A Polish biological man says a “transsexual man in his mid-40s” manipulated him into “sex reassignment” procedures when he was just 14 years old.
Lukasz Sakowski told his heartbreaking story in a revealing Daily Mail article published on Sunday, telling readers, “This is my warning for parents everywhere…”
I am a detransitioner from Poland, here is my story. https://t.co/BQef1MpbuC
— Łukasz Sakowski (totylkoteoria.pl) (@totylkoteoria) August 13, 2023
“For several years,” Sakowski writes, the transsexual man “gave me puberty blockers – dangerous substances that block the effects of testosterone – and hormones of the opposite sex, i.e. estrogens.”
“Just before I turned 18, a psychologist, psychiatrist, and sexologist, after one visit, without any tests, fabricated a diagnosis of transsexualism and referred me, officially, for a sex change, which should never have happened,” he said.
Sakowski says he has since “had a reversal procedure, returning to the true sex I was born with, which I am very happy about,” but his story offers an enlightening glimpse into the ways the media and the medical community have managed to influence adolescent minds.
“I’m gay and that has a lot to do with the story,” Sakowski writes. “When I was 12, I struggled with a lack of self-acceptance. I already knew that I liked people of the same sex.”
“Same-sex couples were not accepted and were actively condemned. In fact, they were ridiculed, and calling someone ‘gay’ was an offensive epithet,” he recalls. “As I pondered my future, I increasingly thought that a normal, healthy, gay life would be impossible. I also developed a belief that same-sex attraction is wrong.”
Sakowski stresses that he did not come to that conclusion because of religion.
“I can’t recall our quite strict nun in junior high school ever expressing a negative attitude towards gays,” he says.
Rather, he points to the way in which the media depicted “homosexual people.”
“They often showed pictures from pride parades, in which gays, fetishists, and exhibitionists were seen strangely dressed and acting in a disturbing way,” he writes. “And I, like so many other homosexual men, absolutely did not identify with such patterns and behaviors. I don’t identify with them to this day.”
“Such media coverage reinforced my belief that homosexuality was something strange and repulsive, and in any case related to disorders – since individuals who appear to be mentally and sexually disturbed are shown as gay and seem to be almost the only ones who openly talk about it,” he says. “I was not aware that the media message does not reflect reality, that there are many ordinary gays outside the clubbing, exhibitionist, parading subculture.”
At the age of 13, while struggling “with a huge dilemma regarding my orientation,” Sakowski says he found “a forum for trans people” on the internet.
“Quite quickly I got in touch with one of its users – a 40-year-old m/f transsexual person (changing from a man to a woman),” he writes. “For the purposes of this text, I will call her Ewa.”
Ewa quickly became the person a young Sakowski turned to “with my problems regarding identity, orientation, emotions, school, and others.”
Ewa began encouraging Sakowski to use “feminine forms instead of masculine ones.”
“It was persuasion, a suggestion that I should ‘not be afraid’ to write ‘like a girl,'” he explains. “Over time, there were attempts to convince me that I should wear girlish clothes, apply makeup and paint my nails.”
When he was 14, Ewa began discussing puberty blockers, eventually offering to send Sakowski one called Androcur.
After a few years of taking the medication, when he was approximately 18, a doctor told Sakowski that he was suffering from advanced osteoporosis and had “had almost 1/4 loss of bone mass relative to the normal one for my age.”
A decade later, in 2022, “several years after I had reversed the sex change and discontinued all hormonal drugs,” Sakowski learned he was still presenting with osteopenia “despite the correct diet, vitamin D supplementation and a very active lifestyle, which I began when I got over the trauma of sex reassignment (so-called gender correction).”
Ewa’s influence over Sakowski continued.
When he was 15, “Ewa also started sending me a prescription-only estrogen medication, and in this case, all kept secret from my family.”
“Cognitive dissonance” soon set in, and was only enforced by the online forums.
Sakowski writes:
I felt more and more discomfort and frustration when someone referred to me as male or when I had to wear some typically masculine clothing. I also felt a great aversion to my body and its masculine features, I felt repulsion and shame.
Ewa, the forum and portals for trans people, as well as the message of transsexual activists, confirmed me in this alienation and pushed me to the next steps of changing my sex, like members of a sect pushing a novice to more and more drastic steps.
If someone asked me then whether I was happy that I was ‘changing my sex’, I would not only confirm, but even reply emphatically.
Therefore, if I had been polled at the time as to whether I was happy with my ‘sex change,’ I would have enthusiastically said yes.
At that time, I succumbed to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, so despite the terrible feeling about my body and the situation, I had the impression that I was going in the right direction, and the sex transition helped me.
“As well as the false information published by transgender activists on the Internet, along with giving them the appearance of reliable knowledge by ideology-driven sexologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Ewa rooted in me the idea that what was happening must be right,” he says.
At the same time that Ewa was pushing him to identify as a “transsexual woman,” Sakowski was seeking medical advice from psychologists and professors who “said that I had sex dysphoria (then called ‘sex disapproval syndrome’) and I was a teenager who did not accept my homosexual orientation, striving to change my sex to be perceived as a heterosexual woman – after all, a gay man after a sex change will still be gay, but from a social point of view, she will also be a heterosexual woman.”
“The diagnosis was correct, and the whole process carried out by this psychologist was thorough and insightful,” Sakowski says, “but I completely denied it.”
What followed was years of secrecy, isolation, anxiety, depression, and shame, made worse by the effects of the puberty blockers and hormones he was ingesting.
“When someone is under their influence and becomes depressed, it is much more difficult for them to understand their own emotions and motivations and thus stop the process of sex reassignment, no matter how harmful it may be,” he writes. “Therefore, although 60-90 percent of people grow out of sex dysphoria, which is confirmed by numerous scientific studies, among those who have already started taking medication, the percentage of people whose dysphoria has passed is decreasing.”
In high school, things only got worse.
“Of course, it’s not possible to function as a woman when you’re a man,” Sakowski notes. “However, I was convinced that when I turned 18 and formally changed my sex, i.e. changed my identity documents to female, I would start a normal life and everything would change. This was the vision of the world transgender activists and organizations are promoting by this toxic ideology.”
By the time he entered college, Sakowski was passing for a girl.
“Due to taking blockers and hormones from the age of 14/15, by the time I was 18 my breasts had grown, my waistline had narrowed, and my pelvis was wide,” he writes.
But that still didn’t solve his emotional problems.
“It’s a myth that sex transition ‘cures’ depression, social relationship problems, autism, borderline personality disorder, non-acceptance of one’s sexual orientation, suicidal thoughts, or other problems,” he states.
By the age of 20, Sakowski had scheduled an orchidectomy (removal of the testicles) but ultimately canceled the procedure — twice.
“To myself, I explained the cancellation of the operation with ‘objective’ reasons (financial, time issues, etc.) – I rationalized it,” he writes. “But deep down, I felt relieved.”
Sakowski studied biology in school and went on to write his master’s thesis in biochemistry, histology and genetics.
Those classes, he says, helped him “to notice how much of the dogma present in the narratives of transgender activists are disinformation, manipulation, and lies, for the sake of concealment called ‘modern science’, with which in fact they have nothing in common.”
“Thanks to biological – or more broadly, natural science – knowledge, I saw how absurd and inconsistent with the facts are views such as: ‘ Biological sex does not exist’; ‘Sex is a spectrum’; ‘There are many sexes and one of them is transsexuality’; ‘You can choose your sex’; ‘Sex is determined by the brain and psyche, not biological sex’; ‘Gender dysphoria is irreversible’; ‘Transsexuality is inborn,'” he writes. “These and other disinformation theses, approaching denial of sex, are just activist wishes, and have not the slightest support in reliable, well-established science unrelated to activism.”
“In the summer of 2014, I decided to stop taking hormonal drugs,” he writes. “A little later, I admitted to my family that the sex change was a mistake.”
Because he had started taking the puberty blockers and hormonal drugs at such a young age and stayed on them for so long, Sakowski required a “a full mastectomy” to remove the breasts he had grown.
“This example illustrates well how dangerous sex change is for health, because although I have not undergone any serious sex-change surgery, castration (orchidectomy), anyway, in order to at least partially undo the effects of taking puberty blockers and female hormones, I had to have a serious surgery under full anesthesia,” he states.
“The formal and medical detransition is behind me, but I have struggled with the consequences of what happened and still struggle to this day,” he says. “I will always have an increased risk of various diseases, osteopenia or a deformed chest.”
“I wrote this text because I care about the welfare of young people today who are confused about their identity, dislike their body, or question their sexual orientation and are being led by transgender activists and dishonest psychologists and psychiatrists towards medical body modification,” he says, adding that, as a result of his ordeal, “no pseudo-information campaigns presenting transsexualism and sex change in a positive light, impress me in the slightest.”
“By my coming-out,” he concludes, “I would like to start a discussion in Poland on the unethical practices of doctors, psychologists, sexologists, activists, and various Internet celebrities dealing with sex transition, earning or making media careers from the physical and mental mutilation of young people.”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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