Florida parents protest art class over Michelangelo’s David, exposing right-wing’s obsession with pronouns and trans rights.
The Tallahassee Art Controversy
It’s 2023 in Tallahassee, Florida. Eighth-grade students, as part of their art history class, are viewing Michelangelo’s sculpture of David. Hell breaks loose in the school. Parents create a scandal, protesting that the school is showing children an image of a naked man. The school director tries to defend himself, emphasizing what a good, conservative educational institution it is. He explains: “We teach children math using the Singapore method here. We teach them Latin. WE DON’T USE PRONOUNS.”
Pronouns Under Fire
One cannot speak – neither in Latin nor in English – without using pronouns. Pronouns are: “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “my”, “our”, “her”, “his”, “them”. But the Tallahassee example clearly shows: for part of the right, the word “pronouns” doesn’t mean parts of speech – but leftist eccentricity that must be fought. Even at the cost of basic logic. Here are tweets from American politician Lavern Spicer: “I never used a pronoun in my life”. “There are no pronouns in the Bible”. “There are no pronouns in the Constitution”.
Political Battle Over Identity
What’s this all about? This is, of course, not some ideology-free campaign against English grammar. It’s a campaign against transgender and non-binary identities, or rather: against treating transgender and non-binary people with respect or simply allowing them to live normally. Donald Trump and Republicans have long been inciting against transgender people. And the Polish right eagerly copies them.
Polish Right-Wing Rhetoric
Mikołaj Pawlak, Children’s Ombudsman during PiS rule, claimed that sex educators in schools “catch neglected children” and without parents’ knowledge “give them some pharmacological agents to change their gender”. Krzysztof Bosak called transgenderism “a threat to youth”, and spoke of gender correction surgery as “self-mutilation”. Konrad Berkowicz, a deputy, ridiculed videos in which people state their pronouns. Paulina Matysiak, a deputy recently expelled from Razem for lack of cooperation with her own group and clear leaning toward PiS, heavily criticized the left for focusing excessively on pronouns. Right-wing detectives – following their American colleagues – track “masculine” jawlines in women’s faces on Twitter.
Beyond the Headlines
In this episode of “What Does It Mean”, I talk about the moral panic around pronouns, and really – around non-binary and transgender identities. Are these really inventions of the caviar left, or do transgender children also appear in Subcarpathia, not only on Old Mokotów? Can one reconcile fire with water in politics and deal with more than one issue at the same time? Who actually pays more attention to transgenderism – the right or the left? And what were the most emblematic battles on this issue on Polish Twitter?
But I also talk about facts, not just fantasies and imagination. I’ll discuss how transgender and non-binary people make decisions to start using their chosen pronouns. How often (or rather: how rarely) using forms other than those assigned at birth is an experiment or a phase one grows out of. What non-binary forms look like – or their proposals – in Polish. And about historical examples of specific people who were likely transgender or non-binary long before we had the appropriate concepts to speak about it.
