“There are no gays in Chechnya,” said Ramzan Kadyrov in a now notorious interview in 2017. Two years on, it seems like the Chechen leader is trying to make good on those words by launching a new purge against LGBT people.
According to recent reports, two LGBT people have been killed and nearly forty detained in the North Caucasus region since December 2018. The Chechen authorities have apparently widened the net: alongside gay men, the purge has now reached lesbian and trans women. And while all the victims face extreme stigma in Chechnya today, for LGBT women that stigma comes with a deafening silence.
Perhaps to an even greater degree than with gay men, Chechen society cannot countenance the idea of their existence.
