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Boise Pride cancels "Drag Kids" event after a number of sponsors withdrew, with a predictable dose of corporate doublespeak.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but what is actually bothering me most right now is the coverage. Particularly this gem:
As far as I can tell, this is a publicly-funded news organization actively spreading outright disinformation--FUD, really--about the term "groomer." It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" practically overnight (no big deal, the term "critical theory" recaptured the energy). It reminds me of the sudden fluidity of online dictionary definitions every time a Democrat politician tells an obvious lie. It reminds me of Clarence Thomas being referred to by Harry Reid as a white man.
"Groomer" is effective rhetoric, so I can understand why certain groups want it killed. But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming? Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles. I mean, yes, emotional and physical and sexual abuse, but also just long term psychological problems. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes? I don't think it's necessarily fair to insist that we strip away the culture war angles entirely, but if I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment, often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate." Are we really going to say Hollywood isn't rife with child abuse? (Hmm, they're also mostly Democrats...) And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.
Am I ranting? This feels pretty ranty. But I do have a serious question. What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language? How should I react, if not with ranting, to a transparent attempt to tar people who clearly want to protect children from manifest harms as mere conspiracy theorists? I am a bit old school, I learned to hate the phrase "think of the children" before many of you were born, but surely sometimes we do, in fact, need to protect children. Not incorporating child-sexualizing events into our civic religion seems like a pretty obvious way to do that.
And, I suppose, someone will point out that Boise Pride's "Drag Kids" grooming hour did indeed get canceled! The system works! The subtext there being--what am I complaining about? Well, in brief, I'm still complaining about the news coverage, which has very big "Republicans pounce" energy. I would like to be able to seriously criticize that sort of thing without actively culture warring, but I don't feel like I have a lot of good mistake-theory tools to respond with. Maybe that's the point, I guess--to try to maneuver people into a position where they feel sheepish for acting like an "aggressor" in the face of kids having "silly fun." Which seems, to me, like an especially evil way of being a conflict theorist.
Because at least 95% of people who do "drag kid" shows do not, personally, want to molest the children involved. It may be 'grooming' in the sense that it's grooming to put a kid in violin classes or to 'groom a successor' for a company. It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available. And the latter is a sense, and implication, that the term 'groomer' is primarily used for. Both may, in fact, be bad - just in crucially different ways.
This kind of rhetoric isn't useful, because it just distracts people from what causes kids to become trans, or gay, or whatever. "teachers / drag queens grooming them into being trans/gay/whatever" ... is not a common cause. Maybe /r/egg_irl is.
Same for calling it "child abuse". Child abuse usually means either beating or having sex, or sometimes 'severe psychological neglect'. Having a male kid get in a dress and dance - which can, still, be perverted, degenerate, and disgusting - isn't really child abuse in that sense at all, and calling it so is just distracting people with vaguely relevant but mostly meaningless assertions.
Sure, it isn't literally grooming. But it's a metaphor that points out the similarities--it has children being pushed into sexual things by adults.
And I rarely see criticism saying "It's not grooming, it's just adults treating children sexually, so call it something else". Usually, when someone says that it shouldn't be called grooming, they're trying to deny that it's sexual or inappropriate at all.
If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".
Well, if it's not 'grooming', it's bad because it's trans, queer, gay, etc, it takes senses and desires that are effective at finding the best mates and having children with them and perverts them into meaningless noise. It's just as bad when children see it as adults. If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.
It's a very obvious argument, but not one conservatives agree with!
This is absurd. The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to or participate in sexual material, even sexual material which doesn't involve naked people, is widespread.
See my other comments - everyone is aware the "idea is widespread", but can you justify it independently of that? Kids seeing a drag show ... whatever. Why does it matter that much? If them seeing sexual material is a problem, television shows or internet advertisements or porn websites are much much much worse. Someone seeing a drag show, in practice, doesn't seem to have much impact!
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That 95% of people who do drag kid shows are enabling and providing cover for the 5% who do want to molest kids doesn't seem a great argument in favor of drag kid shows.
Also even the groomers see themselves as the heroes of their stories. They're welcoming the kids into the community or whatever the current euphemism is.
yeah but then this isn't different from any other community where a small percent are pedos.
Not sure I'd class 5% pedos as a small percent. I think of small percentages as winning the lottery, being struck by lightning and dying, being healthly 18 - 49 and dying of Covid.
Nor does the 5% pedos really address the larger cohort of homosexual men for which this sort of grooming behavior is normalized towards adolescents, pederastry. The behavior covered by some of the accusations against Kevin Spacey or the descriptions of George Takei losing his virginity at 13 to an attractive older man.
Many other communities that work with youth have specific proscribed safe-guarding policies in place to prevent inappropriate conduct. Parent volunteers in schools, scoutmasters, etc. are subjected to criminal background checks and frequently attend training on safeguarding vulnerable populations.
5% was a totally arbitrary number. Is there any evidence the rate of pedophilia or abuse among dragperformers is higher than that among a general population?
Drag performers specifically, I don't anticipate much data. That pederastry is not uncommon among homosexuals is fairly widely discussed.
A recent example; https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/20980
That while homosexuals are not more likely to offend, offenders are more likely to be homosexual has been discussed in the literature. The majority of the studies I've seen focus on pedophilia, rather than hebephilia or ephebophilia.
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Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?
We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?
My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.
Taking a child to a strip club is not 'abusive' in any sense aside from the extent to which a child going to a strip club is bad. If I had, at age 9, gone to a strip club - I'd expect that not to matter at all. Same for drag shows!
Also, the average 12yo will have seen several dozen naked women on the internet, so something drag queens is an ineffective way to prevent children seeing sexualized stuff.
This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo. Nobody wants to argue it, because the very concept is disgusting. Why don't you make the argument against it instead? And why do many arguments in this area sound like this - vague references to badness?
It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.
"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.
The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though. "That fence was there 50 years ago" isn't enough. You'd need to convince people to adopt it again. And if you can't provide a good argument for why it should be there, even if they do put it back, it'll be in the wrong place. The field has changed a lot!
Again, I'm clearly not arguing for trans stuff here, I just want people to make some form of useful argument arguments at all.
In another area, I often argue something like - school isolates children from depth, doesn't allow them to explore and take useful actions for innately-desired goals, and has one spend the majority of time when one's learning just doing rote, uninteresting exercises and taking orders from teachers who want you to complete the exercises and avoid anything too painful or complicated. This means they have no idea how to do anything useful, and their instincts for doing so are perverted or dulled, destroying the depths of human experience. Now, if I wanted to convince someone of that, I could - 1) write a long piece with examples, connections, to make the point in a detailed way, explain exactly what harms come from this, why it exists, etc. Or - I could say "school is child abuse school is bad doing bad things to children is bad you are hurting children that is evil it is bad very bad not okay", and then just repeat that a bunch of times. The former - probably better than the latter.
Yet, when a teacher gives a kid an undeserved bad grade, that is a "bad thing", yet isn't "child abuse". The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.
If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.
You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad. Pointing out that it doesn't mean all bad things within that subclass does not change this.
I mean, does it mean anything more than "very bad act done to vulnerable group"?
It isn't necessary to hide it [specifically, drag and gay people, not children doing drag] from most parents!
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Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.
Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.
Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.
Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.
Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.
For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.
I think the steelman for this is 'sexual attraction' isn't really a coherent category, and a lot of things that social conservatives put into the 'sexual attraction' bin don't actually seem like central examples of what people are actually objecting to, but rather parts of t2 that just have additional cognitive loading.
The internally-used example here is something like the Jessica Rabbit: a style of dress and presentation that's charged... but not actually doing anything. Putting on thick lipstick and a sparkly dress isn't playing hide-the-sausage more than Rabbit playing pattycake was; to the extent the former is sexual and the latter isn't, it's because we've assigned a whole lot of identifiers-for-being-female-socially as sexualized (probably by a mix of taboos and mode expectations?) . But these same things remain as identifiers-for-being-socially-female, separately, and it's pretty common for trans people to glom onto them in that role, in ways that can exist separately from the sexual attraction (although sometimes it doesn't!).
There's a plausible argument that we don't get appalled over the same stuff when done outside of this specific culture-war context. Letting a pre-teen (cis) girl dress in gaudy costumes and make a mess with lipstick might get you shunned, but it's not going to turn into national news, and if we're talking your own kids, probably not get CPS called on you. We don't pass out prison sentences to everyone who lets a kid use an insufficiently-filtered internet connection. At the extreme object level, the serious harms caused by seeing someone's dick through their panties got Ace Ventura a PG-13 rating, and I'm not sure it was actually about that; RuPaul's Drag Race usually nets a TV-14 for broadcast. Or for non-sexual drag, Eddie Izzard probably isn't appropriate for pre-teens, but that's more because of the cursing than the dress.
This is a broader problem for the L, G, and B spheres, too (as well as fandom): it's not uncommon to see people worry about whether Pride parades allow under-18s, which makes sense in the context of Folsom Street Fair... but most parades aren't that, and the complaint remains. The nearest Pride for my situation's most adult situation is the rampant alcoholism, but that's shared with the nearest Nascar event, too.
((This is further complicated because a lot of advocates from either direction aren't aware how limited their understanding is, even as they're motioning about limitations in understanding. Progressives point to various young-teen or pre-teen beauty contests, except these are also things that the vast majority of socons find appalling, as naraburns points out. Conservatives point to endless twerkfests... but it's not like these are some unheard-of thing in straight culture. "Penis inspection day" is and was a regular joke on reddit and tumblr in relationship to trans politics, derived from an older UrbanDictionary meme, but it was also not an uncommon thing for schools to have either full-time staff nurses or contracted doctors who'd perform physicals in bulk, including the turn-your-head-and-cough bit, although this has thankfully fallen out of favor.))
The opposing steelman against is that just because something varies by culture and time doesn't mean we have to accept it in this culture and time, and you have to draw lines in the sand somewhere, and that socons have (sometimes even honestly!) drawn lines well before these points in the past.
Don't have much to say in response, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.
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I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.
The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.
The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.
Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.
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A lot of these child drag events seem to be number four.
Sure, they’re tacky and not plausibly seductive, but everyone knows the context of throwing money at a dancer onstage, or what ‘it’s not gonna lick itself’ means. Well, except probably the child drag stars.
And having kids act out a simulacra of adult sexualization, even in a tacky and ritualized manner, should make us all uncomfortable.
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What if they identify as White?
Then you should be shamed and excluded from the Hugo awards.
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This is mostly how I model this and a good writeup on it. A minor nitpick that I find important:
I don't think this is something that should be elevated to an identity. or more specifically identity is a strange concept in general. Do you remember the hubbub about disabled person vs person with a disability? Disabled person is considered bad because it raises the disability to the level of identity while person with disability is preferred because it doesn't. The way someone dresses is about as surface level as it gets, while I agree it shouldn't be something discriminated against and it would be better if no one cared when men wore dresses. This is all of course suspiciously similar to the other culture war rail, transgenderism. What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?
Um, not sure if you were genuinely asking me as I assume you know at least as much as I do, but I can try in the event that you were.
I had straight male-presenting friends who would come to social dances wearing a dress or skirt and it was just a superficial thing independent of their gender identity as you mention above. Others were non-binary/queer and would do the same but it seemed more meaningful to them as their exterior gender presentation was matching their interior identity, although superficially it may not have looked that different from the outside.
Seems to get back to the classical tension between (some) non-binary folk who want to end the gender binary and trans people who find the gender binary affirming. Maybe someone, somewhere has squared that circle but I'm unaware.
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Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.
For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.
Maybe tier was a poor descriptor and it was more a train of thought or logical chain. I think 'children haven't been inculcated with our social constructs of who should wear what' is the least controversial and easiest to accept, even if it is a far cry from trans pre-teens.
If you'll forgive my assumptions about your gender and relationship status, do you ever feel like it's your duty to tell your wife that she's beautiful? Your child that they're smart or talented, your coworker that they aren't completely useless, your friends that They're Totally Right and their partner is being unreasonable?
We're constantly validating other people, often times even in the face of what (we see as) the truth - it's the lubricant that keeps the gears of social interaction turning. It costs me next to nothing to call someone by their chosen pronouns or accept their choice of clothes, and seems important to them, so why not? You can link Picard counting lights, 1984, or clips from They Live, but the truth is people pick and choose whom to validate all the time.
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Sure it is--the act itself makes the child sexually available, not for intercourse per se but for lewd interactions with the adult audience. You might as well say that strip bars aren't sexual. The act of Drag Kids itself is sex abuse per se--the same way that exposing children to pornography is sex abuse per se, even if you never lay a hand on them. I think I could probably have been a bit clearer about the way I framed this, but your problem here is you're engaging in amphiboly between participants, parents, and organizers. Do the kids think they're being made sexually available? Likely they don't understand the full implications of what they're involved in, which is an alarm bell all on its own. Do some parents think it's just silly fun? Probably--people are stupid like that. But Pride events have always, until recently, been chock full of sexualization. Wrapping kids up into that is sexualization per se, whether or not anyone gets physically assaulted.
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