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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Please tell me: do you believe my art teacher telling me I should come to school in women's underwear to get in touch with my true self qualifies as grooming? [...] I've brought this up twice now, and nobody in the "groomer is a slur" camp has deigned to state their opinion on it.

A teacher who independently "goes rogue" and talks to a student about their underwear should be reprimanded and the incident should be investigated. But that is also the case for a teacher playing a multiplayer videogame with a student, or driving the student home, being alone in a closed room with them, etc. Those actions are not intrinsically evil. Whether they are "grooming" depends on the intent which is unknowable. So schools have protocols to regulate student/teacher interaction to make sure teachers never do anything that gives the appearance of foul play. When teachers break protocols, they (should) get investigated, disciplined, and possibly fired.

My problem with "groomer" is that it is motte-baileying. It is equating secretive intimate behavior like you're describing with (a) a trans activist teacher talking about transgenderism informally with students, (b) school psychologists helping transition a child through formal channels with the full knowledge of school admins and their colleagues, and (c) generally, encouraging children to abandon their birth gender or addressing the child as their non-birth gender, in general.

For the record, I do not support (b) and only partially support (c). However, activities (a), (b), and (c) cannot reasonably be called "grooming" and calling them that is using an intentionally inflammatory insult IMO.