Transgender privacy is no privacy – a few notes on a right-wing attack on Anna Grodzka

January 27^th, my co-worker and the Vice-President of Trans-Fuzja Foundation, Lalka Podobińska, receives an email from Andrzej Potocki, a right-wing journalist working for a semi-political semi-tabloid paper “Wsieci”. The content of the message leaves us laughing for days andmakes a terrible Tuesday at the office quite bearable.

Here are some of the question posted:

• What is your relation with Anna Grodzka?
• How long have you known each other?
• Do you live together and do you share a common household?
  • Do you eat together?
  • Do you drive the same cars?
  • Do you own property together?
• Are you in an intimate relationship?
  
• Are you, as it states in “homopedia.pl”, a heterosexual person?

Trans-Fuzja posts a screenshot of the message to its Facebook fan page for the world to see. It is one of the most-shared updates coming from the organization. We laugh but dread at the same time. Because we know that public-shaming of extremely bad reporting never made a journalist pass on an occasion to humiliate a public figure. Especially if that public figure is a representative of a certain minority. A minority, nonetheless, misunderstood and prone to becoming victims of violence and murder. As a number of threats posed to Anna Grodzka have proven, being a public figure does not create a situation when one can feel safe as a trans person, especially a trans woman

And, here we are, it’s February 2^nd, just a few days from that uncomfortable email, a new issue of “W sieci” is available, and it is worse than one could have ever imagined. It’s not just an invasion of a person’s privacy. It actually is bad enough to question Grodzka’s gender identity altogether because she apparently “lives with a heterosexual woman”.

It is clear to see that this article comes as a direct reaction to Grodzka’s possible presidential candidacy.

I’m pretty sure to say that Lalka Podobińska and her husband, Piotr Podobiński, are going to have a lot of fun when they file a lawsuit against the publisher, especially given the fact that the journalist left out Podobińska’s husband from the story entirely and created a new romantic epoch of two women who fell in love, lived through the other one’s transition and are now a happy couple. The funniest thing – Andrzej Potocki claims that this would be an indication that Grodzka is only faking being trans to gain a lot in Polish politics. Apparently, being a lesbian would actually be a form of “faking being trans”. Because, you know – gender identity has SO MUCH to do with your sexual orientation.

Potocki must be a great expert on transgender and the situation of transgender people in Poland if he thinks that a very catholic and very conservative country would actually encourage someone to go through gender recognition to start a career in politics. Especially that this process can take even up to two years, when one counts diagnosis, legal issues, a civil court case where you are forced to confront your parents (more on that in this report). Potocki must also be extremely well educated on the general situation of trans people in Poland and Europe in, and he also must have familiarized himself with the Hämäläinen v. Finland case at the European Court of Human Rights. How else would he be so knowledgeable on whether a straight woman could be in a relationship with a trans woman?

In the Polish part of the 2012 FRA European LGBT survey 45% of trans people feel they have been treated with less respect than other people, 59% are not open about them being trans in their work environment and only 11% claim that they are open about them being trans to all of their friends. In a country where so many people are simply afraid of just telling their story, the publishers of “W sieci” are trying to trick the public into believing that someone would be comfortable to “fake being trans” for political gain and that a person’s sexual life (even if it was absolutely staged for the purpose of the article) is a reason to doubt their gender identity and expression.

This is a new media low we found ourselves in and I just hope that we will not have to sink again in the future.