Betrayed By Her Own Body: Non-Normative Gender Identity in the Writings of Krystyna Modrzewska

This chapter is devoted to the experience of transgenderism that emerges from the autobiographical and literary writings of Krystyna Modrzewska. Modrzewska was born in 1919 in Warsaw into an assimilated intellectual Jewish family but spent her childhood in Lublin. During the war she went into hiding with ‘Aryan papers’ and was active in the Polish Home Army, which she described in detail in a memoir. After the war she wrote novels under the pseudonym Adam Struś, in which she transposed her own experiences onto male protagonists. As a result of the antisemitic campaign of 1967–8, she left Poland for Sweden, where, in the 1990s, she began writing autobiographical books, central to which was her attempt to understand her own struggles with the rigid categories of gender identity.