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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.
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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