Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has come out in defense of traditional gender distinctions. On November 12th, the head of the party, Jarosław Kaczyński, gave a speech in Wadowice during which he harshly attacked the LGBT movement’s effects on children. “We do not want, ladies and gentlemen, a country in which twelve-year-old girls declare themselves lesbians, although unfortunately these things are already spreading in Poland,” said Kaczyński.
Kaczyński also spoke out against the transgender movement, to which his country has become increasingly susceptible. Polish universities, Kaczyński asserted, were implementing policies friendly toward a progressivist agenda, in which normative behavior and honest debate were punishable. On college campuses in Poland, if a student, “a boy, two meters tall and 120 kilos in weight with a beard says he is Zosia [a female name], then the teacher has to call him that or be fired.”
“This is madness, ladies and gentlemen, and this madness must be fought. What is in the genes cannot be interpreted,” the party leader warned.
Similar observations have been made by other members of the PiS party. Kaczyński’s colleague and Polish Minister of Education Przemysław Czarnek urged Poles to take responsibility for the unique role they play in staving off the destructive ideologies of the West, warning them they “must be counter-revolutionaries” if they “do not want to be the West.” Kaczyński too used the podium to argue that Christianity is “the only widely known ethical system” in Poland capable of combating these ‘woke’ developments. To him, gender ideology “destroys the family, destroys common sense.”
A week earlier, on November 6th, Kaczyński had argued that Poland’s low birth rate is at least in part caused by alcohol consumption by women. While opposition members went on to call the 73-year-old Kaczyński “out of touch,” a 2017 study showed that indeed more than half of Polish women were consuming alcohol during pregnancy and thus putting their pregnancies at risk. The increasing problem of alcoholism among women in Poland had been picked up by the film director Kinga Dębska, who dedicated a documentary and the 2018 movie Playing Hard to the topic.
During his latest speech, Kaczyński referred back to his earlier statements, asserting that he is “in favor of full equality between women and men in all areas of life” and that any offense his remarks may have caused was the unintended result of honesty: “I just wanted to tell the truth about a certain phenomenon,” the PiS chairman clarified.
