“Coal is female now?”: Internet mocks government tweet calling coal “she” and “the moment”
A bizarre post from the U.S. Department of Energy has kicked up a conversation about coal—and pronouns.
On Thursday, the official X account for the U.S. Department of Energy tweeted out a weird pro-coal message that read "She's an icon. She's a legend. And she is the moment," alongside an image of sparkling anthracite coal.
It's clearly an attempt to prop up—or signal to—America's dying coal industry, and that's bad enough. There were plenty of people happy to point out why.
Coal's pronouns are she/her?
But even beyond the basic WTFery of acting like coal is some sustainable future for the U.S., let alone even having a moment at all, folks were quick to latch onto the absurdity of the message phrasing.
Republicans have spent years launching bizarre attacks on anyone who uses pronouns that correspond with a transgender identity. In fact, it's gotten so absurd that there are countless stories of people attacking strangers who list pronouns of any kind in their social media bios or email signatures—even users with parent-given gender neutral names—and freaking out about the idea of using pronouns at all.
Too often, it seems as if these reactionaries have forgotten that pronouns are literally a part of day-to-day life for everyone. It's become an incendiary term over basically nothing.
So to see a government account under a Republican administration start labeling coal a "she" was just downright goofy. It doesn't matter that humans have been anthropomorphizing things like cars and boats for as long as they've been around. MAGA wanted a war on pronouns; the least they can do is stick to their guns (he/they).
Department of Energy gets dunked
There were just too many things to make fun of here—the use of those oh-so-terrifying pronouns, co-opting phrasing that's often associated with queer culture, cluelessly pushing an archaic energy form.
And the real crux of it all...
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