“I studied abroad and I first landed in Cardiff which is a very queer city,” tells me Monika, a genderfluid person who only returned to Poland recently. It was only when I went abroad for student exchange, got to participate in a queer club, that I realized that it doesn’t have to be a medical problem, that there are different ways of expressing your identity.” I was wondering if it isn’t some sort of endocrine disorder or if maybe I’m trans-I was lucky to know another trans person-but I’m just scared of admitting it. Mira, who spent years searching for the right label, has a similar experience: “I was fifteen when I’ve realized that I’m nonbinary but the words for it didn’t exist back then, or rather I didn’t know them. “What was my breakthrough? The first one was just learning that nonbinary people exist, that it’s recognized in some cultures and present in Poland.” “Since my childhood, I knew that there’s something wrong with how I’m perceived by others but I didn’t have a name for it,” Sasza tells me. And yet as the visibility of Polish nonbinary people increases, and the political situation becomes more and more hostile, the community continues to find new ways of resisting-both in their language and on the streets.
It is, perhaps, even harder to express your queer gender in a language that demands your suffixes to subscribe neatly to either masculine or feminine, especially in a country where the most famous nonbinary person is the one that got arrested for trying to oppose homophobic propaganda. It is difficult to be a nonbinary person in a world which still vastly refuses to acknowledge anything that goes past the binary. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All Time.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.