With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the representatives of the LGBTQ community in the occupied territories found themselves in a zone of increased risk. The already discriminatory Russian legislation against the community was strengthened last year, first by banning transgender transition, and later by declaring the "international LGBT movement" to be extremists.
During the full-scale invasion, reports of abuse, violence and torture of activists or community representatives are coming from the occupied territories: some people were kept "in the basement" [torture chamber], another person was left in the the forest shot in the leg. The full picture is still unknown. Only in southern regions of Ukraine, activists managed to bring from the occupied territories about 350 LGBTQ people. Suspilne tells the stories of two people who managed to escape despite all the risks.
"I stopped taking care of myself in order to arouse disgust in case they would want to rape me"
"I have not been in touch for a month and a half. I changed the SIM card and called my friend from Kyiv. She said, "I knew you would survive," a striking blonde is leisurely rolling a cigarette on the other end of the Zoom call.
She deftly wields her thin fingers, which appear even longer because of the sharp black and white nails, lights a cigarette in the same unhurried manner, straightening her pink terry dressing gown. This is her first cigarette during an hour of conversation, while I wanted to smoke more than once during this time. Rapid occupation, life in daily fear, threats of rape, beatings, then the flood after the explosion of the Kakhovka dam, and in addition — detransition, reverse gender transition due to the lack of hormones.
I am speaking via Zoom with 30-year-old Victoria (the name has been changed for security reasons) who has spent half of her life as a transwoman. Last year, she and her mother had to flee from the occupied part of Kherson region. The journey from the occupied territory lasted one and a half months and the woman’s friends did not expect to hear from her anymore. Except for one friend.
"As resilient as a cockroach!" Victoria says. "But much strength is needed to be the cockroach that will survive everywhere!"
Victoria is in Berlin now. Last summer, she made her way to the EU through Russia-occupied Crimea, Voronezh, and St. Petersburg.
"We were going to Latvia when Prigozhin launched a rebellion and started to move to Moscow. We made an eight-hour detour via bad roads. If Prigozhin’s mercenaries had stopped our bus full of people with Ukrainian passports, we would [not have survived] ..." the woman starts to use swear words.
On February 24, 2022, she heard the movement of the occupiers towards her hometown and the smoke from the side of Chornobaivka village signaled the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Victoria was standing on the porch of the house with a cigarette in her thin fingers, pondering the words that she heard on the phone, "Get up, Russia is attacking." She did not know then that her extended nails would fall off, the lack of hormone therapy will bring back facial hair, and her mother would again call her Vasyl, so as not to attract the attention of the Russians (the deadname — the name received by a transgender person at birth — is indicated with the consent of Victoria).
In the first days of the occupation, Victoria stifled her fear with alcohol: shelling — a drink, voices of strangers from the street — another drink, a sudden knock on the gate — one more drink, again and again. She explains this was a way to regain control over life. Now she laughs, "I got so drunk that at that moment I was only concerned about one thing — not to vomit on the bed."
She says that almost everyone drank because of the war back then: neighbors, acquaintances, friends, even Victoria’s tenants. However, over time, a couple of tenants, a mother and a daughter, began to side with the occupiers: the daughter found a lover among them and the mother threatened to betray Victoria to the Russians. The woman explains that at that time she was worried about own safety not so much as a Ukrainian, but as a transwoman. The tenant also considered this and said, "Do you know what they will do to people like you?"
By that time, the occupiers had already visited her house. During the year, they settled in every empty apartment or house, and one day they came to Victoria for water.
"My detransition was already in full swing. I did not shave my legs back then, did not take care of myself. I stopped taking care of myself in order to arouse disgust in case they would want to rape me," she says.
One of the occupiers called her a "girl", to which the other said, "It is not a girl, it is a boy!" And in a second, he hit Victoria in the face with a rifle butt.
"I do not smile now," she notes and shows three gaps instead of teeth. Germany paid for her dentures, but the woman complains that they are not comfortable and fall out when she touches them with her tongue.
"Do not call me a daughter, call me a son"
She is still surprised that the locals in Kherson region did not betray her to the Russians, because since school years, her classmates bullied her for being different. When the girl started transition after graduation from school, the same bullies offered Victoria sex. They fetishized her because they wanted to know what it was like to be in bed with a transwoman.
Before the detransition began, the occupiers even courted Victoria. She tried to divert their attention, "I had a friend who had a baby, and I used to push the stroller [when walking]. I said I was the baby’s godmother, a relative and so on to deceive [the occupiers]. When they [occupiers] approached us, we pretended to be speaking about baby’s defecation, about the death of chickens, about the garden."
"That is where I had wounds," the woman touches her face a little above the chin. "I was constantly biting my lips so that, damn it, to keep silent! I used to tell everyone, "Shut up! Bite your damn tongues!"
At that time, she already looked, in her own words, like a "17-year-old freak". In an empty neighbor’s house, she found some men’s clothes, tied her long hair in a ponytail, tried to make her voice sound rough. The sophisticated manicure, which Victoria always did herself, was out of question. In order to hide her small breasts, she constantly inflated her stomach, simulating a "beer belly". Her mom, who over the years after coming out had already learned to call Victoria "daughter", had to be reminded, "Do not call me Victoria! I am your son. Vasyl, Vasyl, Vasyl." According to the documents, she still remains Vasyl.
"What was it like to pretend to be a man after so many years after the transition?" I asked.
"I did not care then," the woman says. "The main thing was to leave and survive."
Fortunately, this chameleon tactics worked. When Victoria and her mother were passing through the checkpoint to occupied Crimea, the Russians were interested in only one thing — why they did not want to stay in the occupied territory.
"I said that I did not want to stay either in Ukraine or in Russia. Then I honestly did not want to," she explains. Now Victoria dreams of returning to Ukraine, but at that time she wanted to be as far away from the full-scale war as possible. The occupiers were eventually satisfied with her answer.
"I just want a normal life"
Victoria is in Berlin now. She earns her living with manicure. At first, the girl was also an intermediary between the local authorities and the residents of the district in which she lived — she submitted complaints, volunteered, and studied German at the same time.
She started a relationship with a German. This is his first queer relationship; he identifies himself as a cisgender heterosexual man. "A straight heterosexual man," she notes. "But it suits me."
Victoria admits that she does not want to participate in the life of the local LGBTQ community: she does not go to pride events and does not socialize as a transwoman. She still suffers from dysphoria and derealization, sometimes Victoria loses the understanding of who she is — a woman or a man. However, she resumed hormone therapy and now dreams of transgender surgery.
In her passport, she is still Vasyl. According to the Ukrainian legislation, in order to receive a gender marker that corresponds to the gender identity, trans persons still need a "medical certificate on the change (correction) of gender identity". Victoria cannot do this in Berlin — the Ukrainian consulate told her to go to Kyiv.
"I just want a normal regular life," she sums up. Now, after visits to a psychologist who also had to flee from Kherson region, Victoria is gradually learning not to avoid her fears.
"Yes, I have a slightly masculine figure, a low voice, and I have not had surgery yet," she says. "But I am a woman. That is all."
"You see the occupiers with assault rifles and the roof starts to cave in"
In a chat with 29-year-old Vlad (the name has been changed) from Energodar, photos and videos of burned offices appear. "This used to be my desk," he writes.
When we met in a Kyiv coffee shop, he immediately showed his employee card from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. "It was a scientific and technical center (STC)," he explains. "We trained the staff there: safety culture, motivation, stress resistance."
Vlad started working at the Zaporizhzhia NPP when he graduated from the university. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he found himself in danger not only as a resident of the occupied region of Zaporizhzhia, but also as an employee of the strategically important facility. In addition, there was another danger factor. In teenage years, Vlad realized that he was gay. He made coming out to his parents at the age of 19, and the family accepted it without any prejudice.
Considering his own identity, his first decision under the occupation was not reveal himself: "Not to be mannered, not to stand out with clothes," he explains. Since childhood, he says, he has repeatedly seen the news about what is happening to representatives of the LGBTQ community in Russia: humiliation and discrimination, sexualized and physical violence, and eventually murders.
Vlad’s second decision was to leave the city. The longer the occupation lasted, the stronger he was convinced in this decision. "You see [on the streets] Chechens, Dagestanis, Buryats with assault rifles. And your roof starts to cave in," he says. "You realize that you may walk 100 meters away from them, and a bullet may be fired into your back. Just for fun. Or if they are drunk, in delirium."
"When you are being searched, you feel like a criminal. Although your only fault is that you were born Ukrainian"
Vlad had a vacation planned for the summer — as a bonus, Zaporizhzhia NPP employees were given money for rehabilitation, so he knew that he would be financially prepared at least for the road from the occupied territory. He packed his suitcase, hid his ID card in his sneaker, and left the rainbow flag, which he once brought from his first Kharkiv Pride, at home. "We stood in line for the filtration procedure for two days," Vlad recalls.
I look at his tattoos, visible from under his T-shirt and shorts. "Nothing patriotic," he says.
By tattoos, the Russians tried to identify the military personnel during the filtration procedure. In case they saw tridents, flags or anything showing the Ukrainian identity on the body, people were taken prisoners or sent to the basement [torture chamber]. Vlad knew that he was out of danger in this regard, but he was still nervous. "When you are being searched, you feel like a criminal. Although your only fault is that you were born Ukrainian and you do not want to live in this cursed "Russian world", he says. “I do not know, maybe something human woke up in them [the occupiers] then, or they noticed that there were mostly mothers with children in our bus, but they let us go relatively quickly."
He had a bottle of vodka in his suitcase. Acquaintances suggested a life hack: to use it as a bribe if the Russians are too captious. However, it was not needed. At the first Ukrainian checkpoint, where the military met them with the words "Glory to Ukraine!" and the whole bus answered "Glory to the heroes!", Vlad threw the bottle into the trash. The label on the bottle was "Tsar Vodka".
"A boy or a girl — it is unclear who it is!"
In Energodar, the man kept silent about his homosexuality because he did not consider the city safe enough to live openly. In Kyiv, at his new job, he is also silent because he does not want to be exposed to homophobia from his colleagues.
"When NEMO [who identify themselves as a non-binary person and use the pronoun "they"] won the Eurovision song contest this year, all you could hear at work was, "Hey, have you seen who won?! It is not clear who it is! A girl or a boy!" And what the hell is the difference to you?" Vlad is indignant.
Besides his work, he volunteers at "Kyivpride" — a public organization that cares for LGBTQ people throughout the country. He says that it is important for him to feel a sense of belonging to the community and to destroy stereotypes. "My ex was not well received in his family; he no longer communicates with them. So, let us imagine something happens to him, and his closest relatives receive a phone call from the hospital. I think it will be extremely unpleasant for him to see them in such a situation, and not, for example, a loved one," Vlad thinks.
Finally, he mentions the still not adopted draft law No. 9103, which would allow LGBTQ couples to enter into civil partnerships and have legal status — the document has been under consideration in the Verkhovna Rada for a year and a half. During this time, it has been supported by 5 out of 23 parliamentary committees.
"Currently, LGBTQ couples do not exist from the legal point of view," the man emphasizes. "And this is a big trouble."