Category: lgbt

Trans(national) Solidarity

“Yara Tychina, a young transgender woman and Astana resident, picketed on Vodno-Zelyoniy Boulevard next to the House of Ministries and the Parliament. Unfurling a handmade transgender flag, she demanded that the Senate, the Presidential Administration, and the President reject the ‘LGBT propaganda’ amendments. She was taken to the Yesilskoye District Precinct of the Astana Police. Further details are in the video.”

“[In which video Ms. Tychina says] Hello! I am Yara Tychina. I’m an ordinary citizen of Astana. I work in the coffeehouse [?] industry. I’m an openly trans women. I am protesting peacefully today because there are no other means to impact my country’s repressive policies. I don’t simply oppose this law. [It] violates my rights and freedoms, the rights and freedoms of my friends, my colleagues, the people in my life and, most importantly, my family, over half of whom are members of the LGBT minority community. I have carefully scrutinized this law and I can say truthfully that it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘propaganda,’ since in black and white it says that any mention of LGBT—in a positive vein, in a neutral vein, it doesn’t matter which; in personal profiles, in personal conversations with people, it doesn’t matter where—is considered ‘propaganda.’ The fact that I’m an openly trans woman makes me a criminal, according to the new amendments. These amendments also don’t have anything whatsoever to do with ‘protecting children,’ since hundreds of Kazakhstani LGBT children, who had no way of influencing [who they are], will find themselves outlawed. They will be banned. They will be forbidden from talking about themselves on social media. They will be forbidden from gathering together in public or in private.

“[Ms. Tychina is interrupted by Astana police officers, who claim she is violating the law. She repeatedly states her willingness to go with them to the police station. She then continues.] I heartily and tearfully implore the Presidential Administration, the Senate, and the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and the Constitutional Court, if that doesn’t work, to reject these amendments. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Kazakhstanis, will unavoidably suffer. With these amendments, you will bridge the gap between Kazakhstan and Russia, but you will also drive away all international investments and significantly harm Kazakhstan’s standing in the international arena. But first of all you will harm people. You will harm my family. I implore you to stop it. Thank you!

“[Responding to a reporter, who asks her name, Ms. Tychina says] My name is Yara Tychina. I’m in the coffeehouse [?] industry. I have a small business. I’m an ordinary [female] citizen. [Responding to a question about her flag, she says] It’s a transgender flag, the flag of my identity. It’s homemade. [To the police officers] Let’s go! Thank you! [A police officer explains to the press that Ms. Tychina has not been detained but has voluntarily agreed to go with them to the station.]“

Source: werequest.kz (Instagram), 3 December 2025. Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Peter Leonard for the heads-up.

Police in Kazakhstan’s capital detained a transgender activist for staging a solitary protest against pending legislation prohibiting so-called “LGBT propaganda.” Yara Tychyna held up a handmade transgender flag near government buildings in downtown Astana and called for the Senate and the presidential administration to reject changes to the law, which are designed to proscribe “propaganda of non-traditional relations,” a formulation broad enough that positive portrayals of same-sex relations could be treated as prohibited content. Lawmakers have been debating the measure since the lower house approved it in November. Officials insist the restrictions are framed as child-protection rules. Critics warn that the draft’s language is vague and that equating LGBT themes with harmful content risks legitimising discrimination.

Source: Peter Leonard, “Central Asia’s week that was #82,” Havli, 3 December 2025

On Wednesday, November 12, the [lower house of the] Parliament of Kazakhstan (Mäjilis) unanimously passed a law banning “LGBT propaganda” in the media and on the internet. Violators face fines, and in the case of repeat violations, up to ten days in jail.

“Endeavoring to protect children from information detrimental to their health and development, provisions have been made to restrict the dissemination of information promoting pedophilia and non-traditional sexual orientation in public spaces, as well as via the media, telecommunications networks, and online platforms,” the document states.

The changes will affect nine laws. Violations of the ban will be punishable by a fine of up to forty minimum calculation indices (in 2025, this amounted to 157,000 tenge, or approximately 260 euros, or 24,500 rubles), or up to ten days in jail.

Kazakhstan’s Deputy Minister of Culture Yevgeny Kochetov explained that materials containing “propaganda of non-traditional relationships” would have to be labeled “18+.” Content that violates the law would be blocked.

Kochetov added that the strictures currently apply primarily to those who distribute materials. If minors attend a screening of a film rated 18+, the cinema’s managers, not the parents, would face a fine, he explained.

“If, for example, [men] are holding hands in the park, this is not considered propaganda. These are their personal boundaries, and there are no questions here,” said one of the sponsors of the bill, MP Yelnur Beisenbayev.

The Mäjilis initially sought to ban “LGBT propaganda,” in April 2024, by amending the law “On Mass Media.” They later proposed criminalizing “LGBT propaganda” and equating it with incitement to ethnic, social, or religious hatred.

When MPs began discussing banning “LGBT propaganda,” a petition entitled “We oppose open and covert LGBT propaganda in the R[epublic of] K[azakhstan]” was posted on the website E-Petition.kz. It was the third petition in the country to gather the fifty thousand signatures required for consideration by the government.

The Ministry of Culture and Information decided to partly accede to the petitioners’ demands—when it came to strictures aimed at “protecting and shielding adolescents and children from the promotion and cultivation of sexual relations.”

Consequently, the ban was presented as an amendment to the draft law on archiving.

Traditional values

In recent months, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has repeatedly spoken about the need to protect “traditional values.” The day before the Mäjilis passed the bill, and ahead of his visit to Moscow, Tokayev published an article in Rossiiskaya Gazeta in which he spoke about the friendship between the two countries.

“We are united by a common take on traditional values, similar views on the pressing issues of contemporary life, and cooperation in ensuring the welfare of [our two] brotherly peoples,” Tokayev wrote.

In Russia, the law banning “LGBT propaganda” among minors was first introduced in St. Petersburg in 2011, and then at the federal level in 2013. In 2023, the Russian authorities went so far as to declare the “international LGBT movement” extremist.

As of July 2025, Human Rights Watch had catalogued more than one hundred criminal indictments and convictions [in Russia] for involvement in the “international LGBT movement” or for displaying symbols which the authorities attribute to this movement.

Following Russia’s lead, “LGBT propaganda” was banned in Hungary in 2021, and in Georgia in 2024.

LGBTQ+ in Kazakhstan

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Kazakhstan de facto in 1997 and de jure in 1998. Since 2003, transgender people have been able to change their gender marker in official documents.

In 2021, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law ranked Kazakhstan 154th out of 175 countries in terms of public acceptance of LGBTQ+, below Uzbekistan, Russia, and Afghanistan.

The online platform Equaldex, which researches the rights of sexual minorities around the world, writes that “[a]ccording to recent survey data, there appears to be strong opposition to LGBTQ+ rights in Kazakhstan.”

Many human rights organizations have already criticized Kazakhstan’s ban on “LGBT propaganda.”

Human Rights Watch urged lawmakers to reject the bill. The NGO argues that the proposed amendments violate fundamental human rights and could make LGBTQ+ people in Kazakhstan more vulnerable.

Organizations including ILGA-Europe (the European branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association), the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), and TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) have also issued a joint statement against the bill.

The Kazakhstani organization Queer.kz commented on the Mäjilis’s passing the amendments banning “LGBT propaganda” as follows: “We continue to write letters! Our organization will continue to work together with our colleagues to defend human rights and freedom!”

Source: “Kazakhstan parliament votes to ban ‘LGBT propaganda,'” BBC Russian Service, 12 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Peter Leonard for the heads-up.

Over the past four years of America’s modern anti-transgender panic, Missouri has been one of its chief laboratories. Each legislative session brings a flood of new proposals targeting transgender people—with each year opening with often more than a dozen bills—and 2026 is already shaping up to continue that pattern. In the first batch of early bills, lawmakers introduced 21 anti-LGBTQ+ measures, many escalating the state’s enforcement tactics beyond even last year’s cruelties. One stands out in particular: a bill that would ban “social transition” in schools—blocking teachers from using a student’s chosen name or pronouns, even with parental consent.

The bill, SB1085, filed by Senator Joe Nicola, states in its summary that it would prohibit “public school staff members from encouraging minor students in their ‘social transition,’” which the measure defines as engaging in any activity “with the goal of helping a student become perceived as a member of the opposite biological sex.” The text defines social transition broadly—“participating” in a student’s gender transition based on “details such as his or her name, appearance, or behavior”—and bars schools from taking part in any conduct that could contribute to a student “not being perceived and treated as a member of the student’s biological sex.”

The bill explicitly forbids all school staff and faculty from “the use of alternative pronouns or names for the minor student, either in school records or otherwise.” Notably, it contains no provision for parental consent—meaning the restrictions apply not only to unsupportive parents but also to parents who affirm their transgender children. The measure appears to single out trans students exclusively: nothing in its text bars name changes for any other reason unrelated to gender transition.

You can see the provisions here:

Provisions in SB1085

The bill marks the latest front in anti-transgender legislation: an effort not just to ban medical transition for trans youth, but to prohibit any form of transition at all, including social transition. Earlier this year, reporting out of Texas showed how a similar law led teachers to suddenly deadname students who had used their affirmed names for years without issue. Variations of this language have surfaced in several states, but Missouri’s proposal is among the most explicit and far-reaching attempts yet to regulate social transition in schools.

The ban on social transition—even with parental permission—underscores a shift in how anti-trans legislation is being sold to the public. For years, supporters of bathroom bans, sports bans, and “don’t say gay” policies framed their efforts as battles for “parental rights.” Increasingly, though, that language has fallen away as lawmakers move to strip supportive parents of any authority at all, mirroring the approach in medical transition bans that override parental consent entirely. Under Missouri’s proposal, parents would have no right to approve their child’s affirmed name or pronouns, and any teacher who honors a family’s wishes could face the loss of their license.

The social-transition ban is just one front in a broader offensive. Missouri lawmakers have already filed bills to outlaw public drag by defining it as prurient “male or female impersonation,” to strip Pride flags from public schools, and to roll back nondiscrimination protections for transgender people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. And more proposals are almost certain to follow. When the legislature gavels in on January 8, the real question for observers won’t be whether these bills appear—they already have—but which ones Republican leadership chooses to fast-track. That early movement will signal just how aggressive Missouri intends to be in advancing its anti-LGBTQ agenda this session.

Source: Erin Reed, “New Missouri Bill Would Ban “Social Transition” In Schools, Even With Parental Permission,” Erin in the Morning, 3 December 2025

On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.

The language of these policies usually distinguishes men from women by their reproductive capacity, which is assumed to be determined at birth or even at conception. Each statute mandates that its definitions of “sex,” “female,” and “male” be used whenever those words appear in any part of the state code. Some purport to be establishing a “women’s bill of rights,” as the titles of Kansas’s and Oklahoma’s bills suggest; Louisiana’s is titled “The Women’s Safety and Protection Act.” (On the other hand, the name of North Dakota’s bill—into which legislators slipped another term they wanted to define—captures the arbitrariness involved: “The Definition of Female, Male, Sex, and Scrap Metal Dealer.”)

This legislation is part of a broader onslaught. In the past few years Republican-controlled state legislatures have introduced thousands of bills targeting trans people, with measures to ban puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth, bar trans girls and women from sports, mandate that bathroom access be based on birth sex, outlaw drag performances, and more. So far more than two hundred of these laws have passed, with grave, often life-changing consequences for the trans residents of red states across the country.

Continue reading “Trans(national) Solidarity” →

Are These the Bad Old Days?

Source: Ekaterina Reznikova and Alexey Korostelev, “2024: A study into repression under Putin,” Proekt, 22 February 2024

Russia jails dissident once targeted by Putin at KGB for 16 years

A court in St. Petersburg has sentenced Alexander Skobov, a 66-year-old Soviet dissident and activist, to 16 years in jail on charges of justifying terrorism and joining a terrorist group. Skovov was first arrested more than four decades ago and Vladimir Putin was among the KGB officers who worked on his case. Prosecutors said Skobov justified terrorist attacks on Russian territory and supported the Freedom of Russia legion, which Russia has deemed a terrorist organisation for fighting alongside Ukrainian forces.

  • Skobov will spend the first three years of his sentence in prison (typically reserved for highly dangerous criminals such as kidnappers and terrorists and repeat offenders), with the rest in a high-security penal colony. He will be 80 by the time he can be released, although it is questionable whether he will survive that long in Russia’s harsh prison system. The activist has many health problems, including diabetes, hepatitis C, asthma and glaucoma.
  • At the court hearing, Skobov made clear that he did not believe he was facing a fair trial. He refused to answer questions and did not stand when the judge addressed him. “Today they will ask me again – do I plead guilty? Well, now I’m the one asking,” he said in his closing statement. “It’s me asking the servants of Putin’s regime who are present here, who are small cogs in his repressive regime: do you plead guilty to complicity in Putin’s crimes? Do you repent of your complicity?”
  • In the USSR, Skobov was repeatedly charged with “anti-Soviet” offenses. He was first arrested in 1978 on charges of distributing anti-Soviet leaflets and was sentenced to two years in a psychiatric hospital (punitive psychiatry was widespread in the Soviet Union and used as one of the main tools of repression in the 1960s, 70s and 80s). Skobov was forcibly hospitalized again in 1982 for daubing anti-Soviet graffiti on the walls of a building and then released in 1985. 
  • Vladimir Putin, who worked in the Fifth Department of the KGB that was tasked with combating “ideological sabotage,” was among the KGB officers that handled his original cases, independent media and rights groups reported.

Why the world should care

This is far from the first instance when somebody in Russia has been imprisoned for a post on social media. Since 2010, prosecutors have opened more than 1,000 such criminal cases. But a 16-year sentence for an elderly activist in frail health stands out as particularly punitive. It’s safe to say that treatment of dissidents in modern Russia is growing far tougher than it was in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. 

Source: “THE BELL WEEKLY: Billion-dollar loss for Russia’s Facebook,” The Bell, 25 March 2025

“Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) Speaks at the 2025 HRC Los Angeles Dinner,” Human Rights Campaign (YouTube)

The Trump administration and his Republican lackeys in Congress are looking to reverse every single victory this community has won over the last 50 years. And right now, it’s drag queens reading books and transgender people serving in the military. Tomorrow, it’s your marriage license and your job they want to take. Bending to the whims of a bully will not end his cruelty. It will only embolden him. The response to authoritarianism isn’t acquiescence. Bullies respond to one thing, and one thing only, a punch in the face.

But you see, that starts with fully acknowledging what is happening. The meme lords and the minions in the White House are intentionally breaking the American system of government so they can rebuild it in their own image. They’ve shut down cancer research and HIV prevention. They’ve eliminated drinking water and clean air regulations and upended the lives of veterans. They’ve said that a recession that Trump is likely to cause will be worth it, which is an assessment worthy of Trump University.

At its core, what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing isn’t about efficiencies or cost savings. It’s about giving their wealthy friends a tax break and making the middle class and veterans and public school kids pay for it. It’s a few idiots trying to figure out how to pull off the scam of their lives.

Meanwhile, the scariest part is that they’re using the power of the presidency to try to delight their base by targeting vulnerable people, people they think can’t fight back, calling them domestic enemies or claiming they’ll ruin American culture. Remember their slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Authoritarians target vulnerable minority communities first because they think that if they can conquer those that they deem weak, and they can show everyone else who’s boss, which is why we can’t sit back right now and wait to see what happens. If we wait, I guarantee you the battle will have already been lost.

Donald Trump cannot take anything from us that we don’t choose to give him. He and his henchmen don’t want people to realize that. But now is the time for us to wake up. The good news is every day I’m seeing more and more people across this country realize that they don’t want to give him much at all.

The question I get asked most right now is, “So what can I do? What can I do?” And I’m going to be blunt about this. Never before in my life have I called for mass activism, but this is the moment. Take to the streets, protest, show up at town halls. Jam the phone lines in Congress, 202-224-3121, and afford not a moment of peace to any elected representatives who are aiding and abetting Musk and Trump’s illegal power grab. This is not a drill, folks. This is the real thing.

Seize every megaphone you have. Go online and make a donation to the legal funds fighting Trump, to HRC, and to the candidates for Congress that vow to take this country backward. And don’t limit your voice to the traditional political channels. Be like Lucy Welch. When JD Vance went to vacation at the Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, Lucy, who writes the Sugarbush Daily Snow Report, used her report to defend her diverse and wonderful community, ending by saying, “I am using my relative platform as a snow reporter to be disruptive. What we do or don’t do matters.”

What we do and don’t do matters. It matters right now more than it ever has before. When my future grandkids look back on this moment, I want them to know that my voice was one of the loudest in the room, screaming for justice and fighting against tyranny.

And in the midst of this existential fight, this battle that seems to consume everything, well, let’s not take the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular. I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.

I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our institutions, it is easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it. You’re here tonight because you do too. And when I think about that love, I think back to all the times in our history when our ancestors had to fight back against tyrants and racists and those who couldn’t understand that freedom and justice are our foundational promises in this country.

That group of people, that small group of people that got together in Chicago to found this country’s first known gay rights organization. Well, it was called the Society for Human Rights. It was 1924 and the flicker of light was brief. It only lasted a matter of months before social persecution and criminal prosecution bankrupted the promise of the group’s charter. But oh, that flicker ignited something. By whisper and by word of mouth, folks around the country started to catch wind of the idea. And eventually, it ended up in the ears of a man here in California who later said the idea of gay people getting together at all was an eye-opener for him.

Well, that man’s name was Harry Hay. And a couple of decades later, he went on to found the Mattachine Society right here in Los Angeles. It was the first sustained gay rights organization in the United States. Harry said that he was first told about the Chicago group as a warning that the idea was too dangerous and nobody should try to pull anything off like that ever again. How lucky the world is that Harry didn’t listen.

When we say history repeats itself, it’s not because the villains and battles don’t evolve with the ages. They do. But the fight itself remains elemental. It’s always men who would be king, blaming the suffering of the masses on those who look different or sound different or live differently. And since the dawn of time, the triumph of good over evil has relied on those who believe in empathy and kindness, summoning the steel spine needed to defend those values that by their nature leave us vulnerable to attack. This community knows that. You have lived and breathed this fight for generations. Our hope, our hope lies in this room.

The fact that we are still here today means that we have the faith and courage that we will win the battles that really matter. Now, when I first ran for governor in 2018, I started every single stump speech by saying, and this will tell you why Donald Trump doesn’t like me very much. I said at the beginning of every stump speech, everything we care about is under siege by a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic Donald Trump.

Source: Parker Molloy, “Watch Illinois Governor JB Pritzker Reject the Politics of Trans Abandonment,” The Present Age, 24 March 2025. Thanks to Rebecca Solnit for the heads-up.

Alexandra: A Russian Trans Woman in Trump’s America

Alexandra in Times Square. Personal photo courtesy of Republic

Alexandra left Russia four years ago, fleeing oppression, propaganda, and ever harsher anti-LGBT laws. She applied for political asylum in the U.S., made a home in New York, and felt safe for the first time. But with Donald Trump’s return to power, her fears have returned. The new rules and laws, the rhetoric, and the swaying of public sentiment against trans people have been much too reminiscent of what she had escaped. Alexandra spoke to Republic about how America has been changing and what now lies in store for thousands of people like her.

I arrived in the U.S. exactly four years ago yesterday. A lot has changed in that time. I arrived right when the covid restrictions were still in force. Just a couple of days before I arrived in New York, an order to wear two masks each had been issued. The city was completely empty. I went straight to Times Square, and there were maybe one or two people walking down the street. Gradually, the restrictions were lifted, and more and more people were out in public. And then the border with Mexico was opened, and everything changed dramatically in terms of jobs, the economy, and real estate — rent went up about forty percent. Now there are new problems: Trump and Musk. But first things first.

“I always had a hard time in Russia”

I am thirty-four years old. I lived in Perm until I was twenty-five, then I moved to St. Petersburg and lived there until I moved to the U.S. I did a lot of jobs in Russia, mainly sales. In my final years in Perm, I worked at a real estate agency.

I had traveled a lot and at first I decided to just move to a big city in Russia, which didn’t make me safe in the end. I decided to leave Russia after the lockdown started. My ex-husband had gone to the U.S. in 2011 on the Work and Travel Program and he had really liked the country. Besides, when it was possible to fly anywhere again, the only valid visas we had were for the U.S.

When I was twenty-five years old, I officially changed my gender and got a woman’s passport. This was in 2016, back in Perm. It was quite difficult to do this. The problem was that at the real estate agency where I worked, no one knew about me, but I had to sign legal documents there. So I had to change my surname, first name, and patronymic to something feminine, but without specifying my gender. The civil registry office did not immediately know how to do this legally: they discussed it among themselves for several months. In the end, they changed my name and surname to the feminine versions of the original ones. I had been Alexander, and so I became Alexandra. They got rid of my patronymic because they didn’t know how to come up with a feminitive for it.

Later, after the updated information had been entered into my birth certificate, I went to the passport office. They remembered me there because a couple of years earlier they had refuse to issue me a passport on the grounds that the photo I had given them was of a young woman, but my papers indicated my gender as “M.” I had filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office, but it hadn’t led to anything at the time. Ultimately, though, the [passport office] staff decided to meet my needs and help me. I was issued a passport with an “F” in it. I have had several cosmetic surgeries, but have not had intimate plastic surgery, meaning I haven’t undergone a complete transition, but a social one. I don’t want to have surgery yet.

It was always hard for me in Russia. If you are lesbian or gay, you can hide it from society somehow. This is impossible for us transgender people.

You go to apply for a job and you are simply rejected, at best. At worst, you are threatened and humiliated.

I was also harassed at school. For example, I was subjected to a full body search with no clothes on at the checkpoint when I took my Unified State Exam. When it comes to medical institutions, even if you go to a private clinic for a paid operation, you still face discrimination. When I tried to get permission for a sex change, they suggested I go to the male ward because in the female ward they thought I would “rape all the female patients.”

I was an activist in Rainbow World, the Perm branch of the Russian LGBT Network: I constantly attended events and was actively involved in organizing them. When I needed supporting evidence [for my asylum claim] from the head of Rainbow World, she was afraid to communicate with my lawyers, since she seriously feared reprisals from the authorities. Now she doesn’t contact me at all.

We once took part in the May Day rally. We had got all the permissions beforehand, but the placards had not been discussed, and so we ended up having our own mini-gay pride parade. Things were still relatively calm at the time: we marched down the street and people heard us; we were written about and discussed. But then the pressure started. Public opinion shifted dramatically in the direction of aggression towards LGBT people. A few months later, the police came to the offices of our organization and searched them. They confiscated our laptops, and there, of course, they found all our info — addresses, contacts, and passwords. No one thought at the time that things would take such a turn for the worse.

At one point, when I was working at the real state agency in Perm, a local activist came into my life. I don’t know who he was, but he had sent me clip from an episode of the Malakhov show in which he had taken part. He was always stalking me outside the real estate office where I worked. When I would walk past him with my colleagues, right in front of them he would say, “You have to give me an interview.” I would say, “I don’t know you. What’s this about anyway?’ And he would say, “If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone who you are.” This would happen in public, right on the street.

After the first law banning so-called LGBT propaganda for minors was adopted in 2013, police officers started showing up at my house because I right then I was helping out transgender teenagers. The police would knock on our door and ring the doorbell. They would try to get into my flat under various pretexts. One time they stood outside the door for three hours. We just pretended nobody was home. Then, when it got quiet, we looked out the window. The police officers looked up too, realized we were looking at them, and came upstairs again. They stood outside our door again for a while.

Then some people assaulted me and my ex-husband. It turned into a brawl, and a police patrol turned up “by chance.” We were all taken to the police station and advised to “keep quiet and stay inconspicuous.” After that, in 2019, we decided to move to Peter. Everything was relatively calm in Petersburg. But then they found us there too. I do not know what kind of databases they have, but they found us, although I didn’t show my face anywhere at all in Petersburg, and I wasn’t involved in any organizations. The only thing I did was go to the Side by Side LGBT film festival.

I was in no hurry to leave Russia because I have an elderly father, who is seventy-one. I didn’t want to leave him. And I never thought that I should leave the country where I was born, grew up, worked, and paid taxes. Plus, I had a flat and a car in Russia. I didn’t want to start all over again in another place. When covid started, my husband’s and my Schengen visas had expired. We only had our U.S. visas left, and they were still valid for about six months. We decided to give it a try, because we were afraid that, later, the authorities wouldn’t let us go anywhere at all, that the country was heading towards the Iron Curtain.

“Since Moving to the U.S., I Haven’t Been Hiding Anything from Anyone at All”

We arrived in New York on a visa, on a direct flight from Moscow. We started looking for human rights organizations who could provide free lawyers. We called various places: our English was nonexistent, so we used online translators and sometime just read the text into an answering machine. Several organizations reached out to us. Eventually, an organization which deals with domestic violence helped us out. We lived in a hotel at first. We were quarantined there for a fortnight, then we rented a place through Airbnb and looked for a permanent place. I started working three weeks later.

I am currently working as a cleaner and as a webcam model. Webcam modeling is not an easy gig. I started doing it back in Petersburg, because I was afraid of getting a on-the-books job. Initially, you think that it’s easy money and that it won’t affect you in any way, but then you realize you’re just a piece of meat. It’s quite tough psychologically. All this overlapped with my old traumas, and eventually led to big psychological problems. Before the New Year, I stopped taking the antidepressants I’d been taking since 2018.

You can make $100, $300, and $500 a day in the webcam industry. Here in the U.S., it’s a legitimate job, you pay taxes, it’s all above board. Since moving to the U.S., I haven’t been hiding anything from anyone at all. It’s my new principle in life.

I am horrified to read the news from Russia about LGBT people being labeled “extremists” and being murdered in prisons, about gay bars and clubs being raided. It’s wacky, it’s incomprehensible. After moving to the U.S., especially after Russia’s war with Ukraine began, I realized how effective propaganda was in Russia. All my friends and acquaintances in Russia suddenly changed their opinions about politics dramatically, even about LGBT people. Even my friends who are LGBT people themselves either try to avoid the topic or say, “Well, that’s right, but what can we do? It’s the way it has to be.” Some of them I’ve stopped talking to, some I haven’t. Maybe they are simply afraid to say too much.

The authorities inserted pedophilia into the law on “LGBT propaganda” and thus made a strong link in people’s heads between LGBT people and pedophiles. This propaganda has been effective even in my own family.

My dad’s new wife has a niece. The niece’s son was three years old at the time. Kids are drawn to me and I always play with them. But at one point I saw how afraid she was to leave her child alone with me. The propaganda has affected even those closest to me.

In the U.S., I saw a completely different world and attitude towards people like me. When I told someone at work for the first time that I was a transgender woman, I got a neutral reaction, as if I was talking about something quite ordinary. The first time I went to the New York Pride March, it was more like a carnival: it was beautiful, friendly, and flamboyant. There were a lot of children there, and there were separate events for them. For the first time in my life I felt I was no different from anyone else, that I had rights, that I could speak openly, that I could receive proper medical care. When I lived in Perm, I was even unable to find an endocrinologist who did hormone replacement therapy. [Living in New York] has changed my sensibility a lot.

Alexandra in Times Square. Personal photo courtesy of Republic

Donald Trump’s policies have not affected me specifically yet. But knowing how it all kicked off in Russia, I am scared. In 2013, there was the ban on “gay propaganda,” and consequently, teenagers were left without the support that, for example, they had received from Lena Klimova and her project Children 404. I also helped kids out then, shared my know-how with them, and tried to support them. All transgender people have been dismissed from the [U.S.] army. It’s a nightmare. When the state starts cracking down on a single albeit tiny segment of the populace, and it succeeds, it keeps on going.

“Judging by the First Month of Trump’s Presidency, We Are in for Tough Times”

I believe that common sense should prevail in all things. Previously, the bias had gone in the other direction in the U.S.: people used to be afraid to say something against LGBT, and this was also wrong. Everyone should have freedom of speech. For example, my acquaintances from [the country of] Georgia had this thing happen to them. They were working on a commission for a moving company: a gay couple was moving. One of the workers looked askance, or they said something among themselves. They then got a call from the front office and a dressing-down. They were warned that they would be fired if it happened again. Or there was the case of the flower shop: the owners refused to sell flowers for a same-sex wedding, and the shop had to close because of the scandal that erupted. That’s over the top. I think that if you’re refused service somewhere, you can go to some other place. Let them lose their profits. It’s the same with clubs: if the bouncers don’t let you in, well, those are their views. Everybody has different views. But now it’s going too far in the other direction and it’s scary. I hope that one day we will reach a sensible balance.

Now I live with my fiancé, who is from Ukraine. We discuss politics, and we both want the war to end soon, for people to stop dying. I would like to make a trip to Russia.

I don’t think Russia belongs to Putin and his lackeys. It’s my country, just like it is yours, just like it is everyone else’s. I would like to believe that things will change and we can go back someday.

I am in the U.S. legally, but I am waiting for political asylum. There are numerous such cases, and they take a very long time to process. The approximate wait time for a green card in the past was ten years . I was involved in a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Immigration Service, and I was told that as long as I had a short wait time, the case would not be considered. I appealed that decision and have been scheduled for an interview for late 2026. I would like to go to Turkey, for example, to meet my relatives. I would really like to see my dad. But even if everything goes well at the interview, I will probably not get a green card until 2028.

My father loves me, but over the last three years, since the war started, we have come to disagree about Russian politics, and over time we stopped discussing it. He watches [Russian] television and relays to me what is said there. He constantly accuses me of being under the influence of “American propaganda” and “brainwashed.” But I just reply, “Fine.”

They usually say that the first one hundred days of a presidency set the course for the next four years. Judging by the first month of Trump’s presidency, we are in for tough times, although maybe these measures are like Margaret Thatcher’s — first shock therapy, then stabilization. I hope to get citizenship in the future. I would finally feel safe: there is still a risk of deportation for now. I try not to give up, to hope for the best. Let’s see if positive thinking does the trick.

Source: Maria Litvinova, “‘Trump’s rhetoric has become similar to Putin’s, and it’s scary’: How does a Russian trans woman who emigrated to America under the Democrats feel?” Republic, 27 February 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

This Deadly Love

Source: Arkadiy Kurta (Facebook), 25 February 2025. Mr. Kurta posted this photo among a set of photos he took at yesterday’s pro-Ukrainian demonstration in Berlin on the Facebook public group Street Photography.

— I read about your wedding to Yana last year. Tell me, are you happy?

— Yes. But happy in what sense? I don’t feel like I’m in a happy period in my life as a human being. But I’m very happy with Yana. We didn’t even plan to get married: we just had to get married for the paperwork. We are now traveling a lot between countries and applying for visas, and it’s much easier to explain why Yana has to travel with me and I with her by showing them a marriage certificate than by telling them a long story about how we’re from Russia, where gay marriage doesn’t exist. Anyway, we got married, and it as if nothing has changed in our lives: we love each other just as much, and we have the same joint budget.

But the morning after the wedding, I woke up and looked at Jana and realized that she really drives me crazy.

And then Yana woke up and started looking at me funny. Basically, we went around for a week looking daggers at each other, and then we went to psychotherapists, each to her own, and found out that, despite the fact that getting married was a purely formal act to us, it meant a lot to our subconscious minds. That’s why all kinds of shit had started to come out of our heads, which had been building up there all our lives, as it transpired.

For example, after we got married, Yana suddenly moved from the category of “my lady love” to the category of “my family.” I have completely different requirements for my family. Yana looked at me and thought, “I never wanted to get married. Marriage is a trap, it’s the worst thing that can happen.” Because of her family history, she had come to the opinion that there was basically nothing worse than marriage. When we realized what was coming out of us, we just talked to each other and calmed down. Everything fell into place. Now my therapist says we should definitely learn to fight because it’s a good way to find a new common ground, to talk about things, to release emotions. We just haven’t fought yet.

— How many years have you been together?

— Three years. We’ve argued, we’ve been pissed at each other sometimes, but we’ve never really fought. My therapist says this is potentially the weakest point in our marriage, because people in real families should fight and yell at each other periodically. I agree with her. My sister and I or my mom and I sometimes yell at each other so hard that glass shatters. So now we’re learning how to fight.

— Don’t you think that the very fact that you were able to get married is a privilege for people from Russia?

— Of course I do. There is a huge number of people living in Russia who are no less deserving than me and who cannot get married because of their orientation. Of course, it’s very unfair. I’m aware of that, and I’m very grateful to the people who have given their lives, among other things, to make it possible for me to have a same-sex marriage in the United States and for that marriage to be recognized around the world by countries which agree on the simple fact that all people are equal and all people have the right to a family.

— You don’t feel guilty about that?

— No, because I remember that my goal hasn’t changed.

My goal is to get married on Red Square.

I believe that it will happen sooner or later. Every person should have the right to a family, every person should have the right to call their loved one a relative. This, by the way, should not necessarily be bound up with sexual orientation or gender identity. I think a lot about single women or men for whom the most important person in their life is a male or female friend with whom they would like to share a household, bequeath property to them, and identify them as their nearest and dearest. That is, the very mechanism of civil partnerships would be useful not only for LGBT people.

— In interviews you gave long ago, you said that people in Russia generally didn’t care who you slept with. Has propaganda succeeded in turning LGBTQ+ people into enemies?

— I’m not in Russia at the moment, so I can’t see what is happening there now. But I am glad that for every snitch and provocateur who goes to a gay club to turn people in to the cops, there are hundreds of people who know that their friends, brothers and sisters, and coworkers are not hetero- or cisgender people, and yet do not go to the authorities and snitch on them. But of course this is a very difficult time, because, pardon the expression, all sorts of scum who derive power and joy from the fact that they can take away another person’s life feel quite free and easy in Russia now, because a group of people with whom they can do as they pleased has been pointed out to them, and the state will only pat them on the heads for doing it.

Source: Konstantin Shavlovsky, “‘It hurts, hurts, hurts to love now’: a long conversation with Elena Kostyuchenko,” Republic, 12 January 2025. Excerpted and translated by the Russian Reader.

Protestors at Christopher Street Park pose for a photo. Photo: S. Baum/Erin in the Morning

This weekend at Stonewall, trans pasts and trans futures collided. The crowd of over 300 people at Christopher Street Park cheered on as the two kids took the stage, all smiles as they were wrapped in the pink, white and blue. They were led by Denise Norris, co-founder of The Transexual Menace, a direct action group which began organizing against trans exclusion in 1993.

In 1969, the Stonewall uprising spilled out from the iconic gay bar and into the streets — including that same park, a small patch of pavement and grass across the road. Many see this as the birthplace of the LGBTQ liberation movement as we know it today.

Now, a new generation has joined the fight.

“Even in our middle school, which supposedly accepts everyone, we face hate from many of our classmates,” one of the kids told the crowd.

They passed the mic to their friend. “They’re saying, ‘Oh, this school is progressive. And we don’t stand up for hate, and homophobia, and transphobia,’” the other youngster added. “Well, maybe they should do something about it.”

Donald Trump’s second term as president has wrought an unprecedented wave of anti-trans vitriol. The administration has effectively sought to ban trans and intersex people — or likely anyone suspected of being trans or intersex —from joining the military, using the correct bathrooms, playing on sports teams, accessing life-saving medical care, and acquiring state IDs that acknowledge their existence, to name just a few of the provisions’ effects. Trans youth, especially, have been targeted. Meanwhile, politicians and pundits have condemned transness as “toxic,” a “virus” and “a fad”.

But Saturday’s rally was living proof of trans histories, resilience and joy. One protestor held a sign reading: “We are older than your laws and we will outlive them. There are queer and trans kids, adults and elders in the future.”

People gathered at Christopher Street Park in New York City to protest the Trump Administration’s repression of trans people on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: S. Baum/Erin in the Morning

The area in and around Stonewall, including the park, was incorporated into the National Parks Service in 2016 as a historical monument of the West Village enclave where trans, queer and gender nonconforming youth made their home for decades. But after Trump’s return to office, even the NPS webpage for Stonewall saw the word “transgender” removed.

“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,” the new website now reads, the “T” conspicuously missing. “The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights.”

Norris spoke about organizing the event within her own intergenerationally trans family, including her nephew, Garrett. Now in his twenties, Garrett is working with his aunt to cultivate a national network, encouraging trans people and their allies everywhere to take autonomous action.

“If you don’t want to be transgressive, if you’re not here to make the systemic change that we need in this society so trans people have space to be equal — not merely acceptable — you might as well be the ‘transgender happy friends,’” Norris told Erin in the Morning at the rally. “The battle is not about if we are going to be passable or acceptable to the oppressor. It doesn’t matter if you’re ‘passing,’ they’re still going to come for you.”

The Transexual Menace, whose blood-stained logo is a campy, tongue-in-cheek nod to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” cut its teeth mobilizing against trans exclusion from queer spaces and causes in the 1990s. Where some gay and lesbian organizations sought to align themselves with more white, heteronormative, upper class sensibilities, the Transexual Menaces — “Stone Butch Blues” author Leslie Feinberg among them — refused to center respectability politics in their actions, Norris said.

At the rally, speakers showcased a tour de force of trans life spanning generations. Dr. Carla Smith, CEO of The NYC LGBT Community Center, told the crowd how she brought along her wife and grandchild. Jay Walker, a founding member of groups like the Reclaim Pride Coalition and Gays Against Guns, led the protestors in chants. Bernie Wagenblast, the much-beloved voice of New York City subways, was also spotted among the masses.

Angelica Torres, an actress and activist on the board of directors for The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, spoke passionately about trans histories, referencing the mass slaughter of gender nonconforming people by world powers like colonial Spain and Nazi Germany.

“We’re criminalizing trans people for existing and decriminalizing those that commit actual crimes, like Donald Trump and his 1,500 insurrectionists,” Toress said in her speech.

She could be heard from outside the metal gates of Christopher Street Park, which are adorned with archival images of trans and gender nonconforming youth — smiling, hugging, protesting. It was these street queens and butches of color that are said to have “thrown the first brick at Stonewall,” a common phrase used to characterize the much-mythologized riots. Protestors left bricks beneath the photographs in their honor.

Source: S. Baum, “‘We Will Outlive Them’: At Stonewall, Resistance Flares,” Erin in the Morning, 24 February 2025. The Russian Reader has been a proud subscriber of Erin in the Morning for over a year and encourages his readers to subscribe to it as well in this time of peril and resistance.

Trump’s War on Trans: An American Story

Late Monday evening, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively lays the groundwork for a sweeping ban on the 15,000 transgender troops currently serving in the United States military. The order, delegating much of its implementation to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, declares that being transgender is “incompatible with service.” It further mandates that all transgender personnel must be misgendered in official military communication and policy. Most notably, the order frames transgender identity as inherently at odds with “a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

The executive order, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” claims its purpose is to “protect unit cohesion” from “ideologies harmful” to it—explicitly targeting the service of transgender troops. It asserts that the medical needs of transgender individuals are incompatible with military service, despite evidence that treatments like hormone therapy result in no operational downtime. Aware of this contradiction, the order offers an additional justification for the ban, framing transgender individuals as inherently “selfish” and “false.”

See the rationale given by the order here:

Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.

While the order itself is vague on the specifics of implementation, its intent is clear: to serve as a ban on transgender service members. It declares that being transgender is “inconsistent with service” and mandates that pronouns used by the military must “accurately reflect an individual’s sex.” The order gives Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 60 days to implement these directives, including ending “invented and identification-based pronoun usage” and prohibiting transgender service members from bunking with others of their gender.

If implemented broadly, the ban will have immediate and damaging consequences for both transgender service members and military readiness across the United States. SPARTA, a leading transgender military advocacy organization, estimates that removing 15,000 transgender service members would result in the loss of an $18 billion capital investment, with the Palm Center projecting an additional $1 billion cost to recruit and train replacements. Notably, up to 73% of these service members are senior enlisted personnel with 12-21 years of experience—expertise that cannot be easily replaced by the U.S. government.

You can see SPARTA’s figures here:

When asked about the potential for a ban when it was first floated in November, Emily Shilling, President of SPARTA, stated, “The most immediate impact is that transgender people serve in every theater of the world. If it were a fairly fast-moving ban, you would be pulling these individuals out of their units, leaving critical gaps in skill sets, experience, and leadership positions that you’re just not going to be able to fill with equivalent people anytime soon, especially given the shortfalls in recruiting,”

A transgender officer with years of military experience, speaking anonymously about the rumors of an impending transgender military ban, shared that she had recently spoken with several transgender service members deeply concerned about the possibility. When asked about claims that transgender people are a liability to the military, she dismissed the notion outright, stating, “Every trans service member that I have observed performing their job excels at their job, and that’s because we have to… Every trans sailor, every trans soldier, every trans Marine, and airman that I have known has excelled at their job.”

It remains unclear how swiftly or extensively Defense Secretary Hegseth will implement these changes, how many transgender service members will face discharge, or whether the administration will revert to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach—forcing transgender personnel back into the closet or demanding their detransition. What is clear, however, is the administration’s framing of being transgender not as an inherent aspect of human diversity but as a dishonorable and incompatible choice. This rhetoric signals a chilling disregard for the thousands of transgender service members who have served with distinction for decades, suggesting the administration feels no obligation to temper its actions with respect or restraint.

Source: Erin Reed, “Trump Military Ban Says Being Trans Conflicts With ‘Honorable, Truthful, Disciplined Lifestyle,” Erin in the Morning, 27 January 2025


Source: Poetry Daily

Within hours of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”, following a whipping up of anti-trans feeling during the US election.

The order states that Trump’s administration will make it “the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The response from LGBTQ+ groups was dismay and fear. Quoted in the Detroit Free Press, trans woman Rachel Crannell-Crocker remarked that Trump “wants to say we are not real,” while Bobbie Hirsch said “I’m scared, I’m really scared for my future.” Kimberly Frost, co-director of ILGA World, said Trump was “emboldened by anti-gender movements” to “use the lives of trans people as tools to sow divisions in society. Our communities deserve better.”

Trump’s move is not unexpected. During a fraught and divisive election campaign, Republicans spent nearly $215m alone on network TV ads that vilified transgender people, according to recent data from AdImpact. The past few years have seen a rush of anti-trans bills in red states, such as banning changes to birth certificates or defining sex as immutably set at birth. Books featuring LGBTQ+ content have been banned, and drag shows have faced protests and been subject to lurid conspiracy theories by Trump’s far right supporters.

Having spent nearly a decade reporting on far right threats to gender rights, the order’s purpose is clear to me: it sits squarely within the attack on so-called “gender ideology” with the ultimate aim to restore a “natural order” of white male supremacy. And while the target is trans people, the threat goes much wider, potentially laying the groundwork for further attacks on the US’s already degraded abortion rights.

What is gender ideology?

Originating in the mid-1990s in Catholic and other conservative Christian circles, the term “gender ideology” sprung up in response to feminists seeking to place “gender” into a United Nations report on its 1994 women’s conference. Initially the term focused on abortion rights, but quickly expanded to criticise any rights related to gender and sexuality, including LGBTQ+ and trans rights.

As the term gathered momentum, it became framed as a threat to ‘traditional’ – see conservative and Christian nationalist – values. LGBTQ+ activists and feminists were accused of imposing “gender ideology” on everything from schools to families and government, determined to “indoctrinate” children and young people with the “transgender agenda.”

Attacks on “gender ideology” were amplified by conservative writers such as Dale O’Leary who popularised the term in her book Gender Agenda, and picked up by the Vatican, as well as the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ ‘religious freedom’ organisations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. The right-wing think tank is behind the controversial Project 2025, with ADF on the project’s advisory board.

The project – which brings “together … over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people” – is key to understanding Trump’s move.

Project 2025 published a “Mandate for Leadership”, providing an anti-rights blueprint for the incoming administration. It offered policy ideas to demolish so-called “gender ideology”, demanding that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology.” It demanded that “gender ideology” be removed from school curricula and, in language echoed in Trump’s order, warned “radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on … young girls.”

The project also called on the government to “reverse the DEI [diversity, equality, inclusion] revolution in Labor policy”. Trump’s order did so willingly, revoking previous executive orders that protected against discrimination and stating that government agencies must “take immediate steps to end Federal implementation of unlawful and radical DEI ideology.”

A threat to abortion?

While the executive order is first and foremost a frightening attack on trans people, its wording sets alarm bells ringing for abortion rights, too. It will be no surprise that curtailing abortion rights is a key focus of Project 2025 – the mandate mentions “abortion” 199 times.

Trump’s previous administration created a conservative-majority Supreme Court that overruled Roe vs Wade, opening the door for individual states to implement deadly and devastating abortion bans across the US. Now, the executive order’s wording suggests a wider attack on reproductive rights.

The order defines “female” as meaning “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”, while male is defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

As well as being troubling for trans identity, the wording defines male and female foetal personhood from conception. If the foetus is recognised as a person at conception, then that foetus legally has the same rights as a born person, with catastrophic consequences for pregnant women and people. Foetal personhood means a woman can be prosecuted for murder if she has an abortion, as it violates the right to life. She can face manslaughter charges if she has a miscarriage for which she is blamed.

Bethany Van Kampen Saravia, senior legal and policy adviser at the gender rights NGO Ipas, told openDemocracy that “the language used in this cruel and dehumanising executive order is undoubtedly deliberate and deeply flawed on several counts. Simply put, it is outside of the executive authority to declare a fertilized egg a ‘person’ who has constitutionally protected rights.”

This is not a new threat. So far, 24 US states have included foetal personhood language in laws regulating or banning abortion, while 17 states have foetal personhood by law or judicial decision that applies to either criminal or civil law, or both. There have already been multiple cases where women in the States have been criminalised for miscarriage.

“Personhood arguments have long been used by anti-rights actors in attempts to fully ban and criminalize abortion and to punish pregnant people,” warned Van Kampen Saravia. “This language can also ban some forms of birth control and fertility treatments like IVF. This is a clear and deliberate signal of what is to come from this Administration.”

“It is outside of the executive authority of the President to instate a nationwide abortion ban, yet there is much that he can do to limit access to medication abortion and those threats need to be taken seriously,” she added. “Ipas US condemns these egregious acts of hate and bigotry. These executive orders are nothing shy of human rights violations and the world should be paying very close attention now to what is being feigned as ‘defending women’ and who is actually being targeted and criminalized.”

The ideology behind the ‘natural order’

The attacks on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are often interlinked, as both pose a threat to the far right idea of a ‘natural order’ which has been undermined by feminism and human rights, and must be returned to through reversing social progress and protections.

The idea that there is a ‘natural order’ which needs to be re-established has its roots in fascist ideology, and its intent is found in almost all attacks on gender rights including from Trump, Putin, and anti-gender ideologues in Europe. It valorises male supremacy, female subordination, and declares the non-existence of LGBTQ+ people.

As I write in my book, the existence of trans people is a grave threat to the natural order and its advocates who want to reassert male supremacy and abolish the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The goal of male supremacist, anti-gender movements is to ‘naturalise’ gendered stereotypes about men’s and women’s behaviour and status: they want to naturalise male supremacy and female inferiority.

The far right wants to tie women’s inferiority to biology, and to claim that harmful gendered stereotypes are biologically innate in order to pin women to specific roles in society. These same stereotypes are used to justify women’s oppression: women are just more nurturing, or they are bad at leadership, for example, they should stay in the domestic sphere and leave the public sphere to the boys. The anti-gender movement wants to claim that women’s oppression is natural, rooted in women’s biology, and therefore cannot be challenged.

But biology is not destiny, as the famous feminist slogan states. The ‘natural order’ of female inferiority and male supremacy is disrupted by feminists saying women can have control over their fertility, or LGBTQ+ people saying one can express their gender identity as they choose. They therefore have to be stopped.

This order has nothing to do with “defending women” from “extreme gender ideology.” The extreme gender ideology is the one that tries to push women into oppressive boxes, ban abortion, and seek to abolish the existence of trans people and the LGBTQ+ community more widely.

The extreme gender ideology is the movement that elects a President after a judge in New York found a rape allegation made against him to be “substantially true”. It is the movement that celebrates his election with the slogan “your body, my choice.”

Source: Sian Norris, “Trump’s new anti-trans executive order is a ‘human rights violation’: Trump’s first act in office is part of the global far-right’s war on so-called ‘gender ideology’,” openDemocracy, 23 January 2025

The Russian Reader Reads: Erin in the Morning

This is the second in a series of posts in which I showcase some of the newsletters, blogs, Substacks, and websites — all of them produced by hardworking, passionate lone wolves or tiny, perpetually underfunded grassroots collectives — which inspire me to continue making the Russian Reader and inform me about parts of the world and communities about which otherwise I would be utterly clueless.

Erin Reed describes Erin in the Morning as a place to “stay up to date on all of the most important pieces of trans and queer news and legislation for the week. I summarize it all complete with links to source documents. I hope to distill the information that you get from me in other places like @erininthemorn on TikTok and Twitter into a digest so that you can be sure you didn’t miss anything!”

Ms. Reed’s latest post on Erin in the Morning, endorsing Kamala Harris for U.S. president, could not be timelier, of course. More importantly, as a blogger who has chronicled the Putin’s regime ferocious war on Russia’s LGBT community and their rights, I cannot help but be inspired by Ms. Reed’s fierce, fact-driven defense of the transgender community and their rights in the U.S. I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Erin in the Morning and supporting it financially, as I have done. \\\ TRR

As one of America’s leading transgender journalists, I have reported on the wave of anti-transgender legislation sweeping across the United States over the past four years. These laws impact nearly every aspect of our lives: from using restrooms in peace to accessing essential medical care, from seeing our histories taught in schools to expressing our identities through art at Pride parades. I’ve listened to thousands of hours of testimony on these bills. Facing the 2024 election, I can’t stay silent on the dangers a second Trump term would pose to my community. For the long-term safety and dignity of transgender Americans, I believe there is only one viable path forward: electing Kamala Harris this November.

In some of my earliest reporting on anti-trans laws, many Republican elected officials were less fanatical than they are today. For instance, the first bill banning transgender healthcare in Arkansas was vetoed by Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson. In his veto statement, Gov. Hutchinson described the bill as “overbroad and extreme,” noting that it would “create new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents.” In early 2022, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox vetoed a sports ban, making an impassioned plea: “I want them to live.” Many anti-trans bills failed early on, failing to gather enough Republican votes. Even Republican-nominated justices crossed party lines to side with Democratic-nominated justices, affirming that transgender individuals deserve protection under the constitution.

But soon after, the party began waging a fear campaign, leaving countless people in my community harmed in the process. I watched as one Republican-controlled statehouse after another, spurred on by far-right Freedom Caucus members, voted to enact some of the most draconian laws targeting transgender individuals ever seen. I listened as members of my community were labeled “dangerous,” “an infection,” and even “demons.” Gov. Cox no longer “wanted us to live,” and instead quietly signed the first bathroom ban to cross his desk.

I have seen transgender people forced to flee anti-trans states, seeking new lives in places where they are protected. Some of my earliest work involved families in Texas with transgender children who were targeted by Attorney General Ken Paxton, accused of child abuse simply for supporting their kids. Soon, other states followed with healthcare bans, bathroom bans, and more. I reported on these bills as families begged their state legislators for dignity, only to be ignored. I then helped these families raise funds, and I’m glad to report that many now lead fulfilling lives as valued members of their new communities.

I am keenly aware of which states transgender people are fleeing—and which ones they are fleeing to. Every state enacting extreme anti-trans laws has either a Republican trifecta or a Republican supermajority. Meanwhile, transgender people are finding refuge in states where Democrats have established safe havens. One of those havens is Minnesota, thanks to Governor Tim Walz. I know people whose lives were saved by his actions—people who can now live authentically and freely, without fear of government persecution.

Erin Reed posted the latest edition of this periodically updated map yesterday. It was not included in her endorsement of Ms. Harris, but I’ve inserted it to show what is at stake in the upcoming election.

I have followed this election cycle intently and was among the first to report that transgender people would be a primary target of Trump’s 2024 campaign. In early 2023, Trump released a video outlining a dozen anti-transgender policies he would enact upon taking office, including national bans on trans care for youth, investigations into hormone therapy manufacturers, probes into affirming teachers, and eliminating funding for schools that treat transgender students with dignity and respect. These policies would take the harmful measures I’ve seen in Republican statehouses and nationalize them.

In 2024, it’s clear that the Trump campaign intends to follow through. If you’ve watched any sporting event or turned on the TV in a battleground state, you’ve seen the culmination of this fear campaign against transgender people, now led by Trump himself. Nearly $100 million in anti-trans ads have blanketed the nation, with Trump spending more on these ads than on immigration, housing, and the economy combined. I have seen what other Republican leaders do when they center their focus on my community, and I know the end results are not pretty.

When Kamala Harris was chosen as the Democratic nominee, I watched her closely. While the Biden administration was not flawless on transgender rights—and I often criticized it for these shortcomings—no federal anti-trans laws passed during his presidency. I reported on the defeat of 50 anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policy riders as Republicans threatened to shut down the entire government over transgender issues, and Biden did not back down. His nominees have overturned anti-trans laws and policies. Thanks to Biden, I was able to change my passport, even though my home state of Louisiana doesn’t allow birth certificate changes. I wanted to see if Harris would continue that commitment.

I’m convinced she will. One of Harris’s first moves that reassured me was selecting Gov. Tim Walz as her choice for vice president, fully aware of the Republican attacks against him for making Minnesota a safe haven for those fleeing anti-trans laws in other states. Walz, who campaigned on his record of starting his high school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance decades ago, has consistently been at the forefront of supporting LGBTQIA+ people. He brought that commitment with him to the Governor’s office, where he governed with a focus on making the state welcoming and inclusive for all.

Then in the final weeks of the campaign, she and Tim Walz were asked no less than three times about transgender people in interviews with Fox News, NBC, and Glennon Doyle’s podcast. I was encouraged to see Harris stand on her record of supporting transgender people when questioned. She had ample opportunity to throw us under the bus—as some other Democrats have done this campaign cycle—but she did not.

On Fox News, she criticized Trump for spending $20 million on ads targeting our community. On NBC, echoing her stance on abortion, she emphasized that transgender care is a decision to be made between doctors and patients. Her framework mirrored the approach used by many Democrats—and even some Republicans—to successfully push back against anti-trans bills in dozens of states. Meanwhile, that same week, Walz passionately defended transgender youth, stating that Donald Trump was attempting to “demonize a group of people for being who they are” and pledging that the administration would appoint justices committed to protecting our rights.

With over 1,000 bills introduced in the past three years targeting trans and queer people, undoing the harm they’ve caused will require sustained and strategic effort. The path forward depends on nominating justices who can help reverse these laws, while also protecting our rights in cities and states that offer refuge. For those living in oppressive states where their care, bodily autonomy, and right to exist freely have been threatened, we will continue organizing, supporting each other through mutual aid, and building the foundation to dismantle these discriminatory laws for good. The future rights of transgender people depend on electing Harris, uplifting Walz’s leadership, and securing the justices their administration will appoint.

If Trump wins a second term, we could be bound by his justices for an entire generation. Many transgender adults may never see the day when his court no longer controls our right to exist peacefully in public. Project 2025 could become a national reality, turning the same hateful bills and rhetoric shaping statehouses across the country into federal law. Schools could be defunded for allowing transgender youth to use restrooms in peace, and our very existence could be labeled obscene. There may be no return from the harm he intends to inflict on our community.

Transgender people are in a fight for our lives, and we are a powerful voting force, with millions of us across the United States. In an election that could come down to a few thousand votes in key swing states, we have the numbers to make a difference. In states like Georgia and Arizona, the transgender population is four times the size of the previous vote margins. We cannot afford complacency this election cycle. There is a path forward from the harm inflicted by Republican policies championed by Trump—a path that depends on us showing up and casting our votes for Kamala Harris.

Source: Erin Reed, “As A Leading Transgender Journalist, Here’s Why I’m Endorsing Kamala Harris,” Erin in the Morning, 29 October 2024

Pride (and Shame)

Guerneville, Calfornia, 11 August 2024. Photo by the Russian Reader

KOBLENZ, Germany (AP) — Sasha Skochilenko and Sofya Subbotina are planning to get married. That wasn’t an option in their native Russia, but it’s possible now that they live in Germany, which recognizes same-sex weddings.

“We don’t know how or in which city we will do it, but that’s the plan,” Skochilenko, 33, told the Associated Press, looking lovingly at Subbotina, who radiated happiness.

They reunited earlier this month in Germany, shortly after Skochilenko and other Russian prisoners were exchanged in a historic East-West swap — a happy if unlikely ending to an over two-year ordeal.

Skochilenko, an artist and musician, was jailed for speaking out against Russia’s war in Ukraine. Subbotina campaigned for her partner’s release while also trying to make her life behind bars as tolerable as possible.

They talked about marriage in Russia, too, but same-sex weddings have been effectively banned there. Laws restricting LGBTQ+ rights have been on the books for over a decade and intensified since the war began as part of the Kremlin’s campaign for “traditional values,” fueled by its anti-Western views and close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, “I feel that I’m in a really free country,” Subbotina said, as they make plans for a life together in the quiet city of Koblenz in western Germany.

Skochilenko was arrested in her native St. Petersburg in 2022, just weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, for replacing price tags in a supermarket with anti-war messages like saying that Russia bombed civilian targets. She was charged with making false statements about the military, part of the massive crackdown on all dissent over the invasion.

She struggled in pre-trial detention, suffering from chronic illness, including celiac disease, requiring gluten-free meals. Subbotina commuted to Skochilenko’s jail at least twice a week, bringing food, medicine and other necessities. She and their friends made sure the case, which drew public outrage, stayed in the headlines.

Last year, Subbotina was diagnosed with cancer. “I just felt like I was giving up, and honestly, I was just ready to die,” she said.

The couple didn’t see each other for a year. Since they weren’t married, investigators made Subbotina a witness in the case and refused to allow her visits or to receive phone calls from Skochilenko.

“It is not a small thing, when a person you love can’t visit you,” Skochilenko said.

Subbotina added it was “very painful,” noting that she knows many women who married imprisoned men — often with the wedding held in pre-trial detention facilities or in penal colonies.

“It gives them the right for long visits, it gives them the right to get phone calls, short visits, because they have a certain status in the eyes of the authorities,” she said. “We’ve never had this opportunity.”

Subbotina says she eventually was allowed short visits.

They were always very open about their relationship, despite laws against any public endorsement of LGBTQ+ activities, driven by President Vladimir Putin’s close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Skochilenko said it was clear in the early 2010s the Kremlin was headed in a “homophobic direction,” and some of the laws the authorities were adopting drove her to protest back then. In recent years, she said her openness was a form of activism.

People “often have distorted opinions about the LGBTQ+ community because they don’t know anyone” who loves someone of the same sex, and their views often change once they do, she said.

In November 2023, Skochilenko was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison — an unusually harsh verdict.

This summer, while awaiting an appeal hearing at a detention center in St. Petersburg, she said there was a point when she reached a particular point of desperation about her long sentence. She said she was traumatized by the lack of freedom and privacy, the constant body searches, and the persisting hunger from being unable to eat prison food.

Subbotina visited her in July, and Skochilenko recalls bursting into tears for the first time in months.

“I told her, ‘Sonya, I’m tired of wanting to go home. Please tell me that I won’t have to serve the entire sentence, that some miracle will happen.’ And she said, ‘Yes, why don’t you hope for a miracle?’” Skochilenko said.

That same day, a prison official told Skochilenko to “urgently” apply for a presidential pardon, she said. The artist did not want to admit guilt, but the official said she could simply explain her health problems. She wrote the request and forgot about it, thinking that it would take a long time to even process.

Several days later, she was transferred to Moscow without explanation. In the same van was Andrei Pivovarov, an imprisoned opposition politician that she knew from years earlier. There was hardly any reason for them both to be transferred at the same time, so it suggested that perhaps something good was happening.

Skochilenko spent several long days in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, where she was cold and hungry, unable to eat much of the food she was given.

Subbotina learned of the transfer and rushed to Moscow with a care package, visiting every detention center she could think of, without success.

The rest became what many Russians critical of the Kremlin describe as the first good news since the start of the war. On Aug. 1, Skochilenko and 15 others were put on a bus, driven to an airport and flown to Ankara, Turkey, where they were exchanged for eight Russians imprisoned in the West.

From Ankara, the former prisoners were flown to Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz greeted them on the tarmac. The next day, Skochilenko was finally able to embrace Subbotina, who flew to Germany when she heard the news.

The days since then have been “euphoric,” Skochilenko said, filled with small pleasures like walking and buying the food she wants — but also spending time with the woman she loves.

Subbotina particularly enjoys being able to hold Skochilenko’s hand and kiss her in public without worry. In Germany, she says, it is something that is “just in the nature of things.”

They’ve settled for now in Koblenz but want to visit other cities in Germany before they decide where to live permanently. They’re eager to learn German and begin their new lives.

Skochilenko plans to return to making art, displaying sketches she drew about the prisoner swap -– a moment in history in which she became an unlikely participant. She also said she intends to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from her time in prison.

Subbotina, a nurse and a pharmacist whose cancer treatment was successful in Russia, hopes to work in the human rights field and help the hundreds of political prisoners in her former country.

Both admit that they never expected to leave Russia in the way they did.

“I don’t feel stressed about moving, because I’m very happy. I’m very happy that Sasha is with me,” Subbotina said with a smile.

Added Skochilenko: “My relationship with Russia is over. I need to accept that. I’m glad there’s a new life.”

Source: Dasha Litvinova, “Russian artist released in swap builds a new life in Germany, now free to marry her partner,” Press Democrat, 12 August 2024. (“The Press Democrat, with the largest circulation in California’s North Bay, is a daily newspaper published in Santa Rosa, California.” Santa Rosa is twenty miles from Guerneville, both of which are located in California’s Sonoma County, which I have had the pleasure of visiting three times this year.)

On Friday, Trump appeared in Bozeman, Montana, marking his first public appearance since Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate. The former president took the stage later than scheduled, citing engine troubles on his plane. The event garnered significant attention from political pundits, especially in light of Trump’s declining poll numbers. Many speculated on how his campaign messaging might evolve. A noticeable shift emerged quickly: a heightened focus on attacking transgender people.

You can see a compilation of his attacks on transgender people here:

Erin in the Morning, “Trump Targets Trans People in Montana”

Trump’s initial attack targeted Imane Khelif, the Olympic athlete who was falsely accused by prominent right-wing figures of “being a man.” Trump commented on Khelif, saying, “I’d like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer. You saw he won—she won—the gold medal. How about the beautiful young Italian boxer? She got in there, didn’t know what was going on… she was a very good boxer, against other women. She didn’t count on this. She said, ‘OK, I had enough.’ It’s crazy what they are doing… this person won the gold medal. How crazy is this? And she wants it. She wants men to play in women’s sports.”

Imane Kehelif is not transgender, and has never transitioned. She was assigned female at birth, has always been cisgender, and was ruled out of competition by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after defeating an undefeated Russian boxer. Notably, the IBA is presided over by Umar Kremlev of Russia, and has been suspended by the International Olympic Committee due to corruption, judging scandals, and more.

Trump then shifted his focus to Tim Walz, declaring, “He signed a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender so that they go home… I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about her. This is her ideology, this is why she picked him. And he signed a bill allowing pedophiles to claim human rights protections under the state law.”

The law Trump referenced is Minnesota’s legislation designating the state as a refuge for transgender individuals seeking care across state lines. The law does not permit the state to “kidnap children.” This misconception arises from a misinterpretation of a provision that allows Minnesota to “take jurisdiction” in cases involving youth transitions where one parent resides in a state that criminalizes such care and the other in a state where it is legal, particularly during divorce or custody disputes. As for the claim of “allowing pedophiles to claim human rights protections,” this is also false. The confusion stems from the removal of pedophilia from the definition of sexual orientation, but pedophilia remains illegal under Minnesota law.

Finally, Trump addressed schools, stating that he would “remove funding from any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto the lives of our children.” While this could be referring to book bans, which have proliferated in many states, Trump might also be threatening to use similar tactics against schools that allow transgender youth to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, change their names, or avoid forcibly outing trans youth to their parents.

Attacks on transgender people have little record of electoral success, with similar efforts failing in many campaigns over the last few elections. In elections where Republicans made trans people the major issue, the Republican Party faltered: 70% of Moms for Liberty and Project 1776 candidates lost their races in 2023. In Kentucky, the American Principles Project spent millions on anti-trans ads against Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, who won by a larger margin than his first election. Other losses Republicans have suffered on this issue occurred in the Virginia legislature elections, the Arizona Governor’s race, the Michigan legislature elections, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the Walker-Warnock Senate race, and in dozens more places. Furthermore, recent polling from Gallup, Navigator, and the LA Times indicates fading public support for such laws, with huge majorities of respondents seeing them as a distraction and opposing bans on trans youth care.

Despite a history of limited success with these tactics, Trump seems to be doubling down on the issue in a desperate bid to boost his poll numbers. If he succeeds and regains office, transgender individuals could face unprecedented threats as his administration intensifies its targeting of their rights and protections.

Source: Erin Reed, “Seeing Falling Poll Numbers, Trump Targets Trans People In Montana,” Erin in the Morning, 13 August 2024

Tim

Source: The Current

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced that her pick for Vice President is Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. In recent years, as trans and queer people have come under attack from over a thousand proposed bills, Walz is expected to serve as a source of optimism for LGBTQ+ people. The governor’s long track record on LGBTQ+ rights positions him as a strong oppositional force against what has become a national attack on LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender individuals.

“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked Tim Walz to be my running mate. As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team. Now let’s get to work. Join us,” read Harris’ statement on Twitter.

Walz has taken decisive action against attacks on transgender people in surrounding states, making Minnesota a refuge for those seeking care. In 2023, he signed an executive order protecting transgender people from out-of-state prosecution if they seek care within Minnesota’s borders. The executive order also issued a bulletin to health insurance companies, mandating coverage and initiating investigations into health insurance denials in the state.

In 2024, Walz signed a bill banning the gay and transgender panic defense. This defense is often used to help individuals avoid murder charges or receive lighter sentences by asserting that they were “deceived” by a romantic partner who was gay or transgender. According to one study, the transgender panic defense has been used at least 351 times.

Walz’s pro-LGBTQ+ record goes back much further than his time as governor. In 1999, he sponsored the first gay-straight alliance at his high school while working as a teacher. In Congress, he co-sponsored the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Having a Vice President with a track record of protecting trans and queer people will be important for LGBTQ+ members of the Democratic Party. Currently, 24 states have passed bans on transgender care for youth and some adults. Nationally, Republicans are attempting to negotiate over 50 anti-LGBTQ+ provisions into the national budget, including bans on federal funding for any entity offering gender-affirming care for trans youth, as well as trans military bans for dependent care, threatening to shut down the government over such provisions. Walz’s history of fighting against anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ provisions could aid the White House in opposing such policies should Harris be elected President.

As for LGBTQ+ allies and organizations, they appear happy with the pick. Kelly Robinson of HRC stated, “Her pick of Governor Walz sends a message that a Harris-Walz Administration will be committed to advancing equality and justice for all. That is the choice we are faced with in America. A Trump-Vance Administration that would demonize LGBTQ+ people, terrorize our families, send our rights and freedoms back to The Land Before Time and install Project 2025. Or a Harris-Walz Administration that will fight for our freedoms, defend our families, and make America a place where people don’t just get by — but can get ahead.”

Source: Erin Reed, “Tim Walz Took Historic Action To Protect Trans People, Now He’s The Dem VP Choice,” Erin in the Morning, 6 August 2024

The Replacements, “Bastards of Young” (1985)

Ah

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung
Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
It beats pickin’ cotton and waitin’ to be forgotten

Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
The daughters and the sons

Clean your baby womb, trash that baby boom
Elvis in the ground, no way he’ll be here tonight
Income tax deduction, one hell of a function
It beats pickin’ cotton or waitin’ to be forgotten

Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
Now the daughters and the sons

Unwillingness to claim us, ya got no war to name us

The ones love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones love us least are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them

Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young
Daughters and the sons

Young, of young, young, young, young

Take it, it’s yours, take it, it’s yours
Take it, it’s yours, take it, it’s yours
Take it, it’s yours, take it, it’s yours
Take it, it’s yours, take it, it’s yours
Take it, it’s yours

Source: LyricFind

Today Vice President Kamala Harris named her choice for her vice presidential running mate: Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz grew up in rural Nebraska. He enlisted in the Army National Guard when he was 17 and served for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major, making him the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress, according to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.  

He went to college with the educational benefits afforded him by the Army, and graduated from Chadron (Nebraska) State College. From 1989 to 1990, he taught at a high school in China, then became a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, where he met fellow teacher Gwen Whipple, who became his wife. They moved to Minnesota, where they both continued teaching and had two children, Hope and Gus, through IVF. 

Walz became the faculty advisor for the school’s gay-straight alliance organization at the same time that he coached the high-school football team from a 0–27 record to a state championship. The advisor “really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz said in 2018. 

Walz ran for Congress in 2005 after some of his students were asked to leave a rally for George W. Bush because one of them had a sticker for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Walz won and served in Congress for twelve years, sitting on the House Agriculture Committee, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Voters elected Walz to the Minnesota state house in 2018, and in his second term they gave him a slim majority in the state legislature. With that support, Walz signed into law protections for abortion rights, supported gender-affirming care, and legalized the recreational use of marijuana. He signed into law gun safety legislation and protections for voting rights, and pushed for action to combat climate change and to promote renewable energy. 

Strong tax revenues and spending cuts gave the state a $17.6 billion surplus, and the Democrats under Walz used the money not to cut taxes, as Republicans wanted, but to invest in education, fund free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren, make tuition free at the state’s public colleges for students whose families earned less than $80,000 a year, and invest in paid family and medical leave and health insurance coverage regardless of immigration status. 

While MAGA Republicans are already trying to define Walz as “far left,” his votes in Congress put him pretty squarely in the middle.  His work with Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan to expand technology production and infrastructure funding in the state was rewarded in 2023, when Minnesota knocked Texas out of the top five states for business. The CNBC rating looked at 86 indicators in 10 categories, including the workforce, infrastructure, health, and business friendliness. 

Walz checks a number of boxes for the 2024 election, most notably that he hails from near the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and comes across as a normal, nice guy. He favors unions, workers’ rights, and a $15 minimum wage. He is also the person who coined the phrase that took away the dangerous overtones of today’s MAGA Republicans by dubbing them “weird.” As a student of his said: “In politics he’s good at calling out B.S. without getting nasty or too down in the dirt…. It’s the kind of common sense he showed as a coach: practical and kinda goofy.”

Walz is also a symbol of an important resetting of the Democratic Party. He has been unapologetic about his popular programs. On Sunday, July 28, when CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.” 

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” 

Right-wing reactionary politicians have claimed to represent ordinary Americans since the time of the passage of the Voting Rights Act—on August 6, 1965, exactly 59 years ago today—by insisting that a government that works for communities is a “socialist” plan to elevate undeserving women and racial, ethnic, and gender minorities at the expense of hardworking white men. 

Historically, though, rural America has quite often been the heart of the country’s progressive politics, and the Midwest has had a central place in that progressivism. Walz reintegrates that history with today’s Democratic Party. 

That reintegration has left the Republicans flatfooted. Trump and J.D. Vance expected to continue their posturing as champions of the common man, but on that front the credentials of a New York real estate developer who inherited millions of dollars and of a Yale-educated venture capitalist pale next to a Nebraska-born schoolteacher. Bryan Metzger, politics reporter at Business Insider, pointed out that J.D. Vance tried to hit Walz as a “San Francisco-style liberal,” but while Vance lived in San Francisco as a venture capitalist between 2013 and 2017, Walz went to San Francisco for the first time just last month. 

Head writer and producer of A Closer Look at Late Night with Seth Meyers Sal Gentile summed up Walz’s progressive politics and community vibe when he wrote on social media: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your [carburetor], replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door and put a new chain on your lawnmower.” 

Vice President Harris had a very deep bench from which to choose a running mate, but her choice of Walz seems to have been widely popular. Representatives [sic] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who are usually on opposite sides of the party, both praised the choice, prompting Ocasio-Cortez to post: “Dems in disconcerting levels of array.” 

Harris and Walz held their first rally together tonight in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who had been a top contender for the vice presidential slot, fired up the crowd. “Each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game, and to do our part,” he said. “Are you ready to do your part? Are you ready to form a more perfect union? Are you ready to build an America where no matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love, or who you pray to, that this will be a place for you? And are you ready to look the next president of the United States in the eye and say, ‘Hello, Madam President?’ I am too, so let’s get to work!”

Pennsylvania is a crucial state, and Shapiro issued a statement offering his “enthusiastic support” to the ticket. He pledged to work to unite Pennsylvanians behind my friends Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and defeat Donald Trump.”

—

Notes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-vice-president-tim-walz-career-facts-2024-8#tim-walz-was-born-in-rural-west-point-nebraska-in-1964-1

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/tim-walz-harris-vp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/08/02/tim-walz-kamala-harris/

https://apnews.com/article/business-minnesota-legislature-state-budgets-government-and-politics-99f78b46d4bd90ccb9f1ce7525f759f9

https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-harris-vice-president-walz-minnesota-006bca6e18be7ce39ef4bfd97547c3b5

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-ranked-as-a-top-state-for-businesses/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/tim-walz-is-kamala-harris-vp-pick-heres-his-record-on-voting-rights

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/climate-advocacy-groups-call-harris-walz-pairing-winning/story?id=112607332

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/how-gov-josh-shapiro-lost-vp-kamala-harris-tim-walz-20240806.html#loaded

X:

Fritschner/status/1820874987315613913

atrupar/status/1820944764843274286

atrupar/status/1820940281572724920

Acyn/status/1820943608595493026

JoshShapiroPA/status/1820827281658446166

metzgov/status/1820872498235253035

AOC/status/1820846151920230812

salgentile/status/1820815724178285013

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, “August 6, 2024,” Letters from an American, 7 August 2024

WHY WALTZ
Josh Shapiro would seemingly have been a much more interesting choice as a vice presidential candidate for Kamala Harris, but her choice was different. Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, won’t help with his state—Minnesota will vote Democrat anyway—but seems to pose less risk. (Although, it would seem, how much less risk could he pose?) He’s an army veteran, although he wasn’t in combat. He’s white, elderly, rural, and traditional, and he’s from a super reliable political coalition.

What I like about Waltz’s biography is that, before being elected to Congress fifteen years ago and then to the governorship, he was a teacher at a local school for over twenty years. He coached a local American football team that competed almost at the state level, and he was the head of the homosexual/non-homosexual friendship club at his school. I mean, he was just a regular, cool, interesting dude before he went into professional politics in his forties.

Source: Konstantin Sonin (Facebook), 6 August 2024

“It’s Showtime”: Open Space Moscow vs. SERB

Open Space is a project that supports grassroots activists. It has two sites, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with co-working spaces, a human rights center, and a psychological center. The Moscow site is at odds with the pro-government movement SERB, known for its provocations against the opposition. Republic correspondent Nikita Zolotarev is often at Open Space, sometimes as a volunteer. That was how he found himself at the Moscow co-working space last Saturday, where he was detained along with other visitors on the basis of a complaint filed by the “Serbs,” who were assisting the police, and then spent several hours at the Basmannoye police precinct. Here is how it went down.

“It’s showtime,” SERB leader Igor Beketov said on his movement’s video stream before knocking on Open Space’s door. He and another SERB activist, Pyotr Rybakov, were able to get inside after the police arrived.

SERB’s video recap of the SERB-assisted police raid on Open Space Moscow, as posted on their Telegram channel on 19 May 2024

“A circus is about to kick off,” a young woman sitting across from me named Thiya texted a friend at 6:09 p.m. A knock on the door distracted her from solving a strength of materials problem. Nine minutes later, she sent a new message, writing that “the Serbs and the police” had come in.

The [pro-regime] activists walked around filming anything they saw as “extremist propaganda” and drawing the attention of police officers to it. Thus, halting near a painted copy of “The Brotherly Kiss,” the famous photo of Brezhnev kissing [East German leader Erich] Honecker, Pyotr and Igor began explaining something to a policeman. “What does this mean?” Rybakov asked, pointing to the drawing. “Since Soviet leaders could do it, it turns out that…,” he answered his own question uncertainly. The police officer remained expressively silent and photographed the image just in case.

The photograph known as “The Brotherly Kiss” was taken in 1979 at a meeting between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in Berlin during the GDR’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations. Source: Regis Bossu/Sygma/Corbis

Then they went looking for members of Left Socialist Action (Levoe sotsialisticheskoe deistvie, or LevSD, for short), having prudently abbreviated the name of the organization to “LSD,” because, after perusing “the page of this movement, [they] saw that it does not smell of any left-wing movement.” What exactly they did not fancy about “LSD” on a day when the latter were holding “an evening of letters from some political prisoners” remains unclear.

“They came and almost broke down the door,” recalls Anastasia, who organized the event. The SERB activists asked her why her movement was holding an event in support of Ukraine, a conclusion at which they arrived after seeing a couple of posts with Ukrainian flags on Lev SD’s Telegram channel. Anastasia tried to persuade them that such “flags are posted after the massive shelling of Ukrainian cities to express condolences.” A brief discussion ensued, whose acme was the following question from Pyotr Rybakov: “Did you see Soviet people publishing posts in support of Germany during the bombing of Dresden?”

This discussion was witnessed by Anastasia’s friend Andrei, a expert on the history of Yugoslavia. He was surprised that Pyotr “probably didn’t know that there was no Telegram back then” and asked what, in Pyotr’s opinion, “equates the Great Patriotic War [World War Two] with current events.” The “Serb” responded by comparing Zelensky’s regime to Hitler’s, dubbing it “absolutely fascist.” After mentioning NATO, they smoothly segued to the bombing of Yugoslavia. This discussion did not last long: Pyotr soon ran out of arguments against the facts Andrei presented. The culmination of their conversation was when Andrei asked whether the SERB activist had read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, to which Pyotr replied that he had “never read Bunin.” Andrei recalls this conversation with a little annoyance: he says that if they had more time, he would have tried to wheedle some “less cannibalistic” information out of this “ideologically charged man” and “make him think.”

SERB leader Igor Beketov (aka Gosha Tarasevich) and his associate Pyotr Rybakov, both wearing black-and-orange scarves. Source: theins.ru.

At 6:32 p.m., a police officer let some of the people who wanted to smoke out by going out with them. It was as if he knew what the visitors were going to experience a little later.

In addition to writing letters to political prisoners event, a session of board games under the auspices of the Libertarian Party of Russia was being held in the basement of the co-working space. As organizer Vladislav tells it, the libertarians were having a quiet time when Open Space volunteer Sasha suddenly appeared and said, “We’ve got a situation: the police have showed up, the ‘Serbs’ have showed, but so far everything is fine.”

“We took note. I won at Jenga: my buddy had happily wrecked the tower,” recalls Vladislav. After that, he went to make coffee on the first floor of Open Space—where he saw the “Serbs” writing a complaint to the police.

At that moment, Andrei, the expert on Yugoslavia, made a terrible blunder for which he repented long afterwards: he offered the provocateurs Roshen caramels, a Ukrainian brand. On the table with the tea bags there was a metal box, where volunteers put sweets that keep for a long time. The ill-fated caramels were in this box on the day in question.

“Subtle trolling,” Beketov said.

“Everyone knows that Roshen belongs to [former Ukrainian president Petro] Poroshenko,” Rybakov added.

“You can’t get these candies so easily in Moscow—you have to make an effort to find them,” the SERB leader noted.

Forgetting about their complaint to the police, the “Serbs” paced the room talking about Roshen candies. Everyone else in the room was silent, listening attentively to their arguments. But since the entire candy argument consisted of no more than five sentences per two people—Beketov and Rybakov kept repeating the same thing—their listeners could barely contain themselves from laughing. “Sometimes candy is just candy,” Open Space volunteer Sasha finally told them and suggested they taste the caramels, adding that they were delicious. The activists resisted. “Roshen is good quality, no one is arguing about that. But they are Ukrainian candies!” they said. The conversation about candy was interrupted only by the advent of a paddy wagon.

Rybakov and Beketov writing their complaints to the police during the raid on Open Space, 18 May 2024: Source: social media

The people at the board game event hastily made to leave, but a police officer soon came down to them, and, according to Vladislav, “it was clear [we] would spend the next few hours in a less comfortable place.” The moment the policeman stepped away, Vladislav “snuck through a window.” The policeman shouted after him, summoning his partner, but Vladislav managed to escape to a subway station. Not knowing what to do, he wrote on the Libertarian Party’s Telegram channel that the police had begun detaining attendees at their event.

First, the attendees of the two events and several visitors to the space who were just minding their own business were dispatched to the police bus. One of the detainees calmly recalled how she went to the police bus: “Going to the police station isn’t the same as digging a ditch, and I was so tired anyway I wasn’t about to resist. It was a comfortable ride, but it’s a pity they didn’t bring me back.”

Anastasia, who for some reason was transported to the station separately from the others, recalls how she “snapped at the policemen while dying inside.” When asked if she had any sharp objects for stabbing or cutting, she “blurted out that only her tongue was sharp.” The policeman was amused, and a small exchange of pleasantries ensued, but he stopped laughing at her jokes as they neared the Basmannoye precinct.

Ten Open Space visitors went on the first trip to the station. I was among the second batch of six detainees. There were five seats on the Ford Transit bus, not counting the seats reserved for officers, and between the seats was a table, which Thiya occupied by placing the worksheets with the strength of material problems on it.

“More comfortable than in a economy class sleeping car,” said one of the detainees.

The “Serbs” stood by the police vehicle, taking turns proclaiming “Open Space is closed!” They seemed to enjoy the play on words. They too headed to the police station to file their complaint.

The Open Space detainees in the educational classroom at Basmannoye police precinct. Source: social media

We were taken to an educational classroom, where some of the people detained earlier were already located, as well as a couple of people who had been brought to the precinct independently of us—a young man detained for brawling and a woman who had attempted to strangle her sister. Some of the Open Space people were in another office. As transpired later, the officers wanted to take their fingerprints, and several people consented.

As one of the detainees recalls, when the officer “was taking our prints he referred to some order issued by [Interior Minister Vladimir] Kolokoltsev, dated such-and-such a day in July 2023, that all those brought to police precinctd must be fingerprinted.” There is no such order. Moreover, according to Article 13, Paragraph 19 of the Federal Law “On the Police,” an officer has the right to fingerprint a detainee only if their identity cannot be ascertained in any other way. Since almost all the detainees had [their internal] passports with them, they were used to establish their identities. And those detainees who refused to be fingerprinted and later signed statements that they refused to undergo the procedure, left the precinct even earlier than those who had been fingerprinted.

The key question we were all asked by the interrogators was whether we had anything to do with LGBT and whether we were involved in any activities related to this movement. Yevgeny, a lawyer who aid the LevSD detainees, recounted that all the police officers with whom he spoke were convinced that “this was some kind of LGBT gathering, a gay bar and so on.”

“When I told them about the event to aid political prisoners, they started telling me, ‘Come on, stop pitching us a yarn,'” the defense lawyer recalled. In response to the flyer for the event, which Yevgeny showed them, the officers told him, “That’s how they encrypt themselves.”

Around 8 p.m., we were given water and food, and journalists and a support group gathered under the windows of the classroom. At that time we were called out of the classroom to make our statements. It was my turn.

“You’ll tell me all about LGBT. I’ll tell you something too.”

With these words the interrogator started lazily looking for the copy of my passport and preparing a blank form for my statement. At that moment someone called him—probably some supervisor giving additional instructions. The interrogator mostly agreed with what the caller was saying, only at one point he uttered, “They’re mostly came to play board games, that’s all.”

Our conversation flowed smoothly, albeit with a few, brief lyrical digressions.

“What were you doing there?” the interrogator asked in a tired voice.

“I was helping Thiya do her homework, on strength of materials, as it turns out. She still has those strength of materials worksheets with there.”

“Oh, I see. Shear and moment diagrams and all that?” he asked, drawling the phrase.

I rejoiced.

“Yes. Maybe you can help her out later?”

“No, I forgot most of that stuff a long time ago.”

Another officer passed behind me, and my interrogator seemed to come to life.

“Listen, wait! There should be a broad in red pants out there. You cannot let her go!”

His colleague shared his worries.

“Everyone refuses to be fingerprinted.”

“The hell with them. What matters is the woman in red pants…. Don’t let anyone go at all!”

He was talking about Sasha, the Open Space volunteer.

“Nobody’s going anywhere.”

“That’s fucking great.” After a little silence, he added, drawling his words again, “The journalists haven’t arrived yet for some reason. But never mind.”

“Are you expecting them?” I asked with hope in my voice.

“They already filmed me.”

And then he complained me about how he wanted to get home, how he had already “one foot in [my] slipper, and then your gang arrived.” Suddenly, in an animated voice, he asked the key question of the evening:

“What’s up with LGBT?”

“I don’t know anything, I haven’t seen anything, I don’t belong to LGBT.”

“You getting married soon?”

“I am getting married soon,” I said, and showed him my engagement ring.

Trying to guess what material the ring was made of, he let me read the statement. When I asked him if I could get a copy of it just in case, he waved me off, saying, “Don’t even think about it.” I quoted The Heart of a Dog, the passage about the “ultimate in certificates,” but it transpired that the interrogator had not “waded through” the novella. And he had not watched he movie version, either, because it was, from his point of view, a “cheesy farce.” He and I parted on these words.

Inside Basmannoye police precinct

While I was giving my statement, an officer came into the educational classroom and asked whether there was a “competent person” among those present, meaning someone legally literate, apparently, someone whou would write a refusal to be photographed and fingerprinted, so that everyone could write their own refusals using his as their model. Such a “competent person” was found, and the question itself provoked laughter among the detainees.

After my return to the “waiting area,” Thiya went to her interview, her strength of materials worksheets in tow. She returned twenty minutes later with a look of bewilderment on her face. The fact is that she is getting married soon—but not to me—and in the process of making her statement, the interrogator, after finding out that Thiya also had nothing to do with LGBT and was also getting married soon, assumed that she was getting married to me. Thiya wasn’t about to argue with him.

The interrogator reread her statement aloud: “I am getting married. I am not inviting the chief of police.”

“The above is an accurate record of my statement,” Thiya added in writing to the end.

One of the detainees who heard this conversation saw my surprised face—I was planning to marry someone else after all—and gave me a piece of advice.

“When questioned later, you answer that it was dark, and that’s why you mixed up [the fiancees].”

“Uh-huh. I was drunk, I don’t remember!” I joked back, and we laughed together.

“Seryoga, did you count the number of [detainees]?” one of the officers asked my interrogator in the meantime.

“I don’t fucking know. How many are there supposed to be? There’s a whole fucking busload of them, a whole fucking classroom of them. Count them as a pack,” Seryoga the interrogator replied. At some point he took the worksheets from detainee Thiya, scrutinized them, and pointed out a flaw in the diagram to her.

Meanwhile, Vladislav the libertarian was walking towards the police station—he wanted to support his comrades. His fellow party member Georgy Belov was signaling to him from the window: fearing that Vladislav would be detained by the police, he waved his hand at him, telling him to get away. One of the officers at the Basmannoye police department did head toward Vladislav, but he managed to escape again. He then went to the store to buy food to give to his fellow party members and, as he put it, “our buddies from LevSD.” Some time later, LevSD and LPR agreed to hold joint events, primarily debates.

At 8:30 p.m., the officers at the station detained Vladislav all the same. When he and the other libertarians at large brought the care package, the policemen noticed him standing under the windows and took him inside.

Vladislav the libertarian is detained outside Basmannoye police station. Source: Rus News

My attention was drawn to a female detainee who at some point started making postcards for political prisoners. She said that she would send them with the note “A postcard from Basmanny police station.” Someone wanted to work, but since there was no free Internet in the department, they were unable to. “I’m giving them a negative rating for not having wi-fi,” a young woman joked.

Anastasia was indignant.

“We are locked up here, a group of people who were not involved in anything criminal at all, while locked up here as well are a young man who was nicked for brawling and a woman who tried to strangled her sister. Instead of dealing with these people, the cops are dealing with political activists.”

This made her so angry that she stopped being afraid.

At some point, all the officers in the precinct left our part of the department. The metal door leading to the officers opens with a key card, so we had no communication with them. For a little over an hour we had “free time.” Everyone socialized, joked, and planned where they would go to drink beer after we were released, while some of the detainees chatted with the support group outside since the windows were open. And if it were not for the bars on those windows, it might have seemed that the detainees had not even left the co-working space.

From Open Space to Basmannoye police precinct. Source: social media

At around 10 p.m., the interrogator and another officer (the head of the department, probably) brought all the paperwork. They caloled the detainees by name, collecting their papers—the copies of their passports, fingerprinting refusals, and statements—and handing back their passports and escorting them to the queue for release.

At first, those who had not been fingerprinted were released, because “the staff had lost their fingers” [sic]. At 10:07 p.m., I found myself outside with a group of detainees. We waited for the others to be released. Journalists taped our commentary for their news dispatches. At that time, Sasha, the Open Space volunteer in the red pants, was driven away by the Basmannoye police officers for an inspection of the “crime scene,” during which they confiscated several stickers and posters. The last detainee, libertarian Georgy Belov, was released at 11:34 p.m.

Activist Alexandra (“Sasha”) Kalistratova on the seizure of stickers and posters in Open Space by law enforcers.
Source: Rus News (Telegram)

“I feel like we had an interesting, productive time, but it was complete fucking rubbish per se,” said one of the female detainees. “Saturday night was unforgettable,” concluded Andrei.

Left Socialist Action members after their release. Source: Left Socialist Action (Telegram)

Source: Nikita Zolotarev, “Theater of the Absurd at Basmannoye Police Station: Provocateurs and Police vs. Letters to Political Prisoners and Libertarian Board Games,” Republic, 25 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Higher

Once regarded as one of Russia’s liberal universities, the Higher School of Economics (HSE) has become a reactionary hellhole in recent years. Photo: Sofia Sandurskaya/Moskva Agency/Moscow Times

The Higher School of Economics (HSE) has forbidden applicants applying to its journalism program from quoting “foreign agents.” Any mention of people with this status or their publications will cause the results of admissions exams or interviews to be annulled, the university’s regulations say.

Applicants are also obliged to comply with the law “On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to their Health and Development.” They are thus not permitted to use materials “promoting” LGBT, “gender reassignment” and “denying family values” in their admissions applications.

A screenshot of the anti-“LGBT” and anti-“foreign agents” clause in HSE’s regulations for the oral interview taken by applicants to its bachelor’s program in journalism.

The application to HSE’s bachelor’s program in journalism involves undergoing a “creative test”: applicants [discuss] a “literary or sociopolitical” topic. The regulations state that the future journalists must demonstrate “an original position and awareness of current events and problems.”

Russian laws do not prohibit using and disseminating materials published by “foreign agents,” and only registered media outlets are obliged to flag individuals and organizations who have been designated as such.

Journalist Renat Davletgildeyev, who once served on HSE’s admissions committee, explained that in years past, applicants were, on the contrary, encouraged to mention the media outlets now designated “foreign agents.”

“I remember when we used to administer these exams at Vyshka [HSE’s nickname in Russian] and would give applicants the maximum score if they quoted the cool journalists and the media outlets who today make up the bulk of ‘foreign agents’ (in other words, the list of honest and cool journalists and media). I feel sorry for my alma mater. But it’s long been clear where things were headed,” he wrote.

[Last week], it transpired that the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg had announced that the use of feminitives by students was unacceptable. The leaders of student organizations were warned that the presence of such words even in conversations on social networks would be tantamount to involvement in the “international LGBT movement,” which has been deemed an “extremist” organization by the Russian authorities.

Previously, the HSE fired several lecturers for their anti-war stance, banned the remaining instructors from talking about political topics, and installed surveillance to monitor them, said Igor Lipsits, doctor of economics, who resigned his post at the university. According to him, cameras were installed even in classrooms under the pretext of “quality control,” but in reality they were meant to censor and purge instructors who did not agree with the Kremlin’s policy.

Source: “Higher School of Economics Applicants Banned from Quoting ‘Foreign Agents,'” Moscow Times Russian Service, 31 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader