Authors

Discussion

In 2018, Ministry of Health Order No. 850N formalized the procedure for legal gender transition in Russia, but in 2023, only five years later, Federal Law No. 386-FZ nullified it with a full ban on legal and medical gender transition. This paper investigates the framing and transformation of narratives focused on transgender lives and identities in a collection of online Russian news articles during and after this period from 2018 to 2025 in three analytical sections, two thematic and one temporal. The first provides an overview of the broader narrative space using a combination of variable coding and discourse analysis. This frames transgender-related stories and lives as part of a western ‘Cult of Tolerance’ weakening society and posing an ideological threat to Russia. The second focuses on sets of Russian life narrative case studies representing the larger set, including a transgender woman, two transgender men, and a nonbinary person. Findings in this section include a contrast between the narrative portrayals of binary versus nonbinary transgender identities with an emphasis on the existence of ‘true’ transgender people and their suffering as opposed to alleged ideologically-influenced cases depicted as stemming from childhood trauma and a lack of ‘traditional family values’. The temporal section centers on thematic shifts over time by investigating the transformation of narrative focus across this timeframe in relation to the intensification of values-rhetoric and the conservative turn since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I identify the occurrence of a significant transformation in news article narratives about transgender Russian people from 2018 to 2025 from those focused on detailed life narratives of the past to those reporting on detransition and legal matters of the present.