The Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, an influential Catholic think tank based in Poland, is currently finishing up draft legislation which, if adopted by Poland’s national-conservative-led parliament, would not only ban sex change operations for children—which at present are allowed with parental consent—but would see any doctor involved in such an operation subject to a three-year prison sentence.
The think tank’s draft legislation was prompted by the story of Łukasz Sakowski—a gay man, journalist, and science writer—who said he was manipulated by a transsexual into taking long-term hormone therapy during his teenage years, which he says caused serious and lasting psychological and physical damage, including the development of advanced osteoporosis at the age of 18, the Warsaw-based newspaper Rzeczpospolita reports.
“When I was 13, I was manipulated by a transsexual I met on the Internet, about 40 years old at the time, who convinced me that being gay was wrong, persuaded me to identify as a transsexual person (‘trans woman’),” Sakowski wrote, adding that from 14 years old, he took puberty blockers and female hormones. “At the age of 22, I went back to my true male gender, which I was born with.”
Following criticism leveled against the proposed legislation by left-liberal lawmakers, Jerzy Kwaśniewski, a Polish lawyer who heads the Ordo luris, defended the think tank’s position on social media.
It is “time to stop maiming kids. Time to ban the chemical castration of kids. We’ve had enough of child tragedies that have resulted from children being gender-brainwashed and then wanting to return to normality when it’s too late once their bodies have been maimed and hormonal balance disturbed,” Kwaśniewski wrote.
Rafal Dorosiński, the Director of the Legal Analysis Center of the Ordo Iuris Institute, informed the press that the draft legislation will be published in May or June at the latest, and called on Polish parties to support it.
“We are open to cooperation with all interested parliamentarians and we hope that there will be a group ready to submit the draft for legislative work,” Dorosiński said.
In comments to The European Conservative, Dorosiński explained the motivation behind the draft legislation, saying that in the last ten years, there’s been a drastic increase in the number of children ‘diagnosed’ as transsexual and referred to treatment to change—or, as transgender activists claim, ‘correct’—their gender:
In practice, this means a radical interference in the child’s hormonal balance, followed by surgical mutilation of the child.
These irreversible procedures, resulting in the deprivation of the possibility of conceiving one’s own child in the future, the amputation of healthy body parts and the de facto impossibility of starting a family of their own, are carried out on immature people due to their age (who cannot even buy alcohol on their own), teenagers, and even small children.
Dorosiński said many of these children suffer from a range of psychological disorders (e.g. autism), while others have fallen victim to propaganda that erroneously presents human sexuality as an exclusively social construct, in no way determined by biology, and something that can be decided by the individual’s subjective beliefs.
In other words, he explained, the surgical and hormonal ‘correction’ of the body is presented as a solution to difficulties and problems that are fairly typical in adolescents.
This rapid increase in children and adolescents seeking gender-changing treatment is not limited to Poland. According to Dorosiński’s figures, the number of applications to gender reassignment clinics in the UK increased by 2457% between 2009 and 2021; in the Netherlands by 904% in the years 2006–2016; and in Italy by 7200% from 2009 to 2018. Dorosiński finds the development disturbing, given the lack of scientific basis for this type of treatment:
Contrary to the claims of transgender activists, “gender reassignment” treatments do not improve the well-being of people who have undergone them.
Several countries have changed their policies in light of scientific research. Finland changed their previously permissive gender reassignment policies in 2020; Sweden followed suit in 2021; and in 2022, the UK decided to shut down the Tavistock clinic, the country’s one clinic treating gender dysphoria, after an external study found, among other things, that the clinic’s doctors had felt “pressured to adopt an unquestioning approach” contrary to normal clinical assessments. In other words, doctors were pressured to ignore the comorbidities often present in their patients and were more eager to affirm than question the self-identity of young patients.
The draft law being worked on by the Ordo Iuris Institute, Dorosiński said, is therefore part of “a broader trend of opposition to practices that are harmful to children and are based on an ideology that negates the objective reality of human sexuality.”
The draft bill will aim to outlaw such operations or other medical interventions to change the gender presentation of persons under 18.
Meanwhile, Poland’s liberal New Left party has proposed that teens should be allowed to undergo sex change operations without parental consent.
