Bez Cenzury #8 - Film dokumentalny - JAKA JA BYŁAM WTEDY ŁADNA - FILM LGBT - REŻ. PIOTR ZWIEFKA
Magda: untreated rape trauma drove me to transition. 14 years of testosterone and a needless hysterectomy left me scarred and sick. Detransition saved me, but the damage is forever.
Overview
Magda, the subject of Piotr Zwiefka’s documentary, describes how untreated rape trauma and family stress led her to Polish trans forums that supplied black-market testosterone and coached her to obtain a diagnosis in three quick visits. Over fourteen years testosterone and a medically-unnecessary hysterectomy left her with ruined health, mastectomy scars and lost years before she detransitioned and reclaimed her life as a woman.
Full Video Summary
Magda, the central voice in Piotr Zwiefka’s documentary “Bez Cenzury #8 – JAKA JA BYŁAM WTEDY ŁADNA,” recounts a decade-long journey through gender transition and back. After finishing high school she found herself squeezed into a 60-square-metre flat with her parents, her sister, the sister’s husband and their newborn. Feeling superfluous, she drifted into the city and was lured to a stranger’s flat where she was locked up and raped. Too ashamed to tell even her parents, she filed a police report but could not utter the word “rape”; the investigation was dropped and the trauma went untreated. Alone in her room she began typing phrases like “I don’t want to be treated like a woman” into search engines. The algorithms led her to Polish trans forums where private messages offered black-market testosterone and cheat-sheets on how to obtain a diagnosis. Within three brief meetings a psychologist rubber-stamped her for hormone therapy; no blood work, cancer screening or discussion of trauma took place. Testosterone changed Magda quickly and cruelly. After the first injections she felt euphoric, then chronically irritable; her mother noticed that every fresh dose made her daughter furious and unreachable. Over the next fourteen years Magda’s voice dropped, her body masculinised, and she began drinking three beers every night, running ten kilometres afterwards until her health collapsed and she dropped out of university. She clung to the hope that a hysterectomy—recommended on the forums within five years of starting hormones—would let her lower the dose and feel “normal.” She now calls the removal of her healthy uterus “worse than rape,” a second violation committed with her own consent. Throughout this period she lived a double life: in one circle she was “the boy on T,” in another she dreaded meeting old friends who still remembered her as a girl. Dreams of awkward reunions haunted her sleep, reinforcing the sense that she was performing a role rather than becoming herself. In early 2022 Magda finally stopped the hormones and began detransition. Almost immediately she could cry again, study again, feel joy again. Yet she had to resume testosterone briefly because Polish law offered no easy way to revert her legal sex; the mismatch between her female body and male documents felt unbearable. Eventually she threw the “poison” away for good and embraced life as a woman, albeit one carrying mastectomy scars and irreversible changes. Looking back, she believes the transition was not an expression of an innate identity but an elaborate escape from rape trauma, family tension, and the sexualisation she had endured. She mourns the years lost and the medical professionals who, in her words, treated her case as “good business” while ignoring her mother’s warnings. Magda ends the film with a plea: had someone gently connected her distress to the assault instead of affirming a trans narrative, she might never have embarked on the path that cost her uterus, her health and fourteen irreplaceable years.