Transition in Poland, Poland in Transition: Tracing the history of gender transition discourses in Polish social media

The present article explores the history of Polish online gender transition discourses, conceptualized in terms of two main stages – “Transnet 1.0” of anonymous, text-based blogs documenting individual experiences and “Transnet 2.0” of YouTube videos, podcasts and tik-toks created by openly trans activists. It offers an analysis of various kinds of multilingual practices in these narratives and attempts to track the way they have been changing to reveal threads of local and global, conservative and liberal, medical and activist discourses. This is done against the background of Poland’s own transition from a (nominally) socialist state to a modern democracy, which has not followed a simple, straight-forward path to progress allegedly exemplified by the “West”. The history of attitudes towards the transgender community throughout Poland’s democratic transition and its traces in contemporary online discourses paint a more complex picture.