Category: General

This article was first published on the website of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

The colonial expansion of the Russian Empire and its direct successors – the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation – has long been widely ignored by Western intellectuals and politicians and almost completely excluded from critical analysis in the framework of postcolonial studies. This lack of political and academic will to properly address relations between the empire and the countries occupied and colonised by Moscow has created a blind spot right in the heart of Europe. Thus, from the Western perspective, the neo-colonial war started by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in 2014 mostly had to do with what Freud labels “the narcissism of minor differences”. After the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, Ukraine was predicted to fall within two weeks and Kyiv be taken in two or three days, according to official Russian propaganda lines, which used to frame Ukrainians as backward, less developed and passive objects of Russian imperial appetites. Those notions are embodied in the colonial ideology of russkii mir, or “Russian world”. Russkii mir is characterised by the idea of Russian national and cultural supremacy as well as the aggressive expansion of Russian “traditional” values that are heavily loaded with misogyny, homophobia as well as the state-sanctioned and supported fight against feminist values and achievements. Although anti-feminism as a well-founded and organised anti-democratic political project can be found in many societies around the globe, it constitutes a quintessential and integral part of the Russian imperialistic project. This essay aims to investigate the level to which anti-feminism is incorporated into the ideology of russkii mir and to show that Ukraine’s anti-colonial struggle includes opposition to the anti-feminist and anti-gender movements.

Matryoshka – the perfect metaphor for russkii mir

The perfect metaphor of what russkii mir truly is would be the Russian matryoshka – a set of dolls of decreasing size placed one inside of another, each with beautiful female faces painted on them. Bright and charming on the outside, on the inside they remind one of the medieval torture device known as the iron maiden, with its deadly spikes targeting those trapped in the matryoshka’s interior. The Soviet Union’s purportedly anti-capitalist and anti-colonial façade had effectively masked the darker reality of Russian colonial and genocidal practices towards indigenous populations residing within occupied territories. The deliberate concealment of this reality has obscured a history fraught with systematic racist mass killings, ethnic cleansing, and forced expulsions of Circassians throughout the century-long Russian colonial wars in the Caucasus from 1763 to 1864. Additionally, the tragic episodes of forced deportation and extermination of the Crimean Tatars in 1944 further exemplify the implementation of such policies. Ukraine was no exception and has suffered repeated Holodomors¹ (human-made famine imposed to eliminate native Ukrainians and Kazakhs) and Rozstriliane vidrozhennia (political purges of the Ukrainian national elite in 1937–38), as well as complete and total Russification of Ukrainians in the attempt to turn them into mankurts,² which would be compliant subjects for the Soviet regime. All of these events were an integral part of the colonial presence in Ukraine. Overall, the Ukrainian language was banned 134 times (!) during 400 years of Russian occupation. The linguicide of the Ukrainian language has always been one of the most powerful and pervasive instruments of Russian colonial strategy aimed at diminishing Ukrainian identity. These practices were rooted in the understanding that the Ukrainian language has become a primarily distinguishing characteristic that highlighted national, historical and cultural differences between Ukrainians and Russians, who though sharing the same phenotype have stood on different sides of the colonial paradigm.

«Ukrainian women activists advocating for women’s emancipation alongside national liberation.»

To cover up these colonial practices, the Soviet regime invented the “friendship of peoples” myth, which denied any prejudice based on national or ethnic background within its borders. In its modern modified version, “the friendship of peoples” constitutes the foundation of another imperial construction of three “brother nations” – Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians who together comprise a “Slavic Trinity”, the one “All-Russian” nation united under the rule of the predominant colonial ideology.

Ukraine as “singing and dancing Little Russia”

If the nation is an imagined community, as claimed by Benedict Anderson, the Ukrainian nation was re-imagined by Russian imperialism as an orientalised, exotic “singing and dancing Little Russia” – an ambivalent geopolitical construct in which “everything that is good […] comes from the common Russian legacy. Everything that is bad comes from evil, alien influences: Polish, Catholic, Jesuit, Uniate, or Tatar, Jewish, German, and so on”,³ but corruption was, of course, mainly a menace coming from the West. Such a paradigm has created a liminal space in which Russian colonialism could simultaneously claim “brotherhood” with “Little Russians”⁴ and label Ukrainians as “far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis”⁵ without causing any disruptions in the colonial logic.

“The friendship of peoples”, although very prominent, was not the only imperial narrative used to whitewash the Soviet regime. Another one was a myth about women’s emancipation initiated and perpetuated by the Soviet government. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks proclaimed women’s emancipation and abolishment of gender inequality, which was later anchored in in Article 122 of the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union.⁶ The Soviet state declared the creation of socialist modernity free of women’s oppression as one of its main and most progressive achievements. In reality, however, this decision was driven by the Soviets’ need to increase their labour force, which could be used to develop the growing economy of the communist state. In the framework of the formal gender equality proclaimed by the Soviet Union, domestic violence – just like sex itself⁷ – became an issue that was so marginalised and ignored by the state, it eventually ceased to exist in public discourse. In the meantime, women were not relieved from doing all the domestic work and taking care of children, and were thus being overburdened by “the second shift” – a load of domestic chores after their exhausting work in factories or collective farms. In addition to that, they were largely excluded from political decision-making, which had remained deeply rooted in patriarchal power hierarchies. Later, a few years before the collapse of the colonial monstrosity named the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev in his 1987 book Perestroika – New Thinking for Our Country and the World encapsulated the feminine mystique surrounding Soviet women with the idea that women should leave the public space and eventually “return to their purely womanly mission” (Gorbachev 1987, 117) – this idea still remains prevalent in Russian society today.

Ukraine’s feminist movement is anti-colonial

For the majority of Ukrainian women the Soviet dominance meant double colonisation of both their national and gender identities. The Ukrainian feminist movement was deeply rooted in the idea of national emancipation and independence – such a position being quite common for all countries experiencing colonial occupation of their territories (in the early 20th century Ukraine was occupied by the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland). Ukrainian women activists were active both in political and cultural spheres advocating for women’s emancipation alongside national liberation. When the Bolsheviks proclaimed the so-called emancipation of women, the names of those who were at the vanguard of the Ukrainian feminist movement were erased together with their decades of activism. Women were instead expected to be forever grateful to the Soviet regime for setting them free from the patriarchal yoke and prove their loyalty to the government through their hard work.

Collapse of the Soviet Union and the need for “remasculinisation”

The collapse of the USSR was not only “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”, as Putin described it,⁸ but has also led to the decline of patriarchal masculinity, which was directly associated with the decline of Russian colonial hegemony, creating a need for “remasculinisation”⁹ as a direct response to the fall of Soviet imperialism. The Russian Federation, as was its predecessor the Soviet Union, is a society built upon a patriarchal system of values in which “the legitimation of power often demands demonstration of the qualities of a “real man”.¹⁰ The “real man” in this case is defined not by what he is but rather by what he is not: he is not effeminate (and thus not homosexual), not non-white and not non-Orthodox.¹¹ This societal demand was fulfilled by Putin who came to be prime minister and then president at the turn of the last century and who has become an embodiment of the new Russian neo-colonial masculinity “necessarily bound up with the enabling of violence – violence sufficient to overcome the considerable military capabilities of colonised societies” (Connell 2016, 306). Putin’s masculinity, with its visual imagery of the Russian Marlboro Man, its verbal aggressive domination of the political sphere and “a series of crude, macho aphorisms which have been collected as ‘Putinisms’” (Wood 2016, 2) has been used “to project the idea that he was capable of restoring Russia’s global stature” (Orlova 2018, 61). Soon Putin’s hypermasculinity as a scenario of power became central to the project of nation building and branding. In this project, gendered discourses have been widely used to create and perpetuate “the border between gendered Us and Others” (Voronova 2017, 219) – the discursive strategy that has proved to be especially successful since the Russian Federation’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. When the Kremlin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Putin stated:

«The West is trying to destroy our traditional values [my emphasis] and impose its pseudo-values on us, which are supposed to consume us, our people, from the inside; all these ideas that it is already aggressively imposing in its own realm and that lead directly to decay and degeneration, because they contradict human nature.»

What Putin did not mention in his speech is that these “traditional values” are heavily loaded with anti-feminist rhetoric and homophobia. Russian colonialism has recreated a Manichean world of the Cold War, one in which “traditional values” stand in opposition to “gender ideology”, a concept framed as an exclusively Western invention. Open anti-feminism has been an important part of the Russian political and social system for years. While the Russian Constitution continues the Soviet tradition of proclaiming gender equality de jure (Article 19), the de facto Russian popular culture persists in marginalising feminism as an abnormal and perverted ideology since “normal” women should prefer family and children over the struggle for rights and equality. Anti-feminist and anti-gender discourses perfectly match the anti-Western, anti-democratic and anti-human rights narratives so widespread among Russian society and generously exported to those territories physically or ideologically occupied by Russian neo-colonial politics.

National innocence menaced by Western sexual perversion

Quite symbolically, after Putin became president for the third time in 2012, the term “Gayropa” began to be used widely in Russia as a slur referring to European civilisation (as a part of a wider Western civilisation) as opposed to the ultraconservative Russian civilisation, in order to stress the decay and degradation of an LGBTQI+-friendly Europe compared to the “traditional values” of the Russian Federation. Such a framing has marked the beginning of the sexualisation of Russian politics, which uses sexual anxiety to create a myth of national innocence that is constantly menaced by Western “sexual perversion”. In other words, anti-gender and anti-feminist movements have become the Kremlin’s tool for establishing russkii mir as the Russian version of the “politics of eternity”,¹² which has imagined Russian nation as a “virginal organism troubled only by the threat of foreign penetration” (Snyder 2018, 57), thus requiring it to be protected against external monstrosities. As pointed out by Leandra Bias, the “[p]ublic bashing of ‘gender ideology’ serves several purposes at once. It serves to justify authoritarianism and repression inside the country; it legitimises aggression as part of foreign policy; and, finally, it creates common terrain with right-wing movements”.

«Contemporary Ukrainian women and LGBTQI+ individuals play a significant role in the military. They exemplify a shift towards progressive ideals.»

If Russia sees the collective West as its ultimate enemy and directly opposes it, Ukraine is regarded as corrupted by the West and being under so-called “external control”, as it has been put by Russian state propaganda. Such a framing presents Ukraine as a perverted and effeminate entity juxtaposed to the Russian ultramasculine patriarchy. It can be traced back to the gas dispute of 2006, when a Russian television program described Ukraine as a Mammonish kept woman, a “flighty Ukrainian mistress”.¹³ The same colonial rhetoric was used against Ukraine just a few weeks before the full-scale invasion when Putin referenced an obscene song lyric to demonstrate his vision of the relations between Ukraine and Russia. His words “Like it, or dislike it, bear with it, my beauty” clearly refer to the lyrics of the song by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold: “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty”. These lines, which directly imply rape and necrophilia, are symptomatic of Russian internal national misogyny and explicitly anti-feminist narratives, both of which constitute an inseparable part of Russian neo-imperial discourses and politics.

Gender or anti-gender: who is attacking democracy in Ukraine?

The Russian colonial presence in Ukraine has left deep marks on the cultural, social and political fabric of its society. Even after Ukraine officially proclaimed its independence in 1991, the coloniality of power¹⁴ continued to shape the Ukrainian socio-political landscape in social and religious practices, identities, beliefs, representations and other aspects of everyday life. Although anti-feminism was a part of this power matrix, the anti-gender movement has become its core: gender roles, norms and relations mainly defined by woman’s submissiveness, passiveness and domesticity as well as by explicitly homophobic rhetoric were transmitted through Russian-supported media and TV channels in Ukraine and through the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which largely dominated Ukrainian religious life. Symbolically enough, in his sermon on Forgiveness Friday (the last Friday before Lent), the head of the Russian Orthodox Church named gay prides in Ukraine as the reason for Russia’s invasion of the country,¹⁵ thus confirming once again the relation between anti-gender discourses prevailing in the spaces dominated by Russian neo-colonial ideology, an ideology that resulted in the unjustified and unprovoked full-scale military violence against Ukraine in 2022.

Ukrainian feminists have played a crucial role in responding to and challenging anti-gender narratives in their society. They have been at the forefront of deconstructing these narratives by advocating for gender equality, promoting women’s rights, and working to dismantle harmful gender stereotypes and prejudices. The study “Gender or anti-gender: who is attacking democracy in Ukraine”,¹⁶ conducted by Ukrainian feminist and human rights organisations La-Strada Ukraine, Women in the Media and Ukrainian Women’s Fund in 2020, reaches the conclusion that the rise of anti-gender ideology was a part of Russia’s information war against Ukraine after the start of the invasion in 2014. The authors of the study analysed the development of Ukrainian social discourses as well as societal initiatives and changes between 2013 and 2020, and pointed out that anti-gender discriminatory rhetoric was presented under the Russian Federation’s typical narrative of “protecting family values”, which claimed they were being threatened by feminists and LGBTQI+ people. Such a consolidation of anti-gender and anti-feminist movements can be defined as a Russian counter-reaction to the Revolution of Dignity, which took place in Ukraine in 2014.

A new Ukrainian femininity: emancipation as an anti-colonial struggle

Among other socio-political transformations, the Revolution of Dignity has produced a new kind of Ukrainian femininity – an active female agent who managed to find her place in the male militarism of the protests (Phillips 2014; Martsenyuk 2014). Starting from this period, the coloniality of gender¹⁷ in Ukraine started to be challenged by the process of what Ukrainian philosopher Tamara Zlobina has called “gender decay”¹⁸ – the rejection of old gender models and the conception of a new emancipatory social rhetoric, which has allowed high social mobility and visibility of women in spheres traditionally associated with men: politics, military services, business and volunteering. Moreover, the role of women in nation- and state-building processes was officially recognised at the highest level and secured by the law: in 2015, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) adopted the “Law on Amending Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine”, which was formulated to prevent discrimination in the labour market based on gender, gender identity or sexual orientation, and in 2017, the Ukrainian Health Ministry abolished a decree dating back to Soviet times that prohibited women from being employed in 450 professions considered dangerous to women’s reproductive health. Another significant change was Decree No. 292,¹⁹ issued by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry in June 2016, which opened up staff positions for privates, sergeants and sergeant-majors to women undergoing military service under contract. The importance of this decree can hardly be overestimated. Before 2016, women who took part in military operations as snipers or gunners were formally registered as cooks, nurses or other non-combat positions, thus limiting their career advancement in the military as well as denying them social benefits that their male peers enjoyed at the time. As of November 2022, there are almost 60,000 women serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, with approximately 19,000 holding civilian positions and approximately 41,000 serving in a military capacity. Some 5,000 of the latter group are directly engaged in combat operations.²⁰

While the Russian Federation officially decriminalised domestic violence in February 2017 and passed a law banning “LGBT propaganda” among adults in November 2022 (which followed the 2013 “gay propaganda” law that prohibited the dissemination of information about “non-traditional” sexual relationships to minors and that was misused to suppress LGBTQI+ rights and activism), Ukraine’s parliament has ratified the Istanbul Convention and unanimously passed a bill banning hate speech in the media against LGBTQI+ people. These two changes to Ukraine’s legislation were adopted after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (in July 2022 and December 2022 respectively) and demonstrate that Ukraine has chosen to build a democratic and just society based on human rights and the rule of law.

Instead of conclusions

The logic of Russian neo-colonialism turns the Cartesian ego cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) into the imperial ego conquiro, ergo sum (I conquer, therefore I am).²¹ This assertion involves not only the colonisation of territories, but also the colonisation of minds and identities. Anti-feminism and anti-gender discourses constitute a central pillar of the ideology of russkii mir and have proved to be an efficient tool of Russian colonial expansion. Conveniently framing gender equality, feminism and women’s rights as well as the support of LGBTQI+ people as a cunning strategy employed by the collective West to destroy the Russian nation, the Kremlin sweeps away democracy, human rights and the rule of law in order to establish its rule based on the “traditional values” of misogyny and homophobia. Ukrainians are today persistently striving to uphold their national identity and advance gender emancipation, drawing parallels with the women’s movement in Ukraine a century ago. Contemporary Ukrainian women and LGBTQI+ individuals play a significant role in the military, combating the influence of a conservative ruskii mir and thus exemplifying a shift towards inclusivity and progressive ideals.

If we really want to defeat neo-colonial forms of oppression and violence, it is important to confront anti-gender movements and support women’s rights and gender equality worldwide, since without them true democracy, peace, security and stability cannot be achieved. Let us never forget that.

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Bibliography

Bias, Leandra (2023), “The International of Antifeminists”, available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2023/02/24/4808/.

Connell, Raewyn (2016), “Masculinities in global perspective: Hegemony, contestation, and changing structures of power”, Theory and Society, 45: 303–318, available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44981834.

Freud, Sigmund (1930), Civilisation and Its Discontents (London: Hogarth Press).

Gorbachev, Mikhail (1987), Perestroika – New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd).

Martsenyuk, Tamara (2014), Гендерна соціологія Майдану: роль жінок в протестах. Постсоціалістичні суспільства: різноманіття соціальних змін: матеріали Міжнар. соціологічних читань пам’яті Н.В. Паніної та Т.І. Заславської, available at: http://ekmair.ukma.edu.ua/handle/123456789/3511.

Orlova, Alexandra (2018), “Russian Politics of Masculinity and the Decay of Feminism: The Role of Dissent in Creating New ‘Local Norms’”, William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 25/1: 59–86, available at: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol25/iss1/4.

Phillips, Sarah D. (2014). “The Women’s Squad in Ukraine’s Protests: Feminism, Nationalism, and Militarism on the Maidan”, American Ethnologist, 41/3: 414–426, available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027362.

Restrepo, Eduardo (2018), “Coloniality of Power”, in Hillary Callan (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd), available at: http://www.ram-wan.net/restrepo/documentos/coloniality.pdf.

Riabov, Oleg and Riabova, Tatiana (2014), “The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender, Nationalism, and the Legitimation of Power Under Vladimir Putin”, Problems of Post-Communism, 61/2: 23–35, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/PPC1075-8216610202.

Riabczuk, Mykola (2010), “The Ukrainian ‘Friday’ and the Russian ‘Robinson’: the Uneasy Advent of Postcoloniality”, Canadian–American Slavic Studies, 44: 7–24, available at: https://brill.com/view/journals/css/44/1-2/article-p7_2.xml.

Snyder, Timothy (2018), The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Crown).

Voronova, Liudmila (2017), “Gender politics of the ‘war of narratives’: Russian TV-news in the times of conflict in Ukraine”, Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 9/2: 217–235, available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/cjcs.9.2.217_1.

Wood, Elizabeth A. (2016), “Hypermasculinity as a Scenario of Power”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18/3, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2015.1125649.

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1 Holodomor is recognised internationally as a genocide of the Ukrainian people by 28 countries: Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, United Kingdom, United States.

2 Mankurt is the term for the unthinking docile slave stripped of his or her memories and identity, which was popularised by Chinghiz Aitmatov in his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.

3 Mykola Riabczuk (2010), p. 14.

4 “Little Russians” is a common way to refer to Ukrainians in Russian colonial vocabulary.

5 Vladimir Putin’s speech on 24 February 2022, before the start of the invasion, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24.

6 See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm.

7 I am referring to the popular catchphrase “There is no sex in the USSR”, which has been used to describe the stigma and shame surrounding sex-related topics as well as the taboo of publicly discussing them.

8 See https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-historical-russia-soviet-breakup-ukraine/31606186.html.

9 Riabov and Riabova (2014).

10 Ibid., p. 26.

11 Orthodox in the sense of belonging only to the Russian Orthodox Church, since it does not recognise any other branch of Orthodoxy as equal with itself.

12 See Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2018).

13 Riabov and Riabova (2014), p. 28.

14 The concept was coined by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. See https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/347342/mod_resource/content/… (2000) Colinality of power.pdf.

15 See https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-08-22/h_de0516e0f59ac2214af21bbb0aaf152e.

16 See https://la-strada.org.ua/download/gender-chy-antygender-hto-atakuye-demokratiyu-v-ukrayini.

17 The concept was developed by Argentinian feminist philosopher María Lugones. See https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/globalstudies.trinity.duke….

18 Lecture “Gendernyi rozpad” (2016), available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN7-9PVzJYc.

19 See https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/z0880-16#Text.

20 See https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3623578-iz-pocatku-vijni-zaginula-101-zinkavijskova-50-znikli-bezvisti-reznikov.html.

21 I borrow the term ego conquiro from Eduardo Restrepo’s article “Coloniality of power”.

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This article is part of the dossier Feminist Voices Connected.

Why does Ukraine need the Istanbul Convention?
One of the international treaties around which numerous myths and stereotypes have been born, and manipulations have continued, is the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (hereinafter referred to as the Istanbul Convention).

In my opinion, this is due to the fact that this document is valuable and holistic. It contains norms that oblige states to review established practices in combating violence against women and domestic violence, and primarily to eradicate gender stereotypes. After all, stereotypes about the “desirable” or “acceptable” behavior of a woman or a man in Ukrainian society are not just harmful, but also lead to tolerance of violence and human rights violations against those who, in our opinion, behave “not in accordance with the rules”, or against those who have less power, protection opportunities, etc.

In her book “How to Understand Ukrainians: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Maryna Starodubska explores our national mentality, culture, and values, which explain our attitude and perception of certain processes in the country. The author notes that at the personal level, the most important value for Ukrainians is freedom (83.9%), but at the same time, justice (72.5%) is lower than freedom, and the demand for dignity (60.4%) and equality (56.5%) is decreasing from year to year.

“It is not surprising that under such conditions, it is so difficult for people from different communities (we often call them “bubbles”) to negotiate, because everyone strives for maximum freedom of choice and benefit for themselves and does not think about its fairness or accessibility for others.”
We have gone through this path of heated discussions, debunking myths, and have come to the conclusion that we still need to ratify the Istanbul Convention, because the country really lacks tools to combat domestic violence and violence against women.

We have faced new challenges generated by Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine; after all, we are the ones confidently moving towards the EU, and therefore, we must not only bring our legislation into line, but also work to systematically change approaches to working with victims of gender-based violence in practice.

I started working with victims of domestic violence in 2007. At that time, we had the old Law of Ukraine “On the Prevention of Domestic Violence” in force. The practice of applying this law has shown that we do not have enough tools to respond to violence, that the very concept of “domestic violence” significantly limits the circle of persons who can be held accountable.

For example, at that time, it was impossible to hold a former husband or wife, who did not live together and did not have a common life, liable for violence, since this was not included in the definition of “family” within the meaning of the Family Code of Ukraine. There were also no tools to isolate the abuser from the victim. Law enforcement agencies often complained about the insufficiency of mechanisms for stopping violence and removing the abuser, the ineffectiveness of existing administrative measures, etc. Until 2017, there was no such crime as “domestic violence” in the Criminal Code of Ukraine. And if the victim did not suffer any physical injuries, the abuser could only be held administratively liable, even if the violence had lasted for years.

In 2016, there was an attempt to ratify the Istanbul Convention and, in parallel, to adopt a new Law of Ukraine “On Prevention and Combating Domestic Violence” and make relevant amendments to the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

The Convention was not ratified, but the law was adopted and in parallel with this, amendments were made to the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

So, since 2017, the Law of Ukraine “On Prevention and Counteraction to Domestic Violence” has been in force in our country, Article 126-1 Domestic Violence has appeared in the Criminal Code of Ukraine, as well as in Articles 152 of the Criminal Code and 153 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which relate to sexual violence, the concept of “voluntary consent” has been introduced, the absence of which means that rape or sexual violence not related to penetration of the person’s body has been committed.

It is also very important that in the case of committing any crime against a spouse or ex-spouse or another person with whom the perpetrator is (was) in a family or close relationship, this will be considered an aggravating circumstance, which gives the court the right to apply a more severe punishment.

Thus, Ukrainian society has changed its approach to investigating domestic violence cases at the legislative level, which have become crimes, not just administrative offenses.

It would seem that why should we ratify the Istanbul Convention, if we have already adopted a new law, made amendments to the Criminal Code and can work without the Convention.

However, this turned out to be not enough. In practice, problems began to arise with the investigation of domestic violence cases, while we have not learned to identify and investigate sexual violence, because it is difficult for us to understand what the concept of “voluntary consent” is.

And here we return to the fact that Istanbul The Istanbul Convention is a valuable and holistic document. A system aimed only at applying a formal approach cannot work. It is not enough to adopt a law.

It is important for us to understand the spirit of the Istanbul Convention, because it is not for nothing that it speaks of a comprehensive, systemic and coordinated approach to combating violence against women and domestic violence.

The 4P formula, embedded in the content of the Istanbul Convention:

Prevention

Protection

Prosecution

Coordination policies

All these four areas must develop in parallel, otherwise we will not achieve results.

Regarding values ​​and understanding of the problem, the Istanbul Convention outlines in its preamble the main roots and deep understanding of the phenomenon of violence against women and domestic violence, namely emphasizing:

the realization of de jure and de facto equality between women and men is a key element in preventing violence against women;
violence against women is a manifestation of the historically unequal balance of power between women and men, which has led to the domination of women and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full emancipation of women;
the structural nature of violence against women as gender-based violence, as well as the fact that violence against women is one of the main social mechanisms through which women are forced to occupy a subordinate position compared to men.
Joining the states that strive to “create a Europe free from violence against women and domestic violence”, in June 2022 the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted to ratify the Istanbul Convention.

This important document was adopted in the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is worth noting that in its preamble, the Convention emphasizes that states, by ratifying it, recognize “the ongoing human rights violations during armed conflicts that affect the civilian population, especially women, in the form of widespread or systematic rape and sexual violence, as well as the possibility of an increase in gender-based violence both during and after conflicts” and, in this regard, agreed to implement measures to prevent, protect and prosecute such crimes and to build a coordinated policy.

Implementation of the Istanbul Convention: the state of affairs at the beginning of 2025
Despite the full-scale war, work on the implementation of the norms of the Istanbul Convention continues. All key parties, namely the Government, Parliament and civil society organizations, continued to work on the analysis and amendments to the legislation and, in parallel, on changing the approaches in the work of all responsible entities.

It is important to note that the time since the adoption of the Law of Ukraine “On Prevention and Combating Domestic Violence” (2017), the amendments to the Criminal Code of Ukraine in the area of ​​domestic and sexual violence have shown us to this day what gaps have arisen in terms of application practice and what is important to take into account both in the work on bringing the legislation into line and in the work on forming approaches in practice.

It is necessary to realize and understand that laws are living documents that are polished by the practice of their application.

Since the ratification of the Istanbul Convention to this day, there have been a number of legislative and other initiatives aimed at implementing the norms. I will mention some of them in this publication, on which the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the National Police of Ukraine, a number of deputies, including Maryna Bardina, Inna Sovsun, the NGO “La Strada — Ukraine”, the Association of Women Lawyers of Ukraine “YurFem”, the judicial and scientific communities worked.

On December 19, 2024, the Law of Ukraine “On Amendments to the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses and Other Laws of Ukraine in Connection with the Ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence” came into force.

We can highlight the following changes introduced by this law:

Article 173-7 of the Code of Administrative Offenses provides for administrative liability for sexual harassment, including in the field of electronic communications, as well as in relation to a person who is in material, official or other dependence. Before the adoption of this law, there was no separate article in the legislation of Ukraine on liability specifically for sexual harassment. In practice, such actions were classified as gender-based violence in the Code of Administrative Offenses or as sexual violence in accordance with Article 153 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Gender-based violence has been removed to a separate article 173-6 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. So, we now have Article 173-2 Perpetration of domestic violence and a separate article on gender-based violence. This makes it possible to correctly qualify and collect data on the commission of an offense.
Separately, Article 269 of the Code of Administrative Offenses emphasizes that if “domestic violence and gender-based violence were committed in the presence of a minor or underage person, such a person is also recognized as a victim, regardless of whether the damage caused by such an offense, and it is subject to the rights of the victim, except for the right to compensation for property damage.

Also, on December 19, 2024, the Law of Ukraine “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine on Improving the Mechanism for Preventing and Counteracting Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Violence” came into force.

Among the many important provisions of this regulatory document, I would like to highlight the amendments to the Family Code of Ukraine, namely to Articles 110 and 111, which give the right to apply to the court with an application for divorce during the wife’s pregnancy and in the event of a child under one year old, and also prohibit the court from applying reconciliation during divorce in cases of domestic violence.

It would seem that very simple norms on the most important principle of “voluntariness of marriage”, but at the same time extremely strong resistance from the legal community, including from the side.

Before the adoption of these changes, spouses (either only the husband or only the wife) could not even apply to the court with an application for divorce if the wife was pregnant or had a child under one year old. If such an application was filed, the court refused to open proceedings on formal grounds. That is, in fact, the husband and wife lost the right to access justice. And what is more important, in the case of domestic violence, it was the perpetrator, who tried to keep the victim under control, who used this norm as one of the ways to make it impossible to dissolve the marriage, and therefore, to depend on him.

And, of course, abuse of the right to reconciliation was also often used by the perpetrator as a way to put pressure on the victim, so in view of this, in the case of divorce in the presence of domestic violence, such reconciliation cannot be applied.

Of extreme importance is the draft law, registered on December 9, 2024, No. 12297 “On Amendments to the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes of Ukraine to Ensure the Full Implementation of the Provisions of International Law on Combating Domestic and Other Types of Violence, Including Against Children”.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the National Police, JurFem and La Strada have been working on this draft law since 2022. The draft law covers a wide range of issues that need to be resolved in view of the challenges that exist in practice and the requirements of the Istanbul Convention.

The draft law, in particular, proposes to resolve the following important issues:

To define the concept of “criminal offense related to domestic violence”. Yes, since 2017, our Criminal Code has provided for a separate article on the commission of domestic violence (Article 126-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine), but this is not the only article under which one can be held criminally liable for domestic violence. For example, the perpetrator may inflict bodily harm on the victim for the first time or commit beatings or torture, or other crimes that will be related specifically to domestic violence and liability for which will be provided for in other articles of the Code. Therefore, in order to emphasize the commission of crimes related to domestic violence, it is important to provide for the concept of “criminal offense related to domestic violence” in the Criminal Code. This is important not only for statistics, but also for the rights of the victim and avoiding pressure from the perpetrator, who will try to force the victim to close the case. After the innovations, it will be impossible to close a case when a criminal offense related to domestic violence occurs, even if the victim refuses to file a statement.
Explain what should be understood by the “systematic commission of domestic violence”, which gives grounds to talk about criminal liability. After all, in practice, different interpretations of systematicity have arisen.
It is very important that this draft law proposes to provide for criminal liability for stalking, namely, intentional, twice or more illegal surveillance, imposition of communication, other illegal direct or indirect intrusion in any way into the personal or family life of the victim against their will, including using electronic communications, which causes them to fear for the safety of their life or the health of their loved ones.
Special attention in the draft law is paid to the use of restrictive measures in cases not only regarding domestic violence, but also sexual violence.
An extremely important issue, which has already been tried to be regulated by other draft laws, is the exclusion of cases of domestic violence, rape, sexual violence from the list of cases of private prosecution. This means that it is not necessary to place responsibility on the victim for initiating criminal proceedings by means of a corresponding appeal. This will mean that if law enforcement officers become aware of such crimes from any sources or from any persons, they are obliged to initiate criminal proceedings and investigate them.

From the moment of registration of the draft law to the time of its adoption, as practice shows, it can change significantly: some norms can will be removed, and others will be added. However, in its current form, this bill addresses a significant range of issues that arise in practice and are extremely necessary for effective protection and investigation of cases of domestic and sexual violence.

On February 4, 2025, the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on the Integration of Ukraine into the European Union issued its conclusion, according to which this bill meets the requirements of the Istanbul Convention, does not contradict EU law and international obligations in the field of European integration.

What still needs to be done
Two and a half years since the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, significant steps have been taken to implement it in wartime. Of course, much work remains to be done both at the legislative level and in practical implementation.

Regulatory documents are the basis, but they are applied by people working in law enforcement, judicial, social spheres, public organizations, etc. Therefore, in parallel with legislative initiatives, it is necessary to implement victim-centered approaches, especially to ensure the localization of those approaches and documents that have been formed at the national level.

Comprehensive assistance to the victim, avoidance of re-traumatization, communication with society and destruction of stereotypes that lead to victimization and stigmatization of victims are what we need to work with.

For the past two years, JurFem, in partnership with the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the National Police, with the participation of the Ministry of Social Policy and the Free Legal Aid System and public organizations, has been holding an annual conference “Justice Focused on Victims of Gender-Based Violence”. Based on its results, we always form the next steps together with the community. In particular, in 2023, we set ourselves the task of preparing, together with the UCP, standards for pre-trial investigation of domestic violence cases using victim-centered approaches. Such standards were prepared and presented to the community at a conference in November 2024.

In addition, three blocks of recommendations were identified that outline our next steps.

The first block is the issue of institutional changes. During one of the workshops, Judge Vira Levko noted that initiatives are based on individual people, but it is important to build institutional memory, strengthen effective interaction, cooperation, which includes not only the law enforcement sector, but also forensic experts, social workers, the free legal aid system, and public organizations.

There should be a cross-cutting inclusion of a victim-centered approach. It is important to remember about human resources that are being depleted, so we need to think about how to maintain the mental resource.

The second block of recommendations is approaches and internal policies in work. Everyone is talking about unification, standardization of approaches, procedures, documents on needs assessment and more. We need to standardize and at the same time look for approaches to each person, because each person is an individual.

The third block is legislation. Introduction of the institution of a lawyer by appointment for victims of gender-based crimes, expansion of the range of sanctions, the concept of criminal proceedings related to domestic violence, systematicity. These issues are on the agenda and are being resolved.

In the implementation process, it is important to remember that all changes are made by people for people. Therefore, if we proceed from this principle, we will be able not only to formally fulfill the requirements for the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, but also to adopt its spirit and form victim-oriented mechanisms and services.

In this bold and radical book, Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, forthcoming from Laboratorio, science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy: how it first took root in societies and spread across the world from prehistoric times to the present. Saini travels to the oldest known human settlements, analyzes the latest research findings, and traces cultural and political histories, arguing that colonialism and empires have radically changed the way of life in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, spreading rigid patriarchal customs and undermining the way people organize their families and work. In our time, despite the fight against sexism, violence, and discrimination, even revolutionary efforts to achieve equality often end in failure. But “Patriarchs” inspires hope—it reveals the multiplicity of human arrangements, challenges old narratives, and exposes male supremacy as an ever-changing element of control.

A dusty road lined with pistachio trees leads me from the ancient Turkish capital of Konya, home to the tomb of the Sufi poet Rumi, to the ruins of Çatal Göyük, once described as the world’s first city.

The place defies comprehension. Most of the settlement was long buried beneath a rise in the generally flat and arid plains of southern Anatolia. The small part that has been excavated reveals a society in which nothing follows the rules we’d expected. The edge of the archaeological site abruptly disappears into several floors of caves. The houses at Çatalhöyük—which means “fork of the road,” because that was all it was until the excavations—were built tightly together, back to back and wall to wall. They had flat roofs but no windows or doors. Residents entered and exited by ladders through openings in the roofs, walking on top of the houses, not between them. The dwellings were built in layers on top of older dwellings.

What makes Çatalhöyük special is that it was inhabited at the end of the Old Stone Age, at least 7400 BC, in the Neolithic period, before humans invented writing. This means it was inhabited almost 5,000 years before the first pyramids in Egypt and more than 4,000 years before Stonehenge was built in Britain. It is likely older even than the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley. Çatalhöyük is located near the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East that supported some of the world’s earliest farming communities. The land appears dry now, but it was once a wetland teeming with fish and birds. People gathered berries and herded goats nearby. They had clay and reeds to build their homes. But as incredibly early as Çatalhöyük is, it is still brimming with social and artistic complexity.

Thousands of people once called it home. The walls were regularly plastered, and striking works of art were created on the fresh surface. Bright red frescoes depict tiny stick figures hunting huge animals. Headless bodies, stalked by soaring vultures with wide wings. The walls are set with bull heads, their horns jutting out, as if in the interior of some American cowboy ranch.

“It was thought to be in the middle of nowhere, this huge mound with a really rich material culture that was 9,000 years old,” says Ruth Tringham, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on the archaeology of Neolithic Europe. Almost as soon as excavations began in May 1961, Çatalhöyük became a focal point for those seeking to understand human organization at one of the oldest known settlements on the planet. In 1997, Tringham led part of a team that continued archaeological work at the site, helping to piece together a picture of what life might have been like for the people there.

It wasn’t just the buildings or the murals that fascinated archaeologists. My attention focused on something much smaller, something that would fit in the palm of my hand. Now proudly displayed in its own glass case at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, the treasure is known as the “Seated Woman of Çatal-Göyük.”

Experts believe that Çatal-Göyük may have been the site of an ancestor-worshiping cult. The remains of dead ancestors were kept in the same houses as the people, under platforms in the floor. The skulls were sometimes removed, even plastered and painted, and then passed on to one another. Hundreds of small figurines have been found at the site—some clearly human, others resembling animals or something more ambiguously anthropomorphic. Yet the sculptural finds at many Neolithic sites in this region and beyond are unmistakably replete with the likeness of the female form. There are dozens of them in the museum, a handful of tiny Barbara Hepworth-style clay figures. One figurine depicts the torso of a pregnant woman on one side and the protruding ribcage of a skeleton on the other. But nothing compares to the awesomeness of the Seated Woman.

When I see her, I understand the general admiration. Her head had to be reconstructed because it was missing when she was found, but that’s It doesn’t matter when the rest of her body says so much. Several scholars have described her as a symbol of fertility. To me, at least, she doesn’t look pregnant or particularly provocative. She’s curvy, and the bare curves of flesh cascade down her body like waterfalls. Deep grooves mark her knees and navel. These are the signs of a body that has lived a long time—perhaps an older woman, hardened by age. But what stands out most is her posture. Her back is perfectly straight. On either side of her thighs, beneath her palms, are what look like two large cats, perhaps leopards, staring straight ahead.

So the most intriguing aspect of the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is not her famously curvaceous body. It’s her posture, commanding two large cats. In a society apparently preoccupied with animals, hunting, and death, her appearance is admirably commanding.

Even matriarchal.

Joined by — Oksana Kis, Bohdana Stelmakh, Tetyana Guzenko, Mykyta Burov, Alena Gruzina, Dasha Nepochatova, Alla Shvets, Anna Dovgopol, Yevheniya Shevchuk, Bohdana Romantsova, Maria Dmytrieva, Iryna Grabovska, Yulia Yurchuk, Svitlana Babenko, Iryna Vyrtosu, Yulia Yarmolenko, Olena Zaitseva, Maria Poltorachenko.

Women and Full-Scale Invasion: Reportage and Documentary Nonfiction
Berlyand, Iryna, Parubiy, Khrystyna (eds.). (2024). Women at War. Spirit and Letter.

Bilyakovska, Khrystyna, Sereda, Viktoriya. (2024). I Love You… War. Vivat.

Bros, Oreli (eds.). (2024). Women and War. Letters from Ukraine to the Free World. Boston: Academic Studies Pres. The Ukrainian translation in open access was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Kyiv-Ukraine bureau.

Bobyk, Iryna. (2024). D’voina. Bilka.

Ivantsova, Mila (ed.). (2024). Kyiv. Women. War: a collection of memories and reflections of women about life in the capital during the full-scale invasion. Creative agency “Artil”. Published with the support of the Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration Marina Honda and with the budget funds of the Department of Public Communications.

Kari, Olha. (2024). What do you know about war?! Another page.

Nikorak, Iryna. (2024). Strong women of a strong country.

Subotina, Valeria “Nava”. (2024). Azovstal. Steel Press Service. Polon. Folio.

Subotina, Valeria “Nava”. (2024). Captive. Folio.

Foreign Nonfiction
Bar-Zohar, Michael, Mishal, Nissim. (2024). Mossad Amazons: Women in Israeli Intelligence. Our Format.

Bird, Mary. (2024). Women and Power: A Manifesto. Creative Women Publishing.

Hessel, Kathy. (2024). A History of Art Without Men. ArtHuss.

Holland, Jack. (2024). A Brief History of Misogyny. The Oldest Prejudice in the World. Ark. Uay.

Oloni. (2024). Big O. Your Guide to the World of Love, Dating, and Sex. Booklover.

Lamb, Christina. (2024). Our Bodies Are Their Battlefield. Publishing.

Prince, Alois. (2024). The Life of Simone de Beauvoir. Tempora.

Nagoski, Emily. (2024). How Long a Woman Wants. The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Relationships. KSD.

Lang, Olivia. (2024). Everyone’s Body. A Book About Freedom. Grushka.

Nekvapil, Kemi. (2024). Power: Live and Rule Without Apologies. Bookworm.

Fu, Stephanie. (2024). What My Bones Know. Bookworm.

Ukrainian Nonfiction
Alla Horska. (2024). Genealogy.

Blyostka, Katya. (2024). That’s How You Need It, or Why You Should Choose Yourself in a Relationship. Vikhola.

Gundorova, Tamara. (2024). Post-Chernobyl Library: Ukrainian Literary Postmodernism. Komubook

Gundorova, Tamara. (2024). Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma. Vikhola.

Oleksandra Ekster. Histories of Ukrainian Artists. (2024). Projector.

Lodzynska, Olena. (2024). Alla Horska. Flash Before Dawn. Clio.

Lomykamin. (2024). Women’s Resistance in Crimea. Exhibition Catalog. Initiator Tamila Tasheva, Curator Tetiana Filevska. Representation of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea)

Tulchynska, Maya. (2024). I Forgot My Panties. Creative Women Publishing.

Academic Publications
Maierchyk, Maria. (2024, reprint). Ritual and Body: Ukrainian Rites of Passage. Criticism.

Matsenka, Svitlana (ed.) (2024). Cassandra Intermedium: Intermedia Studies. Apriori.

Otrishchenko, Natalia (ed.). (2024). Conversations with Those Who Ask About War. Lviv: Center for Urban History.

Pavlychko, Solomiya. (2024, reprint). Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature. Fundamentals.

Samoilenko, Hryhoriy. (2024). The Stars Continue to Shine: Maria Zankovetska and Her Eaglets: Monograph. Nizhyn: NDU named after M. Gogol.

Ukrainian-Canadian Research and Documentation Center. (2024). Ukrainian Women of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Voices of Prisoners. Author: Kalyna Bezhlibnyk Butler (Solonynka); Chief Co-Editor: Lida Eliashevska Replyanska; co-editor and translator: Khrystyna Eliashevska Shraybi; co-editor: Oksana Martsyuk.

Shvets, Alla (ed.). (2024). “In the name of our national unity”: the voices of the authors of the almanac “The First Wreath”. Lviv: Ivan Franko Institute of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shevtsova, Maryna. (ed.) (2024). Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine. Hear Our Voices. Lexington Book.

References
Ukraine is not silent: Chronicle of the SNPK’s resistance (2022–2024). Folio. The publication was prepared and published within the framework of the project “Standing together. Improving the support system for victims of war-related sexual violence”, implemented by the Ukrainian Women’s Fund in partnership with the public organization “La Strada-Ukraine” and the Association of Women Lawyers of Ukraine “YurFem” with the support of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration and the Office of the Government Commissioner for Gender Policy and with funding from the European Union.

Literature for children and adolescents
Amson-Bradshaw, Georgia. (2024). Incredible women. Stories of women from around the world who inspire. RM.

Babkina, Kateryna. (2024). Mom, do you remember? Squirrel.

Vengrinyuk, Khrystya. (2024). My mother is a mountain. Vivat.

Kolb, Lyudmila. (2024). Train. Vikhola.

Kornienko, Kateryna. (2024). Dyvokrovtsi. Staroy Lev Publishing House.

Kupriyan, Olga. (2024). Miss Olya. Morning

Omelyanenko, Liliya (ed.). (2024.) She is fighting. Publishing house.

Sytnik, Violina. (2024). Lali. VC “Academy”.

Stus, Tanya. (2024). Sprouting. Yakaboo Publishing.

Reyes, Sonora. (2024). Guide to the Catholic School for Lesbians. Publishing house.

Frankova, Maria. (2024). Outstanding Ukrainian Women. Stories for Children about Courage, Fulfillment of Dreams and Faith in Yourself. Osnova.

Yarmolenko, Yulia (2024, reprint). Little Things About Intimate Things. Vikhola.

Zabela, Anastasia. (2024). About Sex and Other Questions That Interest Teenagers. Vivat.

Fiction/Fantasy
Gladstone, Max, El-Mokhtar, Amal. (2024). This is how the war of time is lost. KSD.

Hendrix, Grady. (2024). The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Destruction. BookChef.

Jemisin, N. K. (2024). The Broken Earth Series. Textbook – Bogdan.

Dean, Sunyi. (2024). Bookworms. Yakaboo Publishing

Katorozh, Yaryna. (2024). The Alchemy of Freedom. Georges.

Rybka, Olena (ed.). (2024). Motanka. Vivat.

Samoilenko, Kateryna. (2024). The Two-Flock Series. KSD.

Sanderson, Brandon. (2024). Tress from the Emerald Sea. Vivat.

Sky, Evelyn. (2024). The Virgin Against Trouble. Vivat.

Faisal, Hafsa. (2024). We Hunt the Flame. RM.

Schwartz, Dana. (2024). Immortality: A Love Story. Georges.

A. Achell. (2024). The Queen’s Blade: Child of Shadows. BookChef.

Ukrainian Fiction
Andrukhovych, Sofia. (2024). Katananhe. Komubuk.

Vilna, Pavla. (2024). Anna, Whom I Loved. Publishing House.

Volynska, Olena. (2024). I Hear You: The Intertwining of Fates by Kateryna Bilokur and Oksana Petrusenko. Vikhola.

Dolyak, Natalka. (2024). How Not to Love Her. Tempora.

Ilyukha, Yulia. (2024). My Women. Squirrel

Karpa, Irena (cont.). (2024). I (don’t) know how to write about this. Bookworm.

Nagornyuk, Yulia. (2024) Virgin, Mother and Third. Another Page.

Savaryna, Karina. (2024, reprint). Not Pregnant. Laboratory.

Sanina, Thea. (2024). Ant Circles. Tempora.

Svitova, Slava. (2024). Names. Creative Women Publishing.

Stus, Tanya. (2024). Sprouting. Yakaboo Publishing.

Tarasenko, Galina. (2024). Former People Should Not Read. Orlando.

Shavarska, Oksana. (2024). Rysochka. Bookworm.

Reprints of Ukrainian Classics
Vilde, Iryna. (2024). The Richyn Sisters (Volumes 1, 2, 3). Vikhola.

Zabuzhko, Oksana. (2024, reprint). The Tale of the Kalina Pipe. The Pantry.

Kobrinska, Nataliya. (2024). The Wandering Meteor. Selected Works. Another Page.

Kobrinska, Nataliya, Pchilka, Olena (ed.). (2024, reprint). The First Wreath: A Women’s Almanac. Creative Women Publishing.

Koroleva, Natalena. (2024). Silk Lady. Vivat.

Plytka-Gorytsvit, Paraska. A Sweet Book. Bricks.

Pchilka, Olena. (2024). Selected Works. Another Page.

Starytska-Chernyakhivska, Lyudmila. (2024). Selected Works. Another Page.

Foreign fiction
Bachmann, Ingeborg. (2024). Thirtieth year. Publishing house 21.

Benedict, Marie. (2024). The only woman in the room. Another page.

Besser, Jen, Feste, Shana. (2024). Lustful Diana. Booklover.

Westover, Tara. (2024). Educated. Artbooks

Walker, Alice. (2024). The color purple. Old Lion Publishing House.

Woolf, Virginia. (2024). Orlando. Another page.

Ganeshananthan, N. N. (2024). The single night. Booklover.

Henry, Patti Callaghan. (2024). The secret of Flora Lee’s book. Urbino.

Gudrun, Eva Minervudottir. (2024). Beloved. Texas. Publishing.

Lang, Olivia. (2024). Crudo. Pear.

Leckie, Marianne. (2024). What is visible from here. Vivat.

Morris, Heather. (2024). Sisters in the Morning Sun. Bookworm.

Morrison, Toni. (2024, reprint). Beloved. Plot.

Moss, Sarah (2024, reprint). Figures of Light. Laboratory.

Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda (2024). Americana. Bookworm.

Newman, Sandra. (2024). Julia. 1984. Laboratory.

O’Farrell, Maggie. (2024). Marriage Portrait. Vivat.

Tokarczuk, Olga. (2024). Anna In in the Tombs of the World. Tempora.

Paintings, manga
Arleston. (2024). Grimoire of Elfie: Almost an Island. Nasha Idea.

Kabi, Nagata. (2024). Warrior-wanderer Nagata Kabi. Publishing house.

Kabi, Nagata. (2024). Diary of a relationship with herself. Publishing house.

Inder, Karin, Pelissier, Jerome. (2024). Serpanka. Volume 1: Awakening of the Dragon. Publishing house.

Stevenson, N. D. (2024). Nimona. Publishing house.

Strömqvist, Liv. (2024). The Reddest Rose Blooms. Publishing house.

Dr Pepperco. (2024). Farewell, Rose Garden (Volumes 1, 2, 3). Our Idea.

Poetry
Amelina, Victoria. (2024). Testimony. Stary Lev Publishing House

Kazanzhi, Zoya. (2024). Marta and Other Women. Stary Lev Publishing House.

Kaur, Rupee. (2024, reprint). Body, My Home. Vivat.

Pavlova, Olena. (2024). Light-Sensitive. Stary Lev Publishing House.

Savka, Maryana. (2024). Forever Tender. Stary Lev Publishing House.

Sazhynska, Iryna. (2024). Lemniscate. Torch.

Skyba-Yakubova, Ivanna. (2024). Instead of Apples. Stary Lev Publishing House.

Tsilyk, Iryna. (2024). Thin Ice. Meridian Chernowitz.

Books to be released in early 2025
Bakaev, Mykola, Pugach, Veronika (ed., trans.) (2025) Philosophers. Plato’s Cave.

Bechdel, Alison. (2025). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy. Publishing House.

Woolf, Virginia (2025). A Room of One’s Own. Komubuk.

Woolf, Virginia (2025). Waves. Komubuk.

Imagine that you are walking down the street on your usual route, lost in your own thoughts. Your favorite song is playing in your headphones, which is suddenly interrupted by a scream from behind. You barely have time to take them off when you are knocked off your feet, you feel a sharp pain from the blow. The attacker shouts insulting words about your appearance, hints at your sexual orientation, comments on your hairstyle and clothes. The blows do not stop, people around for some reason do not dare to intervene, and you cannot understand why he hits you, as if with impunity…

What happened is called a “crime based on intolerance”. Each such case is not just a statistic, behind it stands the life of a person whose basic right to safety has been violated.

Hate that affects everyone
Hate crimes are often not related to personal hostility towards a specific person, but rather reflect prejudices and stereotypes about a certain group of people. The motives for such crimes usually relate to inseparable characteristics that a person cannot or does not want to change. These can be nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity or other personal characteristics.

Prejudices often determine the choice of the “victim” or are manifested during the attack itself. For example, a person who just happened to be near Pride may become the object of an attack simply because of their presence at an event that aroused the anger of the attackers. Criminals may target human rights activists or members of the LGBT+ community, even without having personal hostility towards a specific person, but because of their identification with a certain group. Or, say, if the owners of a store hung a rainbow flag, this may become an excuse for vandalism or destruction of the window. Such actions are an immediate and often unpredictable threat, which makes combating these crimes particularly important.

Hate crimes are a clear manifestation of social injustice and discrimination, which negatively affects not only a specific person, but also society as a whole. They undermine trust in the community and contribute to the spread of an atmosphere of fear and tension.

These acts of aggression are often accompanied by serious psychological pressure and leave a lasting traumatic experience for the victims. Attackers seek not only to cause physical harm, but also to undermine a person’s confidence in their own safety, which can negatively affect their mental state, social activity and quality of life.

Therefore, it is important to understand that combating such crimes is not only a matter of protecting individual groups, but also of creating a safer and more inclusive society, where everyone has the right to live without fear of violence and discrimination.

How war intensifies aggression against LGBT+ Ukrainians
Aggression and hatred are deeply rooted in stereotypes and prejudices that exist in society. These attitudes are formed through upbringing, education, and media influence. Negative attitudes towards certain groups of people can be reinforced by religious, political, or cultural beliefs. War intensifies these attitudes, creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust, which further exacerbates social conflicts.

Uncertainty and fear for the future push people to look for “enemies” among those who look or behave differently. In times of social instability and conflict, representatives of the LGBT+ community find themselves in a particularly vulnerable position due to discrimination based on sexual orientation, appearance, and gender identity.

Over the past two years, Ukraine has seen an alarming increase in hate crimes, including homophobia and transphobia. In its 2022 report, Freedom House highlights the increase in violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people during the war. It is noted that the war has intensified xenophobic sentiments and contributed to an increase in hate crimes. However, the real number of such incidents remains unknown due to irregular monitoring and insufficient awareness of victims about their rights. Many cases of violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people are not registered due to distrust in law enforcement agencies and the potential threat of re-traumatization.

The publication “The Situation of LGBTQ People in Ukraine in January-June 2024” recorded 39 cases of such crimes, which already exceeds the indicators for the whole of 2023. This increase is likely due to both the activation of LGBT+ organizations and anti-LGBT+ groups. Cases of physical violence, attacks on LGBT+ centers and activists, as well as deliberate destruction or damage to property during events in support of the LGBT+ community, such as Pride Month and the Sunny Bunny Film Festival, are common. It is worth noting that these statistics reflect only publicly disclosed cases. The real number of hate crimes is much higher due to difficulties in obtaining information from the occupied territories and general problems with documenting such cases.

Law enforcement agencies often qualify the hate motive as ordinary cases of inflicting bodily harm, without taking into account the homophobic or transphobic motive. Only two cases of bringing criminals to justice based on hate motives in 2023 remain the only ones in Ukrainian judicial practice.

Legal vacuum in combating intolerance
Ukrainian legislation lacks clear definitions and specific punishments for acts of violence motivated by hatred of race, nationality, especially sexual orientation or gender identity. This legal vacuum allows criminals to avoid fair punishment.

Experts from the Gender Stream advocacy department note that universal articles of the Criminal Code do not take into account the specifics of hate crimes. This leads to the fact that such crimes are considered simply violence or hooliganism without taking into account the motives. Therefore, the detection and investigation of discriminatory crimes, which may have deeper social causes, is complicated. The lack of special units in the Ministry of Internal Affairs systems for such cases also creates a problem, as there is often a lack of experience and resources for an adequate response.

Ukrainian legislation already includes an article on crimes based on discrimination. The current Article 161 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine defines liability for violating the equality of citizens based on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, disability, and other characteristics. However, this article has several significant limitations that make it difficult to effectively combat hate crimes. In particular, it does not contain specific references to sexual orientation and gender identity, which are critically important for the protection of the LGBTIQ+ community.

As a result, cases of discrimination and violence against LGBT+ persons do not receive full legal assessment and punishment. Such crimes are forced to remain outside the attention of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system. This not only complicates the process of punishing criminals, but also creates a situation where individuals who have suffered discrimination or violence because of their identity may feel unprotected by the law, which, in turn, reduces their trust in the legal system.

To effectively address the problem of hate crimes, it is necessary not only to supplement Article 161 of the Criminal Code with the characteristics of sexual orientation and gender identity, but also to ensure a comprehensive approach to combating such crimes.

Draft Law No. 5488 as a comprehensive system for combating intolerance
Draft Law No. 5488 was initiated by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine under the current Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal precisely with the aim of introducing criminal liability for hate crimes. Its adoption will be an important step in the fight against discrimination and violence in Ukraine. The main goal of this bill is to create a legal mechanism that will allow for the clear definition and punishment of hate crimes motivated by race, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity or other personal characteristics. This bill not only fills the existing gaps in the Criminal Code of Ukraine, but also provides a legal framework for the protection of vulnerable groups of the population, who are often targets of violence and discrimination.

Bill No. 5488 proposes a comprehensive approach to combating hate. This involves the creation of clear mechanisms for registering and investigating hate crimes, training law enforcement officers, developing national strategies to combat discrimination and violence, and raising public awareness. In order to ensure protection from such cases, it is necessary to introduce systematic monitoring and assessment of the situation.

Civil society organizations as a driving force for change
The path to the adoption of Bill No. 5488 in Ukraine turned out to be difficult and thorny. Since its registration in May 2021, the document has undergone numerous discussions, revisions, and obstacles. The Law Enforcement Committee recommended it for adoption in May 2023, but there are still many stages to go before the bill enters into force or even comes up for a vote.

Currently, bill No. 5488 is on the agenda of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Its further fate depends on the votes The second and third readings, the signing by the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and the approval by the President, as well as whether it will be put to a vote at all. The civil sector does not cease to actively work on supporting the draft law, attracting international assistance and mobilizing resources to achieve ultimate success. The full-scale invasion threw off the attention and priority in promoting draft law No. 5488. But already in 2022, advocacy work was resumed.

In this process, civil society organizations play a critical role in promoting anti-discrimination legislation. One of the leading organizations in the advocacy process No. 5488 — Gender Stream is actively working on promoting the draft law. Over the past two years, the Gender Stream team, based on its own advocacy strategy, has initiated the creation of a coalition of human rights organizations to promote draft law No. 5488, and has held a number of strategic meetings to support it both in Ukraine and in the international arena. These include, in particular, meetings with MEPs and international organizations, appeals to international institutions, official and informal meetings with key figures in Ukraine and the country’s partners, work with the European Parliament and the European Commission and close partnership with the Council of Europe, participation in shadow reports, etc.

Since July 2024, Gender Stream has been a member of the Expert Council on Equal Rights under the representative of the Commissioner for Equal Rights and Freedoms, Rights of National Minorities, Political and Religious Views. This is another opportunity to influence decision-making and the political context in Ukraine so that the needs and challenges of LGBT+ are taken into account at the state level.

A third of the Ukrainian population monitors the news every hour, and almost half use their phones for 4-6 hours a day. A huge amount of information is perceived by everyone constantly. It can be difficult to distinguish facts from fakes in this flow. Especially if the manipulations are based on existing stereotypes, including gender stereotypes.

Discrediting Ukrainian refugees and female military personnel is still one of the goals of hostile propaganda. Russia is actively using it for its own benefit. So what is gender disinformation and how to recognize it?

Gender disinformation: what is it and how does it spread
The prevailing opinion is that gender disinformation is misleading or false gendered and/or sexualized narratives created to damage the reputation of women and prevent their participation in the public sphere. That is, when you read another Russian fake about Ukrainian refugees who “became prostitutes in the EU,” it is gender disinformation.

“Russia loves to use gender disinformation. It serves to justify its aggressive policies and war crimes, and is also a tool for dividing into ‘ours and ours’. This vividly illustrates the propaganda construct about Europe, which is opposed to ‘traditional’ Russian values,” said Dzvenyslava Shcherba, an analyst at the NGO Internews-Ukraine, at the conference “DesOut: How to Knock Manipulations Out of the Information Field.”

Dzvenyslava Shcherba

In a study on gender-based disinformation by the NGO Internews-Ukraine, respondents from among journalists and public figures identify two main reasons for the spread of such disinformation.

Sometimes publications reprint external information without checking the facts;

Social media users may spread fake news because they often seek to draw attention to an event or news item, without questioning its veracity.
It is also worth remembering the dominance of Russian propaganda. Together, these factors help gender stereotypes and outright fake news to spread and take hold online.

“Women are often reduced to the role of mothers, daughters, and caregivers, instead of being seen as full-fledged political and economic actors,” says researcher Sarah Soberai from Tufts University in the United States. She identifies three main strategies by which women are forced to be silent or limit their influence: intimidation, shaming, and discrediting.

Sarah Soberai

A striking example is the social media campaign launched in 2017 against Svitlana Zalishchuk, a Ukrainian MP of the 8th convocation. At that time, she gave a speech at the UN about the impact of the war on the lives of Ukrainian women. Fakes began to spread on social networks that the deputy had allegedly promised to run naked through the streets of Kyiv if the Armed Forces of Ukraine were defeated. This is how they tried to discredit Zalishchuk, reducing her role as a woman to a sexual object.

Gender disinformation is also being used against the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska. The most aggressive topics in information operations against her are corruption and crimes against children. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, hostile propagandists have accused Olena Zelenska of spending $1 million on jewelry, purchasing a Bugatti Tourbillon car for €4.5 million, and being involved in child trafficking. All reports turned out to be fakes.

Although such manipulations are always refuted, their presence in the information field harms women. Not all people check information, and some of them may believe fakes. In order not to become the target audience of propagandists, it is necessary to develop media literacy.

How to check media content for gender misinformation and manipulation
Dzvenislava Shcherba suggests asking four questions, the answers to which will help you easily check the content for objectivity. They will be useful for everyone who wants to develop their media literacy and critical thinking.

1. Does the media content contain generalizations about a certain gender?

Check whether the content contains stereotypes and gender clichés. For example, are women described as “caretakers” or “mothers” in a context that is not related to family or household duties? Are men portrayed only as “strong” and “brutal”? Such narratives promote gender stereotypes, on the basis of which many fakes are built.

2. Are the statements supported by facts?

Make sure that the ideas are supported by facts and research. Many of the statements used to spread misinformation about women, such as “all women fled abroad and don’t think about the fate of the country,” “women don’t serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” have no factual basis.

3. Does the content contain manipulative comparisons?

Comparing two issues or experiences that are not actually comparable can mislead people. Common examples include comparing workplace harassment and innocent compliments. The latter are usually aimed at professional qualities and achievements, rather than a person’s appearance. Therefore, “You did a great job” or “You are a true professional in your field” are perfectly appropriate compliments. However, if they relate to appearance or fuel stereotypes (“You are not like that, I am other women”, “You don’t whine like other women”) is a warning signal.

This also includes statements that gender discrimination against men and women is equally widespread, or comparing men with women to show them as “weak” or “worthless”. The latter can often be found in Russian propaganda, where gender stereotypes are used to humiliate both sexes.

4. Does the content justify or encourage violence?

This tool of disinformation is widespread in Russian media. There, they often justify the rape of Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers and even encourage new crimes.

Other examples can be found on social networks – derogatory messages about Ukrainian servicewomen. They write about them that they “came to the army for men”. These narratives justify violence and insults against Ukrainian women in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Fakes are aimed at undermining democratic values ​​within the country, as they devalue the contribution of women to its defense. And therefore, they increase inequality and tension in society.

Gender disinformation is a form and tool of Russian propaganda. It contributes to the spread of stereotypes and the normalization of violence against women, discrediting and intimidating them. Therefore, content on social networks and in the media should be carefully checked for sexist and discriminatory statements.

The material was created by the team of the NGO “Internews-Ukraine” within the framework of the project “Strengthening Truthfulness, Transparency and Democracy to Counter Disinformation”, funded by the Government of Canada.

On February 8, 2024, the official website of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) reports, “His Holiness Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus’-Ukraine Filaret awarded medals for “Sacrifice and Love for Ukraine” to the entire personnel of the medical post of the 1st mechanized battalion of the 72nd separate mechanized brigade named after the Black Zaporozhians of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” And already on February 25, the UOC-KP announced that they were canceling this award for one of the awardees, Viktor Pylypenko, because they “do not share his sinful preferences and LGBT agitation.” In other words, Viktor Pylypenko was recognized as unworthy of the medal because of his sexual orientation, because he is an open activist for the rights of LGBT+ people, one of the founders of the association “Ukrainian LGBT Military for Equal Rights.”

It is no secret that the UOC-KP and other religious institutions are the most ardent opponents of the promotion of LGBT+ rights in Ukraine. Not so long ago, a scandal erupted over a video clip featuring Khrystyna Solovyi and Serhiy Zhadan, filmed in Lviv in the church of St. Andrew the First-Called, which showed two girls kissing. For years, the Council of Churches opposed the ratification of the Istanbul Convention on Combating and Preventing Gender-Based Violence by the Verkhovna Rada, because this document allegedly promotes “gender ideology” and “non-stereotypical gender roles,” and now it is actively opposing the legalization of civil partnerships. And when in 2023 the Pope allowed the blessing of same-sex couples, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was quick to make a statement that Rome’s will does not apply to it.

Being a believing LGBT+ person in Ukraine is obviously very difficult. It’s one thing if you are an atheist and what Church representatives write on the Internet is offensive to you at best, and more often seems like outdated anti-scientific nonsense, the main problem of which is the delays in advancing LGBT+-friendly legislation in Ukraine. But what about a person for whom the Orthodox or Catholic, Muslim or Jewish part of the personality is as integral and important as national identity or sexual orientation? What is it like to feel and understand that a community that is important to you stops accepting you simply because of who you are from birth? And how is it that people who profess religions that are based on love for their neighbor so easily allow themselves to push away and be cruel to people for something that should not concern them: because of their romantic feelings or how they express their gender?

These questions have been bothering me for some time, and a few years ago I began to take an active interest in welcoming, inclusive churches and religious institutions of various faiths. As it turned out, some religious communities have nevertheless taken a step forward towards a more inclusive interpretation of their own religious texts and acceptance of human diversity. In this text, I would like to share a few stories that, in my opinion, best illustrate that religion can truly be about love and acceptance, and not about stigmatizing those who do not fit into the rigid framework established by the Church. And most importantly, I have decided not to write about progressive churches in Sweden or Iceland, from which everyone probably expects, first of all, tolerance and openness to the new. I want to show you that acceptance can also be found in less predictable places. For example, in very Catholic Latin America or in South Africa.

John Botja. Gay Pastor in Bogotá, Colombia
I met John a year ago when I came to Colombia to interview local LGBT+ activists. The topic of conversation turned to religion, which is an important part of national identity in Latin American countries, and my colleague mentioned an openly gay Methodist pastor she knew. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity and asked to share his contact information. John responded to my request to chat almost immediately and invited me to attend their service on Sunday morning. However, he warned me that, as a non-local, I should call a taxi or Uber and have the driver drop me off at the church door, because this area of ​​Bogotá is not very safe.

The Methodist Church of Bogotá (Iglesia Metodista de Bogotá) occupies two small but bright premises in what is certainly not the most peaceful area of ​​the city. If it weren’t for the cross on the roof and the sign on the door, I would never have guessed that this was a church: most of the visitors arrive on motorcycles and mopeds, dressed in leather jackets, many with piercings or tattoos. Although the church is open to all comers, the vast majority of the parishioners are LGBT+ people and their families and allies. John himself looks like an ordinary, nice young priest, the least striking figure in this diverse crowd.

An hour before the service begins, some people gather in a separate room for a Bible reading, and I join them to listen. Today’s topic of discussion is patience and acceptance. How do we explain our opinions without alienating them? How do we be open to a position that doesn’t coincide with ours? How do we understand those who hate us? It all feels more like a psychology debate club than a discussion of the truth.

liturgical texts. However, someone constantly reads passages from the Bible.

Service at the Methodist Church of Bogota

The service itself also somewhat resembles a rock concert. In addition to John, who conducts the service, there are two more girls in leather jackets in front of the congregation. One plays the bass guitar, the other plays the synthesizer. At some point, I myself sing along and dance to a song about how God is love. If it weren’t for this and the large number of men in leather jackets around, it would be no different from a regular Protestant service. After communion, everyone goes to the common kitchen to drink tea and cookies. I start a conversation with a couple next to me, ask who they are and how they came to church.

Everyone’s stories are different, but in general about one thing. Here is Luis from Venezuela, which he left due to the political and economic crisis in search of work in Colombia. The Catholic church at home was not even open to accepting him as gay, but faith had always been very important to Luis, so he looked for a way to join another church until he met John. Maria and Natalia are a couple who help John organize various events. This time they are collecting donations for a shelter for victims of domestic violence. They came to get John from their previous church, where they could not openly talk about who they were.

Finally, I have the opportunity to talk to John about his story.

“I grew up in a Catholic family,” he says. “I fell in love with another boy for the first time when I was about seventeen. I tried to suppress these feelings for a long time because I grew up knowing that it was a sin, that it was a crime to be attracted to someone of the same sex. I struggled with myself for several years, and at one point I even started dating another guy, but it felt like something terrible, a sin. I had to hide who I was from my church, and therefore lie. It killed me from the inside for several years, until I ended up in the hospital with a serious illness. And then, when I was lucky enough not to die, I said to myself: “Enough! If God made me this way, then this must be His will.” And I accepted myself. Then I started thinking: “I can’t be the only gay believer in Colombia!” And I started googling “gay Christians,” “LGBT+ believers,” “LGBT+ Christians,” and I saw a bunch of websites! I started writing to them, making my thematic posts on social media, and little by little I built a community that became almost a family. But what I was missing was ministry. And after years of searching, I joined the Methodist Church, where I started helping the pastor because this church accepted LGBT+ people, had female priests, and our values ​​coincided. It so happened that this pastor was going to serve in Argentina, so he invited me to be ordained and take his place. On February 25, 2018, I became the first openly gay pastor in a Protestant church in Colombia and all of Latin America. Of course, there were other gay pastors before me, but their sexual orientation was hidden, and I became the first gay priest to be ordained, and everyone around me knew it. The whole world knows that I am gay.”
When I asked how his church is changing the world around him, John gives two answers:

“First, we try to change people by our example. When we moved into this building (in a poor neighborhood), people knew that I was gay and didn’t see me as a priest. They immediately thought of debauchery, drugs, alcohol, all these things that some still associate with homosexuality. But then they saw how we help children, women, young people who use drugs, anyone, and they started to respect us. Now they say: “Yes, this pastor has a different sexual orientation, but he is a good, decent person.” That’s how I gained people’s favor over these five years. Secondly, it’s education. I can’t do anything if people don’t understand the basic things: who is an LGBT+ person, what is sexual orientation, gender identity, what is it all about? We have to teach people what diversity is, tell them about the rights of LGBT+ people, why it is important. We need to talk more about our experiences and listen to the experiences of other people. If we are talking about transgender people, I will invite a transgender person to tell about their life, I can’t speak for them. We have to listen to each other. This is how we learn, this is how we become a better version of ourselves.”
And what if God is a transgender woman? Rita Gomez and Iglesia Antigua de Las Américas
Since I worked for several years in Ukraine in the Parental Initiative “TERGO”, which supports families with LGBT+ children, I was interested in talking to similar parenting groups in Latin America. That’s how I found Rita. But she turned out to be not just a lesbian mother and a named mother of a transgender woman, but also a bishop of the Ancient Church of the Americas (Iglesia Antigua de Las Américas). I came to Rita’s house, where I found her surrounded by several dogs and houseplants. The bright red-haired woman told me her story so emotionally and captivatingly that, sincerely rejoicing, I turned on the recorder with her permission, because it was impossible to take my eyes off her and record something.

“The way we see the world depends on where we come from. I am from Osho.

a rich family: my dad and mom were poorly educated people, but, on the other hand, had a fairly liberal mindset for their time. Our home was always a safe place for LGBT+ people, they were part of the environment in which I grew up. They were not strangers, they were part of my family, my dad and mom’s friends, or the children of those friends. It was natural, normal. I myself was not born into a Catholic family. Let’s say, 70% of people in Latin America are believers. A large percentage of them are Roman Catholic. But my parents belonged to the Presbyterian Church, which was already quite progressive in matters of female leadership. Somehow it happened that for me in the church there was no question at all that something was not allowed. So I was a deaconess, I was a pastor, I was a reverend, because women have the right to be ordained just like men. But many churches still fail to understand and accept the issue of gender diversity. Eight years ago, I belonged to the Presbyterian Church. In general, women are welcome in the church, but not everyone in the church sees the issue of sexual diversity the same way. Eight years ago, someone from the church said to me at a leadership meeting: “Rita, I’m praying for you, because you must be really hurt by this.” I ask what exactly hurts me. And she says to me: “Do you know that your daughter is a lesbian?” I look at her and realize that this is my moment. And I tell her: “Of course I know. I knew from the moment she was born and everyone in the family knew, and no one has a problem with it.” And everyone around me fell silent, somehow very awkwardly. And the next week, the pastor invited me for coffee and said that the church was not happy. “So,” I say, “you’re not ready to accept my daughter anymore? My daughter grew up in church, was the youth coordinator of the church, organized meetings for two hundred people. And by Saturday my daughter was an example for everyone, and the next week she was asked not to come to church because, you see, she was not good enough!”
That day I decided that this was not my place. If there is no room for everyone where there is communion with bread and wine, this is not my place. If you are required to be a heterosexual person to be part of the community, this is not my community. And so I left. For a year I went to a Methodist church that accepts LGBT+ people. I sat in a corner for a whole year, learned a lot during the sermons. Then I felt that I wanted more, and then I met a wonderful woman named Gabriela Guerreros and a wonderful man named Hugo Cordoba Quero. Two wonderful theologians from Argentina. She is a lesbian who built a whole process called Las casitas. Casitas are shelters for people with transgender experiences and substance abuse issues. Hugo and Gabriela introduced me to Iglesia Antigua de Las Américas, and I immediately fell in love and joined. Three years ago I started serving, and after a while I was asked to become a bishop in Colombia. It was not easy for us, because our Church challenges traditional religious models.

Rita Gomez (far left) in August 2023 after her ordination as a bishop. Source

First, we are pro-abortion as a church. We believe that women are the only ones who have the right to decide whether or not to have an abortion, and we believe that we cannot allow women to continue to die from clandestine abortions, we cannot allow raped girls to give birth at the age of eight. As a church, we consider ourselves people who support legal, free, safe, permitted abortions with consent, with guarantees as a woman’s right. And we also think about how important it is to approach a person’s decision to undergo euthanasia with understanding. When a person is suffering, who am I to force them to live, because otherwise they will go to hell? Moreover, we do not believe in hell.

Hell is a religious construct that was invented to control people. If you are gay, you will go to hell, if you are a lesbian, a socialist, if you decided to have an abortion or euthanasia, you will also go to hell. Hell is a social, even political construct that the religious world created to rule over people. I have never believed in the idea of ​​hell. I believe in a theology called realized eschatology. Hell is here and now. Hell is starving to death, it’s being a mother of two or three children at 16 and not being able to go to school. Hell is a 50-year-old woman who can’t read or write. That’s what hell is. But we love drama, give us flames and a red devil with horns and hooves.”

Rita then enthusiastically recounts her experience speaking to the participants of Pride in Bogotá:

“I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about God to more than 10,000 people in my life, I only had three minutes. I took the microphone and said, “I know that 90 percent of those present think that God is the biggest symbol of patriarchy in the world, because all our lives we’ve been told that God is a man. I want to tell you that God is Love, that’s what the Bible says, and love doesn’t hurt, because love cares, protects, builds. How many of you have had to explain your diverse lives to a religious person only to be told…

and did you accept this?” Everyone in the square raised their hands. “I want to tell you that being different from others is not a sin or a crime. A crime and a sin is when a supposedly believing person takes advantage of the vulnerability of a child, woman, or young man to satisfy their sexual needs. Today I want to show you that God is a God of diversity. I believe that God is trans. I believe this and I say this seriously. After all, God had to make a transition in his eternal essence to a temporary physical incarnation in Jesus, had to stop being an absolute power in order to become a man who died, starved, suffered, cried, and feared death on the cross. God created the transition. God also travels in the Holy Spirit after the death of Jesus and accompanies us. The Holy Spirit accompanies us. Period! Wherever we go and whoever we are. God makes the transition. Now it is up to us, the new generations and those who think differently, to let God pass through our lives and accept His love, understanding that we must love ourselves in order to be able to love others as well.” And when I saw the wild reaction of the crowd, how people reacted to my words, I realized what uncontrolled power the religious world can have over other people. And that day I asked God to help me better determine how to accompany people more carefully in their transition, because it is a huge responsibility.”
Judaism: Reform Jews
Quite by chance in the middle of 2010, I rented an apartment in Berlin from a Jewish woman who turned out to be not just a slave, but also the first female slave in the (then) CIS countries to perform a religious wedding ceremony for a lesbian couple. That’s when I learned about the existence of a branch of Reform Judaism, which, unlike Orthodox Judaism, supports the rights of LGBT+ people.

Reform Judaism has its roots in Germany, where it originated quite a long time ago, back in the 19th century, and from there it spread to other countries in Central and Western Europe. It is now very popular in the United States and has about two million followers worldwide. The movement of progressive or Reform Judaism is a liberal trend in Judaism. Such Judaism believes that Jewish tradition is constantly evolving, acquiring new meaning and new content with each new generation, therefore it strives to renew and reform religious rites in the spirit of modernity.

Reform Judaism has been advocating for LGBT+ rights since 1965, when the Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) passed a resolution calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality. In 1977, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Union for Reform Judaism passed their first resolutions calling for equal rights for homosexuals. Since then, American Progressive Jewish organizations have passed a series of resolutions on issues such as the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the rabbinate and cantorate, support for marriage equality, the elimination of discrimination in the military and Boy Scouts, and support for comprehensive nondiscrimination and civil rights legislation. In 2015, the Union for Reform Judaism adopted a resolution on the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people, and the Religious Action Center recently published a Guide to Integrating Transgender People to help congregations better include them and their families.

While researching Judaism’s stance on homosexuality, I was intrigued to read an interview with Denise Eger, a female rabbi who began her work in 1988 at a gay synagogue in Los Angeles at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She traveled to the medical center every day to visit young patients being treated for the disease. She says that at that time, the fear of AIDS, especially for those living with it, was palpable.

Rabbi Denise Eger before a same-sex marriage ceremony. Source

Eger, who is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami, a Reform Jewish synagogue in West Hollywood, California, remains committed to helping those who are marginalized and uses her rabbinate as a platform for social activism. She is the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the largest and oldest rabbinical organization in North America. Eger is also the first openly lesbian rabbi to serve as the head of the Reform rabbinate.

The first gay imams: LGBT+ rights in Islam
It took a little longer for mosques to open their doors to LGBT+ people: the first LGBT+-friendly mosque in Europe with a gay imam of Algerian origin was founded in 2012 in Paris (at that time, several such mosques were already operating in Canada, the USA, and one of the first known gay imams opened such a mosque in South Africa).

Imam Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed says in his interview:

“Our mosque became the first inclusive mosque in Europe. Today, such communities exist all over the world: in Western Europe, the United States, Indonesia, South Africa, even in Tunisia. So it spread everywhere, but it started mostly in the USA and Canada […] It was the first time in my life that I was asked to perform the duties of an imam after I left

On the coast of Australia, many, many miles from the nearest town, in a house filled with the love of her mother Agnes and the cruelty of her father, lives nine-year-old Alice Hart. Her mother’s beautiful garden is the only place where she can be unafraid, hiding from sudden outbursts of anger. Until a fire, bringing with it inevitable tragedy and death, forces Alice to abandon everything she feared so much and at the same time loved so much.

The novel “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart” by Holly Ringland, soon to be published by the Laboratory Publishing House, is the story of how, over twenty years, between the lush sugarcane fields on the seashore, between an Australian flower farm and a celestial crater in the central desert, Alice is forced to understand that the most powerful story she will ever own is her own. We publish an excerpt from the book.

Alice followed Candy past the dormitory where the Flowers lived. When they reached the workshop, they stopped at a door that was covered in thick vines. Candy pushed it aside, took her keys from her pocket, and inserted one into the keyhole.

“Ready?” she asked, smiling broadly.

The door opened.

They stopped together at the doorway of the workshop. The morning sun warmed their backs, but the air conditioning in the room made Alice suddenly feel cold. She rubbed her hands together, remembering the boy who had raised his hand to wave.

“You sighed so deeply,” Candy raised an eyebrow, looking at Alice. “Are you okay?”

Alice wanted to say so much, but all that came out was another sigh.

“Words are sometimes overrated,” Candy said, and took Alice’s hand. “Don’t you think so?”

Alice nodded. Candy squeezed her hand before letting go.

“Come on,” she said, holding the door open, “let’s take a look around.”

They went inside. The first half of the workshop was filled with benches stacked like a tower of buckets, a row of sinks, and refrigerators along the wall. On the shelves were tools, rolls of sunscreen, and assorted bottles and spray cans. On hooks on the wall hung wide-brimmed hats, aprons, and gardening gloves, beneath which stood rubber boots, lined up like invisible flower soldiers, frozen in place on the rack. Alice turned back to the benches. Under each of them were additional shelves filled with jars and containers. The workshop smelled of fertile soil.

“We bring the flowers here after we cut them in the fields. We inspect each flower before we send them on their way. They have to be perfect. We get orders from customers all over the country; our flowers are delivered to every corner of the country, to flower shops and supermarkets, to gas stations and market vendors. They are worn by brides and widows and,” Candy’s voice trembled, “women who have just become mothers.” She ran her hand along one of the benches. “Isn’t it magical, Alice? The flowers we grow here speak for people when words can’t, in almost every situation imaginable.”

Alice repeated Candy’s motion and ran her hand along the work surface. Who are the people who send flowers instead of words? How can a flower say the same thing as a word? What would one of her thousand-word books be like if it were written in flowers? No one ever sent her mother flowers.

She squatted down to examine the boxes of cutting tools, the spools of string, and the little buckets of markers and pens of all colors under the bench. She took the cap off the blue marker and sniffed it. On the back of her hand she drew a circle, a straight vertical line, and then another, a slant, the letter “I.” In a moment she had added a dash and the word “t-u-t.” As Candy approached her, Alice erased the words.

“Shh. Alice Blue,” Candy stuck her head out over the bench where Alice sat. “Follow me.”

They made their way between the benches, past the sinks and refrigerators, to the other side of the workshop, which was set up as an art studio. There were tables covered with plain tablecloths, strewn with paint cans and paintbrushes. In one corner stood easels, stools, and a box filled with tubes of paint. On one of the tables lay rolls of copper foil, pieces of colored glass, and jars of tools. When Alice reached the closed corner at the end of the studio, she forgot about the boy. She forgot about June and the statues of her father. She was too absorbed in what was right in front of her.

“The corner under the letter “X,” Candy giggled.

Dozens of flowers in various stages of drying hung from a frame overhead. A long bench ran along a makeshift wall. On it lay tools and fabrics, blackened by frequent use, and dried flower petals, scattered, discarded like clothes abandoned on a beach. Alice pressed her palms to the wooden surface, remembering her mother’s hands floating over the flower heads in the garden.

At one end of the bench lay a velvet sheet adorned with bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and rings decorated with pressed resin flowers.

“This is June’s place,” Candy said. Here she creates magic from the stories that Thornfie is built on.ld.

Magic. Alice stood before the jewelry, each shimmering in the light.

“June grows every flower here,” Candy said, holding up a bracelet that held a pendant with a pale peach petal. “She presses each petal and pours it in clear resin, then seals it in silver.”

Candy replaced the bracelet. Alice studied the rainbow of other flowers pressed into the pendants of the necklaces, earrings, and rings. Each flower was sealed forever, frozen in time, but still holding the colors of life. They would never turn brown or wither. They would never rot or die.

Candy moved to stand beside her.

“In the days of Queen Victoria, people in Europe spoke through flowers. It’s true. June’s ancestors—your ancestors, Alice—women who lived a long time ago brought this language of flowers from across the ocean, from England, and preserved it for generations until Ruth Stone brought it here to Thornfield.

They say she didn’t use it for a long time. It wasn’t until she fell in love that she began to speak in flowers. However, unlike the language of flowers she brought from England, she only used the flowers her lover gave her.” Candy stopped, her face turning red. “Whatever…” she interrupted herself again.

Ruth Stone. Her great-grandmother. Alice’s cheeks flushed with curiosity. She wanted to put a ring on each finger, press cool silver pendants against her warm skin, throw bracelets on her wrists, and press earrings into her unpierced ears.

She wanted to carry the secret language of flowers around her, so that they could say for her what her voice could not.

At the other end of the bench lay a small handmade book. Alice leaned over it. The cracked spine had been repaired many times, tied with many red ribbons. The inscription on the cover was handwritten, in gold calligraphy, with red flowers that looked like spinning wheels. “The Language of the Australian Wildflowers of Thornfield.”

“Ruth Stone was your great-great-grandmother,” Candy said. “This was her dictionary. Ruth’s heirs cultivated language the same way they cultivate flowers here,” she ran her hand over the corners of the worn pages. “It has been in June’s family for generations. Or rather, in your family,” she corrected herself.

Alice ran her fingertip over the cover. She wanted to open it, but she wasn’t sure if she could. The pages were yellowed and stuck out at odd angles. There were bits of handwritten words in the margins. Alice tilted her head. She could only read a few complete words. Darkness. Branches. Crumpled. Fragrant. Butterflies. Paradise. It was the best book Alice had ever seen.

“Alice,” Candy leaned down so that she was at Alice’s eye level. “Have you ever heard that story before? About Ruth Stone?”

Alice shook her head.

“Do you know much about your family, Pea?” Candy asked gently.

A feeling of shame that Alice couldn’t understand made her look away. She shook her head again.

“Oh, what a lucky girl,” Candy smiled sadly.

Alice looked at her in confusion. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“Do you know Alice Blue, the woman I wrote to you about in the letter, the daughter of a king?”

Alice nodded.

“Her mother died when she was little,” Candy took her hand. “She was heartbroken and sent to live with her aunt, in her palace filled with books. Later, when Alice Blue was older, she said that it was the stories her aunt told her and the stories she read in books that saved her.

Alice imagined Alice Blue, a girl in a dress the color of her name, reading in the pale light that filtered through the window onto the pages of a book.

“You are lucky to have found this place, and with it your story, Alice. How lucky you are to be able to know and understand where you come from and where you belong,” Candy turned her face away. In a moment, she wiped her cheeks.

Air conditioners clicked and hummed in the distance. Alice looked at the old book and imagined women who had bent over it long ago. Perhaps they were clutching a sprig of wildflowers in their hand to add a new entry in their secret language.

Alice began to shift nervously from foot to foot, because she was bored. Candy turned to her and asked a question that filled Alice’s whole body with impatience:

— Do you want me to show you how to get to the river?

You can purchase the book at the link on the Laboratory publishing house website.

On November 12, 2015, a landmark event took place in Ukraine: the majority of the Verkhovna Rada deputies, albeit only on the fifth attempt, after long inter-faction negotiations, under pressure from civil society and European institutions, voted to amend the current Labor Code, prohibiting any discrimination in the workplace, in particular on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. “Better a gay pride parade on Khreshchatyk than Russian tanks in the capital,” was how Yuriy Lutsenko, the leader of the BPP faction, explained his vote in support of the bill at the time, clarifying that he himself did not support the “LGBT+ way of life,” but “if we are going to Europe, we must recognize all norms, including LGBT+ rights.”

Amendments to the Code should potentially significantly improve the lives of LGBTQI+ people in our country, because the prohibition of discrimination means that a person would not have to worry, for example, that they would be fired or harassed at work if colleagues or management found out about their homosexuality or bisexuality. However, what do we know about (non-)discrimination of LGBT+ employees by Ukrainian employers almost ten years after the adoption of the amendments to the Code?

Before the start of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, extremely few studies were conducted on the living conditions of LGBT+ people, and the situation on the labor market is no exception. At the end of 2023, the NGO “Tochka Opory UA” conducted a qualitative study “(non-)discrimination of LGBTQI+ people in the workplace and an inclusive labor market. Results of a national survey of the LGBTQI+ community”[1], which sheds some light on the experiences of LGBT+ people living and working in our country. More details about its results, as well as the best practices of Ukrainian and foreign employers, can be found in this article.

I am not beaten, therefore I am not discriminated against. “Marrying a heterosexual” and other survival strategies
Despite the fact that the norm of non-discrimination in the workplace has existed in Ukraine for almost ten years, during all this time there have been no precedents with lawsuits against employers on the grounds of discrimination against an employee due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. However, this does not mean that such discrimination does not exist in Ukraine. Instead, one of the explanations is that, contrary to the claims of opponents about equal rights for LGBT+ people, proving the fact of discrimination in the workplace and holding the perpetrator accountable is a rather difficult and laborious procedure. In addition, many LGBT+ people have a well-founded distrust of the Ukrainian judicial system and police, as they or their acquaintances have already had negative experiences with these institutions.

Another reason for the lack of information about cases of discrimination against LGBT+ people is the generally low awareness of what is and is not discrimination and what rights a person can expect in a democratic country. Many LGBT+ people are so used to living in a society where they are not considered the norm that they have normalized things such as homophobic and transphobic jokes and comments, the lack of inclusive practices in the workplace, and limited access to certain services, such as friendly doctors or housing. Often in the interviews I conducted, my interlocutors answered that they were fine, since they had never encountered direct violence or physical threats against themselves, everything else did not seem “serious enough” to them to have the right to “complain”.

At the same time, many LGBT+ people in Ukraine, when asked whether they had encountered discrimination or violation of rights in the workplace, answered that they had not had such experience, since no one among their management or colleagues guessed about their sexual orientation or gender identity. In other words, they use the so-called straight-passing strategy — “passing off as heterosexual”.

Most LGBT+ people are forced to hide their sexual orientation and gender identity at work.

However, following such a strategy means that LGBT+ people have to constantly hide at work, monitor their behavior and words, and often endure tactless questions about their personal lives and the alleged absence of a loved one. Such people cannot bring their partner to a corporate party or put a photo with their loved one on their desk or as a mobile phone screen saver. They have to control their social networks, photos, content, in which photos and with whom they are tagged, under which posts they have liked.

Among the participants in the study by the NGO “Tochka opory UA” was a person who, in particular, said: “It’s like wearing a collar on a dog. You have to sit and think all the time, assess the situation. I have never felt safe. Every time, before opening up to someone and saying something, you have to think 20–50 steps ahead. There is no ease when you are just honest with people, just living your life because you are who you are, no… you have to think ahead. Because you know that any careless word, any show of weakness, that tiny bit of trust that you have in any person… all of that can affect you ; you cannot simply be independent, free from everything. When you work, you depend on this job, you hope for it. Because, perhaps, you have a debt or you are saving money to buy something, for example, for your dream. And then you are forced to leave this job due to harassment or bullying. It is not because you work badly, you do your job perfectly, but you cannot work with these people, because they simply laugh in your face.

Such behavior, as a rule, is a response to the atmosphere of rejection in the organization where a person works, to his feeling or assessment that opening up to colleagues or management at this workplace will be dangerous. Usually this is expressed in inappropriate jokes by colleagues, comments on relevant news, private discussions, etc. As most participants in the study of the NGO “Tochka opory UA” agreed, the tone in the organization is set by the management, and it mainly depends on it whether the team will be accepting and tolerant or not. In those Ukrainian companies where the values ​​and principles of the organization were clearly discussed and where it was clearly declared that discrimination and oppression of any groups are unacceptable, and, most importantly, where management did not separate words from deeds, employees were more likely to admit to some colleagues or even the entire team about their homosexuality or bisexuality, or felt comfortable enough to make a transgender transition while working at the same workplace. Unfortunately, the number of such companies in Ukraine is still small.

Outing and harassment: what LGBT+ people working in Ukraine face
Even if a person consciously chooses not to talk to colleagues and management about their private life, there are always risks that someone, accidentally or intentionally, will not only find out about their sexual orientation or gender identity, but also make this information public without permission, that is, they will make the person so-called out.

Outing is the public disclosure of information about a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity without their consent. Source

The participants in the study spoke about very different experiences and consequences of outing. Someone was seen by colleagues with a partner in a cafe, someone had their phone hacked, and there were several stories about how information that directly indicated or hinted at a person’s non-heterosexuality came from their private social media profile. As a result, rumors spread in the workplace, the person heard inappropriate jokes about them, and in several situations there was outright harassment, as a result of which the person had to resign from their job.

Such stories show that the fears of LGBT+ people who hide their sexual orientation or gender identity are well-founded. In addition to the risk of verbal or even physical harassment from management and colleagues, one must also consider how difficult it will be to find the next job. While it is easier to start a new life in big cities, in small towns or rural areas, opportunities for career changes may be limited. In addition, the profession plays a role: it is very difficult for LGBT+ people associated with the school education system, since in our society there are still a lot of stigmas and stereotypes about homosexual orientation and transgenderism related to how it can potentially affect children (none, except for a healthy expansion of the understanding of diversity in society). Not to mention the mythical connection between homosexuality and pedophilia, which is actively propagated by some conservative and religious groups. For example, one of the participants in the study, a school teacher in a district center, said that she was forced to leave school because she was constantly worried that someone would find out about her relationship with another woman. Moreover, when she and her partner broke up, she did not dare to register on a dating site, because she was afraid that if one of her students’ parents suddenly found out, the consequences would be painful.

Of course, there are also positive examples. Several participants spoke of complete support at work from both colleagues and management. As a rule, such people said that if they had to look for a new job, they would no longer agree to work in a company where they would have to hide who they really were. Many of these people are professionals, so inclusivity in the workplace is a small price to pay to retain valuable specialists/current. And why else are businesses turning to creating a safe and tolerant work environment?

Why is tolerance profitable?
Probably, many have seen, at least in photos or videos, that in Western countries, for example in Germany, the Netherlands or the United States, large corporations very actively support Pride Month: they hang rainbow flags, produce thematic branded products, and often organize their own platform at the Pride March.

IKEA in support of Pride Month. Source

Source

This is how companies declare their values ​​(both for employees and potential consumers)

c), and also improve brand visibility and recognition. In past years, many Ukrainian companies and organizations have supported this trend in different ways. In 2023 and 2024, rainbow flags were placed on logos by retail chains and Ukrainian mobile operators, posts in support of Pride Month were made by some Ukrainian channels, and PrivatBank, in partnership with Gender in Details, even offered thematic plastic cards.

You can install skins in the Privat24 application.

Of course, we can talk about the general improvement in attitudes towards LGBT+ people in Ukraine, which is evidenced by recent sociological research, and about the principles of business owners and heads of organizations, who are more likely to support so-called European values ​​during a full-scale invasion. However, we also know that private business is not least about profits. What motivates business owners to take steps that potentially involve the risk of losing a share of a more conservative group of consumers?

Ukrainian society’s attitude towards LGBT+ people, 2022 – 2024. Source

Economists and experts from international organizations such as the World Bank and UN Aids have long considered the economic and financial consequences of discrimination and exclusion of vulnerable groups, and in particular LGBT+ people. Back in 2019, Professor Lee Budgett from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA), having analyzed legal and economic information from 132 countries for 1966 – 2011, together with colleagues, recognized that there is a strong connection between the inclusion of LGBT+ people and the economic development of the country.

Discrimination against LGBT+ people not only harms them themselves, but also harms the country’s economy. Legal equality for LGBT+ people is strongly associated with higher GDP per capita.[2] In addition to GDP, experts point to a close association between the level of LGBT+ rights and such economic indicators as the World Economic Forum’s Competitiveness Index, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking, and the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index (GII).[3]

In 2021, a study conducted by Open For Business on the economic impact of LGBT+ inclusion in Central and Eastern Europe, which also covered Ukraine,[4] found that discrimination against LGBT+ people costs Ukraine between UAH 15.5 billion and UAH 37.4 billion (USD 553 million and USD 1.3 billion) annually. Such high figures are due to a number of factors caused by discrimination and exclusion of LGBT+ people from the labor market. These factors include, for example, the emigration of highly skilled professionals to more LGBT+-friendly countries, a decrease in attractiveness for Western investors, health inequalities that reduce the productivity of workers who identify as LGBT+, and the wage gap.

When it comes to creating a safe work environment within individual companies, scientists also agree that a non-discriminatory approach and cultivating diversity in the workplace work to the benefit of economic indicators. For example, a study published in 2019 by the US Chamber of Commerce shows that the shares of companies that support diversity and inclusion policies are on average 6.5% more expensive than the average stock in the relevant industry. The report also proves the positive impact of a safe work environment on a number of critical business indicators, such as team loyalty, engagement in work processes, innovative approach to work and creativity, and overall employee satisfaction. It is not surprising that if a person feels safe and comfortable in a team and does not have to spend energy hiding who they are, they will be more motivated to work productively and will probably be less inclined to change jobs.

Best global practices
So, the awareness of the fact of economic benefit can push companies and organizations to be more inclusive. And what are the strategies for encouraging private and public institutions to support diversity in their teams?

In addition to making appropriate changes to national legislation to create legal mechanisms to counteract and prevent discrimination (including on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity), there are also less formal tools.

One common practice is the creation and promotion of rankings and indices in which companies compete for the status of “more inclusive”. An example of such an index is the Corporate Equality Index, a survey of leading American companies and law firms published annually by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. In 2023 and 2024, almost 1,400 companies participated in this ranking in the United States alone. By the way, there is a similar initiative in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Corporate Equality Index, a national study of corporate policies, rules, and practices of private and public companies regarding the support of equality and diversity, as well as the prohibition of discrimination in the workplace. An analogue of the Index In the EU member states, there is a Diversity Charter, by signing which the organization undertakes to make efforts to create a diverse and inclusive work environment. It is important to note that not only private companies and corporations can participate, but also state structures.

In addition to creating policies and procedures, another common way to support the inclusion of LGBT+ people in the workplace is to create networks and groups within organizations or institutions. Such groups are organized so that LGBT+ people working in the same institution have a safe space to communicate and discuss their problems, do not feel alone in the team and have additional safe channels to voice their needs to the company’s management. These groups can be partially or completely anonymous, in case not all employees feel insecure about disclosing information about their identity for various reasons. In addition to being established within an organization, groups can be sectoral, such as LGBT+ police or healthcare workers (or, as in Ukraine, LGBTQI+ military groups).

Fig. 4. Representatives of the British LGBT+ Police Group. Source.

In cases where it is important to protect particularly vulnerable groups, one option may be to introduce additional mechanisms of state regulation of the labor market. Transgender people remain one of the most marginalized and discriminated groups in Ukraine and abroad. Due to limited access to medical services, complex legal procedures, and a general high level of social rejection, many of them do not dare or simply cannot afford the transgender transition procedure and continue to live with documents that do not match their gender expression, which often makes it impossible to find employment and can push them into prostitution. All the more interesting is the example of some Latin American countries, whose governments are concerned about the high level of transphobic violence and have launched inclusion programs. Uruguay and Argentina became the first countries in the region to introduce quotas for the employment of transgender people.

Fig. 5. Photo from the March for Diversity in Montevideo, Uruguay, 2014. Source.

The government of Uruguay in 2018 and the government of Argentina in 2020 adopted bills according to which one percent of positions in the public sector must be held by transgender people. Although the quota mechanism is often criticized for its imperfections, civil society activists in both countries have generally supported the initiative, hoping that it will lead to increased visibility of the transgender community and attract more attention to the issues. Unfortunately, so far, only a small number of transgender people have actually been able to take up such positions, as they face structural inequality and discrimination very early in their lives, which reduces access to education and qualifications. Therefore, they advocate for educational reforms and try to draw more attention to the problems of this group.

Consulting: how to make your workplace safe and comfortable for LGBT+ people too
If this article has convinced you and you are already thinking about how you can make your company or organization a comfortable place to work for everyone, including LGBT+ people, I offer you a few simple steps.

Ensuring gen

Develop and implement policies.
Some people think that developing policies or procedures is just a waste of team time that could be spent more productively. In fact, having policies such as an anti-discrimination or equal opportunities policy that clearly state that any discrimination in the team (including on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity) is unacceptable sends a clear signal to the team about the principles and values ​​of the organization. Of course, it is important that the company’s employees participate in the development of policies and that all new employees first familiarize themselves with these policies and understand their importance for all members of the work team.

Education and awareness raising.
Very often, people behave tactlessly or unconsciously discriminate against others due to lack of awareness. Raising awareness of colleagues on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity should not be the task of LGBT+ people already working in your team. Instead, regular training for employees on diversity and inclusion, as well as specific issues related to the LGBT+ community, will contribute to understanding and acceptance of LGBT+ people.

Creating a supportive environment.
As Ukrainian and global research shows, creating a supportive environment begins with the leadership of the organization. If the leaders of the company, departments and divisions openly support and encourage an inclusive culture, where diversity is respected and valued, and gossip, inappropriate jokes and bullying are not allowed, as a rule, subordinates also become more inclined to reproduce appropriate behavioral models and organizational culture.

The history of the Ukrainian women’s movement began with those fundamental principles and ideas around which the concept of Ukrainian feminism began to develop, showing its relevance and continuity in different periods of the life of Ukrainian women. In the mid-1880s of the 19th century, Natalia Kobrynska, the founder of the Ukrainian women’s movement, laid the foundations of a new worldview and positioning of women in society, adapting the latest emancipatory trends of Europe to national challenges. Therefore, she is still rightly considered one of the most interesting European feminists, the first theoretician of Ukrainian feminism, who formulated and embodied its main principles, aimed at the formation of a nationally conscious, educated, socially active woman.

Natalia Kobrynska, 1890s

“The women’s issue has penetrated my soul too deeply,” Kobrynska declared 140 years ago in a letter to Ivan Franko about her preoccupation with modern feminist ideas. She gradually crystallized them in her fundamental journalistic works, which still remain the historical foundation of the women’s movement: “On the Women’s Movement in Modern Times”, “Russian Women in Galicia”, “Married Woman of the Middle Class”, “On the Original Goal of the “Norwegian Women’s Society in Stanislaviv” (all published in “First Wreath”, Lviv, 1887), “Women’s Affairs in Galicia” (collection “Our Destiny”, Stryi, 1893), “Domestic Women’s Crafts” (“Our Destiny”, 1893, co-authored with M. Revakovych), “News from Abroad and the Land” (“Our Destiny”, 1893, co-authored with O. Kobylyanska), “Aspirations of the Women’s Movement” (“Our Destiny”, 1895, 1896), “On Ibsen’s Nora” (“The Deed”, 1900).

What were the main messages to Ukrainian women from Kobrynska? What ideas and slogans of their time formed the basis of Ukrainian feminism? How do these imperatives speak to modern women today?

1. The women’s movement is a component of broader socio-cultural struggles.

“The women’s issue reaches further, it embraces all fields in which women as women are oppressed: in the field of social positions, since they are excluded from them, in the field of higher culture, and finally – in the field of law, both public and civil, since this law treats women differently than men” [10:25 – 26].

Nataliya Kobrynska considered the women’s issue in the context of women’s broad socio-political and spiritual aspirations for their own freedom, individual development, and social visibility. She believed that calls for emancipation, which arose from economic conditions, under the influence of European democratic developments, must develop together with other social issues, and not separately, because this would narrow the essence and principles of women’s aspirations. Therefore, the women’s issue, according to Kobrynska, should not be reduced to a narrow understanding of the struggle for equal socio-political rights for women, but should be interpreted in the broader context of deep socio-psychological and cultural-historical changes in patriarchal society.

2. Gender equality.

“In general, women have never spoken out against men as such, but only against the social order, the order that made men masters and pushed women into the position of slaves, excluded from the protection of equal rights, even from science and material independence” [9:374].

The idea of ​​equality between men and women was and is the basis of feminism, but from the beginning of the women’s movement there have been myths about “man-haters” and “women’s struggle against men”. Natalia Kobrynska first addressed the issue of gender parity in her “Report at the meeting of the Stanislavov Women’s Society” in 1884, emphasizing: “I declare to men that we can live with them in common thought for a common idea, and do not consider ourselves only as eternal candidates for their hearts” [3]. With this clear statement, she openly polemicized with the anti-feminist theory of F. Nietzsche: “life knows no equality and in itself is nothing other than the insult and appropriation of what is alien and weaker” [12:21]. And since a woman is weaker, it is worth “keeping her under lock and key, as something that is already condemned to slavery by nature and can only have some value in strong hands” [12:21]. Following Nietzsche’s ideas later provoked the emergence of a separate layer of artistic narrative in literature, in which the main motive is “strength and passion”, and a woman is treated only as an element of a “true strong man”. In contrast, Ukrainian feminism from the very beginning consistently affirmed the idea of ​​equality and socio-cultural partnership between men and women. “It must be so that a woman, as a conscious person, stands next to a conscious man” (letter from Natalia Kobrynska to Osyp Nazariev, 1912) [2, F. 13, No. 35].

Ivan Franko, 1896 Mykhailo Pavlyk

Natalia Kobrynska’s ideas were confirmed in the reality of the time: the development of the women’s movement in Galicia was in every way facilitated by authoritative men such as Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Pavlyk, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Panteleimon Kulish, Vasyl Polyansky, who not only with personal support but also with their own works worked out the ideological ground for emancipatory ideas and consensus.

home actively supported women on this path.

3. Feminism as humanism.
   “Kobrinskaya took into account a woman exclusively as a person, and considered the women’s movement to be the only means at that time for the elevation of this part of humanity” [6:3].

The desire to revive and affirm in a woman, first of all, a person with equal rights and opportunities for personal self-realization was a significant achievement of the emancipatory ideas of the founder of the women’s movement. It is in this context that feminism was consonant with humanism.

4. Nationalism and civil responsibility of women.
   “A woman has always and everywhere been able to understand the spirit of her time and the demands of her society” [13:328].

The national vector is a unique feature of the Ukrainian women’s movement, which was due to a long period of Ukrainian statelessness and national oppression. Therefore, the idea of ​​Ukrainian feminism from its very inception was clearly based on national principles. The acquisition of an independent status of women in public and family life in the understanding of Kobrinska is consonant with the concepts of national, autochthonous, spiritually rooted in one’s own tradition. Hence the close connection between feminism and nationalism, the identification of women’s emancipation and national liberation struggles, which was especially relevant in the conditions of an imperially divided Ukraine. In the words of Natalia Kobrinska, with the emergence of the emancipation movement, “our women throughout the vast expanse of Rus’-Ukraine felt their national existence,” “our intelligent woman felt herself simultaneously a Ruthenian and a man, and remembered her national and public rights” [8:287] (in the language of that time, the word “Rusyns” was used to designate Ukrainians, and “man” in the meaning of “person.” — Ed.).

In a broader sense, feminism was also associated with a state-building strategy, in which women were assigned the constructive mission of a creative citizen, because, as Kobrynska believed, “women took an active part in all the great evolutions of human development” [14:325]. Responding in a timely manner to the national-patriotic challenges of the era, the “spirit of women” and their civic intuition were harbingers of historical transformations and indicators of the life of the people.

Under the slogan of national unity, the women’s almanac “The First Wreath” was published in 1887, proclaiming the main slogan of the publication: “In the name of our national unity.”

Later, in the interwar period, the national idea became central to the ideology of the Ukrainian women’s movement, and was clearly expressed in the journalism of Milena Rudnytska: “Service to the Nation was and is one of the leading ideas of the Ukrainian women’s movement, from which it draws its ethos and its ultimate justification” [16:201].

5. Feminism, European Integration, and National Identity
   “The so often praised Europeanism should not consist in subordinating our spirit to a foreign country, in neglecting everything that is our own, but rather in the ability to elevate ourselves, our own and our national individuality to the heights of European culture and art. And we will never achieve this without learning to preserve the features of our specific character, without learning to truly “be ourselves”” [11:387].

The women’s question arose on the waves of the European progressive movement, associated, in particular, with the change in industrial, socio-economic and cultural relations. Therefore, observing the rapid progress of the women’s movement in Europe, where it had long had its own tradition, literature and achievements, Nataliya Kobrynska sought, on the one hand, to adopt the main trends of European feminism, and on the other – to adapt them to Ukrainian socio-political conditions. “This is quite natural, when we notice how vividly and strongly our society is drawn into its circles by the modern European development of social and economic relations” [8:287], she explained the growing interest in the women’s question in Galicia. It is no coincidence that Kobrynska purposefully projects all her subsequent feminist activities onto Europe, focusing on the European experience of women’s emancipation, primarily in the educational and socio-economic plan, becoming, in the words of M. Bohachevska, “one of the most interesting European feminists” [1:17].

Kobrynska’s unwavering interest in world feminism is indicated by her interesting studies-reviews, which describe the experience and social and legal status of European women, ― “On the Women’s Movement in Modern Times” (“The First Wreath”, pp. 5 – 25); trends in the women’s movement in Europe ― “News from Abroad and the Land” (“Our Destiny”. Stryi, 1893, pp. 79 – 93, co-authored with O. Kobylyanska). Striving, in Frankov’s words, “to involve our women in the sphere of ideas and interests of advanced European women” [17:502], Nataliya Kobrynska initiated the practice of effective cooperation with representatives of other nationalities – Czechs, Poles, Germans, with whom she jointly submitted petitions to the Austrian parliament on women’s educational and electoral rights.

Nataliya Kobrynska popularized European feminism in every possible way, borrowed European stylistic trends in her work, summarized and translated advanced European works and works in order to “introduce the spirit of Europe into Ukrainian relations.” But she perceived the need for Europeanization primarily as an organic

development, the path of formation and self-affirmation of a mature nation while preserving its self-identity in order to expand intellectual horizons. Therefore, Kobrynska advised to assimilate Europeanism in the form of a mental formula – “to be oneself” in all manifestations of national existence: political, spiritual, cultural and historical.

6. Woman and literature.

“We set ourselves the goal of influencing the development of the female spirit through literature, because literature was always a true image of the bright and dark sides of the social order, its needs and shortcomings” [13:328].

Almanac “The First Wreath”, published in Lviv in 1887.

The principles of early Ukrainian feminism are closely connected with educational and intellectual slogans, with the attempt of women to declare themselves through their own writing. “I came to understand the position of women in society through literature” [7:322], Kobrynska explained the origin of her emancipatory ideas. After all, with her own feminist works, the writer formed a new reading for Ukrainian women, striving to give her sisters exactly the book that would show a different essence of women through concrete life examples and women’s destinies, emancipate their multifaceted personality, and encourage them to take an active social role. It is no coincidence that the goal of the first Ukrainian feminist organization, the “Society of Russian Women,” founded in 1884 in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) by Natalia Kobrynska, was the slogan “awakening the female spirit through literature.” Initially, it was planned that it would be a women’s reading room with its own publishing house, created for literary purposes. Why did literature become the most effective way of representing women then? In the conditions of Ukrainian statelessness, when the press and Ukrainian parliamentarism were silent, when a shameful linguocide was taking place in the Dnieper region, writing became an important resource for self-realization and expression of will, a sign of the people’s intelligentsia. According to Kobrinska, “in times of political unfreedom, literature is a kind of refuge for freedom” (letter from N. Kobrinska to Ivan Beley dated September 11, 1885). Also, through literature, a woman could become spiritually liberated, express her feelings and needs, and express herself in writing.

Olena Pchilka and Natalia Kobrinska – co-editors and patrons of “Pershy Vinek”

According to the idea of ​​the founder of the Ukrainian women’s movement, it was literature that was to play an important consolidating role, gathering all conscious “women under the banner of literature for the purpose of explaining and uniting thoughts” [13:299]. In a broader state-building and national-historical perspective, literature, according to Natalia Kobrynska, served as a unifying factor for the nation: “Rus-Ukraine, also divided politically, comes together with the help of literature” [13:290]. This was fully demonstrated by the publication of the women’s almanac “The First Wreath”, which initiated the tradition of women’s writing and literary sisterhood and united 17 Ukrainian women writers on both sides of the Zbruch River.

The Almanac “The First Wreath” — a modern reprint

7. Woman and War.
   “Our capabilities are as small as our environment, but our work is as great as our goals” [6:3].

Natalia Kobrynska, 1910s

Having personally experienced all the hardships of the First World War, Natalia Kobrynska advises passionate Ukrainian women to actively participate in the struggle for national freedom and their own state, and to understand the importance of even the smallest help to the front. The writer suffered morally in this war, becoming the victim of a baseless denunciation with accusations of espionage, barely escaping arrest, remaining alone in the devastated Bolekhov. However, in her civic consciousness, the war events also stirred up optimistic faith in the solution of the Ukrainian question. Already physically and spiritually exhausted, she refused to lead the national liberation leadership in Bolekhov, more willingly devoting herself to concrete work aimed at helping the army: she participated in fundraising and charity missions, made dressing materials for the front, and gladly hosted Sich riflemen who heroically repulsed Bolekhov from the Russian rear in her hut. The writer described all the tragic experience of the war in her military short stories in the cycle “War Stories”, depicting terrible pictures of national martyrology. In these literary texts, the motif of femininity permeates the idea of ​​a viable power of Ukraine, capable of raising triumphant life over the victims of death. In the works of Natalia Kobrinskaya, the idea of ​​saving the nation is feminine in its essence.

8. The conflict between motherhood and civic mission.

“…In order to bring my idea to life, I renounced the happiness that motherhood gives!” [4:6].

According to Olga Duchyminska, Natalia Kobrynska tried to “give new goals and values ​​to the female soul” [5:15], to affirm the “individuality of the female spirit” whether in married life or in personal self-realization and intellectual development. Kobrynska considered the defining value of a woman to be her moral dignity (“purity”), which was most valued at all times: “I consider those women who preserve [protect] purity to be the healthy nerve of society, which preserves the human race.