When Pasha got home from work on the evening of 26 June last year, the flat was empty. Her wife Mariahad left behind the climbing ropes tied to the bunk-bed of their six-year-old son, Kostya, and a portrait she had done of him. There were also Kostya’s crayon drawings at child height, just above the skirting boards: Angry Birds, and the Swedish cartoon Carlsen. All other traces of Pasha’s wife and son were gone.

“I had a premonition in the morning,” Pasha told me. “Maria just seemed too keen to get me out of the house. When I came home and saw them gone, I knew immediately what had happened. I became hysterical. I tried to phone Maria many times, but she would not pick up.”

A year later, in July 2015, at her ground-floor flat in a block of flats in Lyubertsy, an industrial suburb south-east of Moscow, Pasha was leaning against the bunk bed in Kostya’s neat and empty room, now the sombre chapel to a lost child. Tall and athletic, Pasha hid her striking beauty behind androgynous reddish hair that fell in a low fringe over her face. After gender reassignment surgery, she had changed her surname to the female form, but had kept her first name as “Pasha”, the gender-neutral diminutive of both the male Pavel and the female Pavla. She was low from the grief of losing her child and side effects that still made it painful to walk six months after her surgery. She spoke in a whisper, an attempt perhaps to feminise her voice, but she was firm in her resolve to see her son. She had devoted herself to appealing against the Moscow regional court’s decision to deny her custody.

The transgender woman fighting for the right to see her son - Podcast Read more

Pasha tried repeatedly to contact her wife after she left. When she finally managed to get hold of her, Maria had said: “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re doing OK.”

“What about me?” Pasha asked.

“Now you’re free to live as you choose.”

In a cruel way, Maria was right. For years, Pasha had been deferring any thought of changing her gender. Like so many transgender people, she feared that she would be compelled to forfeit her family. Now, however, she realised that she had nothing more to lose. She got involved in protesting against Russia’s new anti-LGBT laws, and a friend she had met through this activism introduced her to a couple who ran a gender clinic in a northern Moscow suburb, where she began her transition. She made her submission to a board of six doctors led by a psychiatrist, received a medical diagnosis of “gender identity disorder”, underwent vaginoplasty surgery, and then, finally, the arduous process of persuading the Russian authorities to change her documents (there is no standard procedure for this, and it depends largely on the caprice of the local functionary).

Her son Kostya has since told a state-appointed psychological observation team that the person who used to be his beloved father was now a “crazy woman” who would corrupt him with her “femishness” (these are both rough translations of vulgar Russian slang).

In the months before Maria left, Russia’s federal parliament had considered a bill that would give the state permission to remove children from parents in “non-traditional” relationships. The bill was withdrawn, but the panic it caused had not receded. In an increasingly nationalistic and socially conservative Russia, where any mention of homosexuality around minors is criminalised as “gay propaganda” and both homosexuality and transgenderism are condemned as signs of decadent western influence, Pasha’s transition has estranged her further from her son.

Ironically, it was Kostya’s birth that rekindled Pasha’s understanding that she was destined to be a woman; a feeling she had repressed since she was about 10 years old. Like many transgender children, she did not understand why she was referred to as a boy and expected to do typically male things. But she was naturally athletic, and her passion was shooting: she loved the focus and the “tranquillity” of marksmanship. “I put my femininity deep inside, in a little box, and it was invisible to the outside,” she told me. “My life was like that scene in The Terminator. Schwarzenegger is looking at a screen, and figuring out what his options are. There are several options, and the most appropriate one is highlighted. I acted in the way that would be most appropriate, to avoid problems.”

My life was like that scene in The Terminator. Schwarzenegger is looking at a screen, and figuring out his options

Pasha became The Terminator: “Military service: highlighted. So I went to the army and became a sniper. Husband: highlighted. So I married Maria. Fatherhood: highlighted. So we had Kostya.”

But when the child was born, “all my female feelings rose up again. I just felt a big love for this little creature, and I wanted to protect him.” Given her training as a sniper, Pasha was employed, at first, by the Russian National Guard, protecting sensitive sites, but she quit this work after seven years. At the time of Kostya’s birth, she worked largely from home, as an IT consultant. She led a reclusive life, while Maria was a party-girl with a senior management job. And so Pasha became Kostya’s primary parent: “But people thought that men should not act this way. I was rebuked for being too soft, too caring, not manly enough as a father. This shocked and confused me, and over time I came to the conclusion that the suppression of these feelings was being imposed on me. Once I understood this, I realised that I had the power to reject it. Society did not have the right to manage how I felt … If I wanted to cry, I would cry. If I wanted to be happy, I’d have fun. I freed my consciousness from everything imposed on me. That’s when I accepted myself as a woman.”

* * *

After Kostya was born, Pasha spent a lot of time reading about her rights and her medical options on the internet. This was a time when, globally, awareness about transgenderism was expanding dramatically. A new LGBT rights movement was flexing its muscles in Russia too, and Pasha watched, at first from a distance, as LGBT Pride marches were attempted, but dispersed. She told her wife how she felt, and what she wanted to do. Maria was supportive at first. But once the anti-gay propaganda law was enacted in Russia, everything changed.

Pasha was deeply troubled by the new state-sanctioned homophobia of President Vladimir Putin’s followers, and their calls for the recriminalisation of homosexuality and the denial of transgender rights. The “gay propaganda” law had been on the books of the province of Ryazan since 2006; during 2012 it was piloted in several other places, including St Petersburg, and by the end of that year, the federal parliament announced its intention to make it national law. Anyone promoting “non-traditional relationships” in front of minors would be subject to a fine of up to 100,000 roubles (£1,000). The law was passed in June 2013: it has seldom been applied, but it has provoked extreme homophobia, including entrapments using online dating services, violent disruptions of public gatherings and, in one instance in St Petersburg, a shooting at a gay community centre that left one young man blind.

When parliament started debating the bill in late 2012, LGBT activists and their supporters demonstrated in Moscow. Pasha began to attend. This outraged Maria, who was determined to keep Pasha’s new identity secret. “Imagine if someone Maria knew saw Pasha on television at one of these demonstrations!” a family friend said to me. “She could never have lived with the shame. She was also, correctly, worried that the child might be teased.” (Maria did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

At the same time, Pasha told me, “on TV they started showing all these horrible programmes that said homosexuality is harmful, it’s an illness coming from the west aimed at the destruction of Russia from within.” In one prime-time programme, aired in late 2012, a group of seemingly deranged cross-dressers were alleged to be in the service of a Ukrainian plot to undermine Russia. Maria had been quite progressive and democratic before, but her views began to change.

Pasha had begun to take oestrogen (without supervision: prescription compliance is very lax in Russia) and to use a breast-enhancing cream. On a holiday in the countryside, during the spring of 2014, Maria’s aunt – a doctor – figured out what was happening, and revealed it to the extended family. Her belief was that Pasha was mentally ill. Pasha’s mother-in-law was upset and angry.

A few weeks later, Maria left with Kostya, and filed for divorce. The divorce was granted quickly, and although Maria was given custody of the boy, as biological mothers almost always are, Pasha’s rights to access were confirmed. In the summer of 2014, Pasha saw her son about a dozen times, but always in a public park, and always with a phalanx of Maria’s relatives in attendance. When Kostya and his relations did not show up for the next meeting, Pasha called and was told the boy was ill: she went over to the flat where Maria’s parents live with gifts for her son, but was denied entry.

When Pasha wrote about these incidents in a Facebook post, Maria’s family accused her of airing dirty laundry in public and shut down access to Kostya altogether. The last time Pasha saw her son was on 12 August last year, at his birthday party in a public park: she was allowed to give him his gifts, but the boy was whisked away – crying for his father, Pasha claims – before she could talk to him. Pasha was not invited to his birthday party this year, and she heard, via her stepmother – who received occasional calls from Maria’s grandmother – that the gifts she sent were distributed to other children.

* * *

Pasha’s stepmother, Valentina Kuziminichinska, is a short, thick-set woman in her 70s, a retired hairdresser and factory worker, with cropped hair and that singular combination of heartiness and sentimentality that defines the Russian babushka. She arrived at Pasha’s flat one humid afternoon last July, bearing fresh fruit from the market, to hear the latest news: Pasha had not only lost her appeal against the custody decision, but had received a call from Maria’s lawyer, telling her that she could no longer see Kostya at all, since the psychologist’s report had said that this would be “destabilising” for the child.

Valentina was outraged: “I am so pained by this. I am furious!” She threw her arms around “my Pasha” and pinched Pasha’s cheeks: “She has always been my child. I loved her when she was my son, and now I love her as my daughter.” She volunteered: “Of course this is not traditional for our country, this is not conventional. We have our own traditions and conventions here in Russia, not like you in the west. But you have to be human in every situation.”

I loved her when she was my son, and now I love her as my daughter. This is not conventional. But you have to be human Valentina

Valentina had struggled with Pasha’s identity at first, but had become her staunchest defender: “How could I possibly turn my back on my own child, when mothers of murderers still visit their children in jail? My Pasha is not a criminal! She is my child and I must support her now that the whole world is against her.” As at several points in her visit, emotion overwhelmed her: “The police can’t stop me! I’m going to go over there [to Maria’s parents’ flat] and punch them in the face!”

The neighbours in Pasha’s building were shocked by her transition, but not hostile. We went to visit an elderly woman named Natalya Efseyeva, who embraced Pasha and told me: “I could see him changing, but I didn’t want to pry. But then you get snatches of things on the TV, and you discover that such things happen, and that – heavens! – your neighbour, the little Pasha you have known since he was a little boy, is one of those!” Some people in the building did gossip about Pasha, she said, but “it’s not malicious. We don’t know the reasons, so we let it go. If he was immoral, or loose, we’d be much more judgmental. But Pasha’s such a good person. Sometimes a guy just becomes a girl, I guess. It happens. That’s life. Who are we to judge God’s will? You must remember we have all known him since he was a little boy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pasha (right) and her stepmother Valentina. Photograph: Maria Pleshkova/Demotix/Corbis

Pasha had, in fact, lived in the flat since she was four years old and her own father had taken custody of her, removing her from an alcoholic mother. Pasha’s only memory of her biological mother was sitting on the floor with a toy and watching her back at the kitchen table where she was getting drunk, a consequence of what Pasha now understands as a severe and untreated post-natal depression. When her father came home from a business trip and found Pasha in hospital owing to the mother’s neglect, he took his child to live with his own parents, in the Lyubertsy flat (which Pasha now owns). Soon thereafter, Pasha’s father met Valentina, a widow with a 10-year-old son: they moved in together. Pasha idolised her father, an engineer at the nearby MIL helicopter plant, who died in 1995. He was a gentle man, she said, who encouraged her to think for herself.

Pasha followed a similar approach to parenting and, in fact, the conflict with Maria and her family had started over this, some time before Pasha’s coming out: “Maria’s parents are very old-school, and they often criticised Pasha for being too soft,” the family friend told me. “But Pasha actually communicated with the child, while Maria, more often, scolded him. Pasha was the one who could calm Kostya down.”

Pasha framed her determination to gain custody of Kostya as a way of saving the child: “He is being treated like clay, to be shaped into anything they want. If I raise him, he will be free to make his own choices about what he wants to be, what he thinks of others.”

The state-appointed psychological panel’s assessment of Kostya, commissioned as a consequence of Pasha’s custody appeal, reported that the six-year-old expressed “a wish to beat his father, using his new martial skills”. The boy described his friends as “real men”, with “balls”, “learning to fight … in a battle”. His grandfather, also one of these “real men”, had told him that “Dad is now wearing braids and earrings and hairclips … and needs to be taught what’s what.” Kostya also reported that “Mum will not let me see Dad, because he could infect me with his illness.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pasha sits beneath a portrait of her son. Photograph: Maria Pleshkova/Demotix/Corbis

The psychologists declined to give an official assessment of the relationship between Pasha and Kostya, because they had not observed them together. But they refused to put the two of them together for the purposes of such assessment, as it might upset the child. “Unfortunately, Pasha’s attempts to gain custody have made things worse for her,” said her legal adviser, Tatyana Glushkova, a celebrated human rights lawyer who has fought several cases for the Russian LGBT Network. “There is now expert evidence that the child is troubled by the father becoming a woman, so now, if Pasha tries to exercise her rights, the mother can use this evidence to limit access.” This is exactly what Maria has done.

Pasha’s only recourse at this point, is to fight for access: she obtained a letter from the State Custodial Service stating that Maria was being uncooperative. If Maria continued to deny Pasha access to her child, said Glushkova, a case could be taken to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. At the time of writing, all Pasha’s attempts to gain access to Kostya had come to nothing.

* * *

Although gender has nothing to do with sexuality, transgender people in Russia are often seen as the most visible manifestation of what is now widely regarded as the “perversion” of homosexuality, and are thus particularly vulnerable. There are very few places they can feel safe. The gender clinic Pasha attended is one of them. It is owned and run by a married couple, Andrei and Yael Demedov, who are both transgender themselves. The Demedovs have also set up a community centre for transgender people in a stately corner of Old Moscow, in the basement of a large Stalin-era apartment block. I went to visit them there one weekday evening.

At the bottom of a stairwell accessed through an unmarked locked door, there was a shop, which seemed at first glance to be filled with the standard cross-dressing apparel: sexy underwear, sequinned frocks, incredibly high heels, walls of wigs. But it had, on closer inspection, everything a transgender man or woman might need: accoutrements sober as well as wild, makeup, falsies, breast-binders, packers. There was also a large meeting room and a suite of treatment rooms staffed by depilation therapists. In the few hours I was there, someone who looked like a middle-aged man rang the buzzer, came downstairs, disappeared into the back, reappeared made up and dressed as a woman, hung around the seating area for a while, offered us tea, disappeared again, reappeared in men’s clothing, and said goodbye. They clearly did not want to leave. They were wearing a wedding ring.

Yael, in her late 40s, was several years older than Andrei. She too had lost access to her son when she began transitioning, she told me, and had not seen him in over a decade: “Pasha’s story is a common one in our community,” she said to me. “But what makes her unique is that she is trying to fight.”

Yael had been a successful financial analyst before her transition in 2009, and had launched a transgender website a few years previously, which she subsidised by selling accessories and clothing, an enterprise that formalised into the shop, and then the dermatological clinic. Then, two years ago, the Demedovs set up the full-spectrum surgery, where Pasha had her surgery. They found a psychiatrist and convened an assessment panel, which was granted a licence by the state to give gender identity disorder diagnoses. They also enlisted the services of medical consultants to do the procedures, and persuaded them to perform them at a significantly lower cost than other private facilities. Pasha’s surgery cost 200,000 roubles (£2,000), about two-thirds of the price she would have paid anywhere else. The Demedov clinic does between 300 and 400 gender reassignment surgeries a year: about two-thirds of these are male to female, and one third female to male. Most of the former are orchidectomies (testicle removal), rather than full vaginoplasties, as these are much cheaper, and will be enough proof of the “irrevocable change” for recipients to change their documents officially.

All the transgender people I spoke to in Moscow told of how dramatically transphobia had increased since the passage of the gay propaganda bill. There is bizarre new legislation that prevents transgender people from obtaining driving licences. Earlier this year, Russia’s most illustrious psychiatrist dealing with gender reassignment, Dmitri Isaev, was forced to resign from his state-run medical institution in St Petersburg and to disband his gender assessment board, because of complaints from conservative activists. There are now only four assessment boards in operation across Russia. Dr Nadezhda Solov’yova, who runs the board connected to the Demedov clinic, told me: “We are worried. This is a witch hunt. We realise that at some point this might reach us.”

While the Demedovs’ basement community centre was unmarked, their surgery in northern Moscow advertised itself, on windows facing a typical Moscow suburban courtyard, with the outline of a woman’s face and the vague words “Medical Clinic”. Inside was a reception room, a consulting room, a theatre, and a small ward. In this last room, with two beds overlooking a garden, Pasha had recuperated for a week, before she was transferred to a general hospital, for another three painful weeks, because of complications arising from of her surgery.

When I met with Solov’yova at the clinic, she remembered Pasha’s assessment, one of about 200 she had done since 2012: “We deemed her to be adaptable, communicative, capable of new skills of socialisation. She was not depressive. The thing we concentrate most on is excluding any underlying psychopathology, such as schizophrenia, for example, which might manifest as transgenderism.”

A small number of applicants to Solov’yova’s board have been turned down: “It’s a responsibility we have to take seriously,” Yael told me, recounting the case of a woman who seemed determined to transition because she had fallen in love with a gay man: “What if we had proceeded? What, then, if she had fallen out of love with this man and then regretted it?”

To change your gender, you have to be so balanced, level-headed, stress-resistant. It's not for the fainthearted Pasha

Solov’yova, a brisk and affable woman in her 40s, is a specialist in treating dementia, and had not dealt with transgenderism before being recruited by the Demedovs. She told me that what has struck her most about her new cohort of patients was that “to go through these trials, these tests, to change your gender, you actually have to be healthier than most ordinary people. They have to be so balanced, level headed, stress-resistant. It’s not for the fainthearted.”

* * *

Pasha has the makings of a new family. In her June 2015 submission to the court to counter Pasha’s suit to regain custody of Kostya, Maria wrote that one of the reasons that the child should not be returned to his biological father was because “Pavel is residing together in a flat with a woman who accepts a homosexual lesbian relationship.”

Pasha met Anya in November 2014, two weeks before she went for her surgery, at a conference on LGBT families in Moscow. Anya, who is married with a teenage son, comes from a Russian city in the Volga region, an eight-hour train ride away. She told me that she too had been mobilised by the gay propaganda legislation. As a devout Christian, she had been horrified by the way that hate speech had found its way into church sermons: “Russia had begun to resemble fascist Germany, the singling out of a vulnerable group. I asked myself: ‘Who will be next?’”

Anya is a psychologist who specialises in adolescence. Her response was to go online and volunteer her professional services to a remarkable initiative founded by a young journalist named Elena Klimova: an organisation named Deti-404, that had set up pages on Facebook and VKontakte, its Russian equivalent, for LGBT youth to tell their stories and chat with each other. In July, Klimova was fined 50,000 roubles for contravening the propaganda law herself, and ordered to shut down her pages. She did not comply.

Anya provides online counselling to the young people who contact Deti-404, and it was in this capacity that she had come to Moscow to attend the conference last November. She and Pasha had connected instantly. When the conference was over, Anya returned to her job and her family, but when Pasha was discharged from hospital in early January and was unable to care for herself, Anya dropped everything and came to Moscow. She planned to be in town for a few days, but she stayed for six weeks. Ever since, she had been dividing her time between Moscow and the Volga. When she was back home, she and Pasha would hang out on Skype for hours every day; when she was in Moscow, she and Pasha did the same with her 16-year-old son Vova and her husband, too, if he was around.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pasha (right) with her partner. Photograph: Maria Pleshkova/Demotix/Corbis

With her cascade of blonde hair, her full figure and her sparkling blue eyes, Anya looks as if she has stepped out of a Soviet-era poster. When I met her with Pasha last summer, they seemed like two women in the first flush of love. Out and about, they were always hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm, oblivious to the looks they sometimes attracted. Being with Pasha, Anya told me, freed her from the gender stereotypes imposed on her: “For most of my life I tried to force myself to believe I could live as a normal female, you know, making meatballs and raising a family, but that would only last for a week or two and I’d find myself back doing some sort of social project – something a man is supposed to do. With Pasha, I don’t have those internal stereotypes. I can just be myself.” She and her husband lived separate lives, she said, although they still lived in the same home and raised their son together.

Vova studied English and read it fluently, and so Anya often asked him to do translations for her. One of these was the much-circulated Human Rights Campaign award speech of the American transgender film director Lana Warshowski earlier this year. When Anya wanted to explain to Vova who Pasha was, she referred back to this video. He shrugged in a noncommittal adolescent way.

Now, a few months later, she had brought him to Moscow to be with her and Pasha during his summer holidays, and she was deeply anxious about how everyone would get along. “But really,” Anya laughed, “I can see that this my concern and nobody else’s. They’re both introverts, but you’d never guess it when you see them together. They talk about computers, and games, and weapons, and Vova’s work as a Wiki moderator. I don’t understand a word of it, but Pasha offers a lot of insight, and it thrills Vova. It’s only been a couple of days, and already they are old friends.”

When I met them in the Lyubertsy flat, Vova was staying in Kostya’s old room, and Pasha seemed pleased with this: “I look at him and I see my own child in many ways. I think they even look similar. And they communicate in the same sort of way: quite shy at first, but then when they warm to you, they really come to life.”

Vova was indeed a shy kid, handsome and studious, with a dry sense of humour and an ironic gallantry around his mother and her new girlfriend. He did not remember the Warshowski video, and could not even remember a “moment” when he became aware of trans people, or homosexual people: “She told me once that she works with people like that. She spoke about it in such a natural way that I did not exactly register when it happened.”

Vova clearly adores his mother, and admitted that he found her long absences difficult to deal with. What would happen were Anya to bring Pasha home, I asked? “No,” he responded. “That would be very difficult.”

A couple of days later, we all wandered around Gorky Park together, and ate pizza at a riverside cafe. Anya and Pasha had exchanged rings, and liked to fantasise about a wedding ceremony – perhaps in Denmark, a favourite destination for same-sex Russian couples. I told them that I came from South Africa, where same-sex marriage was legal, and that I was married to my male partner. Why not come to Cape Town to do it?

“That is a very good idea,” said Vova, deadpan. “Get one-way tickets, please.”

Everybody laughed.

* * *

In August, Anya took Vova back to the Volga, for him to start the school year at his new senior high school, where he would specialise in maths.

Back in the Moscow region, Kostya, just seven years old, started primary school. On 2 September, Pasha posted the following on her Facebook wall:

My Dear, Dear Child,

All I want now is to be with you on this very important day, your first day at school. To be able to hug you and give you the support you need. I wish you success in everything.

I love you infinitely and beyond measure.

I am watching smartly-dressed children on the streets walking to school, accompanied by their parents, and I envy them. I have been denied this important day in my life, and nothing will ever make up for that!

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Some names have been changed to protect identities.

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