I realize I never posted this! I spoke to Lukasz Sakowski, a Polish science writer, about his experience of identifying as trans, detransitioning, and the price he’s paid for speaking out about sex and gender:
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 “I 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.
The last two paragraphs. Truth that too many refuse to believe. I live in a small city in the middle of America and know about 10 young people, mostly females who "transitioned". I have a friend who is a gay man. A recently retired pediatrician, yet he believes it all, and supports transitioning kids when it is done "carefully". I can't believe he can't see it. I can't believe so many can't see it.
Excellent, excellent interview. It is a story both good (because he saved himself) and bad (because of his bad experience with social insanity, and because it provides a good example of how monstrous people can be). Integrity is in short supply in this world.
But, once again, it shows how pernicious and incomprehensible the spread of transgender ideology has been. For some reason, it is a bunch of ideas that appeals to the liberal mind, so much so that it turns liberals into cultists. I just don't understand the contagion. The first time I encountered it, I dismissed it out of hand. I instinctively knew it was nonsense. Why have so few people had the reaction I had? Why are people so overtaken by the bad ideas? The amazing thing is that the cultists seem to be brainwashing themselves.
"I can be anything I want to be." No, you can't.