On a remote farm in Siberia, a man gave Ada a knife. In front of them stood a pig.
“Cut it off,” he said. “If you want to go ahead with the operation, you have to understand what castration is.”
Ada was 23 years old and transgender. After coming out to her family, she was deceived and sent to a conversion therapy center.
She says that earlier in the summer of 2021, a family member asked her to go with her to Novosibirsk, where she was scheduled to undergo major heart surgery.
Ada tells that they were met at the airport by a man and after a long drive the car suddenly stopped. Ada’s relative jumped out of the car, the driver turned to Ada, demanded that she hand over her smartwatch and phone and told her bluntly: “Now we will cure you of your perversion.”
“It wasn’t until a package of warm clothes arrived two weeks later that I realized I wouldn’t be there for just two weeks or a month,” she adds, saying she was forced to take testosterone, pray and do manual labor, such as chopping wood.
When confronted with the pig, she had a panic attack and did not do as she was told.
Nine months later she managed to escape. Someone had left a phone lying around, which she used to call the police.
They sent officers to the center, who said that Ada had to be allowed to leave because she was being held against her will.
The BBC contacted the centre, but the person we spoke to denied any knowledge of conversion therapy programmes. We also contacted Ada’s family member, but received no response.
Ada’s time there was the low point in a battle she says she has been fighting all her life – first with her family, then with wider society and now with Russia’s increasingly draconian LGBT laws.
According to Graeme Reid, an independent expert at the UN, the human rights of transgender people in Russia are being systematically eroded by the government’s broader political strategy to target vulnerable minorities.
A year after Russia passed a law banning sex reassignment surgery, he says transgender people in Russia have been deprived of their “most fundamental rights to a legal identity and access to health care”.
The new law also bans people from changing their personal details on documents. Ada was one of the last people to have her name officially changed before the law came into effect in July 2023.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has been vocal about the West and LGBT rights, saying he is fighting for traditional Russian values. At a cultural forum in St. Petersburg last year, he dismissed transgender people as “transformers or trans-somethings.”
And in late 2023, the Russian Ministry of Justice announced yet another ruling, declaring the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization.
It didn’t matter that no such organization existed. Anyone found guilty of supporting what is now considered “extremist activity” faces up to 12 years in prison. Even displaying a rainbow flag carries a fine and a possible four-year prison sentence for repeat offenses.
In one of the first prosecutions under the new law, two tearful and terrified youths appeared in court in the city of Orenburg in March. Their crime was running a bar frequented by the LGBT community. Their case is still ongoing.
After escaping from the center in Siberia, Ada moved to a small apartment in Moscow, where she provided other transgender people with a safe place to stay. But the new laws were the last straw for her.
“I couldn’t stay any longer… I had to leave Russia,” she says from her new home in Europe.
For Francis, who left Russia in 2018, the new laws mean he will likely never return home. Even before they were implemented, authorities in his home city of Yekaterinburg had already taken action against him.
“As long as I can remember, I knew I wasn’t a girl,” he says. But by 2017, he had married Jack, had three children, and adopted two more.
“I said to my husband, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’m transgender.’”
They agreed that Francis should see a doctor. “They said, ‘You are transgender, 100%.’ I felt so much better. Everything fell into place… I understood – this is who I am.”
He began the transition process, but local authorities soon intervened. Their two adopted children were placed in care, and Francis was told that their biological children would be next.
The family left Russia and has lived in Spain ever since.
Ally, who is non-binary and uses the pronoun “they,” left Russia in 2022 after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was a political decision, unrelated to pressure on the LGBT community, but that pressure has taken its toll nonetheless.
When Ally was 14, someone asked, “Are you a girl or a boy?”
“It gave me such a feeling of joy – I was so happy that she couldn’t see it in my appearance.”
Years later they told a friend, “I don’t think I’m a girl, but I don’t think I’m a boy either.”
“She looked at me and said, ‘Oh, okay. Right.’ And then we went back to eating soup. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
Ally now lives in Georgia and decided to have a mastectomy last year. Close family members still don’t know.
“If I had just gone to my parents and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m a lesbian,’ it would have been easier to say, ‘Mom, Dad, I cut off my breasts and I want you to call me ‘she.'”
Although Ally had a medical diagnosis before the new Russian law banning gender reassignment and had chosen a new gender-neutral name, it is no longer possible to have passports and other important documents changed.
Francis has the same problem. All his documents show his old name, which causes confusion when he is asked for ID or has to fill out forms. But he says life in Spain is good. He has found work in a textile factory, which he loves.
Like Ally, Francis acknowledges that the climate of intolerance created by new anti-LGBT laws has made relationships with family more difficult.
“My mother doesn’t speak to me anymore,” he says. “She thinks I’ve brought shame on our family and she’s ashamed to look the neighbors in the eye. It’s like I’m a freak, or a thief, or I killed someone.”
And being a Russian living abroad while the war in Ukraine continues can add another layer of complexity, Ally says: “In Russia, the authorities and the conservative parts of society don’t like us because we’re transgender. Abroad, people don’t like us because we’re Russian.”
All the transgender community really wants, Ada says, is “for people to be able to dress the way they want and not be afraid of getting beat up… I just want people to stop thinking about how to survive.”
