Heterosexuality Is Now the Official Sexuality of Florida

It's not just "Don't Say Gay" anymore in the Sunshine State: HB 1069 legislates gay and trans out of existence

It’s hump day, friends, and yours truly is one week closer to quitting her day job and becoming a full-time writer. So get your friends on board now, and:

Photo credit: courtesy of the State Library and Archives of Florida/Wikimedia Commons

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Once again, the scary fascist Republicans in Florida are playing “Can You Top This?”

The newsletter Florida Politics reports today that the state’s legislature has passed yet another bill regulating speech and thought in the state’s schools. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Governor (and 2024 presidential hopeful) Ron DeSantis signed into law in March 2022 banned a range of books, curriculum and speech in pre-K through the third grade classrooms. HB 1069 extends those bans to the eighth grade and adds restrictions on what pronouns students and educational employees may use.

You can read the whole bill here, and you should, because it contains nearly everything that the far right has wanted since the 1950s. DeSantis is expected to sign the legislation in the weird hope that the more he craps on queer people, the more attractive he will be to the GOP base in the primary season and then, in a national campaign, to the independent voters that make up almost half the American electorate.

As statehouse reporter Anne Geggis writes, HB 1069 was approved 27-12 after a fierce debate. While Democrats characterized the legislation as an attack on LGBTQ people more generally, Republicans argued that it was liberals who were waging a culture war—on the children of Florida. As Geggis reports, Republican Erin Grall asserted that the curricular materials and speech that the the bill bans “confuses” children:

“We are depriving children of the ability to figure out who they are when we push an agenda — a sexualized agenda — down onto children,” Grall said. “I can tell you that my 11-year-old daughter does not know what it means to be heterosexual.”

The bill is an expansion of last year’s legislation (HB 1557), called the Parental Rights in Education Act. Critics labeled last year’s legislation “Don’t Say Gay” law because of the way it prohibits instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity. This one has been dubbed “Don’t Say They” because it more tightly restricts the use of pronouns.

But the bill does more than that: it seeks to legislate what sex and gender are, nominally for the purposes of education, but in fact as a stepping stone to a statewide ban on actually being trans. Section 1 defines sex as “the classification of a person as either female or male based on the organization of the body of such person for a specific reproductive role, as indicated by the person's sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, and internal and external genitalia present at birth.” Section 2 then codifies “the policy of every public K-12 educational institution that is provided or authorized by the Constitution and laws of Florida that a person's sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person's sex.” Intersex people are exempt from these rules, and defined as “disordered.”

The bill also bans speech that does not conform to sections 1 and 2: no public school employee may speak to a student about which pronouns they wish to use. Even more insidious is that no public school employee may use pronouns that do not correspond to their “sex” as defined by the Florida legislature. This means, for example, that a transman who has made a full, medical transition and who worked in a Florida school would have to use the pronouns “she/her,” effectively making it impossible for that person to be employed in a school.

In other words, the bill effectively requires trans or questioning students to be silent about who they are, and bans trans people from doing any job whatsoever in a state-funded school.

But there’s more: HB 1069 also legislates trans people out of existence and makes heterosexuality the official state sexuality of Florida. It mandates that courses on sexuality “teach that biological males impregnate biological females by fertilizing the female egg with male sperm; that the female then gestates the offspring; and that these reproductive roles are binary, stable, and unchangeable” (emphasis mine.) It also requires that instructors “teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage” (emphasis mine.) Such courses must also “teach that each student has the power to control personal behavior and encourage students to base actions on reasoning, self-esteem, and respect for others.”

In other words: Pregnant? It’s your fault, honey.

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Short takes:

• The Tennessee Legislature’s Republican majority may soon regret that they called any national attention to themselves, since apparently their racism is only the tip of the iceberg (which is often the case, more generally.) Judd Legum at Popular Information, who was the first investigative reporter to uncover the fact that Speaker Cameron Sexton was (illegally) not living in his district, has now ferreted out new information about a sexual harassment coverup involving—interns!—that also implicates the Speaker. Apparently, the majority has spent almost $10,000 relocating female interns who were being sexually harassed by one of its members. Sexton says this is news to him, but whether he knew or didn’t know, it’s a problem. Why? Because the legislature’s sexual harassment policy “states that, after a sexual harassment complaint is filed with `any staff director’ or `the chief clerks,’ it must be `reported to the…Speaker.’ After the Speaker receives a sexual harassment complaint, the Speaker sends it to the Director of Legislative Administration, Ridley, to conduct a staff investigation. At the conclusion of that investigation, the report is sent to the Speaker.” So which way were the rules violated on your watch, sweet pea? (May 3, 2023)

• In Texas, children can’t have drag queen story hour or books that mention gender, but they may soon be required to learn how to stop a sucking chest wound. In the aftermath of yet another hideous mass shooting, which Governor Abbott blamed on the victims’ and perpetrator’s immigration status, we are learning that a 2019 bill that required students in the seventh grade and up to learn battlefield trauma skills, is being amended to begin such training in the third grade. “In related news re: what Texas is doing or not doing about school shootings,” writes Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin, “Republican Ken King has proposed a bill that would pay public school teachers and staff up to $25,000 to carry guns at school.” Since the average salary for a Texas teacher is less than $60,000 a year, this could be quite the incentive. (May 2, 2023)

• For those mourning the policy gap left by Bernie Sanders’ absence from the 2024 presidential campaign, according to Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone, it’s seventy-year-old spiritual guru Marianne Williamson who has picked up the banner for adjusting capitalism to meet the needs of ordinary people. Williamson “favors socialized medicine, free college, an end to college loan debt, paid family leave, guaranteed sick pay, and a guaranteed livable wage,” Featherstone writes. “She supports the PRO Act along with even stronger labor protections. All of this, Williamson points out, is mainstream policy in every other advanced democracy.” (April 27, 2023)