A transgender girl was not allowed into a St. Petersburg club. The security guard called her a “monster”, the owner suggested that she “be patient”

On the night of July 8, 17-year-old Melissa Salikhina came with three friends to the Ionoteka club in St. Petersburg . At the entrance, the guards asked her to show her documents. Salikhina identifies herself as a girl and is already undergoing hormone therapy, but is recorded as a man in her passport.

The guards began to insult Salikhina. As she says in a conversation with Meduza, at first one of the guards did not believe that it was her passport. “He asked me in front of the whole crowd to lift my dress and show my Adam's apple. My friends were very worried about me, and I didn’t want to show that I was offended,” she recalls. When the guards were convinced that Melissa was transgender, they began to call her a "monster" and an "idiot." According to the girl, the skirmish between her and the guards lasted 15 minutes, after which she and her friends went home. (Formally, the reason for not allowing Salikhina into Ionoteka could be that she is a minor, but neither the girl herself nor the club administration mentioned this in conversations with Meduza.)

A few hours later, Salikhina wrote about the incident to Alexander Ionov, the creator of Ionoteka and producer. In a message on VKontakte, she told him about the incident and added that her friends were "very upset."

Ionov replied that he was "not able to change the mentality of a country the size of a mainland." “ You, my dear, knew what you were getting into. Now be patient. You're still going to be bullied a lot. Like all minorities in Russia,” he added. When Salikhina wrote that, as an employer, Ionov is responsible for the behavior of his employees, he said that if the guards do not like transgender people, then he does not have the right to “rape” them - this is “their nature.” He suggested that Salikhina sue the people who insulted her, “if you don’t mind the time and money,” and then blocked her account. Screenshots of this correspondence were published by Salikhina's friend Lina Tukhatevich on her Facebook page .

Ionov does not agree with the criticism addressed to him. He agreed to speak with Meduza only by correspondence and sent his comment on VKontakte. He said that accusing him of “homophobia” (Tukhatevich’s post referred to transphobia) is “the most ridiculous thing in the world.” “I grew up in San Francisco. My first teacher was gay, my first flatmate was gay, a lot of my employers and colleagues were gay,” he explains.

According to Ionov, "personal hostility" arose between Salikhina and the club's guards. That is why she was denied entry: it is "completely common practice in clubs." “Now the LGBT community [on social media] is insisting that I fire the security guard,” says Ionov. “They want me to retaliate against him for his convictions. And I am proud that in my organization there is no such pressure from the authorities on people. It is respect for the individual and freedom of thought. Artificially imposed tolerance is disgusting.”

Transgender people in Russia are often discriminated against when they need to show documents. Johnny Dzhibladze, coordinator of Vykhod, a St. Petersburg group that defends LGBT rights, told Meduza about this. As Dzhibladze explains, people undergoing gender reassignment “do not have the opportunity to immediately update their documents” because obtaining certificates is time-consuming and expensive. As a result, transgender women are recorded in the passport as men and vice versa; this often becomes a pretext for excesses and discrimination.

Irina Kravtsova