Polish TV station apologises over “What gender are you today?” joke to father of trans child

Poland’s largest private broadcaster, TVN, has apologised after a commentator appeared to mock the idea of deciding one’s own gender identity while speaking live on air to a colleague who has spoken publicly about his own trans daughter’s struggles.

The station, which is owned by US conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, generally holds a liberal political outlook, including being supportive of LGBT rights. In a statement, it said that it “apologises to all our viewers, especially the LGBT+ community, for the words that were said in yesterday’s program”.

The incident occurred during a satirical programme, Szkło kontaktowe, that airs on news channel TVN24. At the end of the show, the host, Tomasz Sianecki, spoke to the presenter of the following programme, Piotr Jacoń.

As he did so, his guest, Krzysztof Daukszewicz, a regular on Szkło kontaktowe, cut in to ask “And what gender is he [Jacoń] today?”

Two years ago, Jacoń revealed that he has a trans daughter. He has since spoken about the difficulties she has faced – including the complex legal process for changing your officially recognised gender in Poland – and has published a book on the struggles of trans people in Poland.

During last night’s broadcaster, after making his joke, Daukszewicz was heard saying as the credits began to roll: “I think I f**ked up.”

After the broadcast, TVN began to face criticism over the remarks, often from figures supportive of Poland’s ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has itself led a long-running campaign against what it calls “LGBT ideology” or “gender ideology“.

PiS and its supporters are critical of TVN, which they claim is dishonest in its coverage of the government.

While TVN has removed last night’s episode of Szkło kontaktowe from its online media service, a leading LGBT activist, Bartosz Staszewski, posted an extended clip on social media showing how, in the lead-up to Daukszewicz’s joke, Sianecki had shown videos of PiS-linked figures making remarks about gender.

Staszewski did not excuse Daukszewicz’s remarks – which he called a “granddad joke” – but said that it was important to see the full clip “because the right is already taking it out of context”.

Speaking to news website Wirtualna Polska today, Daukszewicz said he had “apologised to Piotr [Jacoń] because it [the joke] came out awkwardly”. He said Jacoń had accepted the apology. Jacoń himself, however, denied that he had.

In an Instagram post featuring a screenshot of how he had looked on air after the joke, he wrote: “Remember my face. It is the face of anger and helplessness. And also of a dilemma: how to explain to my family…why I have tears in my eyes…and avoid hearing that as always I am spoiling the fun and blowing it out of proportion?”

“Yesterday’s situation is perfect proof of how introducing the language of hatred ends,” he added. Showing clips of politicians mocking trans people normalises such language and can lead to such “jokes”, he argued.

 

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A post shared by Piotr Jacoń (@piotr_jacon)

Poland has for the last four years running been ranked as the worst country in the European Union for LGBT people by ILGA-Europe, a Brussels-based NGO.

As well as the ongoing anti-LGBT campaign by the ruling party, LBGT people in Poland also lack many of the rights enjoyed in other European countries, including no form of recognised same-sex partnership and no hate crime laws relating to sexual orientation or gender identity.

Last year, PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński called the idea of people being able to declare their own gender as “madness that must be opposed…because it destroys the family, it destroys common sense”.

Main image credit: TVN24 (screenshot)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.