CBS News is under fire after running a piece on transgender Ukrainians struggling to get legal gender changes in the midst of the ongoing conflict with Russia.
On March 1, CBS News published an article titled “Transgender woman says transphobia and discriminatory laws keeping her hostage in Kyiv during Russian invasion.” The piece focused on Zi Faámelu, a biological male who identifies as transgender living in the capital city of Ukraine who says he is unable to leave the country due to a lack of documents that affirm his gender identity.
In the piece, Faámelu, 31, is quoted as saying, “This is not a very rainbow-friendly place. … Lives for trans people are very bleak here,” before detailing that Ukrainian men who identify as women are being prevented from leaving the country due to a law prohibiting fighting-aged males from fleeing.
On their twitter, CBS News presented transgender people’s plight to get legal gender changes in Ukraine as a “war within a war.”
The piece was immediately met with extreme backlash across social media, with many questioning the appropriateness of the article while the conflict and its consequences rage on.
Other netizens noted that many Ukrainian women are not attempting to flee the country at all, and are instead staying back to fight in the military or provide services to their community. According to Military.com, an expanded pool of Ukrainian women were required to register for the draft as of December 17, 2021, and now make up over 10% of the Ukraine Armed Forces currently engaged in active combat in the conflict.
As of March 2, the CBS News tweet on the article has over 3,700 overwhelmingly negative quote retweets and over 7,000 replies compared to just over 1,200 likes.
On Twitter, Faámelu, who works as a musical artist and dancer, asked people to raise awareness about how Ukrainian males who identify as women were not allowed to leave the country due to the presidential decree barring males from leaving the country.
The singer came out as transgender in 2014 after appearing on a Ukrainian show similar to American Idol, at which time he was known as Boris April.
According to a 2020 paper by researchers at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, there were approximately 8,200 transgender people in the country (excluding territories occupied by the Russian Federation) out of a population of 44 million people.
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