A lesbian couple have become the first gay married couple in Russia, but they may not get to remain married if homophobic lawmakers have anything to do with it.
Irina Shumilova and Alyona Fursova were married at a St Petersburg registry office over the weekend, both wearing traditional white wedding dresses. They were issued the marriage licence because legally Irina is listed as male on her passport. She is currently going through hormone therapy and identifies as a transsexual, she says.
Legal officials in the city aren't happy about the wedding, with one man, Vitaly Milonov, saying he will seek to have the marriage annulled – and saying that registry office clerks should be tried for treason or criminal negligence since they didn’t do anything to prevent the wedding when the women showed up to be married.
Gay rights activist Nikolay Alekseev doesn’t see it is a triumph for the LGBTQ community though. ‘This is in no way a same-sex marriage. This is a question of transgender, not homosexuality,’ he told news channel Russia Today. ‘This is an old story, there had been such cases before. A certain gender is written in a passport, but how they dress for the wedding is their business.’
Meanwhile, Irina told the channel: ‘Yes, in my passport it says ‘male’. Transgender is a term to describe discrepancies between social and biological sex. I am transsexual, meaning that despite I have XY-genome, psychologically I am a woman.’
Russia passed an anti-gay law last year ordering that ‘gay propaganda’ be banned from distribution to children.
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Picture: Irina Shumilova/vk.com
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.