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

The Russian Reader Reads: Havli

This is the first in a series of posts in which I showcase a few 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 I would otherwise be utterly clueless.

Peter Leonard describes Havli as “a Central Asia-themed Substack written by me, Peter Leonard, a former editor at Eurasianet and the one-time Central Asia correspondent for the Associated Press. By drawing on my decades of experience visiting, studying and reporting on the region, I intend to make this newsletter an informative and, fingers crossed, engaging way to keep abreast of developments of note.”

Mr. Leonard’s latest post on Havli dovetails with so many of political and social trends I’ve been tracing over the years that it seems tailor-made for my website. Enjoy! I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Havli and supporting it financially. \\\ TRR

Closed-circuit television footage showing a teacher at a Tashkent school grabbing a pupil by the neck.

In the worst-case scenario, giving a teacher lip usually ends with the offending pupil visiting the headmaster’s office.

Things have to get pretty bad for a classroom kerfuffle to provoke a diplomatic incident.

A teacher at a school in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, managed to do just that this week by manhandling a pupil who complained that she was conducting her Russian language class entirely in Uzbek. Closed-circuit television footage obtained by the boy’s parents shows the teacher grabbing the child by the neck, and then slapping and screaming at him.

The video images quickly circulated on social media, eliciting howls of protest from self-avowed Russian patriots indignant at this alleged case of maltreatment of their ethnic kinfolk.

“You can just imagine what a racket there would be if a similar thing happened in Russia with a migrant. And it is not like Uzbekistan is confronting a wave of ethnic crime from Russia; you don’t get murderers, thugs, drug dealers, and Wahhabis going there from our country,” wrote the author of a Telegram account that disseminated the footage.

This was quite the overreach. Expatriate labourers from Central Asia living in Russia face systematic harassment and violence, often from the police. This happens so frequently it barely makes the news.

The spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Moscow was quick to demand an investigation.

“If it is justified, action must be taken against the perpetrator of this cruel treatment against the child,” Maria Zakharova said. “We are monitoring this situation closely.”

The response from Uzbekistan was swift. Alisher Kadyrov, the deputy speaker of parliament, suggested that Russia “mind its own internal business.”

“The rights of this child are being violated in a school in Uzbekistan, the offence was committed against a child of an Uzbek citizen, and measures will be taken on the basis of laws adopted on behalf of the people of Uzbekistan,” he wrote on Telegram.

Uzbek Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov delivered the same message in person, albeit more obliquely, to his Russian counterpart on the sidelines of the ongoing United Nations General Assembly, noting that their meeting “underscored the importance of commitment of states to the principle of non-interference to each other’s internal affairs.”

Following this outcry, news emerged that the teacher at the Tashkent school assaulted another pupil in an unrelated incident and has since been sentenced to serve seven days in jail.

Moscow shows every sign of relishing the opportunity to make hay of this episode.

Claims of Central Asia’s allegedly spiralling Russophobia problem have been wielded with increasing readiness by surrogates for the Russian authorities since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin perceives the region’s rulers as more or less loyal, but it worries that the general public is not as reliably slavish. The nightmare scenario for Moscow is that a groundswell of anti-Russia sentiment across parts of Central Asia could eventually force a gradual shift in diplomatic stances.

The concern looks overblown at present, but it is not fully unjustified.

Older generations, especially the shrinking cohort with vivid memories of the Soviet Union, are typically more sympathetic to Russia and its bellicose conduct. Younger people whose media diet does not consist of consuming Russian state propaganda are more hostile.

Russian chauvinists are alarmed that the increasingly exclusive use of local languages in Central Asia is weakening their ability to project their message.

Research by Central Asia Barometer, an attitudes-surveying think tank, suggests that there is some association between language use and views on the war in Ukraine. Russian speakers in countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are more likely to justify the invasion of Ukraine than those who speak their own languages.

Fears that the status of Russian is slipping leads at times to comically petty whining.

Earlier this year, famous Russian TV presenter Tina Kandelaki complained in a Telegram post that Kazakhstan was poised to rename a number of train stations to make them sound less Russian. She cast this move — which comprised in the event of changing names like Railway Siding No. 13 to Akshi Railway Siding — as the start of a slippery slope that would end with the closure of Russian schools, the banning of the Russian language and “[Russian] pensioners getting kicked out into the cold.”

Historians in Central Asia crafting narratives that highlight the negative aspects of Russian and Soviet rule are another trigger. The mere suggestion that the region owes its civilisation to an era pre-dating the arrival of the Russians is enough to irk some.

In August, scholars from all over the region assembled at the Eurasian National University in Astana for the first-ever edition of the Forum of Historians of Central Asian States. “It is important for us to begin to rethink our common history,” Kazakh Science and Higher Education Minister Sayasat Nurbek told the scholars.

Mirziyoyeva is taking a leading role in lobbying for a vision of Uzbekistan’s history that looks beyond the role of the Russians and the Soviet Union.

The political elite has taken the lead on this. Saida Mirziyoyeva, a senior advisor to her father, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, in August delivered a speech in Kazakhstan that strongly signals what areas of the official narrative on recent history will be emphasised going forward. She alluded in her talk to a pair of reformist and softly nationalist movements that emerged in what are today Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as having been thwarted by Soviet oppressors.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, both the Jadids and representatives of the Alash movement fought for a single goal: the liberation of the people, for the development of their motherlands. But they were not given the opportunity to realise their dreams,” she said.

Russian critics of this kind of talk smell a rat.

They point to the content of one history textbook in Uzbekistan as evidence of dangerous revisionism. A passage from a book cited by outraged Russian patriots talks of how the “Soviet regime subordinated Uzbekistan’s economy to the interests of the centre, turning it into a raw materials appendage.” This is loathsome ingratitude designed to demonise Russians, they grumble.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are far more economically dependent on Russia than either Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, but they too have in their own small ways worked to forge narratives that are gently but implicitly critical of the legacy of Muscovite rule. In July, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov officially recognized five victims of Soviet repression as founders of the modern statehood of Kyrgyzstan. All the men were executed in 1930s during waves of Stalinist repressions against perceived nationalist movements.

That anti-nationalist campaign was the same one that crushed the Jadidist and Alash movements referenced by Mirziyoyeva.

Central Asian leaders periodically try to soothe the nerves of Russians eager to winkle out evidence of xenophobia in the region.

In his address to the nation earlier this month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev reprised a tried-and-tested Astana mantra.

“In Kazakhstan, there is no — and cannot be any — space for discrimination on linguistic, religious, ethnic or social grounds,” he said. “Incidents and provocations do sometimes occur, but these happen because of the thoughtlessness and ignorance of individual citizens. When these things happen, they are dealt with — and will [always] be dealt with — by law enforcement agencies.”

The large community of vocal Russian revanchists monopolising the public conversation inside their country do not buy it. And they are seizing on any excuse to make their point heard.

Source: Peter Leonard, “Russophobia panic fanned by school scuffle in Uzbekistan,” Havli, 27 September 2024. The link in the sixth paragraph was put there by me. \\\ TRR