I love history – and one of my favorite parts thereof is reading up on how we got to this place – including how people like me were perceived in the past. The most rewarding finds usually come not through the Internet, but finding old books, especially medical handbooks.
This particular one is a 1987 publication titled Płeć Człowieka (The Human Sex) by prof. Krzysztof Boczkowski, who was also a poet apart from being a pretty accomplished scholar of medicine, with introductions to Sappho’s works among other things. The book was originally published in 1971 and this edition represents its final evolution.
I dug out this book out of a resale pile at the local collection center. Apparently some medical bigwig died and their book collection ended up being sent to recycling – there were other books, but this one caught my attention. It’s an artifact of its time and includes a lengthy section on trans people. My favorite quote is one that expresses a grudging sort of respect (automatic and unpolished translation):
The persistence of the aspirations of transsexuals, the consistency of their conduct, and the ingenuity and sacrifices they are ready to bear in order to realize their intentions, are astonishing.
Krzysztof Boczkowski, the Human Sex
It comes from a fascinating glimpse into Eastern Bloc attitudes towards transgender people, which are sometimes progressive, sometimes hilarious, and all mixed up with a very rigid, conservative Slavic culture that even forty years of socialism didn’t manage to entirely uproot:
TRANSSEXUALISM
Transsexualism occurs when a woman or a man considers themselves to be a person of the opposite sex than the one indicated by their sexual organs and secondary sexual characteristics. There is, therefore, a contradiction between objectively affirmed characteristics (sexual organs and secondary sexual characteristics) and psychosexual attitude. This means that a woman considers herself a man or vice versa. A man, therefore, dresses like a woman, performs female activities, and desires to give himself to other men, just like a woman, etc. This should not be confused with homosexuality, because the majority of homosexual men do not consider themselves women and do not desire to be women.
The causes that lead to the development of transsexualism are innate factors as well as improper upbringing and the influence of the environment. For example, if parents very much want to have a child of the opposite sex and say this to the child, regretting that they were not born a little boy or a little girl. A similarly harmful influence can come from suggestions of the environment, e.g., if a little girl hears from her earliest years that a woman is worth less than a man, that it would be better if she had been born a boy, and she orientates herself that in her environment women are treated with disregard.
In a boy, the cause of transsexualism can be the fear of taking on the role and responsibilities of a man. Boys who are less decisive, delicate, full of fears and doubts may fear that they will not be able to cope with male duties and take refuge, as it were, in a more passive female role.
An interesting light is shed on the problem of transsexualism by research conducted among Native Americans inhabiting North America. Men who fear that they will not be able to cope with the duties associated with their sex, such as hunting, fighting, and a dominant role in sexual relations, have the right to adopt the role of women. This privilege, however, belongs only to members of socially high-ranking families. Men who take on the role of women enter into marriages with men and assume the female role in sexual intercourse. Periodically, they also fake menstrual bleeding by inflicting wounds on their thighs and inducing bleeding in this way. Sometimes they also imitate pregnancy and go through “childbirth”. They recreate its course and labor pains and it is said that they gave birth to a “dead child”. Homosexual marriages of this type are also found in other primitive cultures and are an escape for transsexuals or impotent men.
Modern civilized society does not accept transsexualism, and a man dressed as a woman, or conversely — a woman as a man, exposes themselves to legal consequences, detention by the militia, etc.
A reader who has not even once encountered a case of transsexualism does not realize the intensity of the desires and the zeal of efforts with which a transsexual strives to realize their dream of a complete change of sex. It is not simply a desire to periodically dressup in the clothing of the opposite sex, or to have homosexual intercourse, but a deep and absolute conviction of a man that he is a woman, and of a woman that she is a man. To the question of a doctor or the environment, such a man answers: “I am in reality a woman, I only have a male body build” or “nature made a mistake and by mistake gave me a male body build”, “I am a man only by name”, etc. Such a man, despite sometimes being married and having children, firmly desires a legal sex change. He often takes large amounts of female hormones to induce breast development and obtain a female body build. The persistence of the aspirations of transsexuals, the consistency of their conduct, and the ingenuity and sacrifices they are ready to bear in order to realize their intentions, are astonishing. They also desire to give birth to a child, they ask the doctor if this is possible, and when they are finally convinced of the absolute impossibility, they want to adopt a child “to be a mother to it”. Some of them have been husbands and are fathers of children.
Women with transsexualism exhibit the same stubbornness and consistency in their actions, only directed, of course, in the opposite direction. They always walk dressed in male attire, a suit, a leather jacket, with closely cropped hair. They wish to perform only male professions. Both the presence of breasts and the appearance of menstruation they treat as a mistake of nature. It is impossible for them, even through complicated plastic surgeries, to obtain male sexual organs.
Examinations of transsexuals have shown that in the majority of them hormone secretion is normal and that it is a psychological defect.
The term transvestism means merely dressing up by an individual in the clothing of the opposite sex. An example here could be George Sand, who at the same time did not exhibit traits that could be classified as transsexualism. In the majority of cases, however, transvestism is one of the manifestations of transsexualism.
Change of sex. Sometimes the daily press gives reports about a so-called change of sex. Generally, newspapers, for understandable reasons, or due to a lack of information, do not provide closer details, stating only that Mr. NN, who was previously a man and is the father of two children, became a woman and entered into a marriage again, this time as a woman.
What is described by the press as a change of sex is essentially a change of the metric — legal — sex of a given individual. One should distinguish two fundamental types of sex change:
- Change of sex in a person with abnormal development of sexual organs. These are therefore cases of intersexuality with hermaphroditic sexual organs, when there are consequently difficulties in the final classification of the individual to the male or female sex. Due to the better development of the sexual characteristics of one of the sexes, or as a result of the direction of the sexual drive towards men or women, there may arise in such an individual the necessity of a legal sex change, so that it corresponds to their sexual feeling, or the best possibility of fulfilling the sexual act. Thus, in these cases we should speak rather of a correction of sex, although from a legal point of view it is a change of metric sex.
- The second type of sex change is related to the psychosexual attitude of the patient, which is abnormal, because it is inconsistent with the build of their sexual organs. It concerns therefore cases of transsexualism, when a properly built man feels like a woman or when a normally built woman feels like a man.
Because in persons with transsexualism this desire dominates over their entire psychological life, in some countries — Denmark, Sweden, the FRG, Switzerland, the USA — operative changes of sexual organs are performed. These operations, however, are possible only in the direction of changing male external sexual organs to female ones. There is no complete possibility of changing female external sexual organs to male ones.
In Poland, this problem is currently regulated from both a medical and legal point of view.
It’s a fascinating read, though I have to note that it is completely wrong on that last point: While courts did accept petitions by transgender people to amend their birth certificate since 1978, there was no comprehensive regulation of our status in PRL’s legal system. In fact, despite almost half a century, there has still been zero attempts at comprehensively regulating the status of transgender people and giving us a dignified path to exist.
In other words, we still have astonishing sacrifices to bear here, in Poland, regardless of whatever marketing the current right-wing government employs.
Leave a Reply