Unexpected stories

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

· Possibly the earliest historical mention of a same-sex couple dates to around 2400 BCE and comes from Ancient Egypt. The courtiers Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were found in a shared tomb whose walls depict them embracing in a kiss. Ancient Egyptian history also contains references to the “sekhet” — a “third gender” alongside male and female.

· In the ancient civilizations of Central America — the Aztecs, the Maya, the Quechua, and others — both same-sex contact and expressions beyond the two genders were widespread, and there is a great deal of evidence for this. Their ideas about sexuality and gender allowed for far more changeability and fluidity, and in a certain sense were closer to what we now call “queer”. Among Native North Americans, the practice of shamans who call themselves “two-spirit people” — that is, people combining a female and a male essence at once — survives to this day.

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

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

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

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

The tendency to condemn homosexuality is characteristic of later Christian civilizations, in whose culture the notion of “sin” becomes one of the central ones, along with the perception of everything sexual, carnal, and aimed purely at pleasure as sinful and therefore a violation of “natural law.” It was in this context that people began to be persecuted by the Inquisition for same-sex relationships, and later, once its functions passed to secular authorities, same-sex sex was written into the laws of many countries as a criminal offense. The easing of such legislation began in some countries in the 18th century, and more actively in the second half of the 20th.

We can therefore say with confidence that gay people have 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 decadence, but above all of many gay people stepping out of the shadows. 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 one more factor: the medical technologies for aligning gender and sex, such as hormone therapy and surgery, were only refined and standardized in the second half of the 20th century. Over the years they have become more accessible in terms of legal regulation, the availability of competent specialists, and cost. As a result, more and more people who could once only dream of transitioning are now able to do so.

Viewing homosexuality as a mental illness is not a traditional position in historical terms. Such views began to spread in the scientific community in the 19th century. To some degree this discourse was an alternative to the then-dominant 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 work of the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing and of the well-known researcher of homosexuality Magnus Hirschfeld, who at the end of the 19th century ran an entire campaign to abolish punishment for same-sex relationships in Germany.

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

A variety of methods were used in attempts at treatment; collectively they are known as conversion therapy (the term “reparative therapy” can also be found). At different times and in different countries they included surgical lobotomy, hormone therapy, psychotherapy through psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, and aversion therapy using electric shocks. Over time, however, every one of these methods proved ineffective. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, plethysmograph studies were carried out on gay men who had supposedly changed their orientation to heterosexual, and the results showed that they were still aroused by men. In 2001 a study by Robert Spitzer was published, ostensibly in favor of conversion therapy, but its findings were criticized: most of the participants were religious people with an interest in reporting better results than were real, and their accounts could not be verified. The researcher later withdrew the work himself, acknowledging his mistake and apologizing to the gay community. In another study, from 2002, only 3% of those who had undergone conversion therapy said they had changed their sexual orientation to heterosexual, and some lost sexual desire altogether.

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

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

It is worth noting that the construction of medical classifications should not, in general, be seen as something entirely scientifically objective. What matters most for it are practical considerations: which placement in the classification offers better opportunities to help the people whose condition it describes. Even so, it is precisely the position that homosexuality or being transgender is a mental pathology that is hard to ground scientifically.

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 gay people whose mental qualities were in no way different from those of heterosexual people of the same age and social standing. Later, in the 1950s, Evelyn Hooker reached similar conclusions in a study of a sample of 30 gay and just as many heterosexual men, chosen from among people who had not sought psychiatric help. No difference that could point to pathology or social maladjustment in the gay men was found between the two groups. Hooker concluded that the forms of homosexuality can be just as varied as the forms of heterosexuality.

Also important in rethinking views of 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 same-sex encounter in their lives that ended in orgasm. This pointed to a far greater prevalence of homosexual behavior than was believed at the time.

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

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

As for transgender people, in 1979 the ways of providing them with medical care were set out for the first time in the form of standards, which identified hormone therapy and surgery to align sex characteristics with gender identity as the main methods of treatment. Later, a number of studies confirmed that most trans people are satisfied with the results of this approach and that their quality of life improves, while those who regret it are very few. This undercut the position that being transgender is a condition calling primarily for the attention of psychiatrists.

In 2011, in the 7th version of the Standards, WPATH called for distinguishing gender dysphoria — distress at the mismatch between a person’s assigned sex characteristics and their gender identity — from the diversity of gender identity and expression as such. It also cited research showing that it is stigma, prejudice, and discrimination against “non-standard” gender expression, rather than that expression itself, that often becomes the source of mental health problems for transgender people.

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

When it comes to 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 sexual acts between adults, each person can knowingly give or withhold consent 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, at which a person is considered able to give it, differs from country to country and in Ukraine currently stands at 16, 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 is therefore no logical basis whatsoever for linking the normalization of homosexuality with pedophilia or zoophilia.

There is also a belief that a significant share of gay men are pedophiles at the same time. This misconception has historical roots. The term “pederasty,” sometimes used incorrectly as a synonym for same-sex relationships, comes from ancient Greek traditions in which it referred specifically to relationships between a mature man and an adolescent boy. But there is no reason 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 such cases it is incorrect to speak of a homosexual or heterosexual orientation for them (there is a view on which this is treated as a separate sexual orientation altogether). Of the rest, the majority are heterosexual or bisexual men, and according to one study 90% of them are married. Their orientation and the sex of the children they target do not necessarily match. Finally, in another study that determined the sexual orientation of child molesters, fewer than 1% turned out to be homosexual.

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

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

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

Anal sex is often thought of as an exclusively gay male practice, but that is not the case. 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 previous year. Among gay men, between 75% and 90% had experience of anal sex in their lifetime. Although the latter figures are higher, if these data are combined with data on the sexual orientation of the population (up to 4.5% of people in the United States are not heterosexual), it becomes clear that the number of heterosexual people who have engaged in anal practices is larger.

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

Clearly, such prevention requires education about HIV and safer sex, and reaching gay people with it is far easier when they are integrated into society as equals rather than having their rights restricted, which effectively drives them underground and makes access to such services harder. The American Psychological Association notes that LGB youth who do not find acceptance are 3.4 times more likely to engage in risky sex. In light of the data from this and other studies, it explicitly names homophobia and discrimination among the causes of the HIV epidemic.

While a same-sex couple indeed cannot have a child carrying an equal share of genetic material from both partners in that couple, there are other ways for such a couple to have children. For example:

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

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

· The couple can adopt a child.

In recent years a technique called “mitochondrial replacement” has appeared, 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 for the artificial creation of gametes are also being developed, which may soon allow people of the same sex to have genetically shared children (this method has already produced successful results in mice).

As for transgender people, although a trans man cannot today father a child and a trans woman cannot give birth, this does not mean they are incapable of having genetic children in principle. They can have them before starting to transition, if they begin the transition after puberty. Later on, genital surgery may stand in the way, but today such operations are no longer required to complete a transition in a great many countries, including Ukraine, and many trans people choose not to have them. Hormone therapy, while 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.

There are by now many known cases in which trans men have carried and given birth to children this way. In addition, ART and adoption are generally available to families in which one of the partners is a trans person. Current clinical guidelines explicitly recommend that trans people planning a transition consider the various reproductive options before starting it.

At the same time, LGBTQI+ people are often limited in their ability to have children at the level of the law itself. This can take the form of bans on or obstacles to assisted reproductive technologies and adoption. Or it can work indirectly — through the sterilization requirement for legal gender recognition (changing documents) for transgender people, and through the non-recognition of same-sex relationships, as a result of which the partner to whom the child is not genetically related is not recognized as its mother or father and has no corresponding rights regarding the child. So if, according to various studies, 9–16% of gay men and lesbians and 15–50% of trans people have children, compared with around 70% of cisgender heterosexual people, we can say with confidence that without these restrictions the 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. Tying the idea of family exclusively to having children — especially when the subject is LGBTQI+ people — is therefore incorrect. After all, Ukrainian law itself defines a family simply as people “who live together, are bound by a shared household, and have mutual rights and obligations.”

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

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

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

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

Studies conducted in the last century did indeed produce fairly high figures for the number of partners among gay people, indicating that they changed partners often. In Germany, according to the research of the sexologist Martin Dannecker, the average number of partners per year was 14.3 in 1971 and had dropped to 5.5 by 1987. By 1996, 50–60% of gay students had had more than 10 partners over their lifetime, compared with 15% of heterosexual students.

Even so, this spectrum included both people with many fast-changing connections and those who leaned toward lasting relationships. In the United States over the same period, 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.

Current data show that the stability of same-sex relationships is approaching that of heterosexual ones. A 2017 study in the United States found that same-sex relationships are on average shorter than heterosexual ones, but that for couples who live together this duration increases. Where a marriage is concluded, the difference in stability disappears altogether, and same-sex couples may even become more stable. Another study, from 2016, found no significant difference in the stability of same-sex and different-sex couples. Finally, a 2019 study that also tried to take earlier results into account showed that for couples living together, whether same-sex or different-sex, the risk of the relationship ending is practically the same, and registering the relationship helps to lower it.

This dynamic shows that things are in fact the other way around: as long as gay people face society’s condemnation of their relationships and have no way to make them legal, casual encounters in a few specific places are easier than maintaining a stable relationship that has to be hidden. Once society and the state allow same-sex couples to live under the same conditions as heterosexual ones, the difference in stability disappears.

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 by 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 makes it possible to defend one’s rights at the European Court of Human Rights.

When it comes to people’s practical ability to exercise all of their rights, however, it is impossible to ignore that people differ in many ways, and achieving genuine equality for them may accordingly require different measures.

For example, when a transgender person transitions, the data in their identity documents stop matching the name they actually go by, their gender, and their appearance as well. The person periodically has to explain this mismatch, probably disclosing the fact that they are transgender — private information they might prefer 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 start a family, they may want the civil rights that come with it: joint ownership of property, raising children, inheritance, and so on. These rights are usually conferred by marriage, but if marriage is defined as being concluded between a man and a woman, same-sex couples are deprived of them. To achieve genuine equality, then, the law must be changed so as to extend the right to marry to them as well.

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

LGBTQI+ people more often encounter prejudice, which can show up as an unwillingness to hire them or rent housing to them, as a failure to provide them with proper medical care, as problems while traveling and crossing borders, and so on. LGBTQI+ people also more often become victims of violence, when they are attacked, beaten, or harassed — again because of their orientation or identity. Having SOGI grounds included in anti-discrimination and hate crime legislation, along with dedicated policies spelling out measures to counter and prevent such acts, therefore helps to fight these phenomena and reduce them to nothing. Of course, in an ideal world, where attitudes toward LGBTQI+ people would on average be no different from attitudes toward cisgender heterosexual people, such measures would no longer be needed — but that is still a long way off

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

By now a great deal of research has been done 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 people among these children is somehow higher than average — most of them grow up entirely heterosexual. Nor were any particular features of gender identity or gender role noticed in them. In the “Resolution on sexual orientation, gender identity (SOGI), parents and their children,” updated in 2020, the same APA repeats this position with a qualification drawn from several studies that found greater flexibility and less stereotyping in the gender expression of the children of LGBTQI+ people. It also notes that in the development of these 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 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 notes that the greatest stress factor for children is not a parent’s transition as such, but the tension in the parents’ relationship that arises around it, especially when it comes to divorce.

Those who worry about the situation of children in same-sex families often cite Mark Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study”. Conducted in 2012, it supposedly showed that children from such families have a worse quality of life — in particular in terms of education, employment, susceptibility to depression, and substance use. This study has methodological problems, however: only 2 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 a same-sex relationship at some point in life. Some of the children studied had also lived through their parents’ divorce after a heterosexual marriage, which is hardly good for a child’s well-being regardless of sexual orientation.

In 2015, researchers tried 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 or lesbians is minimal. This is confirmed by many other studies as well, and some even indicate that children in same-sex families are slightly happier and healthier. On the whole, we can already speak of a scientific consensus that there is no difference in the physical and mental condition of children in same-sex and different-sex couples.

“Promotion” would have to mean that public figures and activists from the LGBTQI+ community are urging others to enter same-sex relationships or to have sex with people of their own sex. Nothing of the sort is actually happening.

In effect, such claims substitute one meaning for another, counting as promotion things that are nothing of the kind. For instance, when presenting the variety of expressions of sexuality and gender as normal is called promotion. But positioning something as normal is not encouragement to do it and does not by itself lead other people to change their preferences. If different people like different food, different films, different literary genres, each of them may talk about their preferences, but the others are unlikely to change their tastes as a result.

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

The influence that isolated instances of visible homosexuality or transness have on society thus does not come close to the level heterosexuality enjoys. The opposite impression can only arise from the cognitive bias of selective observation, in which people are more inclined to notice the things they think about most. So if someone sees LGBTQI+ promotion everywhere, that may above all say something about 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 largely achieved equality, including the right to marry, the annual Pride parades have the character of a celebration, often with elements of a carnival procession that cisgender heterosexual people gladly join without any worry about their own orientation. In countries where a large part of these rights still has to be won, Ukraine among them, Prides (not parades) take place more in the form of a human rights march with slogans and political demands addressed to the authorities. They can have festive elements too, though — for some participants this is the one day of the year when they can come out freely and speak for themselves. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that.

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

In reality, bisexuality as a trait is not about what relationship a person is in right now, but about their 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 decided that they want to spend the rest of their life with this particular person, a bisexual person has not necessarily decided on women or men exclusively for the future. Nor are they obliged to decide.

Sometimes the demand to “make up your mind” comes from gay people, born of the fear that if someone can move like this from same-sex to different-sex relationships, then they too could be forced to do the same. It is important to understand here that every person’s sexual preferences are individual, and one person’s choices should never be a reason to push another person into the same thing.

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

In fact, things work the same way for bisexual people as for heterosexual and gay people: although the latter choose partners within a particular sex, that does not mean they are ready to sleep with just anyone of that sex. In the same way, a bisexual person is attracted not to just anybody but to a specific person — it is simply that at one period of life this may be a person of one sex, and at another, of a different one.

Such ideas grow out of stereotypical notions of relationships as heterosexual by default, in which a man and a woman are opposites embodying masculinity and femininity. In this paradigm, if a man is attracted to other men, he will try to reproduce an image close to a woman’s in his appearance and behavior, and a woman attracted to women will reproduce a man’s.

This stereotype falls apart on the very logic it is built on. 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 the “feminine woman,” who is no different from women in general. The same goes for two gay men.

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

On the whole, LGBTQI+ subculture produced quite a few models to follow over the past century. There are “camp gays,” who reproduce elements of femininity in their manner of speech, their movements, and certain details of dress — at times in an exaggerated, somewhat grotesque form — and who may sometimes refer to themselves in the feminine. In some gay circles this behavior is not welcomed, so much so that one can speak of a phobia toward it. On the other hand there are “bears” — burly men, often with a beard and thick body hair, who cultivate a rough masculinity. Among lesbians, a division into “butch” and “femme” — masculine and feminine women respectively — was long widespread, with the latter often not seen as “real” lesbians because of their typically feminine appearance.

Features of appearance that set it apart 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 exactly what the phenomenon of “gaydar”, that is, “gay radar,” is based on. It can misfire, however — on metrosexuals, for example, men who pay a lot of attention to fashion and style, or on feminists who reject beauty practices produced by patriarchy. Besides, some gay people avoid such outward difference precisely because in a not very tolerant society it raises their risk of facing stigma and violence.

So the LGBTQI+ community as a whole cannot be sorted into categories based on appearance and self-presentation. In the 21st century, as the ideas of feminism and queer theory increasingly undermine the gender binary, blurring its narrow frames and ultimately changing not only gay but also heterosexual environments, such divisions are becoming less and less relevant.

People tend to associate sex primarily with primary sex characteristics, that is, with the external genitals, because 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. There are currently no means of changing a chromosome set from XX to XY or the other way around (or from or to some other set, if we remember that intersex people with chromosomal variations exist).

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

· Sex hormones. Their levels in the body can be adjusted by taking hormonal medication; a course with an appropriately chosen dosage can create a hormonal profile matching the one typical for 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 on” but of complex techniques for constructing new genitals using material from the old ones and, in some cases, other body tissue. Visually they may be indistinguishable from the genitals of cisgender people, but because there are no gonads they are not fully functional. People who have had such operations cannot conceive children, and their sexual function, especially in trans men, may be limited to some degree.

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

· Legal sex — the “sex” field in documents. Depending on a given country’s legislation, changing it may or may not require certain medical interventions as a precondition. In Ukraine that precondition is currently a medical intervention to change (correct) sex, which may be either surgery or 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 in fact a change in secondary sex characteristics which, as the description above shows, is achieved primarily through hormones and does not depend on genital surgery. Unlike surgery, moreover, 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 conclude that they do not need genital surgery and limit themselves to hormone therapy. And in recent years, as in Sweden for example, they have even been winning compensation for such operations, which for a long time were a mandatory condition for obtaining legal gender recognition (that is, a change of legal sex). This practice of state requirements is now called “forced sterilization,” and with each passing year more countries abandon it — as Ukraine did when it changed the transition procedure in 2016.

Finally, it is worth noting that, given the list above, the term “sex change” itself is not accurate. It is better to specify which particular components of sex are being changed in each specific case.

The question of transgender people’s access — above all trans women’s — to gender-segregated facilities has been debated especially actively in recent years. This has been driven in large part by the so-called “bathroom bills” — legislative initiatives pushed by conservative politicians mostly in various U.S. states, aimed at restricting access to restrooms, showers, and the like based on the sex a person was assigned at birth. The declared purpose of such laws is to protect privacy and to shield women and children in particular from violence.

Meanwhile, measures for legal gender recognition of transgender people — that is, the ability to change identity documents — as well as anti-discrimination measures that to some degree allow trans people to be recognized in line with their gender identity even independently of documents, have been in force in many countries for years now. This makes it possible to assess how they actually affect the situation in terms of safety. In 2015, for instance, 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 trans students, including in restrooms, were found. And in 2018, also in the United States, a study was carried out in various facilities in Massachusetts taking into account whether they had an inclusive policy toward trans people. The results showed no difference at all in rates of sexual offenses in public restrooms or locker rooms between facilities with such a policy and those without.

Individual incidents involving, for example, women being spied on in locker rooms by trans women as well as by men posing as them have indeed happened, but these are isolated cases against the general background of sexual offenses committed against women by men. They give no grounds whatsoever for concluding that simplifying legal gender recognition changes the situation for the worse. The same can be said of prisons and shelters.

It is worth noting that in most cases there is no permanent access control for facilities like restrooms or locker rooms in the first place — so if a male abuser wants to get in, he usually does not even need to pose as a trans woman. At the same time, control methods such as checking a passport at the entrance, to say nothing of genital checks, smack of totalitarianism and would sit badly not only with transgender people but with most cisgender people as well. Most safety problems and fears, on the other hand, can be solved by separate stalls with no gender marking at all that simply lock securely.

In spaces where people stay for long periods, such as prisons and shelters, entry screening is in fact important and appropriate. It should not be reduced to a formal check of sex or gender, however, but made more individual, 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 deciding factor. This is already done, for example, in the prisons of New Zealand and Scotland.

In 1966 Harry Benjamin — an endocrinologist and sexologist who devoted a significant part of his life to studying transgender experience — published a classification of transgender presentations in his book “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” which later became known as the “Benjamin scale”. In it, one of the attributes of “true transsexualism” in its strongest form — 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 — was a sexual orientation directed specifically toward men.

Since then, psychiatrists have often relied, directly or indirectly, on the Benjamin scale when diagnosing transsexualism — or more precisely, when deciding who could or could not be allowed to transition. As time went on, however, the limitations and arbitrariness of this scale became increasingly clear. Trans people themselves, knowing which standard they had to meet in order to be approved, tailored their life stories to it when telling them to doctors. This applied to aspects of sexuality as well, whenever they did not fit the model of “authenticity.”

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

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

At first glance one might see a certain correlation in the fact that in countries where homosexuality is condemned by society and persecuted and where transition is hard to access and unregulated altogether — chiefly the Islamic countries of Asia and Africa — the population is mostly growing rapidly, while in Western countries that are liberal toward LGBTQI+ people population growth is small or absent entirely. Birth rates, however, are affected by many factors, which need to be considered together.

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

Looking at this list, it is easy to see that a large 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 matters is not the size of the population but its quality: having a child is not necessarily a family’s priority, but once that decision is made, they try to give the child the very best.

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

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