You're reading: Kyiv lawyer helps transgender community fight for dignity, against discrimination

Name: Oksana Surchok

Position: Private lawyer

Key Point: Fights discrimination against transgender clients

When Russia’s war broke out in eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014, Oksana Surchok fled Donetsk.
“If I’d stayed I would have been shot, and not even for being transgender, but because I’m pro-Ukraine,” she said.

Surchok now runs her own legal practice in Kyiv.

“I take all kinds of clients, the only difference is I don’t take money from transgender clients,” she said.  “I know they’re poor, nearly of them are on the verge of survival and rarely do they have work.”

According to Ukrainian NGO Insight LGBTQ, there are no statistics on the transgender population in Ukraine, largely because discrimination keeps the community closed off and the state has never shown interest in conducting studies.  However, international surveys estimate transgender populations across the globe vary from 0.1 to 1.2 percent.

Since Surchok moved to Kyiv in 2014, she has taken on cases of around 50 transgender clients – most facing discrimination from medical practitioners.

But her biggest battle has been repealing an obsolete Ukrainian Health Ministry directive – order 60 – and establishing a new, dignified protocol for gender recognition.

Adopted years ago, the anachronistic framework forced transgender people to undergo often traumatizing procedures to have their gender identity legally recognized.

Under the old rules, a transgender person would be forced to undergo psychiatric observation in hospital for 30 to 45 days as well as surgery, such as gender reassignment – whether they wanted it or not – to change their documents.

Those who were jobless, homeless or had underage children would also be unable to have their gender identity legally recognized.

In August 2015, Surchok with Sergii Shum, deputy director of the Health Ministry’s Ukrainian Research Institute of Social and Forensic Psychiatry, began to write a new framework.

Then in late 2016, acting Health Minister Ulana Suprun repealed order 60 and signed off on the new protocol.

“It was hard work because I had to translate materials from different sources and adapt it to Ukrainian law. We had to prove a lot,” Surchok said. “But it took even longer to get it signed.”

Under the new rules adopted by the Health Ministry, which regulates the procedure for gender correction, transgender people can receive a diagnosis from a psychiatrist via outpatient visits, remain married and are no longer required to undergo surgery.

That was what Surchok and Shum originally co-authored as part of the new rules.

But Shum told the Kyiv Post that somewhere throughout the process, the document was sabotaged.
“When we saw what happened, we were shocked, because somebody reinserted mandatory surgical intervention,” he said.

Shum said as soon as the unplanned amendment was spotted, under Suprun’s orders, they drafted a new protocol with several human rights groups.

Nevertheless, both Shum and Surchok say even at present, the changes brought in last year were progressive. Perhaps the most progressive change, Surchok says, gives teenagers under the age of 18 access to hormone therapy and medical assistance, with parental permission.

It comes as a major turnaround from the previously prescribed reparative psychotherapy, which was aimed at coercing a person into accepting the gender they were assigned at birth, something Surchok condemns.

“Gender identity cannot be normalized; it has been proven. You’re always born with it,” she said.

Activists protest treatment of transgender persons in Kyiv on October 22, 2016 for the International Day of Action for Trans Depathologization.

Activists protest treatment of transgender persons in Kyiv on October 22, 2016 for the International Day of Action for Trans Depathologization. (UNIAN)

Gender identity

Transgender identity is currently listed as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization, but the public health agency is looking at declassifying the condition in its revised edition of International Classification of Diseases, due out in 2018.

However, Surchok fears that even if the change is enacted at a global level, it may take years for Ukraine to catch up.

While LGBT rights in Ukraine are slowly progressing, the transgender community is still largely and openly stigmatized.

The Kyiv lawyer believes it’s part of the reason why progressive changes for the transgender community, including the repeal of order 60, are often dragged out or given low priority.
“We’re not needed by anyone, we have no money, very few people are interested,” she said.

Transphobia transgression

According to a 2016 Insight LGBTQ report, transgender people become victims of hate crimes more often than other minorities. But there are no statistics on transphobia related murders and many of the crimes are “hushed up,” written off as “hooliganism” or lumped together with domestic disputes.

Furthermore, the transgender community is at a higher risk of suicide, which, according to Ukrainian transgender civic initiative T-EMA, grows when a person is rejected by family, friends or resides in a country that offers no legal protection.

Surchok says she tried to suppress her gender identity for decades, which drove her to a suicide attempt at 30.

“After that I realized there was only one option, to transition,” she said.

Adoption rights

Surchok is currently assisting Shum with changes to government rules that prevent transgender people from adopting children.  Currently the Health Ministry lists a transgender diagnosis among a number of “diseases” which preclude adoption.

But under a draft framework this diagnosis, along with others related certain to HIV and disability statuses, could be scrapped from the list.

“The government is restricting people’s rights, people’s right to a family,” Surchok said.
It’s a right she hopes to win this year.