists who are publicly visible, and they may to some extent speak on behalf of the entire community. Here, too, an analogy can be traced with a party and its members, who represent the interests of a broader segment of citizens.

However, this terminology is somewhat misleading, and “community,” let alone “membership,” is meant rather conditionally. To a certain extent this is also wishful thinking, since sometimes LGBTQI+ people themselves would like to see their movement as more unified than it actually is. But if we do pursue the analogy with parties, then just as a country has many of them with different agendas, there are likewise many LGBTQI+ organizations with different orientations. The number of such organizations in Ukraine can be estimated at several dozen, and they differ in territorial scope (from the national level to local ones), in target group (LGBTQI+ people in general, or separately gay men, lesbians, transgender people, LGBTQI+ youth, and so on), and in areas of work (advancing legislative change, supporting the local community, education, medical assistance, and so on). At the same time, while on nationwide issues, such as advancing draft laws concerning equal rights for LGBTQI+ people, representatives of different organizations may coordinate with one another, on most other matters they work independently and may not even know what their colleagues from other organizations are doing.

There are also international LGBTQI+ organizations, and here, too, an analogy can be drawn. The UN is a supranational structure in which almost every country in the world is represented, yet it does not determine those countries’ policies. Likewise, the largest global association of LGBTQI+ organizations is ILGA World (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) – which, incidentally, cooperates with the UN – but it, too, does not set the agenda for its member organizations; rather, it can provide them with help and support in their work.

The fact that many LGBTQI+ organizations receive funding for their work from foreign donors may also create the impression that they are thereby being directed from some “global center.” In reality, however, this mechanism works differently: local organizations themselves write up the content of the projects for which they want to receive funding. Donors only assess whether the submitted projects meet their formal requirements and, once a project is approved, monitor compliance both with those requirements and with those that the LGBTQI+ organizations themselves set out in the projects. It can also be noted that, amid the full-scale war with russia, the Ukrainian state as such largely exists on funds from foreign donors, yet this does not make it controlled by the “collective West.”

Finally, when people speak of “LGBTQI+ ideology,” this notion may artificially lump together very different things: from the normalization of homosexual orientation and transgender identity in society as such – to promiscuity, communism, pacifism, and so on. It is worth recalling, however, that the abbreviation “LGBTQI+” by definition refers only to features of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). And if anything does unite most LGBTQI+ people, it is the desire to live comfortably in the world with the SOGI they have. In everything else, belonging to LGBTQI+ does not in itself determine a person’s ideological and political positions, and those can vary just as much as anyone else’s: from anarchist to conservative. Some people may combine LGBTQI+ activism with political activity, just as LGBTQI+ organizations may cooperate with various civic and political movements – but this does not make the positions of such movements inherent to all LGBTQI+ activism, let alone to all LGBTQI+ people in general.

When people speak of “unnaturalness,” they usually mean that homosexual relationships exist exclusively in human society, whereas nature in its primordial state contains nothing of the sort, and therefore all of this comes from the devil. Such claims are often backed up by the thesis that the goal of any species is reproduction, which in higher animals occurs sexually, and so there is no place for homosexuality among them.

Yet the factual evidence shows this view to be mistaken. Back at the end of the last century, the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl wrote in his book “Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity” that homosexual behavior is well documented in 450 animal species. Overall, it has been observed in more than 1500 species.

Manifestations of homosexuality include courtship, affection, pair bonding, sexual activity, and even the raising of offspring by same-sex pairs. Examples can be cited for a range of species:

• In giraffes, homosexual behavior is observed primarily among males, which first rub their necks together, court one another, and then mount each other for sexual contact. On average, such encounters are even more frequent than heterosexual matings – as Bagemihl notes, in one study their share reached 94%.
• In lions, same-sex relationships occur both between males and between females. Males may form a “coalition” in which they jointly care for their pride, which includes lionesses and cubs, and reinforce their bond through sexual contact.
• Bonobos are one of the species closest to humans, and like humans they can have sex simply for pleasure. Bonobos are considered fully bisexual, with about 60% of their sexual activity consisting of sexual contact between females. For them, sex can also serve the social functions of defusing conflicts and establishing hierarchy.
• Black swans tend to form stable pairs that can stay together for years. Of these, about 25% are “gay pairs.” Sometimes such a pair forms a temporary alliance with a female in order to obtain eggs from her; they then drive her away and incubate the eggs themselves.
• In penguins, homosexual behavior was observed as early as the beginning of the 20th century, but at the time such information proved too shocking to be made public. In our own century, a number of cases are known from zoos in which penguins formed same-sex pairs, incubated eggs, and raised chicks.
• While for most animals the data point rather to bisexuality that can situationally take the form of heterosexual or homosexual behavior, in the case of sheep, research indicates that about 8% of rams have an exclusively homosexual orientation. That is, they prefer sexual contact with other rams even when females in estrus are nearby.

To date there is still no scientific consensus on how to explain homosexual behavior in animals. A number of researchers hold that it has social functions, strengthening bonds within the group. Another view is that homosexual pairs, even though they have no offspring of their own, can nonetheless contribute to passing on genetic material indirectly, by helping to raise their relatives’ offspring. This accounts for the non-obvious evolutionary benefit of homosexuality, thanks to which it continues to reproduce itself in nature.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that those who insist on the supposed unnaturalness of homosexuality inconsistently forget that the technological achievements of human civilization have far more claim to being called unnatural: roads, buildings, computers, telephones, and so on. At the same time, most of the diseases that people try to treat and be rid of are entirely natural. 

Thus, the naturalness or unnaturalness of a given phenomenon is not in itself something good or bad, and it makes no sense at all to treat it as an argument about that phenomenon’s right to exist.

The idea of two sexes as something mutually exclusive and “opposite” is connected with the concept of “sexual dimorphism”. It describes the difference between individuals of different sexes within one species, concerning both their reproductive system directly and their secondary sex characteristics. Such dimorphism is characteristic of a large share of animals, humans included, as well as of some plants. Its existence is considered a consequence of the evolution of species, in which females and males perform different roles that make reproduction more effective.

At the same time, even in sexually dimorphic biological species there are exceptions to the rule, when an organism combines features of both sexes or has these features in some intermediate form. This phenomenon has the collective name “intersex,” and its prevalence among people, across all possible variations, is estimated to reach as much as 1.7%. Such variations may be caused by different factors and have different manifestations:

•         Chromosomal variations, in which instead of a pair of sex chromosomes XX (female) or XY (male) there is only one X chromosome (“Turner syndrome”), an XXY set (“Klinefelter syndrome”), an XXX set (“trisomy X”), and so on.
•         Mutations of the gene responsible for sex differentiation on the Y chromosome. They result in more or less developed female genitalia together with a male XY chromosome set.
•         Variations at the level of genital development. They may manifest as undeveloped or partially developed gonads; as an ambiguous form of gonads combining male and female features (“ovotestis”); or as an ambiguous form of the genitals (“clitoromegaly” or “micropenis”).
•         Variations related to the particular way sex hormones act on the body. These include complete or partial androgen insensitivity, which leads to the formation of external female genitalia together with internal ones closer to male; “adrenogenital syndrome” – conversely, an elevated level of testosterone that leads to the development of male secondary sex characteristics together with female primary ones; and others.

In medical classifications, intersex variations are still positioned as certain “developmental anomalies.” At the same time, although some of them may give rise to specific health problems, these are related more to the particular action of hormones than to the configuration of the genitals as such. In some cases, intersex people even retain the ability to have children of their own. Instead, it is precisely attempts to “normalize” intersex people’s genitals that often result in health problems for them – both physical and mental. Yet even setting the health question aside, when such variations are regularly reproduced in the population in an entirely natural way, it is absurd to claim that nothing of the kind exists in nature.

In general, it can be said that natural sexual diversity extends far beyond dimorphism:

•         Some microorganisms and fungi have complex reproductive mechanisms in which the number of mating types – the prototypes of sex – can be considerable. In the split gill fungus, for instance, it can exceed 28000.
•         Many plants and insects, some fish, amphibians, and reptiles, and in rare cases birds as well, can reproduce by parthenogenesis, in which the embryo develops from an egg cell without sexual fertilization. Among them there are species for which this is the main mode of reproduction; they consist almost entirely of females and only occasionally produce males in their offspring, which are infertile.
•         More than 500 fish species are known to be able to change their sex in adulthood. For example, if the male is removed from a group of bluehead wrasses consisting of one male and several females, the largest of the females soon changes her behavior and within 21 days turns completely into a male. This change, however, is final, and it cannot go in the opposite direction.
•         In several mole species, females have a hybrid sex organ that combines ovarian and testicular tissue. This makes them stronger and more aggressive, which can matter for life underground, where it is often impossible to flee from danger.

Such examples only confirm that the richness of nature is not exhausted by “two opposite sexes.”

Such arguments are usually accompanied by references to “traditional values,” to which modern society is supposedly meant to return. Yet if we look at ancient traditional cultures, it turns out that in most of them one can find various manifestations of homosexuality or of gender variance going beyond notions of “typical” male and female gender. And this applies to far more than just the civilizations that gave rise to the modern Western world.

• Perhaps the first historical mention of a homosexual couple dates to around 2400 BCE and comes from Ancient Egypt. The court officials Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were found in a shared tomb, on the walls of which they are depicted embracing and kissing. Ancient Egyptian history also contains references to the “sekhet” – a “third gender” alongside male and female.
• In the ancient civilizations of Middle America – the Aztecs, the Maya, the Quechua, and others – both homosexual contacts and expressions beyond the two genders were a widespread phenomenon, for which there is ample 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 of shamans who call themselves “two-spirit people” – that is, people who combine a female and a male essence at once – survives to this day.
• In China, mentions of homosexuality also begin in the period before the Common Era and are not uncommon in literature. During the Han dynasty, in particular, it was fairly typical for emperors to have male lovers, who could receive high positions at court.
• In India, an integral part of the culture from roughly the beginning of the Common Era to the present day is the religious caste of “hijra” – people born male who dress and to some extent behave as women. They are considered a separate gender.
• In ancient Greece, homosexual 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 who was to teach him “men’s affairs.” It is from this type of relationship that the word “pederasty” derives.
• 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 text by condemnation of such practices, so as to maintain formal compliance with the norms.
• Finally, on the territory of present-day Ukraine, the Scythians, who appeared here in the 7th century BCE, had a distinct social group that roughly corresponded to transgender women – the Enarei. Born male, they felt a female soul within themselves and wore women’s clothing. And in the early Christian period, between the 10th and 16th centuries, an Orthodox rite called “adelphopoiesis” existed here, which resembled the sacrament of marriage but united people of the same sex – mostly men.

The tendency to condemn homosexuality is characteristic of later Christian civilizations, in whose culture one of the key notions becomes “sin,” along with the perception as sinful of everything sexual and carnal that is directed solely at pleasure and thereby violates “natural law.” It was precisely in this context that people began to be persecuted by the Inquisition for homosexual relationships, and later, when its functions passed to secular authorities, same-sex sex was written into the laws 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 century.

It can therefore 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 the result not of fashion or moral corruption, but above all of many homosexual people stepping out of the shadows into the light. For once their difference is no longer considered a crime or an illness, they are no longer forced to conceal it.

As for transgender identity, it is worth adding that the technologies of medical procedures for aligning gender and sex, such as hormone therapy and surgery, began to develop at the start of the 20th century and were systematized and standardized only in its second half. Over the years they have become more accessible in terms of legal regulation, the availability of competent specialists, and financial cost. As a result, transgender transition is being undertaken by more and more people who previously could only dream of it.

The view of homosexuality as a mental illness is not traditional in historical retrospect. Such views began to spread within the scientific community in the 19th century. To a certain extent this discourse was an alternative to the then-prevailing approach of criminalizing homosexuality: if a criminal must be punished, then 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 homosexual relationships 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 in this respect is that of the outstanding mathematician Alan Turing, convicted of homosexual relations, who was given a choice between imprisonment and treatment by chemical castration. Having chosen the latter, he could not survive the consequences of the punishment and soon took his own life.

Various methods were used in attempts at treatment, collectively known as conversion therapy. At different times and in different countries they included surgical lobotomy, castration, psychotherapy in the form of psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, aversion therapy using electric shocks, and also reparative therapy supported by religious organizations. Over time, however, all of these methods proved ineffective. In the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, plethysmograph studies were carried out on homosexual men who had supposedly changed their orientation to heterosexual, but the results showed that they were still aroused by men. In 2003, Robert Spitzer’s study was published, ostensibly in favor of conversion therapy, but its findings were criticized because the participants were mostly religious people who had an interest in reporting better results than were actually the case, and their accounts could not be verified. The researcher later retracted his own work, acknowledging the error and apologizing to the gay community. Contemporary research, by contrast, shows that conversion therapy causes significant and lasting harm, contributing to depression and substance abuse and increasing the risk of suicide. In other words, it not only fails to “cure” but actually worsens a person’s mental state.

In the case of transgender identity, 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 likewise recognized as ineffective and harmful. There is the well-known case of David Reimer, whom his family tried to raise as a girl in childhood even though he identified himself as a boy. This attempt was eventually deemed a failure and abandoned, but because of everything he had gone through he developed depression and ultimately took his own life.

Today such methods of “treatment” are condemned by many professional associations – both within individual countries and international ones, such as the World Psychiatric Association and the World Medical Association. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, France, individual jurisdictions of Australia and the United States, and a number of others have banned conversion therapy practices in law 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. Rather, what matters for them above all are practical considerations of which position in the classification offers better opportunities to help the people whose condition it describes. At the same time, scientific grounding is hard to find precisely for the position that homosexuality or transgender identity is a mental pathology.

Early studies of sexuality were often conducted among patients of psychiatric clinics, which created a 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 whose mental qualities did not differ in any way from those of heterosexual people of the same age and social standing. Later, in the 1950s, Evelyn Hooker reached similar conclusions, conducting a study on a sample of 30 homosexual and the same number of heterosexual men, whom she selected among people who had not sought psychiatric help. No difference that could indicate pathology or social maladjustment in homosexual men was found between them. Hooker concluded that the forms of homosexuality can be just as diverse as the forms of heterosexuality.

Also important in rethinking 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 accompanied by orgasm in their lives. This pointed to a far greater prevalence of homosexual behavior than was believed at the time.

In Britain, Sir Wolfenden’s committee conducted interviews in prisons holding men convicted for homosexual contacts. As a result, in 1957 the “Wolfenden Report” was made public, 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 only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects.”

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

As for transgender identity, in 1979 the ways of providing medical care to transgender people were for the first time formulated as international standards, in which hormone therapy and surgery to align sex characteristics with gender identity were defined as the main methods of treatment. 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 undermined the basis for the position that transgender identity is a condition requiring the attention primarily of psychiatrists.

In 2011, in the 7th version of the Standards, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) called for distinguishing gender dysphoria, which is 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 stigma, prejudice, and discrimination against “non-standard” gender expressions that often become the source of mental health problems in transgender people, rather than those expressions themselves.

So when the WHO was deciding on the place of transgender diagnoses in its new 11th revision classification, the arguments above were taken into account. And ultimately their removal from the category of mental disorders came about not because trans people simply wished not to be considered ill, but because leaving them there would in fact do more harm than good.

From the standpoint of which sexual relations can be considered normal and which cannot, the key notion 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 a manifestation of pedophilia – 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 is 16 years, and orientation, again, is irrelevant here. As for zoophilia, it is obvious that an animal, lacking developed consciousness, is in principle unable to give consent to sex. There are thus no logical grounds whatsoever for linking the normalization of homosexuality with pedophilia or zoophilia.

There is a belief that a significant share of gay men are also pedophiles. This misconception has historical roots. The term “pederasty,” which is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for homosexual relationships, comes from ancient Greek traditions, in which it referred specifically to relationships between a mature man and an adolescent boy. There is, however, no reason to equate those traditions with the whole diversity of homosexuality in the modern world.

As research shows, some pedophiles are fixated only on children and have no sexual interest in adults at all, and in this case it is incorrect to speak of their orientation as homosexual or heterosexual (there is also a view under which this is regarded as a separate sexual orientation altogether). Of the rest, the majority are heterosexual or bisexual men, and many 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 people who had abused children, homosexual people accounted for less than 1%.

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

The UN program on HIV/AIDS – UNAIDS – defines key populations: groups at the highest risk of acquiring and transmitting HIV that at the same time have 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, their clients, transgender women, and prisoners. According to 2022 data, MSM, regardless of their sexual orientation, accounted for only 20% of all new infections. This figure varies substantially by region: it is, for example, considerably lower in Eastern and Southern Africa than in other regions.

If we then look at the risks of transmitting HIV by different routes, among sexual practices the highest is for anal intercourse, although even here the probability is only 138 per 10000 contacts with an infected person. By comparison, with a blood transfusion from an infected person the probability reaches 9250. On the whole, however, the sexual route of transmission predominates because such contacts are far more frequent than transfusions.

Anal sex is often considered a purely homosexual 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% within the past year. Among gay men, between 75% and 90% had had experience of anal sex in their lives. Although the latter figures are higher in themselves, if they are combined with data on the sexual orientation of the population (according to surveys from different years in that same United States, these vary within a few percent, reaching 9.3% in 2025), it becomes obvious that the number of heterosexual people who have engaged in anal practices will turn out to be far larger.

Moreover, substantially reducing the risk of infection does not require giving up such practices entirely. For instance, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using condoms reduces the risk by 80%, pre-exposure prophylaxis by 92%, and antiretroviral therapy for those 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 homosexual people with it is far easier to achieve when they are integrated into society as equals, rather than restricted in their rights, which drives them underground. The American Academy of Pediatrics points out that LGB youth who do not find acceptance are 3.4 times more likely to engage in risky sex. In general, homophobia deters many LGBTQI+ people from seeking HIV prevention services and worsens the quality of those services, and therefore – it is homophobia, not homosexuality as such, that fuels the HIV epidemic

Although a homosexual couple indeed cannot have a child carrying genetic material equally from both partners in that couple, 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, which the person was in before accepting their own homosexuality.
• The couple may use assisted reproductive technologies (ART).
• The couple may adopt a child.

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

As for transgender people, although at present 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 transition, if they start it after puberty. Later, genital surgery may stand in the way, but today such surgeries are no longer mandatory for completing transition in a significant number of countries, Ukraine included, 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.

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

At the same time, LGBTQI+ people are often restricted in their opportunities to have children at the level of legislation itself. This can take the form of a ban on, or obstacles to, access to assisted reproductive technologies and adoption. Or it can happen indirectly – through the precondition of sterilization prior to 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. In Ukraine, in particular, same-sex couples are deprived of the right to adopt, while diagnoses related to transgender identity impose restrictions on both adoption and access to ART. So if, according to various studies, children are present in the lives of 9–16% of gay men and lesbians and 15–50% of trans people, compared with about 70% of cisgender heterosexual people, then it can be said with confidence that in the absence of restrictions these figures would be higher.

Finally, it is worth noting that among heterosexual families, too, not all have children and not all can or want to have them. Tying family exclusively to the presence of children – especially when it comes specifically to LGBTQI+ people – is therefore incorrect. After all, Ukrainian legislation itself defines a family simply as persons “who live together, are bound by a common household, and have mutual rights and obligations.”

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

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

Even within this spectrum, however, there were both people with a large number of rapidly changing connections and those who gravitated toward stable relationships. In the same period in the United States, in particular, various data showed that 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 homosexual relationships is approaching that of heterosexual ones. In particular, a 2017 study in the United States found that homosexual relationships are on average shorter in duration 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 altogether, and homosexual couples even become more stable. A 2019 study, which also sought to take account of the findings of earlier ones, ultimately showed that for couples who live together, whether same-sex or different-sex, the risk of the relationship ending is practically the same, and registering the relationship helps to reduce it.

In a survey conducted back in 2013, 84% of adult LGBTQI+ people named love as a very important reason for getting married. Also, 60% of respondents were either already married or would like to marry, and 93% supported to some degree the very idea of legalizing such marriages. Finally, according to the same data from the United States, 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.

Such data and their dynamics show that the opposite is in fact true: as long as homosexual people face society’s condemnation of their relationships and have no opportunity to legalize them, casual encounters in specific dedicated places are simpler than maintaining stable relationships, let alone starting families and having children. But when society and the state allow homosexual couples to live under the same conditions as heterosexual ones, the difference between them gradually fades away.

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 altogether 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. Yet the birth rate is affected by many factors that need to be considered together.

The birth rate is pushed up by such factors as the desire to have children, women’s orientation toward family and children, religiosity, the availability of social support, living in rural areas, government family-support programs, social pressure to have children, and so on. A falling birth rate is associated with high incomes, high levels of education, government demographic policies aimed at limiting births, the use of contraception, high rates of women’s participation in the workforce, and other factors.

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

At the same time, a survey conducted in 2023 across 30 countries showed that on average 9% of the population identify as LGBTQI+ (a 2024 survey in the United States produced similar figures, 9.3%). Even if we imagine that all of these people leave no offspring behind, this is still a relatively small share of the total population – too small to significantly affect the overall birth rate. The assumption that they have no offspring, however, does not match reality: according to various data, 9–16% of gay and lesbian people and 15–50% of transgender people have children. Moreover, what often limits their ability to become parents is not their own wishes but the state and society, which complicate or altogether block access to assisted reproductive technologies, adoption, and parental rights.

Finally, if we look at data on population and population growth in different countries over time, we see that Western countries with more liberal LGBTQI+ legislation mostly show small but nonetheless positive growth. Population decline, meanwhile, is occurring in countries such as Italy, Moldova, Poland, and Japan, as well as China and Russia, where today there is neither legalization of same-sex marriage nor a simple, accessible gender transition procedure.

Human rights as such really are 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 based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). In the countries of the Council of Europe – that is, in almost all European countries – a document similar in substance is also in force, the European Convention on Human Rights, which is no longer merely declarative but makes it possible to defend one’s rights before the European Court of Human Rights. Finally, Chapter II of the Constitution of Ukraine sets out the rights the state guarantees to its citizens.

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

For example, when a transgender person transitions, the data in their identity documents stop matching the name they actually use, their gender, and their appearance as well. The person periodically has to explain this discrepancy, in one way or another disclosing the fact that they are transgender – private information they have every right to keep to themselves. Their right to privacy is thereby violated. To avoid this, 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 wish to obtain the civil rights that come with it: joint ownership of property, raising children, inheritance, and so on. These rights are usually granted by marriage, but if marriage is defined as being entered into between a man and a woman, same-sex couples are deprived of them. So to achieve genuine equality, legislation has to be changed in such a way as to extend to them the ability to exercise the right to marry.

In these cases there is not even any need to mention SOGI or LGBTQI+ people specifically – 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 SOGI grounds.

LGBTQI+ people more often encounter prejudiced treatment, which can manifest as an unwillingness to hire them or rent housing to them, as failure to provide them with proper medical care, as problems while traveling and crossing borders, and so on – precisely because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQI+ people also more often become victims of violence, being attacked, beaten, and harassed, again because of their orientation or identity. That is why including SOGI grounds in legislation countering discrimination and hate crimes, as well as in dedicated policies spelling out measures to counter and prevent such acts, helps to fight these phenomena and reduce them to nothing.

Moreover, such instruments provide protection not exclusively for gay, lesbian, or transgender people – in a hypothetical situation where a heterosexual person were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, they could help that person just as well. So we come back to the point that human rights are the same for everyone, but their observance has to be secured by appropriate means.

As of today, according to our own analysis, there are at least 11 rights defined in the Constitution of Ukraine that LGBTQI+ people cannot exercise as freely as other citizens.

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

A fair number of studies have by now 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 any data suggesting that the share of gay and lesbian people among such children is supposedly higher than average – most of them grow up strictly heterosexual. Nor were any particular features of gender identity or gender role observed in them. In the “Resolution on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity (SOGI), Parents and Their Children,” updated in 2020, that same APA repeats this position, with a qualification based on several studies that showed greater flexibility and less stereotypical gender expression among the children of LGBTQI+ people. It also notes that in the development of such children – in terms of health, behavioral traits, and peer relationships – no differences were found compared with those raised by heterosexual parents.

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

Those who worry about the situation of children in same-sex families often refer to Mark Regnerus’s study of “new family structures”. Conducted in 2012, it supposedly showed that children from such families have a lower quality of life – in particular in terms of educational attainment, employment, susceptibility to depression, and psychoactive substance use. This study, however, has methodological problems: only two of the children it examined had actually lived in a same-sex family throughout their childhood, while for the others one of the parents had merely had some experience of same-sex relationships at a certain 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 the parents’ sexual orientation.

In 2015, researchers attempted to reanalyze Regnerus’s data, correcting his errors, and obtained a fundamentally different result: the difference between children raised by heterosexual couples and by gay men and lesbians is minimal. This is consistent with the findings of many other studies, and some even indicate that children in same-sex families are somewhat 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 LGBTQI+ people in the public eye call on others to enter same-sex relationships, to have sex with people of their own sex, or to “change sex.” Yet nothing of the kind actually happens.

In fact, claims of this kind involve a substitution of meaning, in which things that are not propaganda at all are classified as such. For example, 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 an encouragement to do it, and does not in itself cause other people to change their preferences. If, for instance, different people like different foods, different films, and different literary genres, each of them may talk about their preferences, but others are hardly likely to change their tastes as a result.

Sometimes any LGBTQI+ visibility at all is also considered “propaganda” – whether as characters in a feature film, in a public display of symbols, or in open displays of affection between two girls or two boys. In that case, however, we 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 people describe how they met someone of the opposite sex, went on a date with them, or took a vacation with them, this can be counted as heterosexual propaganda. Everything relating to family life in the conventional sense belongs to it as well. The quintessence of such propaganda is wedding ceremonies with their traditional rituals.

Thus the influence that isolated instances of visible homosexuality or transgender identity have on society does not come anywhere near the level heterosexuality has. The opposite impression can arise only because of the cognitive bias known as observational selection bias, in which people are more inclined to notice the things they think about more. So if someone sees LGBTQI+ propaganda everywhere, this may above all indicate that person’s own fixation on LGBTQI+ topics.

“Parades,” in turn, are the quintessence of visibility for LGBTQI+ people. In countries – mostly Western ones – where they have already achieved equality at least in legislative terms, 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 fears about their orientation and gender. In countries where a significant portion of rights still has to be fought for, Ukraine among them, Pride events (rather than parades) take the form of a human rights march with slogans and political demands addressed to the authorities. That said, they too can have festive elements – for some participants this is the only day of the year on which they can freely come out and declare who they are. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that.

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

In reality, bisexuality as a characteristic concerns not what relationship a person is currently in, but 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 this particular person, a bisexual person has not necessarily settled on relationships exclusively with women or exclusively with men in the future. Nor are they obliged to settle anything.

Sometimes the wish that someone would “make up their mind” comes from gay and lesbian people, born of the fear that if someone can move from same-sex to different-sex relationships like that, they too might be forced to do the same. It is important to understand here, however, that every person’s sexual preferences are individual, and 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 to have relationships with people of both sexes at the same time, as is sometimes assumed. People also sometimes conclude that if a partner’s sex does not matter to someone, then it does not matter at all who they are with. 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, everything works the same way for bisexual people as for heterosexual and homosexual ones: although the latter’s choice of a partner is limited to a particular sex, that does not mean they are ready to have sex with just 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 stereotypical notions of relationships as heterosexual by default, in which a man and a woman are opposites embodying masculinity and femininity. In this gender-binary paradigm, if a man is attracted to other men, he will supposedly try to reproduce in his appearance and behavior an image close to that of a woman, while a woman attracted to women will reproduce 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 a “feminine woman,” who would not differ from women in general. The same goes for two gay men.

This does indeed happen. Gay men and lesbians, growing up in the same society built on a gender-binary system, are not free of its attitudes. That is why some of them, when building relationships, try to reproduce in sex – and to some extent in life as well – the “top – bottom” model, in which the active role may be associated with the traditionally male one and the passive role with the female one. However, a count of profiles on an American gay portal in the early 2010s, for example, found that only a little more than half of users clearly indicated their role, and by default it refers there only to sexual preferences.

In general, over the past century LGBTQI+ subculture has produced a variety of role models. There are, for instance, “effeminate gays,” who in their manner of speech, their movements, and certain details of dress reproduce elements of femininity – sometimes in an exaggerated, somewhat grotesque form – and may occasionally refer to themselves in the feminine gender. In some gay circles such behavior is not welcomed, so much so that one can even speak of a phobia toward it. On the other hand there are “bears” – burly men, often with beards and thick body hair, who in this way cultivate rugged masculinity in their appearance. Among lesbians a division into “butch” and “femme” was long widespread – masculine and feminine women respectively, the latter of whom, 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 that make it easier for gay men and lesbians to recognize their own – in particular when starting new relationships. This is precisely what underlies the phenomenon of “gaydar”, that is, “gay radar.” It can misfire, however – for example, on metrosexuals, men who pay a great deal of attention to fashion and style, or on those feminists who reject beauty practices generated by patriarchy. Besides, some gay and lesbian people, on the contrary, avoid such visible difference, since 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 reducible to categories tied to appearance and expression. In the 21st century, as the ideas of feminism and queer theory increasingly undermine gender binarity, blurring its narrow boundaries and ultimately changing not only gay and lesbian but also heterosexual environments, such divisions are becoming less and less relevant.

In 1966 Harry Benjamin – an endocrinologist and sexologist who devoted a significant part of his life to studying transgender identity – published, in his book “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” a classification of transgender expressions that later became known as the “Benjamin Scale”. In it, as one of the attributes of “true transsexualism” in its strongest manifestations – where a person assigned male at birth feels themselves to be a woman and seeks to bring their body as close as possible to a female one – he identified a sexual orientation directed specifically at men.

Benjamin himself cautioned against using his classification as an absolute yardstick. Psychiatrists, however, have since often relied, directly or indirectly, on the Benjamin Scale when diagnosing transsexualism – or more precisely, when deciding who may or may not be allowed to undergo a gender transition. Yet as time went on, the limitations and conventionality of this scale became increasingly clear. In particular, trans people themselves, knowing what standard they had to meet in order to obtain permission, adjusted their life stories to fit it when telling them to doctors. This applied to aspects of sexuality as well, when their expressions of it did not fit the model of “authenticity.”

Today it can be stated with confidence that there is no direct link between being transgender and sexual orientation. This is confirmed, among other things, by sociological studies of trans people that examined the question of their orientation. Although the data point to a substantial difference in the distribution of sexual orientations among transgender people compared with cisgender people, the key difference lies in the greater diversity of orientations among trans people. Thus, according to 2018 data from the United States, about half of trans people described their orientation as directed at people of more than one sex or gender, while about 17% described it as strictly heterosexual, and almost as many as homosexual. This may be due to the fact that, because of the divergence between their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth, trans people generally reflect more on topics related to gender and sexuality and are less inclined to rely on stereotypical social attitudes when building relationships.

As for gay men and lesbians assigned male and female at birth respectively, the only thing that can push them toward thoughts of “changing” their sex is a situation in which homosexuality is condemned by society far more harshly than transition is. A vivid example of this today is demonstrated by Iran. There, sexual relations between people of the same sex are punishable by up to the death penalty. Gender transition, by contrast, is fairly accessible and partly financed by the state. Gay and lesbian people are thereby indirectly encouraged to transition so that their relationships become heterosexual – in which case they escape punishment and gain recognition as law-abiding citizens. As a result, Iran ranks second in the world for the number of genital surgeries performed. This would hardly be the case were it not for the state’s repressive policy toward gay and lesbian people.

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

• Sex chromosomes. At present there is no means of changing a chromosome set from XX (female) to XY (male) or vice versa (or from or to any other set, if we take into account the existence of intersex people with chromosomal variations).
• The sex glands, or gonads. These can be removed by surgery: orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), or in the course of more complex operations. Their functions can also be suppressed without surgical intervention through hormone therapy. At the same time, no methods for creating the gonads of the other sex exist today.
• Sex hormones. Their levels in the body can be adjusted by taking hormonal medications; a course of them with an appropriately selected dosage can create a hormonal profile matching the typical profile of the other sex.
• Primary sex characteristics – the genitals. Surgery can both remove them and form new ones. The latter is not a matter of “sewing something on” but of complex techniques for constructing new genitals using the material of the old ones and, in some cases, other tissues of the body. 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 had such operations are unable to conceive children, and their sexual functioning, 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 develop mammary glands and their breasts grow; if they wish, they can enlarge them further through breast augmentation. 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 epilation.
• Legal sex – the “sex” field in identity documents. Depending on the legislation of a particular country, changing it may or may not require certain medical interventions as a precondition. In Ukraine today, according to the “Fundamentals of Healthcare Legislation”, that precondition is undergoing a medical intervention to change (correct) one’s sex, which may or may not include surgery but must include hormone therapy, and which in turn requires a diagnosis of “transsexualism.”

The change in appearance by which people usually perceive someone as a “girl” or a “boy” is driven by changes in secondary sex characteristics, which, as the description above shows, are achieved primarily through hormones and do not depend on genital surgery. Also, unlike surgery, 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 come to the conclusion that they do not need genital surgery and limit themselves to hormone therapy alone. And in recent years – in Sweden, for example – some have even won compensation for such operations, which they underwent against their own wishes because these were a mandatory requirement for obtaining legal gender recognition (that is, a change of legal sex). The practice of such requirements on the part of the state is now called “forced sterilization,” and with every passing year more and more countries are abandoning it – as Ukraine did too, by changing its gender transition procedure in 2016.

In closing, it is worth noting that in light of the list above, the term “sex change” itself is not correct. It is better to specify which components of sex are being changed in any given case, and to use “gender transition” as the umbrella term.

The question of transgender people’s access – above all that of trans women – to gender-segregated facilities has been discussed particularly intensively in recent years. This has been driven in large part 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 depending on the sex assigned to a person at birth. The declared purpose of such laws is to protect privacy and to safeguard women and children above all from violence.

Meanwhile, measures for the legal gender recognition of transgender people – that is, for changing their identity documents – as well as anti-discrimination measures that to some extent allow trans people to be recognized in accordance with their gender identity even independently of their 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 conducted 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 transgender students, including in restrooms, were found. And in 2018, again in the United States, a study was carried out in various facilities in the state of Massachusetts, taking into account whether they had an inclusive policy toward trans people. The results showed no difference in rates of sexual offenses in public restrooms or locker rooms between facilities where such a policy is in force and those where it is not.

Although isolated incidents involving, for example, women being spied on in locker rooms by both trans women and men posing as them have indeed occurred, these are individual cases against the general backdrop of sexual 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 about 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 pretend to be a trans woman. At the same time, control methods such as checking passports at the entrance, not to mention genital checks, smack of totalitarianism and would be unwelcome not only to transgender women but to most of the cisgender women they are supposedly meant to protect. Most safety problems and concerns can instead be solved by separate stalls with no gender marking at all, which do, however, lock securely.

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

This point of view often comes from representatives of right-wing conservative movements and people who share their views. For them, patriotism is closely tied to so-called “traditional family values,” which allow only heterosexual relationships and families with the typical gender roles of “husband” and “wife,” and which also exclude any expression of transgender identity. Since this is part of their vision of Ukraine as a nation state, in their view LGBTQI+ people have no reason to support it. And so, they claim, LGBTQI+ people cannot serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, leave for Western countries at the first opportunity, or even side with russia altogether.

But patriotism can take different forms. And there is no contradiction whatsoever in a person supporting progressive values –­ in the social sphere in particular, striving for equality for different forms of relationships, families, and self-expression – while at the same time loving Ukraine and seeing it in the future precisely as that: socially progressive.

As for active expressions of patriotism, such as defending one’s country, back in 2018 the association “Ukrainian LGBTQI+ Military and Veterans for Equal Rights” was founded. It has more than 500 LGBTQI+ service members and veterans, only a small share of whom are out in public, while the total number of LGBTQI+ people in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine may be considerably higher. In 2023 the homophobic serviceman Serhii Bondar initiated a “manifesto” claiming that LGBTQI+ people are supposedly absent from the front line, but his data were based on comments without any verification at all. The association of LGBTQI+ service members, by contrast, compiled a list of more than 50 units in which its members serve. At the same time, some LGBTQI+ people may hesitate about military service not for lack of patriotism but because of the high level of homophobia and transphobia in the army. For trans people there is the additional problem that the state does not provide them, for the duration of their service, with the hormonal medications they need to take on an ongoing basis.

The question of LGBTQI+ people leaving Ukraine during the full-scale russian invasion has been raised more often by Western organizations and media – primarily with a focus on trans women, who are unable to leave if their passport still lists them as male. But this does not mean that all or even most trans women, let alone LGBTQI+ people in general, wanted to leave – on the contrary, Ukrainian LGBTQI+ organizations continued their work, adapting it to the conditions of war. And even when they find themselves abroad, Ukrainian LGBTQI+ activists try to draw attention to war-related problems and needs, in particular by calling for more weapons to be supplied to Ukraine. Thus, the slogan of the Equality March held as part of Pride in Liverpool in 2023 was “The war is not over.”

Accusations that LGBTQI+ people are sympathetic to russia are the most absurd of all. Of course, individual LGBTQI+ people may hold any political views at all, including pro-russian ones – just like people from any other social group. But it is worth remembering that it is the russian federation that is arguably the most homophobic and transphobic country in Europe, at the level of both society and state policy. In recent years it has had in force a ban on the propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relations” and a ban on gender transition, and the “international LGBTQI+ public movement” has been declared an extremist organization there. It is therefore hard to imagine an LGBTQI+ person who would want such a reality for themselves instead of an independent Ukraine. What is more, the testimony of those Ukrainian LGBTQI+ people who found themselves in territories under russian occupation shows that concealing their sexual orientation or transgender identity becomes a matter of survival for them, and that the best possible option in life is to get out of there.

At the same time, some members of the Verkhovna Rada draft and promote bills very similar in content to the above-mentioned russian law “banning LGBTQI+ propaganda.” So the question of whether such homophobic lawmakers can be patriots would look far more apt.

People are generally inclined to perceive those who differ from them in certain respects as a more homogeneous group than those who resemble them in those same respects. This phenomenon was studied as early as the beginning of the 1980s, is called the “out-group homogeneity effect,” and can be briefly described as “they are all alike, we are all different.” This cognitive bias is explained, among other things, by the fact that people usually tend to consider the differences between the “in-group” and the “out-group” more important than the individual features of particular people within the “out-group.” So if a person perceives LGBTQI+ people as “alien” to them, they will very likely ascribe more similarity among them than there actually is.

At the same time, the very term “LGBTQI+ community” seems to point to something held in common, while such expressions as “member/representative of the LGBTQI+ community,” which are used here and there, can involuntarily bring to mind something along the lines of a political party. Moreover, when a significant share of LGBTQI+ people remain invisible, the public faces are mostly activists, who may at times speak on behalf of the entire community. Here, too, an analogy can be traced with a party and its members representing the interests of a broader segment of citizens.

This terminology is somewhat misleading, however, and talk of a “community,” let alone of “membership,” is rather conventional. To some extent it is also wishful thinking, since LGBTQI+ people themselves sometimes want to see their movement as more unified than it actually is. But if we are going to pursue the analogy with parties, then just as a country has many of them with different agendas, so there are many LGBTQI+ organizations with different focuses. The number of such organizations in Ukraine can be estimated at several dozen, and they differ in geographic scope (from the national level to local), in target group (LGBTQI+ people in general, or separately gay men, lesbians, transgender people, LGBTQI+ youth, and so on), and in areas of activity (advancing legislative change, supporting the local community, education, medical assistance, and so on). And while on nationwide issues, such as advancing bills concerning equal rights for LGBTQI+ people, representatives of different organizations may coordinate with one another, on most other matters they work independently and may not even know what their colleagues in other organizations are doing.

There are also international LGBTQI+ organizations, and an analogy can be drawn here as well. The UN is a supranational structure in which almost every country in the world is represented, yet it does not determine those countries’ policies. In the same way, the largest global association of LGBTQI+ organizations is ILGA World (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) – which, incidentally, cooperates with the UN – but it likewise does not set the agenda for its member organizations; rather, it can offer them help and support in their work.

The fact that many LGBTQI+ organizations receive funding for their work from foreign donors can also create the impression that they are thereby being run from some “world center.” In reality, though, the mechanism works differently: local organizations themselves write the content of the projects for which they want funding. Donors only assess whether the submitted projects meet their formal requirements and, once a project is approved, monitor compliance both with those requirements and with those the LGBTQI+ organizations set out in the projects themselves. It can also be noted that under the conditions of a full-scale war with russia, the Ukrainian state as such exists to a significant degree on funds from foreign donors, yet this does not make it run by the “collective West.”

Finally, when people speak of an “LGBTQI+ ideology,” they may artificially lump various things together under this concept: from the normalization in society of gay and lesbian orientation and transgender identity as such to promiscuity, communism, pacifism, and so on. It is worth recalling, however, that the abbreviation “LGBTQI+” by definition points only to features of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). And if anything does unite most LGBTQI+ people, it is the desire to live comfortably in the world with the SOGI they have. In everything else, being LGBTQI+ does not in itself determine a person’s ideological and political positions, and these can vary just as much as anyone else’s: from anarchist to conservative. Some may combine LGBTQI+ activism with political activity, just as LGBTQI+ organizations may cooperate with various civic and political movements – but this does not make the positions of such movements inherent to all LGBTQI+ activism, let alone to all LGBTQI+ people in general.