Lalka Podobińska, Lalla Stanisława Fedorowicz-Podobińska by full name, was already over fifty, with a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences, a family, academic and professional experience, as well as her own rather unusual interests, including speleology. She had no plans for an activist career. Even less did she plan to become one of the most important allies of transgender people in Poland. It all began in 2006 with ballet. Interested in a performance by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, she began searching for information online. Her search led her to the Crossdressing.pl forum, where she first came into closer contact with the transgender community. It was there that she met Anna Grodzka. Their online acquaintance quickly developed into a friendship, which in turn grew into many years of social activism. In 2008, Lalka, together with a group of co-founders, established the Trans-Fuzja Foundation, one of the first Polish organizations focused primarily on the rights of transgender people. In the years that followed, she led support groups, organized training sessions and workshops, educated students and representatives of various professions, appeared in the media and participated in advocacy efforts for legal change. She also served as president and later vice-president of the Foundation.
Her work was not limited to the organization. When Anna Grodzka became a member of parliament, Lalka became the director of her parliamentary office. She soon found herself on the other side of the parliamentary debate as well, representing transgender people during work on the Gender Recognition Act. In 2015, she addressed the Senate Committee on Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Petitions, arguing that requiring a transgender person to sue their own parents was not only legally archaic, but also deeply burdensome for entire families. Lalka was, moreover, an unusual figure within the transgender movement. She is not herself transgender. She is a cisgender woman, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. In the community to which she devoted many years, she came to be called a “transmother”, a term that aptly reflected her natural inclination to care for others. She had done this before as a scout instructor, and later as an academic teacher and mentor to students. Even her nickname has a history older than her activism. “Lalka” was the name her parents called her when she was a child. Officially Lalla, publicly Lalka for decades.
Her story is therefore more than a story of transgender activism in Poland. It is the story of a woman who did not have to fight for her own rights, yet chose to fight for the rights of others. A woman who entered the world of activism by chance, through an online search for information about ballet, and a few years later was speaking in the Polish parliament, trying to change the law affecting thousands of people. In her work, Lalka brought together several seemingly distant worlds: science, education, family, activism, politics and personal relationships. And at the heart of this story remains a question that seems just as relevant today as it was when she first logged on to the Crossdressing.pl forum: why does someone choose to stand up for other people when they do not have to?
|
|
“To this day, my family knows how important transgender people’s issues are to me.” photo by Luka Łukasiak |
Lalka: That’s true, I do get questions like that sometimes. On social media, there are jokes such as: “Lalka? And Podobińska (which means “to be liked” in Polish) on top of that! Who comes up with names like that?” I usually explain that Lalka is short for my first name, Lalla, and that I took the surname Podobińska from my husband.
Monika: Your biography includes pharmacy, science, scouting, speleology, activism and politics. If you had to introduce yourself to someone who had never heard of you, which version of yourself would you present first?
Lalka: Of all the activities you mentioned, the two closest to my heart are speleology and activism. It is difficult for me to choose which is more important to me... But since you insist, I would say activism after all (smiling).
Monika: Did your family understand from the beginning why you had suddenly started devoting so much time to transgender people, or did they spend some time wondering what exactly you were doing with your life?
Lalka: I think that at the very beginning of my involvement in transgender issues, it may have been a little difficult for them. My children were already in their late teens at the time, and their mother’s presence in their everyday lives was probably not that important to them, although we had shared interests: hiking in the mountains and caving, because both my husband and my children are also cavers. And suddenly, in addition to our shared caving trips, there were meetings with transgender people that I organized as the so-called “Trans Pogaduchy Zalesie” at my summer cottage in Zalesie. As a result, I had less time for weekend trips to caves. But quite quickly, both the children and my husband grew fond of these trans get-togethers, sometimes even taking part in them, and came to understand my interests. My husband accompanied me several times to TransParty events organized by the Crossdressing portal. To this day, my family knows how important transgender issues are to me. And they say that although I am on so-called “activist retirement”, they still see my activity on these issues on social media.
Monika: And since we are already talking about family, do your grandchildren know that their grandmother is part of the history of the Polish transgender movement? And if they do, does it impress them, or do they simply think that Grandma has a rather strange job?
Lalka: My older grandchildren know about my work on behalf of transgender people. Ever since they were children, I have been sending them children’s books dealing with human rights. They know several transgender people and are friends with Ania Grodzka. And the younger of the older grandchildren recently said that there is a classmate in his class who actually feels like a girl. And to him, that is completely normal. The oldest grandchild is friends with his mother’s friend (that is, my daughter’s friend), who has undergone gender reassignment. The younger grandchildren, meanwhile, are of preschool and nursery age and do not yet really understand what being transgender means, but they know that everyone has the right to be themselves. They know and like Ania Grodzka and call her Ania. I know that their parents, my son and his wife, whom I treat as a second daughter, will make sure they develop a proper understanding of human rights, including the rights of transgender people, even independently of my involvement in this.
Monika: How did your involvement affect family life? Were there moments when your loved ones felt that Trans-Fuzja was getting more of your time and energy than they were?
Lalka: I have actually already told you a little about that. But I will add that there were indeed times when my husband was a little jealous of the time I spent at Trans-Fuzja. It was difficult for him to get used to the fact that we no longer did everything together, but there was something that was as close to my heart as caves, or perhaps even closer... I think it became easier for both of us to understand each other when he began working very actively as an instructor of cave mountaineering in our home club, Speleoclub Warszawski, where for some time he was even head of training. By then I was no longer actively involved in caving, so each of us had our own favourite area of activity. And that balanced things out, if you know what I mean.
|
|
“While running a support group for transgender people, I noticed that their experiences and stories were very similar.” |
Monika: Do you remember the moment when you first thought, “This is no longer my hobby or helping a few people, I have really become an activist”?
Lalka: It is difficult for me to remember one specific moment... But someone once, quite a long time ago (smiling), said that I was the most positive activist among those they knew. That was nice, and perhaps that was when I realized that I really had become an activist.
Monika: What surprised you most when you began getting to know the transgender community? Was there anything that completely contradicted your previous ideas?
Lalka: While running a support group for transgender people, I noticed that their experiences and stories were very similar. They discovered their gender incongruence in similar ways, had similar fears about coming out to those closest to them, and had similar hopes and dreams. It surprised me a little that these stories were so repetitive... And people after transition, and sometimes even those a little before transition, wanted so badly to make up for the lost time when they had really been living a life that was not their own that they sometimes even “went a little overboard” in expressing their experienced gender. But of course I understood it and noticed that after the initial fascination with the femininity or masculinity they had longed for, their expression became more restrained.
Monika: You met Anna Grodzka before she became a member of parliament and before she became one of the most recognizable transgender people in Poland. How do you remember the Anna you knew then, privately, before Anna Grodzka became known from television and parliament?
Lalka: At the beginning of her journey towards transition, Ania was somewhat lost. She did not know whether to follow that path or whether, after such a serious change in her life, she would be able to cope in what had until then been a fairly stable professional, social and family situation. Her wife had already demanded a divorce when she first noticed signs of her non-normative gender expression, but fortunately her son understood and supported her. When Ania told her family and friends about her doubts and her need to be herself after years of playing someone else, most of them turned away from her. I encouraged her and I feel that, to some extent, I influenced the path Ania chose. In her book “My Name Is Ania”, she wrote a dedication to me: “If it weren’t for you, Laleczko, I would never have dared to be called Ania, there would have been no Trans-Fuzja and no book. If it weren’t for you, there would be nothing. And there is, because you are, and for that I thank you very, very much.”
Monika: Do you remember the first truly difficult conversation with Anna, when you realized how serious the decisions about her own life that lay ahead of her were?
Lalka: Yes, I remember. It was actually during our first “tangible meeting”, meaning a meeting “in person”, because for more than a month our conversations had taken place online. That conversation, which took place in the now-defunct “Motto” café, lasted more than three hours. In fact, I already knew everything about Ania from our conversations online, about her family situation, her problems with her wife and the divorce that was awaiting her, and her fears about the changes in her life. But it was then, during that meeting, looking at Ania, who had tears in her eyes as we talked about the difficulties she could expect and what her future would look like, that I realized how difficult a road lay ahead of her. And that was when I decided that I would be there for her and support her as much as I could.
|
|
“Activism taught me that you cannot give up and that you have to keep working until you succeed.” |
Monika: For years, you were something of an “emergency hotline” for many people, someone they could call when everything was falling apart. Who was that emergency hotline for you?
Lalka: That’s true. Even today, although I am no longer active in Trans-Fuzja, I often still receive such calls and emails. And who was there for me? Actually, then and now, that emergency hotline for me is Ania Grodzka. She is my closest friend; on Facebook and in my smartphone contacts, I have her saved as my sister. We have worked together for years, jointly creating Trans-Fuzja as well as the now-defunct LGBT Business Forum Foundation and FAIR Society Foundation.
At present, we are in the process of establishing a publishing cooperative. We like working together; our personalities and temperaments complement each other perfectly. Each of us has different skills, and that is what makes our two-person team so strong. And what about other matters connected with everyday life? I turn to Ania with many personal matters. Yes, she is my “emergency hotline”. And I know that I am the same for her.
Monika: Did activism teach you more about patience, or rather about gritting your teeth?
Lalka: Definitely patience. I used to have what you might call a “short fuse”; I would easily become irritated when things did not go my way. Activism taught me that you cannot give up and that you have to keep working until you succeed. Perhaps speleology helped me with that a little (smiling), because after all, as we know, “a drop hollows out a stone”...
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Lalka Podobińska.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
No comments:
Post a Comment