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War has made life even harder for trans people in Ukraine [1]
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Date: 2023-02
“I felt like the whole world was trying to break me once more, like it was against me again,” says Polina Skvortsova, about the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February.
Skvortsova, a 36-year-old trans woman living in Kyiv, says that before 24 February she’d only just started to emerge from a period of financial struggles, worsened by poor mental health. The invasion crushed her hopes for the future: in the past year she has had to move from one unstable housing situation to another, been unable to work and partially lost access to hormone therapy.
“I had a bad financial situation even before 24 February,” says Skvortsova, a self-taught and self-employed computer technician, who takes orders for repairs via Facebook. “But I had a clear plan for how to get out of it, and it was working. Because of the war, I fell backwards again.”
Although there’s no official statistical data on the number of trans people in Ukraine, 7,000 Ukrainians received a permit for a transition between 2016 and 2019, according to an analytical report by the Center of Social Expertise.
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For many trans people in Ukraine, including Skvortsova, the war has aggravated already precarious living situations. Since a row with her transphobic father in 2010, Skvortsova has lived in Kyiv, hundreds of miles away from her family home in the Kherson region. She has experienced persistent financial hardship and suffers from depression.
As well as the rising inflation and deteriorating economic situation facing all Ukrainians, trans people have additional obstacles to deal with. Medical treatment has become patchy – the price of hormone therapy drugs, for instance, has shot up by 20% – and changing one’s official documents is even more difficult than it used to be.
People’s need to complete their legal transition has also become more urgent, so they can flee the country or avoid trouble with Ukraine’s conscription office. And every encounter with officials and the police brings a risk of being harassed and humiliated.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-trans-people-war-lgbt-gender-identity-documents-hormones/
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