In a scene eerily reminiscent of a 1960’s cold war era novel, the young woman sat nervously at the outside table of the café not far from the museum district and main railroad station in St.
Petersburg, chain smoking French Gitanes and toying with the food on her plate in front of her. She kept nervously glancing around as if she expected to suddenly be swept up in a secret police raid.
The primary cause of her anxiety and discomfiture she explained to the journalist sitting across the table from her, was that as a transgender woman, she felt threatened and afraid.
Unable to continue to live in her native region in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, [region] in the Ural mountains she had moved first to the Russian capital of Moscow.