ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the state-socialist approach to gender nonconformity in Poland before 1989. It was informed by the official ideology of socialist humanism and provided individuals diagnosed as transsexual with state-funded medical care and relatively simple legal procedure for changing their documents. The argument is situated in the context of current debates regarding the agency of women and sexual minorities under state socialism and the biased nature of certain sociological concepts, such as agency vs. structure. By reconstructing the premises of sexological diagnoses of transsexualism and legal procedure of gender reassignment the author argues that one of such problematic distinctions is the opposition between medicalization and emancipation, which does not hold when applied to the socialist humanist project.
