Anna Grodzka made history in Poland as the country’s first transsexual member of parliament after a new anti-clerical party stormed to third place in Sunday’s general election.
Born as a man, Grodzka, now 57, recently completed her sex change, part of which was carried out in Bangkok, Thailand.
“With 99 percent of the results in, I have been elected,” Grodzka told AFP Monday, with official results showing she had scored 19,000 votes in the deeply Catholic southern Polish city of Krakow — once home to the late Polish-born pope John Paul II.
“I’m thrilled. It’s the dream of my life come true today, and a new chapter has started,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.
“Today, Poland is changing. I’m the proof,” insisted Grodzka, a declared atheist who has worked as a publisher, and more recently a film-maker. Ever since her childhood as a boy, Grodzka says she had known that inside she was female, although she fathered a son when she was still a man. She intends to propose legislation facilitating gender changes in Poland.
Grodzka ran for parliament with the outspoken Palikot Movement, which broke new political ground by sharply challenging the powerful Roman Catholic Church.
Led by Janusz Palikot, a flamboyant tycoon-turned-politician, the party scored some 10 percent of the vote Sunday, behind the conservative Church-backed Law and Justice party and Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform, which won a new term.
