Russian Church agrees with Putin on transgender sports people

Petrovsky is not against transgender people playing sports. “But it seems that transgender athletes distort the meaning that is inherent in competitive sports: identifying the best sides and capabilities of the human body and spirit”, Petrovsky told Russian press agency RIA Novosti. “If a person wants to correspond to God’s plan for himself, then it is more than strange to compete in an artificially constructed representation”, he added.

Petrovsky said this in a response to a statement by the Russian president Vladimir Putin at the annual press conference last week. In that press conference, Putin told journalists that women’s sports would cease to exist if reassigned men could compete. As was reported by the Russian press agency Interfax, the president said he supports the traditional approach where “a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, and a father is a father.” Putin added that he hopes Russians have “internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religions of the Russian Federation.”

The secretary of the Patriarchal Commission on Physical Culture and Sports said further that “The desire to correct God’s plan for man, by correcting himself surgically or hormonally, as a rule, has negative consequences for the development of the human personality.”