Muammar Al Khadafi

For the first time since 2008, there will be a transperson sitting in their nation's highest legislative body.

57 year old Anna Grodzka is a member of the newly minted liberal party called Pallikot's Support Movement, which stunned the political establishment in Poland by garnering 10 percent of the vote in Sunday's election..

The party was founded by vodka tycoon Janusz Palikot who was a lawmaker in Prime Minister Donald Tusk's center-right Civic Platform until he got exasperated with the party's conservatism on social issues and broke away to form his own party.   Pallikot's Support Movement has attracted younger voters with its support for gay rights, abortion and legalization of soft drugs and with its attacks on the influential Roman Catholic Church

Grodzka is also an example of what can happen if you just step out there, put yourself in the game and get in it to win it. "I decided to be a candidate for Palikot's Movement because I want the voice of people who are excluded and discriminated against in the Polish political system to be heard," she wrote in her blog. "I believe that little by little does the trick."

She garnered 19,541 votes in the Krakow II electoral district to secure her place in the Sejm, Poland's lower house of Parliament.  She is set to become the first transperson in Poland to become an MP and the first in Europe since Vladimir Luxuria lost her seat in the Italian elections in 2008.

Georgina Beyer, the world first transsexual to be elected to their national legislative body, retired from New Zealand's Parliament after serving as a Labour MP from November 27, 1999 until February 14, 2007

Grodzka is the founder and president of NGO Trans-Fuzja, and has her work cut out for her in her stated mission of help Poles understand the problems of people who transition as she did last year.   The Polish anti-discrimination law of 2010 does not include gender identity nor gender expression as possible grounds for discrimination.

Congrats Anna on making some trans history.  May you be wildly successful in your dual missions of representing your constituents and fostering increased understanding of transpeople in a staunchly Catholic Poland.

Cristan Williams of the Houston based Transgender Foundation of America continues to put out the nuggets of history from the archive that it has painstakingly built up that blows up the lies of those who claim that the transgender term is only a 90's invention.



It also blows up the lies of people who claim that transsexuality is just a late 20th century-21st century phenomenon.



from Clinical Sexuality, a 1974 book by  John F. Oliven, MD 

The milder case of transvestitism does not come easily to medical or any
other professional attention, and it has rarely been included in the
reports from clinic now specializing in transgender research.

From the 1979 Newsday article on Christine Jorgenson reprinted in the Winnipeg Free Press 



As a young man, Jorgensen experienced strong emotional attachments to
two male friends, but she says those feelings were never expressed. She
admits now that she wasn’t entirely candid in the book. She did have “a
couple” of homosexual experiences before she went to Europe to seek a
medical solution to her problem, but they only reinforced the feeling
that she wanted to relate to men as a woman, not as another man. “If
you understand trans-genders,” she says, (the word she prefers to
transsexuals), “then you understand that gender doesn’t have to do with
bed partners, it has to do with identity.”



There's some fascinating stuff here that Cristan continues to add to at this transgender research link.

One of TransGriot's ongoing missions is to search out, find and post nuggets of our African American trans history.  I discovered this one courtesy of Black Past.org and  BlackAmericaWeb

While living in Kentucky I'd heard multiple stories about James 'Sweet Evening Breeze' Herndon from Dawn since she was from Lexington where 'Sweet Evening Breeze' is a legendary presence in the TBLG community there.  But they may also need to start talking about Lucy Hicks Anderson, who was born in Waddy, KY  where we used to get gas on our I-64 runs between Louisville and Lexington.

Lucy Hicks Anderson was born in 1886 in Waddy as Tobias Lawson.   When Lawson entered school she insisted on wearing dresses to school and began calling herself Lucy.  Since the transgender definition hadn't been coined at that time to diagnose what was going on in her life, her mother took her to a physician who advised her to raise young Lucy as a girl.

Lucy left school at age fifteen to begin doing domestic work and left Kentucky in her twenties to move west.   She settled in Pecos, TX and began working at a hotel for a decade until she married Clarence Hicks in 1920 in Silver City, NM and moved west with him to Oxnard, California.  She divorced him in 1929.   

While in Oxnard she continued to do domestic work but was also saving her money she earned from that job.  She eventually purchased some property near the center of town and later operated a brothel.   She also got married again in 1944 to Reuben Anderson, a soldier who was stationed at Long Island's Mitchel Field.  


It was the second marriage that brought the legal trouble into her life.   When it was discovered that Lucy had been born biologically male, the Ventura County district attorney decided to prosecute her for perjury. He asserted that Anderson committed perjury when she signed the marraige license application and swore that there were 'no legal objections' to the marriage.

Of course Lucy had a dissenting opinion. "I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman,” Anderson told reporters in the midst of her perjury trial. “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.”   The jury convicted her of the perjury charge, but the judge sentenced her to ten years probation rather than send her to prison. 

However, Lucy's legal troubles weren't over.  Since she'd received allotment checks as the wife of a US Army soldier, the feds prosecuted her and Reuben Anderson for fraud in 1946.  They were both found guilty and sent to prison . 

After serving her time, she tried to return to her life in Oxnard but  the police commissioner threatened her with prosecution if she returned, so she moved to Los Angeles where lived out the remainder of her life until she passed away in 1954.