Trans women risk being held back and sent to war in Ukraine
Right now a good transgender friend of mine is at the train station in Lviv in Ukraine seeking a way out of the country. She and her family managed at last to get out of the bombing of Kharkiv. But I fear she is not safe yet. Ukrainian border guards hold back people with an M in their passports, as they are seen as potential recruits.
The photo above is not of my friend. It is from an article over at Vice and the photo is of Zi Faámelu, a a 31-year-old trans woman from Kyiv.
Faámelu says:
“Like hundreds of trans people in Ukraine, I am a woman, but I have ‘male’ in my passport and on all my ID, so this is a war within a war. Ukrainian trans people were already fighting for their lives.”
“There are hundreds of us stuck like this, living miserable lives. We need some influence from abroad. We need people to write to their politicians and charities to help us.”
Trans people in Ukraine can obtain legal gender recognition, Vice points out, but human rights groups have called the process “abusive”, as it “violates the rights to privacy and physical integrity.”
Any person with a male gender marker on their legal documents — aged 18 to 60 — have been banned from leaving the country.
Let me be very clear about this: Vladimir Putin is a Fascist tyrant and the war against Ukraine is a war against humanity, against democracy and against the freedom of us all. The Ukrainian authorities have my full support in their courageous battle against the invaders.
I can also understand the idea that you encourage even non-military people to stay and join the forces fighting the attackers. In desperate times you do desperate things. Still, what worries me is that they continue to use assigned gender as a basis for who are going to fight and who are not, instead of skills and general fitness.
It is not that transgender women cannot and should not fight per se. The problem is that so many of them are so traumatized already, that invalidating their identity because of an M in the passport and then giving them guns to fight as men may utterly destroy them.
Being held back at the border does not automatically mean that my friend will be sent to the front. But it means that she has to stay in a war zone, separated from her family. That is not good! Moreover, my friend is not fit to fight on the front line and it serves no one to force her to do so.
UPDATE: We know that the Norwegian organizations Rosa kompetanse and Fri are involved in establishing a coalition of European LGBT+-organizations that are to help Ukrainian transgender refugees, both as regards getting out of Ukraine and finding help across the border. They are already assisting trans women past the “men must serve” barrier. It helps if the trans woman in question has documents that proves her transgender status.
European Pride is asking for money contributions in support of Pride activists in Ukraine. The donations go to will go to Kyiv Pride and Kharkiv Pride.
Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt.
