The first openly transgender politician in Russia has described how the Russian authorities threatened to commit her to a psychiatric hospital unless she detransitioned, Novaya Gazeta Baltic reported on Tuesday. Yulia Alyoshina, who headed the opposition Civic Initiative party in Siberia’s Altai region until 2022, announced on her Telegram channel in May that she had returned to her gender assigned at birth and changed her channel’s name to “Alyoshin”, the male version of her surname. “I went through my relatives’ photo albums and prayed for them, and it helped me realise that I am a guy,” Alyoshina wrote in a post in which she also apologised “to all the Russian people”.