Putin’s Crackdown Leaves Transgender Russians Bracing for Worse
Jan Dvorkin had raised and nurtured his adopted son in Moscow for seven years until, one day in May, the Russian authorities notified him they were revoking custody.
A woman Mr. Dvorkin knew had filed an official complaint, saying that because he was transgender and gay, he was an unfit parent.
When Mr. Dvorkin asked the woman why she had reported him, she told him he had brought it on himself, and “that I could have easily avoided it by staying in the closet.” He managed to find another family to take the boy, who is deaf, so that the child would not be sent to an orphanage.
Mr. Dvorkin’s experience underscores the increasingly repressive treatment gay and transgender people are subjected to across Russia — a hardship that seems certain to grow as the government leverages the war in Ukraine as justification for greater restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q.
