“I signed an order,” Donald Trump declared in his address to Congress this week, “making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” It wasn’t quite the victory for common sense he thought it was. President Trump, consciously or not, was following a playbook. One that we at Coda Story have tracked for years — a playbook that was written in Russia and is now being followed almost to the letter in America.

For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump’s speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as “protecting women,” framing gender-affirming care as “mutilation,” and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin’s government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: “Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere.”

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their “punk prayer” in Moscow’s central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as “Gayropa.”

This wasn’t about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, “Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay.” Russia’s social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, “hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn’t.” 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law banning the “promotion of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against “propaganda” that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian “family values” defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

“Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society.”

When Trump spoke about banning “gender ideology,” he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had “signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women’s sports,” he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia’s bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn’t the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin’s traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

“People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed.”

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a “foreign agents” law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like “gender ideology” and protecting children from “propaganda” have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia’s Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  “people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it’s easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. “He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university,” Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was “promoting sodomy,” he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city’s gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

“We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society,” Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump’s speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring “common sense” back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa’s legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state’s civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia’s state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I’ll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi’s main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to “save the world from homosexuality.” What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

“I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men,” he thundered. “My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations.”

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn’t encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people “who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves.” Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing “Love is equal” on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don’t care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump’s speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin’s halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: “You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms… but in Russia they think more like emperors.” The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we’ve documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.