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So this is not "grooming" in your mind???? Conservatives would consider cultural influence "setting them on the course" to join that community as grooming their children. If you've set a child on the course of sexual development, the grooming is done.
This is not how most LGBT activists (particularly T) act. They behave as a population that knows it will go extinct without the ability to hard indoctrinate children out of the view of parents.
What, in your mind, separates modern fears about the trans community indoctrinating children, and the old fears in the 1950's that gay men were hoping to turn your child gay?
I feel like human psychology is easily manipulated when it comes to children - see the Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger, and a dozen other hysterias that were wildly out of proportion to what was actually happening on the ground.
While a surprisingly high number of kids are putting "they/them" in their profiles, and saying they're non-binary, the number who are seeking surgery or other medical interventions is fairly low still. See, for example, this article which says that "[i]n the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis." That's around 258 a year, in a country of 330 million people. Even if you accept the "irreversible damage" line of thought, and think that a good portion of those girls will go on to regret it, that is a really tiny number of cases to use as the basis for fearing for the fate of your own children, or those in your community.
It just seems like people are myopically focused on a fairly unlikely outcome, and using that to justify clamping down on the freedoms of a lot more people as a result.
Don't get me wrong - I do think the medical establishment has a responsibility to take the well-being of patients into account, and so the moment the evidence is strongly in favor of discontinuing a particular practice, we should stop. The history of lobotomies is all one needs to believe that doctors can sometimes be horribly wrong - so we have to humbly consider that with any intervention we're doing. All the same, even if you consider every mastectomy of a female-bodied adolescent to be a terrible tragedy, the tragedy is much more bounded than lobotomies were back in the day.
Little, in that I believe both to be true.
Would you be willing to expand on your thoughts on the second one for me? I'm curious what you feel the evidence for your position is.
There is approximately zero credible evidence for the "born this way" explanation of homosexuality. It has little to no heritabilty, for example. In addition, most current celebrity (and known to me) homosexuals have a tale of a young experience that solidified their orientation. Most, absent that, would likely have drifted away from their sexual confusion into heterosexuality, as happened before the gay normalization campaigns, same as what happened for tomboys before the trans agenda began in earnest.
Doesn't your view have a basic chicken and egg problem?
If being gay requires sexual experiences with another man to solidify, then wouldn't there have to be some first gay man who has sex with a handful of boys? In which case, what man seduced the first gay man and made him gay?
Also, if I understand you correctly, you seem to believe people can be "sexually confused" as youths, and then if a "sexually confused" guy has sex with another guy it might solidify their sexuality and make them gay. But, doesn't that make what you're calling "sexual confusion" basically the same thing as "bisexuality" or "gay" with extra steps? Why do "sexually confused" guys want to have sex with men in the first place, prior to the experience that solidifies their orientation?
Do you also believe that people aren't straight if they don't learn it from society, and from experiences in their youth?
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