This is a rough translation of what I put on the polish fundraising portal. If any of you wish to support it, it would mean a world to me. My goal is around PLN 10,000.00, which is around €2,400.00. Or $2,450. Or £2,000.00. I was told the site supports foreign transfers but did not test it.

Full description below:

‘To leave the pain, bitterness, and sorrow behind’

Hello. My name is Maja. I inhabit the Internet and occasionally I live in a Polish countryside. I talk too much. I have a menial, boring, poorly paid job. The family used to tell me that I would be famous and brilliant; only they forgot to make sure that I was born among the 1%. So on the daily basis I am rather a bundle of nerves. I can’t even code, which makes me less of a trans girl.

For most of the time I was involved in helping people like me through the Milo Mazurkiewicz Solidarity Fund — the grassroots initiative created by transgender people for transgender people. Helping others with what I have been denying myself. I am raising money for something called transition. I see it as a passage from one state, full of pain and suffering, to a state where there will presumably be less pain and suffering.

I am humbly asking for your help if you have anything to give away. I won’t try to impose myself but without your help I will spend more years beating myself up. I can’t even gather as much as I ask on my own for now — and I will eventually need more. I live in Poland, and there are almost no possible ways to obtain what I’m looking for via public healthcare. If you’re curious about how things run around here, you can read this article:

https://tranzycja.pl/en/publications/how-to-start-medical-transition-in-poland/

You don’t even know how hard it is for me to write about this. I’ve been preparing for this for like a month. Usually it’s easy for me to complain or spit long text walls — but not to openly ask for help.

I don’t even know what I should tell you about what the purpose of this fundraiser is. Most people title is “for transition.” Or “for being myself.” Someone once stole the idea from me, as they wrote sth like “To stop being afraid and start living.” But what does that actually mean to someone who has never experienced anything like me? Someone who didn’t grow up for years feeling that something was wrong with them but was not sure what it was? How do you even explain it to anyone?

There are many narratives of a person “born in the wrong body.” Such flawed attempts to tell what cannot be put to words. How do you tell the story of being frightened by stubble appearing on your face when you were a teenager? Or the body hair that was dark and thick and was taking up more and more of the surface of your skin, so you could no longer look at without disgust? Even now I feel dirty when I write about it. And I still have a voice in my head that tells me, “Leave it, people around the world have more serious issues.”

Because they do. What’s more, people like me cannot count on good press these days. The panic that a “man dressed as a woman” will enter your bathroom and do you harm has recently hooked on such absurdity that one so-called feminist in the UK urged armed men to patrol women’s toilets (!). Normal people knock themselves on the head when they hear such things or argue with those who say so. But when it starts to affect you personally, the perspective changes completely. First comes rage, then fear. And then self-doubt.

A typical cisgender person doesn’t ask themselves as many difficult questions a day as transgender people do. Do I actually need this? What’s in it for me? Isn’t it better to live your life as before, pretending that you are comfortable not only with your natural-born body, but also with the fact that everyone treats you like someone you are not?

I know what I’m saying. I’ve spent far too much time denying who I am. For example, I told myself for years that I had no gender at all. Or that life is hard enough for me anyway to add more weight to my worries.

I am 36 years old. In February, I will turn 37. When I was a child, I had no idea at all that there was such a thing as transgender person. Yes, I sometimes played with dolls and read Astrid Lindgren books, but I also played with Matchbox cars and watched Power Rangers. I was playing more often with girls than with boys, but the family thought it was because I was afraid of boys and that it were some “developmental problems.” Also, come on, guys, you’ve never played jump rope or hopscotch with the girls? No? You lads are weird.

Adolescence is a strange time and growing up in denial of what your surroundings are starting to put into your head and constantly grokking yourself is even stranger. Everything around you tells you that certain behaviors and certain roles belong with your gender. You are forgiven for certain things, and you get scolded for others. Boys don’t cry. You hear this and something rebels inside you. But it’s not an “oh just that they cry” kind of rebellion. It’s something more like “why do you assume you know who I am?”. And it’s only harder from here. Anxiety. Despair. Denial.

For years, I had no idea it could be different. And when it first seriously struck me that something was deeply wrong with me, I was immediately reassured by the world that this was the natural order of things and that I needed to grow up. To be a man. At the time, I didn’t know whether I felt more like a woman or not, but when I heard the M word, I got chills. I had never ever in my entire life used it to describe myself. If I did I must have been in a phase of acute denial. When I heard the word from my first therapist, it made me shiver. I really felt like I was in a cage.

When I first saw a documentary about “sex change” on some Discovery Channel, I was struck by the image of someone (a “man”) from the US in their fifties in a military uniform whose psychiatrist told them to wear his wife’s make-up and the final result was so gross that it made me wish to bury my face in the ground. I didn’t know what to think about it; I couldn’t see myself in it. The vision that if I wanted to “become a girl” I would have to undergo a series of further humiliations — as if the everyday ones in my life were not enough — was chilling. You know, things weren’t too good at school or at home; I was raised by so-called high-functioning alcoholics. Well, the “high” part was just crumbling before my eyes, since they were getting older.

I’m not going to summarize al my life for you, don’t worry. That’s not the point here. I just wanted to show you that different people’s experiences are… different. For years, I pushed away the very idea that maybe I wasn’t this “genderless entity” I thought I was after all — that perhaps my whole aversion to the subject of corporeality and communication with my body didn’t come from the fact that, according to myself, I came from outer space. Perhaps it was simply a matter of me being a woman who actually never had the chance to be born. That I grew my hair long not just because I wanted to cover my protruding ears, and that I didn’t dress up in skirts “for fun” in theater classes. That when I met a girl who I knew from the beginning was a lesbian, I fell in love with her as if I thought it was natural that it could be mutual.

And at the same time, I pushed it all away. Very actively. I even wanted to start practicing Krav Maga to “man up”. Then, something finally snapped. In 2017 or 2018, I woke up from a dream in which I had a different body, a different voice, and a different presence. You can guess what kind of. When I woke up, I almost burst to tears. I wanted to go back there. Everything hit me like a 10,000-pound weight on the head of Wile E. Coyote.

Someone then told me that people who are not transgender never spend so much time thinking about their identity. If you see this happening to you, be aware there may be a reason for it.

I fell into despair. I had wasted so many years flailing around in corners, denying the obvious. Along the way, I developed anxiety, including the existential one. When I went to the first meetings of a support group for trans people in my city, I was devastated by the fact that I was surrounded by these young people who had the chance to do something for themselves much earlier in their lives. Something that I could only dream about.

At that time, I only got my first job on a regular contract. There was no way I was coming out to these people, since it was a customer service and “customers may not understand”. I was earning just enough to survive, as I had a close dependent — a person whose life was also hard, only in a different way. So I supported myself, her, and the house. And the cats. For more than five years I was telling myself: just a little more time, and everything will change; then I’ll save some money and start the transition.

Of course I was being myself, so instead of demanding something from others, me and some girls have founded an initiative with the goal to… help people like me get money for treatments and medical appointments, which are not reimbursed in Poland. That’s how the Milo Mazurkiewicz Solidarity Fund was created — an initiative named after a person who lost their battle against the health care system and general national idiocy, taking their own life. A final leap into infinite darkness — to go along with the pretentious title of this collection. [it’s a song, but don’t ask who sang it; he was not a good person]

Meanwhile, cramming in my job to the point of impossibility, I finally seized the opportunity and scouted out a corporate job. A corpo was appearing as nice, rainbow-colored. It paid me even less, but at least I got a chance to rest. I was still working to support the household. The years went by. Finally, the person I supported for years found a job. Only that I had to finance a nightmarishly expensive roof renovation, on which it literally depended whether my house would survive the coming winter. I would rather not tell you how much I borrowed — either through my family or simply denying myself everything to save some monies. Then, out of the blue, I lost my corpo job at and I found myself unemployed for a full year. Had I arranged such a fundraiser at that time, I would have spent everything on living expenses and whip myself with the guilt for cheating my supporters.

Because you need to know that if you want to transition in Poland, you need money. A lot of money. Not even for some plastic surgeries, but for appointments with doctors who are at least not ignorant. There are only few of them in 40-million country. Then, an endocrinologist who will help choose the right dosages for hormone replacement therapy. A sexologist who will be able to give an opinion for the court, since you have to sue your parents to change the sex marker on your ID. A psychologist to get through it all. A voice training lessons 'cause I’d like to sing the way I hear myself in my head and not like a caricature of my grandfather during morning shave.

And, last but not least, laser body hair removal. A ‘rich girl’s whim’, as certain person once spitefully told me. Well, maybe so. Perhaps the canons of beauty imposed by culture are absurd. But tell that to cis women with hirsutism, or people like me who went through sexual puberty on testosterone and their hair grows even on their shoulders, and the thick facial stubble sticks out from under their skin after just shaving.

I don’t even dream of some more complicated operations or surgical interventions. That’s something I certainly won’t be able to save for in this lifetime. But I don’t need everything, either. There are things I can get over. However, there are some thing that ache too much. One day I’d like to be able to go out on the street, looking more or less like the ones in my photos (they’re ancient; the second one I had to redo a bit because I’m simply ashamed to expose myself to strangers). Maybe even appear somewhere in a tailored dress and not arouse malicious whispers. To appear in public without being embarrassed that someone will take a picture of me that I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life.

My relationship was shattered to a fine dust by my coming-out. It happens to almost every one of us. My parents don’t even fully know about me. I’ve made allusions, but I don’t dare tell them. No, they are not in a position to hurt me; I am an adult and independent. But they can whine worse than me. In good faith, they will discourage me and undermine my self-confidence. But they will learn because, of course, they deserve it. When I feel for myself, nothing they say will turn me from this path.

I have many passions. Many of them underdeveloped — whether through lack of money or time, or simply through fears and anxieties that I won’t be good enough at it, so why bother. For many years I’ve been writing to a drawer, playing the bass, producing a lot of junk content on the Internet and arguing with various dangerous narratives in public discourse. I can’t code, so I must stick to unskilled white-collar jobs. I wrote an essay on the politics of Star Wars - maybe I will translate it to English some day. I also used to be a ‘real’ activist, but became disillusioned with local movements.

In fact, all my life I’ve been helping other people solve their problems instead of taking care of my own ones. I’ve been appreciated for it on occasions, but did not really need it. You can’t make your stomach full of virtue, as the old Polish saying goes. And it was also strangely convenient for the same people to peel away from me when my help was no longer needed.

I’m not sure if anyone reading these words has made it here. But if they have, I just want to briefly summarize this nightmarishly long elaboration. I apologize for it. But when something is suppressed for years, it then spills out like a river. And you dress it up with quotes from songs about the deaths of Polish poets - although, to be honest, I’ve never had such thoughts myself. And I hope I won’t have any. It’s not my style. If my dreams don’t come true, I will remain unhappy but alive. Empty inside and even more bitter, but still able to contribute to GDP.

Switching to the professional language, so highly valued in this era:

  1. I am raising money for aesthetic medicine treatments and hormone replacement therapy for so-called feminization. I will use all the favors and acquaintances I can use, but with galloping inflation, these costs alone are even more than what I am asking for here. I simply doubt that anyone will help me even to that extent.

  2. All money raised here I will use only for my personal needs as described above. The money raised will not contribute to the Solidarity Fund in which I am active. That initiative is mediated by the non-governmental organization Fund For Change (Fundusz Dla Odmiany), where everything works transparently, is accounted for, etc.

  3. If you think that someone like me does not deserve help because we once quarreled on the Internet and/or I am generally pathetic, but you may be willing to help other transgender people in Poland, I sincerely ask you to contribute any amount to the account of the Fund For Variety with the note “Fundusz Milo”. I do not own this initiative, this is a collective, and we are charitably helping people in deep need.

  4. I cannot offer any handicrafts or gadgets in exchange for help, because I am all thumbs. But if there is something I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask me. I’ll even feel better with the thought that I didn’t scrounge for help. Well, unless you are a laughingstock who wants to pay me just to say sth like “kill yourself”. Then sorry, you can’t afford this service.

Whoever you are, I thank you a thousandfold.