Okay, so you know the Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida? The one that prohibits “gender ideology” in schools?
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
The words “he” and “she” are gender identities. “Mister” and “Missus” are gender identities. It’s illegal for a teacher in Florida to introduce themself as Mr or Mrs. It’s illegal for a teacher in Florida to tell a student another child’s pronouns, even inadvertently.
If a concern is not resolved by the school district, a parent may …. Bring an action against the school district to obtain a declaratory judgment that the school district procedure or practice violates this paragraph and seek injunctive relief. A court may award damages and shall award reasonable attorney fees and court costs to a parent who receives declaratory or injunctive relief.
As far as I can tell, this is exactly the kind of situation the Satanic Temple exists to help with. All it takes is one single parent in Florida to ask the Satanic Temple’s help suing a school for using the words “he” and “she” in the classroom.
BOOM. Overnight, the headlines “DeSantis law forces school to use gender neutral pronouns” would appear. It would be the biggest scandal and loss of face for the Republican party in the eyes of their voters since ever.
Why hasn’t this already been done?
Three links to the same story: letter recommends referring to all students as “they” and “them” to avoid “gendered pronouns” like “he” and “she.”
- https://scoop.upworthy.com/teacher-maliciously-complies-with-dont-say-gay-bill-to-use-they-them-pronouns-for-all-kids
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dont-say-gay-he-she-sabotage-teacher-letter-moms-for-liberty-florida_n_62489f02e4b0587dee6a3a1a
- https://news.yahoo.com/memo-circulated-florida-teachers-lays-234351376.html
‘Unrelated’ Aftermath:
I’ve seen that story before, and it doesn’t answer my question. I don’t think this is an issue teachers can solve by malicious compliance doing the right thing. This is an issue that parents need to solve. Because the bill allows parents to sue (and therefore establish legal precedent), not teachers. If a teacher uses genderless language, as you say, they’ll get fired. But if a parent sues a school for having the words he and she, and wins, it is now an incontrovertible part of the law that he and she are forbidden in Florida schools. This means teachers can no longer be punished for following the law, it means they have to follow the law, and this will have a much bigger impact on headlines due to its wider and firmer scope.
Why hasn’t a parent done this?
Note that teachers have an open lawsuit. Specifically:
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- The initial letter was signed, “Thank you, Mx. XXXXXXXXXX”
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- Florida teacher fired for using gender-neutral title Mx.
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- That teach and two others challenged the law in federal court, arguing the state’s laws on titles and pronouns is unconstitutional.
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Because judges are people, not robots mindlessly applying legislation. To succeed in such case you need the judges on the trial and all appeals to all decide to maliciously comply with the law.
Or you need a lawyer to make the very easy case, and the judge to have a shred of integrity.
Why haven’t they tried?
Because it’s not a very easy case. In fact, there is no real case.
- It’s not just a stretch, but a huge leap, to claim that using “he” or “she” counts as “instruction […] on sexual orientation or gender identity”.
- And even if you did manage that, you also have to argue that it’s also “not age appropriate”.
- And if you managed that as well somehow, you have the problem that judges can take into account things like the intent of the lawmakers, and what’s reasonable, not just the raw text of the law.
Side note:
If marriage is between a man and a woman as Republicans claim, then Mrs is not only a gender identity but also a sexual identity, and is doubly prohibited.
(Arguments that Mrs entails allosexual identity are equally predicated on Republican misconception, in this case lack of understanding of the sex/romance distinction)
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I don’t think it would be evil to ban gendered pronouns in Florida schools. I think it would provoke a great deal of careful thought in these schools and broaden students’ horizons. And I also think the Republicans would immediately undo it to “save the kids” by repealing the Don’t Say Gay bill inside of a month. So ultimately no harm done, and quite likely some good for the students. But on a broader level, it would do a lot of good by repealing the bill and making Republican policies look hostile to Republican voter interests, delegitimising the party’s image in Florida and swinging the state left.
You, and everybody interested in this who wants real integrity in their leverage to argue this stuff, need to get Hofstadter’s remapping of gender-terms from Mr vs Miss & Mrs to …
… IF you are white, THEN there is 1 pronoun for you, …
… ELSIF you are black, THEN your pronoun is dependent on whether you’re employed or not
written by Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, the keystone to competent philosophy ), for Scientific American magazine, decades ago.
It may be in the “Metamagical Themas” book.
It was mentioned in the 1990’s in the Feminism FAQ as being trailblazing, because it caused what we were unconscious-of to GET in our faces, violating our habits, so we could actually perceive just how prejudiced it is.
searching … This may be it…
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I only glanced at it, it’s too jarring for me ( I’d rather that I could just live in solitary isolation for the entire rest of my life: humanity’s abuse ), but it may help crystalize the ability to articulate just how stilted this all is.
I completely agree that “Mr.” and “Miss”, “Mrs.”, “Mz” all are gender-identifying, and as-such ought be considered illegal under their law.
But exactly as the convict/felon/inmate Yehoshua “Jesus” benJoseph identiied, a couple of millenia ago, legalists insist on the letter-of-the-law, while ignoring whatever law’s inconvenient to their artifice.
Legalists haven’t changed since benJoseph called them “Hypocrites!”.
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