They Should Have Helped Me Accept My Body: Eliza Mondegreen Interviews Lukasz Sakowski

Lukasz Sakowski is a Polish science journalist and blogger. You can find his work at www.totylkoteoria.pl

Eliza Mondegreen: Tell me about how you first learned about what it means to be trans.  

Lukasz Sakowski: I first learned about such a thing from television, where at the time a very popular program featured interviews with transsexuals. That made me think about the possibility of gender reassignment. It’s not something I would have thought of on my own. It wasn’t a product of my mind, but an idea I got infected with from the media.

EM: So, you sat with this idea for a while. What made you take a closer look?

LS: When I was 13 years old, I started looking for information on the Internet. I found a transsexual forum, which is known in Poland as the “blue forum,” because it was intensely dark blue in color. There I found a lot of advice on how to change sex/gender, which specialists would give prescriptions for puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones, and what to say to get a diagnosis. But I was not immediately convinced that this was something I should do. Then a transgender woman, a biological male, who was about 40 at the time, reached out to me and we started writing back and forth. I’ll call this person ‘Eve.’

This person first urged me to use feminine forms. In Polish, this is of great importance, since the Polish language has a system of grammatical gender that requires a gender category to be applied to most words. So, if you’re a man, you say “Ja poszedłem, ja zrobiłem, ja przeczytałem,” and if you’re a woman, you say “Ja poszłam, ja zrobiłam, ja przeczytałam,” and so on. This alone messed with my head a lot. Today, they call this “social transition.” Then Eve urged me to dress more feminine, paint my nails, apply makeup, until finally she started sending me first puberty blockers, and then estrogen through the mail. And so it went on, from when I was 14 or 15 years old, until I was 18.

EM: And then you went to a clinic. What was your experience? 

LS: It was a dental clinic where this psychologist had her office. Just before coming of age, I went to see her. She was recommended by the main Polish transgender foundation, Trans-Fuzja. This psychologist—without assessing me or doing any psychotherapy—diagnosed me with transsexuality. She wrote down my official diagnosis which said that I had a number of tests and psychotherapy sessions with her, but this was not the case at all. She mentioned what to do in court, because in Poland legal gender reassignment is decided by the court. She told me not to talk about any of this in court. This psychologist then referred me to a psychiatrist and a sexologist, who issued certificates stating that I was transsexual, without doing any real assessment. The psychiatrist talked to me for about 10 minutes and, based on that, she concluded that I was trans. It was the same with the sexologist.

EM: When we spoke earlier, you told me about an earlier visit you’d made to a sexologist. Could you tell me about that?

LS: Yes. When I was 15, my mother took me to a sexologist in my city, in Poznan. This was when I was already talking to Eve. This sexologist’s PhD student examined me over the course of several months, conducting a series of interviews and tests. She ultimately concluded that I was a gay man who didn’t accept his sexual orientation, and that I had defensively adopted the identity of the opposite sex in order to avoid thinking of myself as gay. Back then, as a 15-year-old, I rejected this diagnosis. It filled me with great fear and disbelief. But Eve reassured me that this diagnosis was wrong and that I should not pay any attention to it.

I shared this diagnosis with the psychologist I went to just before my 18th birthday. She waved her hand at it and told me not to show it in court during the legal sex change. She said she disregarded the diagnosis because the sexologist whose student made it, was later convicted and jailed for molesting female patients, although this was unrelated to my case. But I don’t think that’s why she really rejected it. She had a preachy approach to gender reassignment. You could feel her enthusiasm about changing my sex/gender. She ran a support group for transsexuals in Poznan, so you can see that she had a sense of mission. She didn’t even take money from me for this opinion, although that could also be because she was just about to fly out to Canada, and was formally closing her practice.

EM: What happened after that? 

LS: Then I filed documents with the court and—about a year later—I changed my personal information and Personal ID Number to female. Polish law also requires that a notation of gender change is also added to the birth certificate.

After that, I went to university, and studied biology. For the first six months, I tried to live a normal life, but it didn’t work out for me. I didn’t feel comfortable as a woman. I had problems in interpersonal relationships, and I also had severe anxiety and periods of depression. Aside from going to the university, I stayed at home all the time. Femininity didn’t make me feel any better either. I never wore dresses or skirts or strong makeup. Rather, I dressed like a tomboy, with a few feminine elements. But styling myself as a ‘woman’ neither attracted me sexually or emotionally or in any other way. I only treated it as ‘a means to the goal’, which, as with many other sex/gender changers, turned out to be a dead end, overlooking a chasm.

I was scheduled for an orchidectomy, which is an operation to remove the testicles. I cancelled it—actually, I cancelled the surgery twice—rationalizing that it would be a waste of time and money. I was tempted to have the surgery because I knew that until I had my testicles removed, I would have to continue taking testosterone blockers, which are very harmful to the liver, bones, and brain. Already, at the age of 18, I had advanced osteoporosis, confirmed by a bone-density test. I also had stabbing pains around my liver. So, I was in a seemingly hopeless situation. Taking blockers made me feel like I had to go through with surgery, but ultimately my self-preservation instinct saved me. And, since I studied biology, and was interested in genetics and evolutionary biology, gaining knowledge helped, too. The myths propagated by the trans community that you can change your sex/gender didn’t make sense to me anymore. I was seeing more and more clearly that from a scientific and medical perspective, trans ideology was one big hoax. Today, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Michael Bailey, Colin Wright, Lisa Marchiano, Ray Blanchard, Jonathan Haidt, Debra Soh and other scientists talk about these things, but when I was a teenager, such voices did not exist or did not get through.

EM: What led you to detransition? 

LS: There were a lot of factors. First, I never felt comfortable as a “woman.” As I mentioned—except for brief episodes where I tried to be more feminine—I styled myself as a tomboy or military-style ‘woman.’ I also didn’t form any intimate relationships. Although I had some opportunities to do so, I turned them all down because I didn’t feel good about myself. It was also important that I decided to cancel the orchidectomy, which influenced my thoughts of withdrawing from all this, although I still felt significant shame and anxiety at the thought that the sex change may have been a mistake. I’ve never had suicidal thoughts, but thinking about withdrawing from sex change, I’d thought that I’d rather kill myself, and I suspect that the many suicides of trans people are motivated by this, among other things. I also met with another psychologist. It was a one-time thing, but very emotionally electrifying. After a long session, she asked me directly if I regretted changing my gender. I felt very ashamed and immediately denied it, but she was an experienced psychologist and I could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t believe me. So, while I did not admit any doubts, the psychologist reflected my fears, worries, and shame, which was a powerful and psychologically healing experience.

Once, when my mother and I were traveling in the car, she asked me if I really wanted this sex change and if she should put aside money for me for the operation. I felt even more resentment about the whole sex change thing. I thought to myself, what am I actually doing to myself? My family neither approved of my desire for a sex change, nor tried to dissuade me from it. Rather—like most families with such a problem—they didn’t understand what was actually happening.

EM: When we spoke before, you said you think you are the first person in Poland to reverse a legal sex change. What was that process like? 

LS: As far as I know, I am the only one, although I am not 100% sure. Basically, I had to go through the same legal process as before—but in reverse. I had to file a lawsuit with the court and be examined by a forensic psychologist and psychiatrist. I also had to show the court the diagnosis from when I was 15 years old—the one that said I was gay, but unable to accept myself—the concealment of which was recommended by the psychologist who fabricated the diagnosis of me being transgender. What surprised me was that during the detransition process, the office of public prosecutor became involved in my case. Fortunately, it requested the same thing as I did, which was to legally return to male identity. I suspect that the prosecutor’s office was there to deter possible further manipulators like Eve, or this psychologist who made the false diagnosis.

And there was another surprise—an unpleasant one—which was that instead of erasing the annotation of the first ‘sex change’ on my birth certificate, an annotation of a second ‘change of sex’ was added. So, despite the fact that I am a male, I have a notation on my birth certificate about a double sex change, even though I simply reverted to my sex, rather than changing it once again.

EM: What resources or sources of support exist in Poland for people who detransition? Did you have support or did you have to figure things out alone? 

LS: In Poland, there are no organizations to support people after detransition. Doctors don’t know what to do with people like me either. When I went to my family doctor with a problem arising from medical transition, I was 29 years old and it had been nine years since I detransitioned. But the doctor did not understand what I was saying to him. He wanted to diagnose me with transsexualism! So, while there are plenty of organizations, websites, and Facebook groups in Poland that not only support but even urge people to change their gender, after detransition, people have neither support nor even minimal guidance on what they should do. I think the problem partly stems from the fact that most of the sex-change community has a negative attitude toward detransition, because detransition is tangible proof that the conduct of professionals in the field for decades has simply been negligent, unethical, and not based on scientific medical knowledge. Even specialists who were more careful than the ones who facilitated my transition will face more and more patients detransitioning.

EM: After all of this, you moved on with your life and became a popular science writer. Why did you start a science blog? What kind of topics have you written about? 

LS: Actually, I started writing my blog a few months before I detransitioned, while I still thought of myself as a woman. I remember going back and changing the language forms in my first blog entries from feminine to masculine after I detransitioned.

Anyway, I started writing about what interested me and was related to my studies, and, since I studied biology at the faculty of veterinary medicine, I also had a lot of exposure to the fields of medicine or nutrition. So, I wrote articles about nutrition, the effects of various substances on health, genetics, evolution, embryology or zoology, and medical biology. My blog became more and more popular every year, and the Polish media—from right to left—were eager to quote it, asked me regularly for interviews, and so on. I myself was stunned by the scale of my popularity as a blogger and science journalist.

Today, I think that my annual “Biological Nonsense of the Year” contest—in which I nominated the dumbest statements made by politicians, celebrities and journalists about chemistry, biology, medicine, and psychology, and then put them to a vote—contributed to this popularity. I nominated people from across the political spectrum: right, center, left, socialists, liberals, conservatives, and progressives. I always tried to be objective and non-partisan. Over the years, statements like contracting measles enhances health, that humans were alive during the time of the dinosaurs, and most recently that men can bear children have won. In addition to “Biological Nonsense of the Year,” I also won a lawsuit against Poland’s most popular charlatan, who promotes dangerous and ineffective methods of “treatment.” The result was that my work was picked up by the media and my popularity and social media following grew.

EM: What made you decide to start writing about sex and gender in 2020? What happened next?

LS: At first, I began to write about sex in general: how it’s determined, how it develops, etc., from the evolutionary, genetic, embryological side. I did this because I saw more and more misinformation on the internet that sex can be chosen, that there are many sexes or genders, that sex is a spectrum, that sex or gender is determined by the brain, not by chromosomes contained in the sperm, and so on. This misinformation was, of course, promoted by trans activists, who had a strong influence on my readers. I had also written many times before about the biological basis of homosexuality, so I had quite a fan base within the LGBT community. And some members of this community began to incite my readers against me, claiming that I was a transphobe and a fatphobe—because I also wrote about the health consequences of obesity. Over time, not only did they start to pester me with comments, wishing me, for example, a bath in acid or burial in a lime pit, but they also started to harass me, writing anonymous, threatening letters. Eventually, a group of trans activists, who somehow figured out the story of my detransition, started to blackmail me. So, finally, I decided to go public with the story myself and take away the blackmailers’ weapons. I am sad to admit that the smear campaign against me involved not just activists but “inclusive” journalists, influencers, and even some scientists and doctors.

EM: Could you tell us about the political and media climate in Poland around transgender issues? Is your experience of being harassed and targeted by activists typical? 

LS: Until my coming-out, when I described my story in detail on my blog a few months ago, all centrist, liberal, and left-wing media promoted gender reassignment—even for children. Conservatives and those on the right tended to be silent on the issue, and only the Catholic media were critical of this issue. But the Catholic media does not enjoy much credibility in Poland since some have promoted anti-vaccine campaigns or denied evolution.

Before I came out, I was increasingly attacked in public. Not only by activists and influencers, but also in the legacy media as well. They stopped inviting me for interviews, most stopped writing about the “Biological Nonsense of the Year.”

It also happened more and more often that first someone would interview me or invite me to a conference, and then I would receive a message that the interview would not be published or that my invitation to the conference was withdrawn, because of my alleged transphobia or my statements about sex and gender. For example, one of the largest influencer conferences in Poland, ‘Influencers Live Wroclaw’, first invited me and then kicked me out when a group of prominent female influencers and journalists made a pitch against me. Extinction Rebellion asked me for an interview, recorded it, then cancelled it—also for alleged transphobia. I was expelled from Poland’s largest documentary film festival, MDAG, for “incompatibility of values,” although they had initially invited me themselves. The Oko.press portal broke off cooperation with me, for my statements about gender and the health risks of obesity. Book publishers with whom I had collaborated stopped sending me work. As it turned out, trans activists had sent false denunciations about me, calling me a fascist.

By 2021, I had lost about 80-90% of my earnings, and I also lost many patrons on Patronite, the Polish equivalent of Patreon. In 2022, a group of my stalkers, including scientists and doctors, organized a campaign against me, claiming that supposedly the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) was criticizing me, and that I had been expelled from my doctoral studies. Both were lies. The Polish Academy of Sciences even confirmed that it was not criticizing me, but it didn’t matter. The whole incident arose because a PAS-appointed association, which does not belong to the PAS, and which includes several of my stalkers, published a statement critical of “inappropriate writing about gender identity,” and linked this cursory statement to me. The statement cited methodologically flawed research. It was later criticized, moreover, in the pages of the scientific journal ‘Criminology Bulletin’, published by the same Polish Academy of Sciences, which is said to have publicly “attacked” me.

However, the witch hunt against me before my coming out, was only a preview of what followed. After my coming out, almost all of Poland’s mainstream media threw themselves at me, including Gazeta Wyborcza, which is the Polish equivalent of the New York Times in terms of prestige and coverage. But at least Gazeta Wyborcza gave me a chance to respond, unlike most outlets, publishing one honest and fair interview with me. Poland’s Newsweek, on the other hand, wrote that “giving me a voice is morally questionable.” Overall, many liberal, leftist and centrist media outlets automatically attacked me. I was accused of lying, making things up, cheating, using my story to treat my trauma, even exterminating trans people. A nationwide hysteria was launched against me, eagerly joined by Poland’s leading LGBT NGOs, such as the Stonewall Group, Miłość nie Wyklucza, Lambda, and Poland’s main LGBT magazine, Replika. Only one portal, Queer.pl, took a balanced approach, criticizing the attacks on me and admitting that the vilification of me may give the impression of attacking the victim of a paedophile-priest. On top of that, a well-known Polish “fact-checking” website wrote an article purportedly explaining my “manipulations” about transsexualism. It turned out that in addition to the lies contained in this “fact-checking” article, the author of the text was a fraudster. This man claimed to be a psychotherapist accredited by the Polish Psychiatric Association, while he was not, and had no ties to this organization.

I lost a lot during this witch hunt, but I feel that I could not have done anything else. There were months when, because of all the hate, I lost so much work that I earned less than the lowest national salary in Poland. But it’s only money. I could not denounce reality and parrot the misinformation of the trans activists for the sake of preserving my position, fame, and money. I learned a lot about people during this process, including who will abandon their principles to protect their position. Besides, friends are made in poverty. As a result of these events, I saw something very important: many of my former acquaintances joined in the hate against me to promote themselves on the internet, but I also learned which friends I could trust and I met new, honest, and authentic people.

EM: What do you wish people in Poland knew about transgender issues? What do you hope will happen as a result of you speaking out about your experience? 

LS: I would like people to learn that the artificial socio-medical constructs called “transsexualism,” “gender incongruence,” “gender dysphoria,” or “transgender” are really just symptoms, behind which are various psychological, familial, and social problems, such as rejecting one’s homosexual orientation, family conflicts, mental disorders like borderline personality disorder and narcissism, PTSD, bipolar affective disorder, autism, and social contagion with the idea of adopting a transsexual or non-binary identity. There is no study that objectively confirms that someone is transgender, or that proves in any empirical, post-Popper fashion that such a thing as congenital, permanent, and pure transsexualism even exists. Changing people’s gender doesn’t help, it harms.

I also think that, when I was younger, I should not have been banned from the internet and computer games, but that I shouldn’t have had so much free rein. I should have been pushed out into the real world with real people, far away from weird and disordered users who stay online all the time. That would have helped me form a better connection between body and consciousness via sport and learning to be in the here and now. And once I developed the idea that I was transgender and should transition, specialists shouldn’t have just affirmed me but rather sought to understand what was really going on with me: that I was lonely and disconnected from the real world, that I was uncomfortable with being gay and that I was being groomed online. They should have helped me accept my body and my sexual orientation. That is the way to recovery.