Russian lawmakers have rejected legislation drafted more than a year ago that would have forbid transgender persons from getting married. The bill proposed a ban on marriages where one or both of the individuals hoping to be wed has had sex reassignment surgery or is in the process of sex reassignment at the time of the marriage.
The State Duma’s Committee on Family, Women, and Children Affairs refused to endorse the legislation, saying Russia’s laws already stipulate that marriages can only take place between a man and a woman, reported the Gazeta.ru news website.
Despite the legal obstacles, some transgender people in Russia have successfully “gamed the system,” registering marriages thanks to the formalities of their state identification records. In March 2016, for instance, Reid Lynn and Sophia Grozovsky, a transgender man and transgender woman, were legally wed in Moscow, thanks to their official documents identifying them as a woman and a man, respectively.
You can read more about the lives of Russia’s transgender people in a report published earlier this year by the news website Meduza, translated into English here.
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