Posted on 04/08/2022 12:04:30 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Zi Faámelu woke up at 5:03 a.m. on Feb. 24 to the sound of loud booms outside her apartment in Kyiv.
“I looked at the window, and I saw the orange sky,” she said.
She called her friend, who was panicking. They both realized the war had started.
Faámelu is a transgender woman whose passport gender marker does not match her gender identity, which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to leave the country. With martial law having been declared in Ukraine, all able-bodied men ages 18 to 60 were required to stay and be available to join the army. Faámelu — who has lived as a woman for nearly a decade but whose passport still says male — would have to stay and potentially fight.
In the past, transgender people in Ukraine who wanted to legally change their gender markers on official documents had to go through extensive psychiatric observation and sterilization and undergo gender-reassignment surgery. In 2017, the process was revised, making it easier for trans people to align their documentation with their lived genders, according to Human Rights Watch.
While hospitalization in a psychiatric institution is no longer required, people still must receive official diagnoses of a “gender identity disorder,” such as “transsexualism,” to update their identity documents.
While the war has created a devastating humanitarian crisis and has forced millions of Ukrainians to flee their homes, transgender refugees, like Faámelu, face an added layer of danger and uncertainty, said Aaron Morris, the executive director of Immigration Equality, an LGBTQ immigrant rights organization.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
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