Poland’s transgender people are bracing for an onslaught of hate speech from politicians before parliamentary elections next year after the chair of the ruling party used several meetings with supporters to launch attacks on them.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the chair of Law and Justice (PiS), first touched on the topic in late June, on the same day as Poland’s largest Pride parade took place in Warsaw, when he met supporters in the town of Włocławek.
“We have elementary knowledge in biology, we know that gender is determined at the level of chromosomes … In extreme cases, an operation must be performed, but this does not mean that after this operation a man will be a woman and a woman will be a man,” he said.
Demonstratively looking at his watch, he told the crowd that leftwing people believed that “it’s now half past five, before I was a man but now I’m a woman”.
Since then, Kaczyński has returned to the topic on numerous occasions, snickering about situations in which someone with a male name wants to change it to a female name, and claiming to feel compassion for transgender people while describing them as “abnormal”.
He also launched personal attacks on Anna Grodzka, Poland’s first transgender MP, who sat in parliament from 2011-2015.
It is not the first time the Polish government has targeted the LGBT community. Two years ago the PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, ran a successful re-election campaign based on a fight against so-called LGBT ideology, though the focus was rarely on trans people.
“For a long time, ‘gender’ and ‘LGBT’ was just used to mean ‘gay people’,” said Maja Heban, a trans activist and writer.
But polls suggest there is increasing tolerance for gay people in Polish society, possibly making transphobia the next political strategy. Heban said Kaczyński appeared to be “workshopping” the material to see if it resonates.
Emilia Wiśniewska, of Trans-Fuzja, a Polish trans advocacy organisation, said: “Many people already know someone who is gay or bisexual, and it’s difficult to make people hate their friends or neighbours. Trans people are still less understood and less accepted and that makes us a better target.”
Although it is difficult to measure hate crimes against trans people because Polish law does not classify them as such, Wiśniewska said there had been an increase in incidences of violence and hate speech over the past two years.
Krzysztof Śmiszek, an MP with the opposition New Left party and head of the parliamentary group on LGBT+ equality, agreed that “homophobia doesn’t resonate the way it used to” among large sections of Polish society. He said Kaczyński was happy to sow hatred if he believed it would bring political gain, noting the rhetoric used by PiS during the 2015 refugee crisis.
“Poland in 2022 is not so easy to be manipulated with homophobia … Kaczyński consciously did not choose the entire LGBT group, but only transgender people,” he said.
Rightwingers around the world are pushing back against trans rights. In Hungary, traditionally the PiS government’s closest European ally, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has led an attack on “gender ideology”, and his government outlawed legal gender recognition on official documents in 2020.
One of Duda’s first acts when he became Poland’s president in 2015 was to veto a bill passed by parliament that would have made it easier for trans people to gain legal recognition – which at present can only be achieved by using a loophole in which a trans person sues their parents for assigning them the wrong gender at birth, often a lengthy and difficult process.
Since the PiS came to power, trans activists say they have stopped all governmental advocacy, believing it to be at best pointless and at worst counterproductive. Instead, they have been focusing on raising awareness and empathy in Polish society.
So far, other members of the ruling party have not joined in with Kaczyński’s anti-trans rhetoric, and it has not been widely picked up by pro-government media, suggesting a decision may not yet have been made about whether to make it a main pillar of next year’s parliamentary election campaign.
Heban said she believed that, ironically, the lack of progress on trans rights in Poland may be the thing that saves trans people from being the target of a full-fledged government campaign.
