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Last week, right-wing gadfly David Cole wrote a banger exploring the parallels between the childhood transgender craze and the “childhood sexual abuse”/“ritual satanic abuse” panics of the 1970s and 80s. Cole points out the irony of the “say groomer” obsession on the right, and the larger moral panic in right-wing spaces about how the “trans kids” phenomenon is primarily about “sexualizing children”, given that the first wave of moral panic about the molestation of children was driven primarily by leftist women, which is the same demographic now primarily driving the movement that is in turn being accused of molesting children. I think Cole makes a very convincing case that the “groomer” thing is a red herring, a distraction which has blown up into a full-blown purity-spiraling moral panic in the hothouse ecosystem of the Extremely Online right. If you think that the people teaching kids that they’re trans are primarily doing so because they’re interested in molesting kids, why are they so overwhelmingly women?
His observations ring true for me; from the constant sharing of the Auron MacIntyre sign-tapping meme and the Sam Hyde quote, to Pizzagate and the obsession with Epstein, the right wing is proving that it’s every bit as susceptible to purity spirals and moral panics as the left wing. And as Cole points out, it’s especially odd because the “groomer” panic on the right is itself a response to the “trans kids will all kill themselves unless we affirm them” panic on the left. The “groomer” panic also features the same obnoxious and cancerous motte-and-bailey strategic-equivocation tactics that rat-adjacent rightists despise so much when it’s used against them; figures like James Lindsay, Rod Dreher, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene, are all involved in a linguistic shell game, wherein they use a word which they know for a fact is supposed to refer to grooming children for direct sexual abuse, and when pressed they retreat into “well, they’re saying that children have a sexual identity, which is kind of like sexualizing them, which is the same thing that child molesters do.”
There are certain topics that I won’t publicly touch even in a space like this; I’ve thought about one day trying my hand at starting a Substack and joining the right-wing online commentary/content-creation ecosystem, and there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin. The whole issue of child sexuality, how it relates to teen sexuality, whether or not queer theorists want to rape kids, etc., seems like the most high-voltage of any of those third rails. Being seen as an apologist for child molestation is a hell of an accusation to face, no matter how specious and lacking in credibility, and it’s nice to see a writer with some level of clout in right-wing commentary stick his neck out there and identify this moral panic for what it is.
I’m even hesitant to offer too much more of my own larger commentary on the issue, but I wanted to put this piece out there for commentary, particularly for those who do take the “groomer” thing more seriously than I do.
Epstein's abuses and surrounding corruption (Florida for example) and media shilling have been pretty well documented. It seems weird to lump that together with Q nonsense.
I’m not disputing that the Epstein stuff happened; I’m disputing the interpretation of what it means, how important it is, how it connects to other political events/theories, etc.
By lumping it with something that was very false?
You seem to be downplaying it... strongly.
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I think cutting off a child's sexual organs meets a very clear and universal definition of "sexual abuse". And saying the 12 year old consented to the sexual harm would be considered pedophilic and evil in any other circumstance.
I cannot express how NOT euphamistic and how NOT a motte and bailey the accusation of grooming is. Right wingers do not believe "gender affirming care" is anything but butchery, that any transition social or biological is irreparably destroying a child's mental health and at the point of medical transition, their bodies as well.
These are not metaphors, these are not euphemisms, this is literally what the right believes is happening and they have THOUSANDS of weeping detransitioned boys and girls who no longer have sexual organs because some doctor hacked them off that they can point to.
Do they think the muchhausen by proxy mothers pushing their kids to be trans are motivated by peadophilia... probably not, but the actual damage is so SO much worse. If I had a daughter I'd wish she'd be simply molested by a teacher instead of groomed into the trans ideology. I wish a son of mine might merely be sodomized by a creep, instead of chemically castrated by a doctor.
I'm honestly shocked, and believe its almost certainly an indictment of the American right, that there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
According to ny basic assessment of what's going on from a non-progressive lens They are sexually butchering children. And teachers and progressive activists are actively grooming them to be sexually butchered.
This is what we're talking about. this is what the American right believes. And the boomercons are so poisoned by "tolerance" they're actually letting it happen.
Doing that sort of shit on abortion clinics certainly has saved any babies. If anything, it's done the opposite.
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Equivocation. Sexual abuse for my entire life has refered to using children for the sexual gratification, not just "abuse that involves primary sexual characteristics". Why not call it "child abuse" or "child disfigurement" except to free ride on the negative associations of the term? Same with "grooming".
That would only build political capital for the other side. Regardless, if the only correct response to the government/society doing something horrible were a terrorist attack, no decent man would yet survive. Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.
And people here believe AI apocalypse is three years away. Why aren't they bombing Nvidia factories and sabotaging electrical converters?
I don't think this is true. The effect on the child is much more important than the perpetrator's motives, which are themselves mostly inferred and of minimal consequence to the outcome. For example, let's consider some scenarios.
An adult with no sexual desires at all physically beats a child to punish them.
An adult with no sexual desires at all sodomizes a child with a broom to punish them.
An adult with a BDSM fetish physically beats a child because they secretly enjoy it (but makes no explicit targeting of sexual organs).
An adult with a BDSM fetish sodomizes a child with a broom because they enjoy it.
I would argue, and I think most people would agree, that 2 and 4 are sexual abuse, while 1 and 3 are not. Meanwhile, the motive theory would categorize 3 and 4 as sexual abuse but somehow have to argue that 2 is not. And yet, as far as the child, or the law, or anyone who isn't a mind reader are concerned, 2 and 4 are indistinguishable, as are 1 and 3. I don't think it's any sort of free riding of negative associations of the term to group things together if the harms to the child are the same.
In the medical transition case, whether they are mutilating the sexual organs of a child for internal sexual gratification, or to punish the child, or to help the child because they genuinely believe it to be a good thing, or to virtue signal, or to "get back at the right", or for literally any internal reason, the sexual trauma to the child will be the same. Calling it sexual abuse is primarily a claim that the magnitude and type of the harm is comparable to other forms of sexual abuse. You ignored a significant part of /u/KulakRevolt 's claim, which I agree with
It's not free riding, because medical transition is similar to in kind but actually worse in magnitude than most other forms of sexual abuse. Most sexual abusers don't permanently disfigure their victims in the course of their abuse. Some do, but those are the worse offenses for that reason. And sure, the medicalization and supposed consent and anesthetic surgery and whatnot make the process less violent and thus less severe in some aspects than violent rape would be, but that's exactly what the groomer label refers to: gradually indoctrinating children into agreeing to a sexual action that they don't fully understand the ramifications of, can't morally consent to, and will probably be bad for them. It doesn't matter what the internal motivations of the groomers are, what matters are the effects on the children. And again, the medical transition is similar in kind but worse in outcome than grooming for pedophillic sex would be, so it's not unfair to call it that and carry over the connotations.
... no, not at all. Let's say (and I'm sure this has happened before) a child has severe testicular cancer, so has to have both testicles removed. Or has to have the whole penis removed from penile cancer. Nobody would ever call this sexual abuse.
Okay, maybe malice is necessary. Consider a medical error in removing testicular cancer that causes both testicles to be (unnecessarily) severed. That'd be bad, parents might sue for malpractice, and nobody would call it sexual abuse.
I mostly agree with the labeling of your specific examples, but I'm still not satisfied with motive as the determining factor. Consider a doctor who was deluded into thinking that sodomizing with a broom would cure cancer, so they regularly did this to child cancer patients with no ulterior sexual motives. I think most people would call it sexual abuse. It's hard for me to figure out which components of this are causing that: the action itself being generally sexual in nature, the nature of the harm to the child, or the doubt that the doctor's motives are really so pure. It might just be that such a belief would be so egregiously negligent that no one could possibly believe it except by biased reasoning motivated by subconscious pedophilic motives, but I still think even given a guarantee of the pure motives it would still count as abuse. In the realm of physical abuse, we might consider
A: a man falls and his fist strikes his wife by mistake
B: a man believes striking his wife will save her from demons possessing her so he beats her on purpose for her own good
C: a man is angry so he strikes his wife.
A is almost certainly not abuse, C is definitely abuse. B is probably abuse, the closest of the scenarios to actual medical transitions: an action, taken deliberately, with the same effect as regular abuse taken for purportedly good but dubiously intelligent reasons. Now, maybe if we made an example with more science and reasoning behind it we could make an even closer approximation that paints the man in a better light. Maybe leading scientific journals publish papers suggesting that reinforcement learning therapy is good: so if you beat your wife only as punishment for mistakes (and reward obedience) she'll become a better happier human being, and the man reads these and trusts the science behind them. But I still think the deliberate performing of the action with mistaken beliefs would count as abuse in a way that the mistaken action in scenario A does not.
Terms don't have to, and often don't, have perfectly sensible meanings outside their value as use. A doctor sodomizing with a broom would be considered 'sexual abuse' either because 'broom in ass' is a fundamentally sexual act (is it? say a primitive tribesman falls on a wooden pole in the ground and it goes up his ass and it hurts. Do he or his tribebuds consider that sexual? I'd lean towards 'they'd notice it and joke about it, but not take it seriously', but I'm not sure.) or because 'broom in ass' is close enough to a sexual act we'd consider it sexual abuse.
What this points to is that the 'very bad'ness of sexual abuse is borne out of specific characteristics of the claimed harm that, in a way mostly related to their sexual nature, interact with the future of the person harmed in a negative way. So being raped as a child would be sexual abuse because it'd cause, so it's claimed, trust issues, fear about having sex in the future, maybe seeking to imitate that sexual abuse in the future with other abusers, et cetera. Whereas having your balls or penis cut off by a doctor accidentally probably wouldn't do that. The reason we find sexual abuse to be that bad is in part wanting to protect kids from that. But it's also mixed in with a lot of disproportionate, bizzare overreaction tbh. Children getting raped is bad, but it isn't really worse than murder or accidental death - but people, culturally, act like it is.
And that's why calling it 'sexual abuse' is materially wrong and not useful - having gender transition surgery doesn't cause any of the bad things sexual abuse causes, or have any of the malicious motives most sexual abuse has. Sure, it has different bad effects and bad motives. But they aren't the same. But because it's quite adjacent to 'children' and 'sex', and for whatever reason 'protect the children from pedophiles' resonates so much with people, we get this.
I'm not convinced. It causes severe sexual disfunction, usually prevents the achieving of orgasm, will significantly interfere with the ability to have meaningful sexual relationships in the future, can cause long term body image issues and dysmorphia. While these are not a perfect overlap with the harms of more central examples of sexual abuse, and the mechanism it causes these through is more physical and less psychological (though still some), I still think that broadly they are in the same class as those of sexual abuse. It's (probably) not going to prevent them from living their daily life, or driving a car, or performing your job, or having ordinary friendships, but it is going to permanently cripple their ability to have sex and sexual relationships. The harm is primarily of a sexual nature, even if the action itself is medicalized and professional in bearing.
SRS doesn't "usually prevent achieving orgasm". It definitely sometimes causes that, but in >75% of cases i'm pretty sure it doesn't (and it's probably higher). example reddit posts, iirc studies from surgery clinics found >75% could orgasm. I don't think it causes "severe sexual disfunction" in most cases either.
Yeah, but in an entirely different way from sexual abuse. From a purely outcome-based perspective, the way it prevents that is much closer to 'cancer surgery gone wrong' than 'sexual abuse'.
Why does that make it bad in the same way? None of the things that are supposed to make sexual abuse 'VERY BAD' - e.g. "there are a bunch of opportunists who will take advantage of children if they're given the opportunity" - apply to it.
Why call it sexual abuse, i guess? SRS doesn't have that much in common with the features that makes sexual abuse specifically bad. Accidentally injuring a penis during sex is also 'harm of a sexual nature', but it's not sexual abuse. Same for getting STDs.
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I've been saying for 10 years that that was what Yudkowsky should have been doing if he actually believed the AI stuff, that or smuggling coke and heroin so as to fund his future Turing death squads.
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Richard Hanania is a good counterexample here. I don’t particularly like the guy (not least for his one-time soft plagiarism of me, but that’s a tangent) and I’m not a central member of his audience, but he spends a great deal of time and effort writing essays that castigate and rebuff people who do particularly like him and who want to be central members of his audience. He is a Problematic writer who constantly and openly decries the pathologies of the Problematic, spending more effort than plenty of leftists chronicling all the ways conservatives go wrong, and pulling no punches when doing so. Not just that. He doesn’t touch third rails, he bear-hugs them, and his audience only grows as a result.
And that makes him Interesting, and so I read what he has to say, and sometimes I learn things.
The primary thing a public-facing writer needs is to be Interesting. Forget tribes, forget cancelation, forget whatever: deviations make someone Interesting, and the Freddie deBoers of the world flourish while a thousand cut-and-paste Breadtubers with impeccable production value and assembly-line opinions drown in the kiddie pool before anyone cares who they are.
Oh, and the fiercest partisans? They won’t forget a single thing you say against them, and they’ll bring it up as part of the chattering Discourse around you if you get big enough, but that won’t stop them from loudly amplifying everything you say that expresses their worldview eloquently enough. Most people don’t pay attention to most things most of the time; they notice people when convenient and forget about them otherwise.
In particular, for all its faults the online right ecosystem is higher-variance than the online left, defined more by shared opposition than shared values. They’re used to envisioning themselves as a cloud of heretics, and while they can and will scream bloody murder at you for committing heresy against their particular orthodoxies, they cannot precisely kick you out and will not stop listening unless you are Dull.
Out of the loop: How did Hanania plagiarize you?
It's a bit petty and I haven't talked about it here to my recollection, but basically: when he ran a survey of his fanbase, he copied the format and many of the questions I used to survey r/themotte, repeating a number of items verbatim and copying much of my presentation of the results down to specific color choices. That's totally fine in my book—I'm glad he was impressed enough to use it, and it's a fun format that I think should spread—but when sharing the results of the survey, he first requested someone make an imitation of my results table, then removed all mention of my initial table after someone had copied it. You can see the archive here, where it links my work, with no mention of it in the live version.
Technically he did attribute my original when he was asking the questions, but it left a bit of a bitter taste for me when he edited any attribution out of the results page itself, and when I reached out asking about it, he first replied by saying that he didn't know what I was talking about, then went radio silent. It's not the sort of thing I'm interested in making a huge fuss over, but it did leave the lingering impression that his disagreeable approach is more than just an affect and that he can be a genuinely unpleasant person on an interpersonal level.
Wait, Richard Hanania is Motte-adjacent enough to have seen your survey somehow and think it was useful to him? Interesting.
I don't know about the motte but he was definitely on SSC back in the day.
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Yeah. His description was a bit odd ("I found an image online of a survey in which SlateStarCodex fans rated various things"), so it's hard to tell just what sort of proximity we're looking at, but definitely some sort of Motte-adjacency.
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I appreciate this post and your sentiment of encouragement. And indeed, Hanania is someone I had in mind who is anathema to a lot of people on the hard-right, partially for exactly the reasons that you outline.
My concerns here are primarily about the need for cross-promotion - the need to appear on the YouTube/Bitchute/etc. channels of other content creators, to get retweeted and looped into Twitter dialogues, to have your work linked to in other writers’ Substack pieces, etc. As you mentioned, the online Right is a Very Big Tent, and that means that there are a number of different “factions” or “silos” who don’t actually interface much across boundaries, except to snark and hurl invective. Given my opinions about race especially, but also about other topics such as religion, I’m naturally a terrible fit for the “tradcon” tribe, and would be a far more successful participant in more harder-edged circles, where guys like Hanania have no traction and are largely treated as a joke. I’m not saying that this corner of the right doesn’t tolerate gadflies of any stripe, but there are definitely certain topics that seem to be so inflammatory that if you say the wrong thing about them, you’re now one of the guys that people tweet about being a “crypto-Jew” or “confirmed homosexual” or “subversive” or “cuck”.
Right now, I’m still in the stage of figuring out, “What are the areas of discussion where I not only have something Interesting to say, but also care enough about them to be comfortable standing by my opinions even if I’m taking a significant amount of criticism and am risking alienating a significant amount of people?” Hell, maybe it’s the sort of thing that you just need to discover as you go, by being as authentic as possible at all times and being willing to own whatever shit you step in as a result. I wish I could believe that, but the patterns I unfortunately observe in the particular corners of the right wherein I mostly dwell suggest that right now the cool thing is to purity-spiral and compete to be the most glib and hardcore about every issue at all times.
Honestly, talk to @KulakRevolt. You can aspire to be a scene player fitting into one of the silos, or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience, cross-promoting and jumping between scenes as you see fit. Kulak twittermaxxed and grabbed the attention of everyone from Scott Alexander and Tyler Cowen to Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson in short order. By the time you're at the stage where people tweet about you being a homosexual crypto-Jew, you've already won. If they care enough to slot you into a role in their mind, they care enough to pay attention when the people they like notice something you say. Let them tweet. The people they read will still link you whenever you say interesting enough things about the things they care about.
I dunno. I think basically anyone honest will alienate large swathes of people in their natural circles at times, but that's when you find out which ones are interesting and which are simply tiresome. Heaven knows I've done and said enough to alienate plenty, and as my profile grows I can't imagine that pace of alienation will slow down, but you don't want to be an ideological foot soldier, and interesting people don't want to hear only from ideological foot soldiers.
This was a very encouraging post and I appreciate it!
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Ah, the Shoe0nHead Gambit. Seems to work as far as I can tell, but is probably hard to pull off.
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Either I'm remembering things wrong, or the "Satanic/D&D panic" was mostly among the religious right -- the American Left after all not having "Satan" high on their list of bogeymen, even in the 80s.
If the guy can't even get basic facts right, I'm disinclined to consider his thesis much further.
"Satanic/D&D panic" was distinct from the "Satanic/daycare abuse panic". The first was generally (or mostly pure) religious right, the second was shared by the religious right and the feminists. (Should be noted that this book, for instance, persuasively argues that many of the most notable daycare abuse cases were based on real physical evidence, not "Satanic panic" narratives or tall tales by kids.)
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The moment the LGBT movement started making and accepting arguments equating being uncomfortable being touched in certain ways with homophobia they crossed the line into being apologists for child molestation. To the extent that they continue to tolerate such arguments, they absolutely deserve the groomer label.
I have no idea what you're referring to. Can you elaborate?
I'm referring to arguments such as the one made by Mark Greene in this article that homophobia prevents platonic physical intimacy between men.
Exactly backward: homophobia enabled physical intimacy, not prevented it.
Men were often physically intimate in 19th century because homosexuality was so vilified and deplored it was barely on anyone's mind.
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Seems to me like in this post and your replies to people, you did publicly touch it in a space like this.
But I appreciate you doing so. I think the Motte is usually pretty rational, but I've been surprised at how much people subscribe to the "the Left is full of pedophiles" narrative around here, which to me really does seem to be a purity spiral. And I think your identification of the motte and baily strategic equivocation is pretty spot on. I don't really understand how people come to these conclusions. It just seems so much like people on the Right/Center trying desperately to find a weapon to strike their enemies with, and it seems too close to essentially what the Left has been doing for over a decade. Except replace "racist" with "pedophile", because both are equally hateable by society.
I understand the Right's desire to do this. Since all forthright arguments seem doomed to fail against the Left, why don't we fight fire with fire? Except that for people like me, that just makes me dislike the Right/Center more. I hate the use of fire, not the Left.
This is a liberal-traditionalist space; you won't find many progressives around here to defend them against that charge. The last one that put serious effort into doing so has, as far as I know, left the forum- sure, his argument wasn't as solid as it needed to be, but this is something progressives seem to take really personally and I've yet to charitably understand the life outlook that demands that.
Because (from a liberal perspective) they're failing the [Turing] tests that should clearly predict [sexual] incentives on purpose?
If the Left is trying to advance pedophilia, they're clearly doing an absolutely terrible job of it, considering the average age of virginity loss and general age of consent has done nothing but rise (making these ages gender-neutral is not really a liberalization of the law) and the newer generations are more sensitive to this, perhaps as a reaction to constantly having gross sex stuff they hate forced into them every waking hour. Considering the cultural power they have to change these things, this failure is out of character.
They aren't following the gay rights playbook of "fix the perception that X is a complete and utter rejection of social norms so that the average Joe thinks you're sufficiently like him that he no longer sees fit to stop you"; instead preferring only to ride the wave of gunboat diplomacy that is the trans rights movement (which, in fairness, doesn't exactly follow that playbook either).
It should be extremely telling that there's basically zero "groomer literature" that features a relationship the average boy or man would ever be interested in (given all the pairings are gay men, gay boys, or gay men with gay boys; if a woman is ever featured it's lesbians- my evidence is that the spiciest stuff the Right can dig up only includes [young-ish] boys, because if it were [young] girls they'd trumpet that instead). One would assume that if the movement was purposefully pro-sex-with-kids thing their literature would feature a lot more girls or straight women for what should be obvious reasons, but since that's not the case that claim is obviously false.
Now sure, that's still damning with faint praise given that we already know the Left is perfectly fine portraying boys like that (and will not hesitate to call them bigots for complaining about/resisting the same kind of unwanted sexual attention from men that women have been trying to banish for decades now), but I think the trads doth complain too much; their brand of Junior Anti-Sex League has the same end result, they just doesn't like the concessions the progressives leave for man-on-man (or the bullying potential progressives leverage from the narcissism of this small difference, as viewed from a liberal perspective).
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Why?
I'm not exactly saying every leftist is a paedophile, but I'm pretty sure that most paedophiles would vote for the left, given they're currently going all in on expanding the capacity of children to consent to major things and normalising children keeping major secrets from their parents (and adults helping them do so). Maybe it's not explicitly paedo-advocacy, but it's a hell of a windfall for paedos and a step in the direction they would be delighted to go. And nobody major on the left seems too concerned about that, either...
(Replying here, but @anti_dan's sibling reply makes some similar points, so tagging them, too.)
I pretty often see low-effort comments on /r/politics and similar spaces accusing the Republican Party of being the party of pedophiles, providing evidence like their support for child marriage (which, in current law, is actually pretty mixed between red and blue states, more common in blue states, if anything), inspecting children's genitals to maintain sex segregation in sports (that link is Politifact calling BS on that claim), and politicians convicted of child molestation (obviously, that was an older case, actual comments often include more recent cases that haven't actually made their way through the legal system, so it's less clear they're even actually true).
In case I haven't made it clear in my tone, I think claiming the Republicans are pro-pedophile is absurd. As far as I can tell, everyone is anti-pedophile (and, similarly, anti-rape) right up until someone in their in-group (for some scope of in-group) is accused and then they don't want to do anything about it. I doubt there's a meaningful difference there between the left and right on that, and trying to cherry-pick examples is just culture warring.
I think there are obviously the bad guys like NAMBLA and the like. My point is actually that there is no Schelling point when you subscribe to consent sexuality + underage people can make permanent sexual life decisions.
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How is that a windfall for us? As far as I'm concerned, the "left's" behavior you cite is just making my life all that much harder with no upside for me. They are normalizing sexual and sexualized behavior in kids, rubbing my attractions in my face while making interacting with society feel even more like navigating a minefield than it already does all the while dumping the blame for problems it causes at my feet because they supposedly don't have sexual motivations. And I'm supposed to be delighted by this?
I mean they're also the rehabilitation instead of punishment camp, as well as the general defund the police and soft on crime camp.
What about that is an upside for someone who hasn't committed a crime and doesn't intend to?
I suppose the theory at work here is that those who want guardrails to be lowered will vote for the people whose policy objectives optimize for lowered guardrails (political mesa-optimization, perhaps). Your contention is whether or not those who want guardrails to be lowered exist--to which, I have no idea what the answer is. I personally suspect that a pedophile without the self-restraint/closeting you mention doesn't have the sort of political acuity/consciousness to optimally vote in their benefit in this way.
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We have a handful of actual pedophiles on here. Why don’t we ask them?
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You sound like someone on the Left saying that even if the average conservative isn't racist, it's creating a haven for racists to normalize their racism, which is bad because we need to stop any and all racists at all costs. Therefore, we need to throw all support behind the left to stop the proliferation of racism. Just replace racist with pedophile and right with left.
And I think that argument is just sheer projection coming from them, the ones who tell us it's not only alright, but imperative to put racial concerns first and foremost when dealing with people.
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Why? The Left's sexual morality is compatible with pedophiles, even though there are some very prudish elements in other valences such as California having one of the highest age of consents, and left wing universities having sexual kangaroo courts. Fundamentally, this comes down to their emphasis on a broken sexual system that revolves around a concept of "consent". Now, the standard redoubt to this critique of consent would be something like, "children cannot consent." Alas, this is broken by their transgender pivot (and frankly practically broken by the homosexuality pivot before that), because it has a heavy emphasis on the feelings of kids, and allowing them to make choices that are, frankly, much more impactful than your average sexual encounter.
You're entirely putting words and thoughts into their mouths when you say this. You seem obsessed with the notion that pedophilia is wrong specifically because it's very impactful on the child's future, and you always talk about that. That could make sense. But maybe other people think pedophilia is wrong for other reasons. Leftists think pedophilia is wrong because it's an unfair power dynamic, and takes advantage of children, who are weak and need our protection. That reason could make sense too. But it's not okay for you to wave that away and say "sure, they say they're against pedophilia, but what they really mean is something else, because of <roundabout justification regarding how underage sex is impactful just like trans surgeries>".
No value system is bulletproof, and all are subject to people finding edge cases and random gotchas. But when you do that, you're not really listening to them, you're just attacking them because you want to attack them. Your values aren't theirs. That doesn't mean they are okay with pedophilia any more than you are. This all just comes off as you trying to find any random justification to believe that your outgroup is a bunch of monsters. You're specifically focusing on pedophilia being wrong because it has impacts on the child's future because it allows you to attack the left for not seeing it quite that way.
No. My point is that their consent system is broken with regards to this question (and others), and that they will probably be easy to exploit along those line as the progressive consent system has proven easily exploited in other areas like homosexuality (it wasn't happening until it was), Title IX kangaroo courts, transing the kids, etc.
Any my claim is not that my sexual morality has no tough cases and no flaws, simply that from what I can tell, the consent system can't deal with any of the hard cases at all, and in fact generates a whole slew of other issues that the older religious and nonreligious systems didn't have. I prefer an objective conduct standard.
I fail to see how their system deals with pedophilia any worse than a traditional system. You say elsewhere that "there is no Schelling point", but there is a clear Schelling point to Leftists, which is where basically everyone on the Left found it, which is that you shouldn't have sex with young children, because young children can't consent, because there are power dynamics in play and children will be taken advantage of, which is wrong. Just like @token_progressive says, people on the Left will say the converse thing, that people on the Right are more likely to engage in pedophilia, and they'll point to all kinds of things like Catholic sex scandals and the like.
Consider as well, something that Jonathan Haidt writes about in The Righteous Mind, that people's moral judgements are not reasoned out, but are instead driven by intuitions and post-hoc rationalizations. From Haidt:
You'll likely find that most people are against pedophilia (along with necrophilia, incest, and anything else that people have strong moral disgust reactions to) and will be against it for many different reasons. Their intuitions and disgust of pedophilia are there first, and then they come up with the reasons afterward as for why pedophilia is actually bad.
All of that should apply to transgender activists being in classrooms and MDs and etc.
Yes, which they intentionally miscategorize, or do so because they were misinformed by other people on the left who intentionally miscagtegorized it as something other than homosexual pederasty and grooming. Which they further warped because guess what is an even bigger pedophilia and pederasty organization that the media mostly ignores to this day? Public schools!
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if sexual morality should not be about consent, then what do you think it should be about?
Consent is a sort of ideal system that works in all the easy cases and just about none of the hard ones. I suppose it is a good, fictional, moral system. But practically systems need to deal with the hard cases. A closed door rule works better almost all the time. As does a chaperon rule. Or a ban on premarital sex that is enforced against adults but not minors.
Consent, has the weakness in that it breaks down wherever it is pushed on. It gives you polygamy and pedophilia, and takes away sexual adventurism more or less randomly (from the point of the accused, and often the accuser).
Are these rules meant for reducing sexual coercion? I am not sure what flaw of the consent based morality you think these rules can fix.
but then you say that it
which your proposals all do even more.
yes, it is hard to prove that consent occurred but I don't think this justifies further restrictions on sexual freedom. If a woman wants to be safe, they can take precautions when around men. And if your problem is that it is too easy to falsely accuse people of sexual coercion then the solution is to raise the bar for evidence required to the 'innocent until proven guilty' level.
No. My proposals restrict sexual freedom very non-randomly.
That is, indeed, one of my problems. The solution of raising the bar has proven unpalatable to the people who are most on board with the consent standard (evidenced by college campuses, #believeallwomen, etc), and isn't even really the legal standard. Where it is well applied in the law, the consent portion makes up a trivial part of the legal trial.
Do you want society to place additional restrictions on sexual freedom mostly so that less people fall victim to sexual coercion, or are there other causes for which you think that certain restrictions are warranted?
Not really. I think that idea has motte-bailey'd itself so hard that there is no there there. Sexual cohersion that does not fall into old common law crimes is a small problem. Its not something a sexual morality or legal system should worry itself much with.
Indeed. For example, sexual confusion is the much bigger problem in society. There is a real lack of courtship norms, a real lack of understanding what a relationship is and what its boundaries are (even for many people's marriages), and there is the problem of the confusing hookup (all examples of a wide problem).
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They're not, but, that child drag queen performing for adult gay men was too much. That's obviously not common, but what little exists is abhorrent.
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I’m keeping my commentary very much at the object level of the article and of the efficacy/coherence of the “groomer” discourse, but there’s a much larger discussion about the range of possible right-wing views about the “age of consent” policy sphere that I’m just not willing to stake any public position on at this time.
Any specific age of consent policy is going to entail some degree of legal absurdity, but you have to draw a line somewhere or else you’ll get defendants arguing in front of a jury that that 8-year-old girl was totally into it.
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Wait, the Satanic panic was driven mostly by leftist women? I had always assumed that it was driven by conservatives and/or Christians. Is that really not the case?
Anyway, the groomer panic / the use of groomer accusations to attack the left reminds me of the school shootings panic / the use of school shootings to attack the right. Just as school shooters commit a tiny fraction of all gun homicides, it is likely that transgender people commit a tiny fraction of all child molestations. If one's actual goal is to reduce the number of gun homicides and child molestations, school shootings and transgender people are probably not the best things to focus on. Politicians and rich people, also, probably commit a small fraction of child molestations. I mean I could be wrong, but I imagine that most child molestations are committed by the child's relatives. And in most cases, relatives are not transgender, politicians, or rich.
IIRC most child molestations are committed by older youth- the median case of CSA is a teenaged boy abusing a younger victim. Step parents are in number two.
Actual biological relatives aren’t a particularly common offender.
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It started with the pizzagate thing and only spread from there, morphing into the trans groomer issue. It combines two things: child grooming and trans rights into one thing. The explosion of the trans issue is real, whether this has led to grooming or if the motive is grooming is more debatable. I am sure this can be resolved by looking at the stats, once and for all, but those whose careers depend on the spread of said conspiracies are least likely to be pursuaded by stats.
Why are you dismissing the possibility that the observed explosion was a product of grooming out of hand?
not dismissing anything
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My take is that 'groomer' is not even a real thing that anyone (modulo lizardmen) believes -- the right is just casting about for weapons.
I don't think it's a particularly good weapon, but it's better than lying down and taking it I suppose.
My take is that the whole Loudoun County thing lit a fire under a lot of "normie" asses and that "Groomer" is absolutely a real thing and that the reason the woke-left and alt right are both trying so hard to paint it as a nothing-burger is that it has struck a nerve.
It's absolutely a real thing -- just not the right word for that thing!
Language-obsessed internet-fool -- out.
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Are you aware of things like the Catboy Ranch discord server?
Absolutely not -- you could sub "Catboy" for "Lizardman" in my OC if you like.
Catboy Ranch was a discord server run by keffals where minors would be invited and then pressured into taking HRT, which keffals would also provide.
The relevant threads on the farms have all the info you might want, as well as screencaps.
OK, that I believe -- maybe I phrased this thing poorly. I don't mean that zero groomers exist; I mean that essentially zero of the people accusing their local librarian of being a groomer really think that she is doing it for sexual pleasure reasons. Which to me is an essential element of the definition of the word -- the "you're such an egg" people probably have some element of that at least.
What the librarian is doing is also bad, I just don't think "groomer" is a good word for it. Other than trying to make the librarian (and her supporters) feel bad -- which probably won't work. But at least it's an effort, and if it makes the people slinging it around feel good I'm OK with it. At least it signals that not everyone supports the groomers, in a fairly unambiguous way.
I don't think it's an essential element, personally.
I don't think someone needs to be consciously grooming for their own use, I think it's sufficient merely that their actions have, as a byproduct, primed the victim to be more open to abuse from other sources. Teaching kids to hide things from their parents, that it's okay to have secrets between you and another adult that you keep from your parents, is the exemplar behaviour I'd point to to illustrate this. This is not, in itself, paedophilia, but it will make it a hell of a lot easier for paedophiles to prey on that child once they've accepted the concept.
Moreover, I can't really think of a better, more accurate word to describe that kind of thing.
Over on DataSecretsLox the problem has been noted, and they coined "flergeflamming" -- I'd like something that captures the essential evil of it more, but the idea is to promote rational discussion rather than shouting matches I guess.
"Medical malpractice" covers it for the doctors doing this shit, but I'm not sure of a pithy way to put it for their army of support staff -- "sexual genocide workers"?
Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm never going to accept that kind of term for it. Something that sounds like a word you'd smugly play in scrabble if you were in Middle Earth comes off as an attempted dismissal of the seriousness of the action. Names have power, and naming this manipulation of children after something that sounds like it would tumble whimsically out of Tom Bombadil's mouth after altogether too many extra strength pints doesn't cut it at all, I'm afraid.
This is even more hyperbolic and less accurate than just calling them groomers.
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Them: Obvious demons demanding their right for public sexual performances, insisting prepubescent children must participate
You: This is a nothingburger
Me: Jesus Christ, King of Kings, King of my soul, forgive my years astray in Satan's grasp, forgive us all, for we know not what we do.
Either you misunderstood me pretty bad, or I'm misunderstanding you -- to be clear, do you actually believe that a significant number of the teachers etc who go around 'affirming' transness are doing it for purposes of future sexual gratification? If so you are one of the rare exceptions, but I think it's a pretty uncommon belief even among those who are calling people groomers.
I (obviously) agree that it is, de facto, functionally, just grasping around for weapons, but I do think 80%+ of people who say 'groomer' genuinely believe that drag queens and teachers something children something sex. The belief is incoherent enough that rendering it into direct causal statements that aren't obviously false is basically impossible. But, if you're just a normal 100iq person who follows libsoftiktok or watches right-wing media ... what incentive do you have to explicitly lie or propagandize, mostly to your fellow normal right-wing media consumers, about grooming? They're just making what they see as actual factual they're genuinely upset about.
Compare to the satanic panic from OP, or the 'covid is killing our babies' people, etc
Fuck it, I'll draw the line that you don't seem to be willing to because frankly I'm with the normies on this one
This is not "teachers something children something sex". This is why are you taking elementary school kids to drag shows and talking to them about how to give a good blow-job if you aren't trying to sexualize them? Why are you urging them not to tell their parents if you didn't know that you might be doing something their parents would object to?
The abject failure to even acknowledge these very simple and obvious questions is how you can tell the "stop saying groomer" crowd are either idiots or "in the tank" with the LGBTQ+ types.
Let us speak plainly "Gender affirming care" (IE is things like puberty blockers, top and bottom surgery, etc...) is a euphemism for mutilating kids. Mutilating kids is bad. Those who do it, who enable it, or who simply run interference for those that do are bad people.
Yeah, this is my point. Teachers are not taking elementary school kids to drag shows, probably 1 in 300 progressive parents are. I'm not sure who specifically is talking to elementary school students about how to give a good blowjob - but I'd posit the rate of teachers doing that in a slightly-officially-sanctioned manner to random internet strangers doing that surreptitiously is at least one to ten thousand. But nothing like that is happening in even the 98th percentile of weirdness american public school, nor for the 98th percentile of weirdness trans child's experience in school. A combination of carelessness and intentional propaganda on right-wing media is smashing together dozens of different, rare incidents, folding the correct disgust at trans and queer perversion in with an incorrect claim of intentional predation by teachers to make it fit into the values of the average conservative parent. "Mutilating kids", "child drag shows", "elementary school blowjobs" do not co-occur in 99% of these situations, and the fact that those who say groomer claim they do, when they do not, is why the groomer accusation is stupid and distracting. And when you believe that, you can't figure out why kids are transitioning, and you try to stop it by homeschooling your kids or banning gay teachers, which does not work (a ton of trans people were homeschooled or had un-accepting authority figures).
They are though that's the thing, Prohibiting it is why DeSantis has been described by CNN the Washington Post and David French as "a Fascist" trampling upon American freedoms. Then there was that hilarious self-goal where having insisted that they weren't showing explicit material to minors, parents posting pics of the hand-outs got slapped down for posting explicit content.
The problem with the "Groomer" claim is not that it is stupid and distracting, it's that it has struck a corde with the normies.
I mean, if you have evidence of widespread "teachers taking classrooms of children to drag shows", "elementary school students being taught how to give good blowjobs", or even general efforts to make children queer or trans in schools that aren't that extreme but are still stronger than I say happen above, I'd just be wrong! And, if such exists, I'd want to see it. But "desantis is a fascist, says david french" is not that.
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Sure, I believe that too -- just that this is not really what "groomer" normally means.
One can try to pull off the leftist academic(/Red Queen) trick of redefining words to mean what you want them to mean, but I don't think the right has the institutional credibility to make it stick in this case.
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Regardless of whether "grooming" is literal grooming, it has enough aspects in common with grooming that the comparison becomes obvious; it's exposing children to sexual things and it's deliberately excluding the parents from being told. If you're going to do that, people are going to call it grooming regardless of any technicalities about whether it's being done for the personal pleasure of the groomer rather than in the name of ideology.
I'm not sure what, specifically, you're referring to here. I don't think keeping sex ed topics secret from parents is common. Do you mean the "a child can use pronouns or dress as the other gender and the school will assist with it without telling the parents"? That just doesn't feel like grooming.
This would be grooming: A teacher picks out specific students who have few friends / are shy / seem unusually influenceable, befriends them specifically, maybe shows them favoritism. They try to build (initially non-sexual) emotional intimacy. They'd spend some time in private doing shared, fun activities with the kid. They'd then move those fun activities to things like - dressing or acting feminine, doing weird (not sexual yet) things the teacher orders. If/when mild resistance occurs, pull the general friendliness temporarily. Then over time move more and more to more explicitly trans or sexual acts.
And - that's something that does happen, constantly! Sometimes with the explicit trans angle, although it's much more common w/o the trans angle. But the many-to-one nature of instruction, the generally regimented nature of school (there's usually somewhere you're supposed to be, doing the group activity), and the general cultural suspicion of authority figures being pedos makes it hard for a teacher to do that. But for a random old guy on the internet dming kids, all that reverses - 1 on 1 interaction is trivial, kids spend lots of time clicking away on their phones, many of them are lonely / don't have many internet friends, and you can start off making a connection just by sending memes or playing video games.
That's grooming! It describes a complicated and purposeful set of actions on the part of a specific individual towards specific, harmful ends. Alleged grooming in school is diffuse, done by different parties for small amounts of time, and is mostly just 'normal progressive stuff'. What part of "sex ed including gay/trans info", "kids can, if they choose to, come out in school if they want", "teachers putting pride flags up in their classrooms" is explained better by "grooming" than just "most people are progressives on gay/trans issues"?
Whether or not it's common is irrelevant. Murder and rape are uncommon.
No. Grooming has a much broader definition. The sudden restriction stems from it striking a chord.
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I actually believe that a significant number of teachers are sexually/satanically activating prepubescent children for the purpose of future sexual gratification. That does not necessitate the groomer is the ‘beneficiary’
People call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer don’t they?
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Like I say, I think maybe one in a hundred people using the term right now agree with you -- that doesn't even mean you're wrong necessarily, just that lots of people will say stuff they don't quite mean if they think it will hurt their enemies.
I'm fine with it as an expression of hatred/frustration, but I don't think it's a way of winning.
It's just a personal preference, but I deeply hope you're wrong. Both about 'lots of people,' and the consequences.
Why the fixation on calling people groomers? If there are better ways of winning, why not use them?
Suggestions?
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I'd read your Substack, if for no other reason than to see whether it would be the right or the left who devours you first. The left for obvious reasons, the right because you've been doing this thing for a while as an ex-lefty Blue Triber where you try to remind your fellow rightists that woke leftists are people too, with recognizably human motives, and you don't quite seem to realize that outside of places like the Motte (and only barely here), that is not a message they're trying to hear.
As for comparing groomers to the Satanic abuse panics of the 80s, it is really saying something that you've made me agree with @The_Nybbler twice in one day. You have observed that some moral panics are irrational, and that all moral panics tend to look superficially similar. That does not mean all moral panics are irrational. (Well, by definition, "panic" is irrational, but not all such panics are based on nothing.)
Now, I do personally think that "groomer" is slung around too casually, including by people who are just trying to cynically weaponize it against their ideological enemies (i.e., GLBT folks). But as I've said before, while I don't think every drag queen who wants to read books to children at a library is a groomer or a pedo, I also don't think "WTF are you up to?" is an unreasonable reaction. There is something deeply disturbing about thinking that drag is some kind of family-friendly show that should be normalized for children, and if intentional grooming isn't behind it, it sure seems to be groomer-adjacent to me.
Ditto all the trans people saying they want to be a "trans mommy" to any random kid who needs one, the very deliberate invitations to chats and Discord servers where they can talk about things they won't share with their parents - like, even if most of those people have good intentions, how is it not obvious that this is creepy and would code as predatory in any other context?
None of this wariness (I will say, instead of "moral panic") requires some Victorian notion of the pure and sexless innocence of children.
I feel like the Quokka is a bit of an uncharitable and overused meme, but over the last couple years it has becoming increasingly apparent to me that there are a lot of people who grew up in generally affluent blue-tribe environments who genuinely seem to lack a sense of wariness. I feel a third installment of my inferential distance post coming on.
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Would you say the same about panto? Now of course there are probably individual drag artists who do inject an odd level of quasi-sexualisation into their act, but I don't think that is inherent to drag. Drag definitely can be family-friendly, because otherwise most British parents are apparently unwittingly exposing their children to 'groomer-adjacent' behaviour.
Drag queens typically perform in 18+ establishments, as a rule.
Moreover, pantomime dames don't actually dress like that outside of the theatre for any reason that I'm aware of. Once he's done for the night, Jim takes the wig off and doesn't think about it until the next performance. He certainly doesn't make a separate social media profile for his dame alter-ego, nor list it on his other social medias. It's entirely contained within that one specific context... and nobody had a problem with drag while it was confined to its specific context, either.
Pantomime dames are performing the role of a type of desexualised older woman (often, but not always, the hero or heroine's mother) and wear "ugly" makeup and padding everywhere, not just the chest. The borderline-inappropriately-sexualised character in panto is the hero, who is played by an attractive young woman in skin-tight trousers (leather if there is the slightest excuse).
Drag queens are performing a caricature of female sexuality - in that the character they are playing is supposed to be attractive to hetrosexual men (in some traditions of drag performance the actor in character also is, and in others she isn't).
If someone launched "pantomime dame story hour" in the UK, nobody would complain.
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Shouldn’t there be a Victorian notion of pure sexless innocent children? I’m not talking even teenagers. But…what is so bad with me wanting my future 8 year old (only a few years away) to be innocent?
No? South Park is more of a documentary than anyone ever wants to admit to themselves and I'm still trying to figure out why nobody acknowledges this; third grade was a fine time for "I heard she got in trouble for doing lesbian stuff in the bathroom", making tons of dick jokes, and figuring out exactly how flexible the middle finger is when it comes to expressing oneself.
I have reason to believe my experience is typical, and as such I'm still trying to figure out why nobody else remembers this... or is simply motivated not to remember- that was a plausible enough explanation for 10 year old me (having an upbringing , and I have received no evidence suggesting he wasn't correct. Maybe being sophisticated enough to notice this stuff is connected to being able to remember it in the first place, I dunno.
Whose interest do you think that outlook serves and why?
("Only mine, I don't like the aesthetics of my little bundle of joy saying 'suck my balls, you fucking bitch'" is an acceptable and interesting answer.)
You sound like a dude. I’m a dude. I have zero clue how ten year old girls really talked. It wasn’t clear from my post but I have daughters.
There is even a difference between 8 and 10.
I have aesthetic reasons for wanting my daughters to remain innocent but also practical ones that aren’t as relevant for boys.
The answer is "just [as bad as] the boys". Well, not so much on the dick jokes for what should be obvious reasons.
Third grade, however, is not 10.
While that is the time in my life I developed the notion that "adults are forgetting on purpose", the evidence for that view was piling up prior to that.
Do tell; I'm very curious as to how "knows the words and the specifics" is supposed to translate into "loose virtue/an easy mark".
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I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting something but I do find it weird to bring it up here.
Culture is so saturated with straight sexuality that it seems like- unless you have different standards for queer sexuality and straight sexuality-
You must be spending way more of your time sheltering them from the straight stuff.
This here. Western culture rams straight sexuality down the throat I. Copius amounts and seems to be oblivious of what it's doing. However when to comes to queer sexuality that's far less intense than the staraight stuff suddenly we have a moral panic on our hands.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if you don't like sexuality permitting everything then the way to do that is stop putting sexuality in everything.
Now I'd personally be quite happy with the proposed arrangement, sounds like a damn good deal to me, I don't care for how sexualised mainstream culture is. But I'd point out that there are actually some other options. Number 1 is to just suppress minority sexualities and continue allowing the promotion of the sexuality of the majority, in fact this is substantially easier than simply suppressing sexuality all together.
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Frankly I do intend to shelter them for both as long as I can. But I also have a different standard especially when it comes to trans stuff. I think trans is contagion (to a large degree; there probably are a very small subset with gender dysmorphia).
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Does "innocent" mean "My child should never be exposed to any hint of sexuality, ever?" A literal Victorian notion would be something like "Pregnant women should be kept out of public sight because it would cause children to ask awkward questions and then they might start wondering where babies come from."
My five year old has seen my wife pregnant with my five year old’s siblings. She understands babies come from mommy. But we haven’t explained to her how babies are made outside of a generic mommies and daddies make babies when they are adults and married. We can talk more about it when you are older.
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I'm far from an expert on the Victorian era, but I never heard of this, and a bit of Googling doesn't seem to turn up anything like that. Where did you get that idea from?
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I'm not sure quite what to label the phenomena but when I think back to being exposed to unimaginably hardcore pornography (goatse, lemonparty, 2girls1cup, that nail in dick thing) at ~8 years old I'm existentially horrified, but also just laugh it off like most of my peers.
It's also just occurred to me as I'm typing this your kids' experience with all that may be a great deal more sanitized than mine.
Wait, goatse qualifies as existential horror?
I guess it's true what they say: you gaze into that abyss, and that abyss gazes back into you.
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pain4 iirc
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There are some in the Dissident Right that counter-signal the conservative moral panic for the reasons you allude to. The DR is not conservative, so when and if it finds itself sharing the exact same rhetoric as the conservative boomerwaffen, some hesitancy is warranted. Especially because there is a bunch of Q-Anon nonsense among that demographic, which is adjacent to the "pedophilic elite" conspiracy, which is in turn adjacent to "groomer" rhetoric. Your enemies are going to use their full power to tie the "groomer" rhetoric to Q-Anon, and I've already seen that comparison made more than once.
Yesterday I found myself thinking about how tragic it is that the rainbow, a solar symbol with a rich history of meaning, is now appropriated for gay and trans activism and you can't see a rainbow without identifying with or against the movement. You could say "they shouldn't have done that, that's an unfair move to take a neutral symbol and use it to rally a cause", but they did and it's extremely effective. It's the work of the Symbol-Manipulators that Hlynka consistently underestimates. I think this is why the accusation of a conservative "moral panic" usually comes across as concern-trolling, because where and how exactly are conservatives supposed to provide pushback in similar measure?
One of the most effective and prolific tricks of the LGBTQ movement is to use the word "phobic" to denounce, insult, and shame their opponents by associating their beliefs, and themselves personally, as pathological. You're transphobic. You could write a post breaking out the dictionary definition of a 'phobia' and say "Ghee, you all on the LGBTQ+ community should stop accusing conservatives of transphobia, because their beliefs don't really describe the dictionary definition of a phobia." I think you would appreciate how feckless that would be, and if it's effective why would you expect them to not use the term? Or do you just accept that the LGBTQ movement will use such rhetoric to extreme effectiveness, but you think its opponents should be more principled and consult the dictionary before they engage with in-kind rhetoric?
I do endorse the groomer rhetoric because it's actually engaging in the debate on a symbolic level in the way progressives have only been able to since the conservative defeat on gay marriage. I don't think it's a moral panic for conservatives to appreciate the symbolic humiliation of drag queen story hour:
Children learn their lessons- their notion of reality and right and wrong, through stories. A story hour is a safe place for childen to learn through stories, and furthermore the storyteller is usually a trusted figure in the community like a teacher, mayor, or president. There is something symbolically revolutionary about children sitting in a circle around a flamboyant drag queen and being told a story. That symbolically matters. As hesitant as I am to endorse the rhetoric of the boomerwaffen, I can't fault them for picking this battle and I think it's gaslighting honestly to call their discernment of a sexually-charged augmentation to a symbolically important community ritual involving children a "moral panic."
I'm not clever enough to make the plan, but I saw a suggestion once that we meme into reality that only /ourguys/ wear baseball caps. Every once in a blue moon you come across an idea you hear just once that captivates (ha) you forever.
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Agree. It's effective rhetoric. And not completely unfounded either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour
How does that story in any way corroborate the 'groomer' narrative? Ok, there was one drag artist who took advantage of the potential for close access to children, but that could equally happen in all sorts of other scenarios (teachers, clergy, sports coaches etc.) and that is never considered grounds to smear the entire group with the tar of the 'groomer' label. And as for the library's failure to vet, seems like just ordinary laziness is the most likely explanation.
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Wait, why is that unfair? People use existing imagery and ideas and recontextualize them for generating tribal division all the time. The simplest example would be school mascots and animals, but the stakes are obviously less dire in those contexts.
Moreover, you can 100% see rainbows w/o connotations of the LGBTQ+ movements, and that's in children's books and media. And before someone jumps at trying to tell me this is a sign of attempting to groom kids, no, the ones I'm referring to are shown at a beautiful part of nature. I worked at places that used rainbows on the walls of the rooms where children were kept for this exact reason.
But even discounting the LGBTQ+ movements, I see little importance placed on the rainbow among adults. It's nice to look at, but I think there's a reason the "double rainbow all the way" guy went viral - everyone found his fascination abnormal and funny.
Sorry I think it was unclear, I don't think it was unfair I think it's how you win a culture war. You do it by changing the meaning of symbols and words, or stretching them here and there to suit the battle you are fighting at the time. People complain about the culture changing the meaning of words and symbols, they don't realize it's the reverse: you change the meaning of words and symbols in order to change the culture. I don't oppose that, I recognize the reality of it. It's why I would usually dismiss progressives as concern trolling when they break out a dictionary to test if it's really grooming. The correct response to that is "Ok, groomer" and I think that is going to work.
That's a stretch. If you polled people with a rainbow color array and said "What does this mean?" 20 years ago, do you accept that would be radically different than the association people would have with it now? 50 years ago?
You said it, I provided a modern counter-example.
20 years ago was 2003, three years after The University of Hawaii changed its sports teams' name to "Warriors" from "Rainbow Warriors", initially defended as avoiding confusion with the gay rights movement, so even then, it seems like people thought of the flag that way. They might not have included the "Trans" or "Queer" part of it, but the sentiment is the same.
50 years ago was 1973, which was before the use of the rainbow flag as an LGBT symbol, so yeah, I guess you're correct on that one.
"Rainbow Warrior" was the name of the first flagship of I-can't-believe-it's-not-ecoterrorism group Greenpeace, bought and renamed in 1978. At the time, the rainbow represented peace and nature, and the choice of name was inspired by a fake Native American legend on that theme. Greenpeace continue to use rainbows on and off in that way (e.g. in their maritime pennant). Rainbow flags identical to the gay flag except for "PEACE" written across them were still being used as a non-LGBT-specific peace symbol in Cambridge UK as late as 2002, although the gay meaning was the primary one by then.
OG Rainbow Warrior was sunk in port by French special forces in 1985, and Greenpeace bought the second Rainbow Warrior in 1987 and the third in 2011 - at this date they still felt for whatever reason that there was no risk of being confused with an LGBT group. The rainbows painted on the first (I couldn't find a colour photo) and second Rainbow Warrior don't look like the gay flag though.
tl;dr - rainbow flags were being used by other hippy-adjacent groups before they became gay flags, and the older meaning has not fully been lost
Here in Italy I still see them used that way, if it matters.
That is interesting. I suspect it reflects less-than-complete Americanisation of Italian leftism - I don't think you could get away with a rainbow peace flag in an English-speaking country in 2023.
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I don't think I said it was completely lost. But SecureSignals was asking if the meaning of the rainbow had changed from 20 years ago, I was pointing out that even then, the association wasn't completely unknown to people.
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To be clear, I’m not talking primarily about the boomerwaffen, I’m talking about much smarter and edgier DR figures like, again, Auron MacIntyre, who can normally be counted on to dunk on conservatives for being too naïve and lowbrow. My general observation is that the farther-right a commentator gets, the more intense he is about the groomer discourse. Like I said, I’m observing what to me is obviously a purity spiral, in which “being absolutely obsessed with rooting out pedophiles” is seen as a badge of honor and based-ness. Are you seeing something different?
I've seen Richard Spencer consistently echo your exact concerns and counter-signal conservatives for chewing on a bone that doesn't really matter while they remain blind to the bigger picture. There's truth to that, I think it's fair to say that the conservatives are blind to the bigger picture, but I also think they are identifying something that is real when they describe "grooming." Does it fit the dictionary definition? Maybe, maybe not, but they are getting at something real.
I have also seen DR figures like you describe though. It falls along similar lines as the Klaus Schwab debate in the DR. Some on the DR pushed hard on the Schwab-posting since it was more adjacent to mainstream rhetoric and served as a potential gateway for conservatives whereas others opposed it for the simple fact that it isn't true, so you shouldn't sacrifice your credibility by pushing rhetoric that is fundamentally untrue.
I personally opposed the Klaus Schwab narrative because I didn't think it was getting at something real, but I will support the conservative rhetoric on this issue because I do think they are picking up on something real and opposing it in a way that may turn out to be effective.
I think your concerns are valid though, I am explaining why I fall on the side on supporting conservatives if they are picking up on something real.
It's the whole status optimization thing. What views optimize for a high-value/SES audience. Being avowedly anti-Klaus signals lower status. The high status view is to push back against the populist, knee-jerk reaction against him... taking a middle ground that is critical of the WEF and Klaus yet doesn't devolve into low-status/low-information populism. I saw a similar triangulation play out in early 2021 with the Covid vaccine, in which the high-status view was to oppose the lockdown/masks but support vaccines. Or, in 2022, downplay vaccine deaths, but criticize Pfizer and Biden and the media.
Yes, if you seek status validation and approval from your enemies on the left, their preferred views for you will always be the ones in which you lose nobly. The question is, why are you doing that and playing that game in the first place?
If you are more concerned about keeping high status and looking good than winning, you are basically just a useful idiot. This is always the downfall of boomercons and establishment cons, because they ultimately serve two masters, where their leftist counterparts do not.
Keeping high status and looking good lead to winning, unless you're in a purely physical contest, which the Culture War is not.
Looking good in the eyes of your enemies, however, is not helpful, unless it's purely a ruse.
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Are we reading the same article? From reading your post, people get the impression that it reads "like a boomercon trying to insist that we remain respectable to our enemies and simply lose with grace and honour, which is all boomercons know how to do."
Cole's main point is that what he calls 'trannyism' is like an amped up version of the child sex abuse scare back in the day, which was the fault of the left. He's saying that this is really bad and awful and needs to be stopped but that we should stop it in a different way than accusing them of being groomers. He doesn't know how specifically but he's not condemning 'a full-blown purity-spiraling moral panic in the Extremely Online Right', in that they're wrong, only that they're ineffective. He's condemning the people messing with children's genders.
I think he's saying that there's definitely sex abuse going on, chemically castrating children. But instead of happening due to perversion alone, there are all kinds of women who think they're doing good and feeling happy about themselves regendering your children.
Yes, we are definitely reading the same article, and I think it’s extremely clear that Cole is condemning both “trannyism” - which is bad because it’s medically mutilating children as a result of a moral panic on the part of (mostly) neurotic progressive women - and also the dissident right, which has responded to that moral panic with a wrong-headed moral panic of its own - the “groomer” obsession. Cole is correct that the transgender movement needs to be stopped, but he’s also correct that “it’s about molesting children” is a completely specious and distracting criticism of a movement that deserve to be criticized for better and more accurate reasons.
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What level of evidence would it take to convince you that the term "grooming" has a history of common and uncontroversial use to describe adults or older youths maneuvering themselves into a position of unaccountable confidence and authority over younger adolescents and children, to their benefit and the child's detriment, but without explicitly sexual connotations? For example, if I could provide you examples of mainstream media describing street gang recruitment as "grooming", would you agree that this seriously undermines your statement above?
Because if "grooming" has in fact been the accepted term for such behavior, it doesn't become less appropriate when the specific behavior in question is aimed at shaping children's understanding of sexuality and sexual identity in deeply unhealthy ways, does it?
Grooming in that context isn't to the child's detriment. It's to the child's benefit. It means you have picked them out to receive special training and privileges so they can take over some high status role in the group.
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It can be used in other ways, but the allusion in these cases is usually pretty specific.
If the allusion being reached for was how one grooms a horse resulting in a shiney new mane drawing the analogy that the trans kid is a shiney beautiful new creature, then it would be being used by the left not the right.
The context it is used in, the types of memes it is used in, the language it is used with is what tells you what version of grooming is being alluded to.
If the term grooming is appropriate because it is aimed at situations in shaping childrens sexuality then churches and every parent pretty much ever have been grooming kids for centuries. But it is not used in that fashion there, only because they don't like the particular shape in question.
It's a weapon. Which is fine, its a culture war not a culture scrapbooking but I think we can be honest that it is a weapon.
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Tough to say, how about you throw some my way?
Edit: I now see that FC substantially edited and fleshed out his comment after I had already responded to it, leading to Hlynka’s response below, which I found confusing until I went back and saw FC’s edit.
About 30 seconds of searching turned up this hand-out from Shared Hope international.
#1 REASON THEY JOIN? RELATIONSHIP
They are drawn by ‘belonging’ – dress codes, gang colors, power and being part of something strong and impenetrable.
Poverty is a huge factor in recruiting victims.
English as a second language makes some more vulnerable. Undocumented aliens makes them a target. Who would they tell?
They may have real needs for food, clothing, shelter, rehab or resources. The gang offers to protect and provide. **Grooming ** includes promises and flattery.
-- “See that girl in the nice clothes? She’s one of mine.”
-- “Do you need something? We will hook you up.”
-- “I care you’re in pain.”
I didn’t realize that FC had added significantly to his original comment, so I was unsure why you thought that this one single example was going to look like strong evidence in favor of his proposition. Now that I see your comment in relation to his edit, I at least realize why you picked this example, although I still consider it nowhere near strong enough evidence to refute my accusation that those using “groomer” are attempting to smuggle the most inflammatory connotation into their every use of the term.
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Walking out the door for a road trip, but consider this an IOU. I'll see if I can get a compilation together tonight or this weekend.
@HlynkaCG got you, have an excellent road trip. Keep some 5W-30 in the trunk just in case.
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Parallels in form don't mean things are the same if the substance is different. Yes, there were moral panics about essentially-nonexistent satanic child ritual abuse in the 1980s. There were also moral panics about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and organized child sexual abuse in Rotherham. Difference is, these latter two existed. Just saying "Oh, grooming rhymes with satanic panic" doesn't demonstrate anything -- because both rhyme with Rotherham.
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Counter take. When you're taking flak, you're over the target.
Maybe the reason nazi-adjacent homosexuals like Cole and Yiannopoulos as well as various other figures on the alt-right are annoyed with the Boomercons and Barstool-types for latching on to the Epstien and Groomer stuff is that Boomercons and Barstool-types have correctly identified a vulnerability in the prog-left. One in which interests of the alt-right as sexually liberal blue-tribers are more closely aligned with the LGBTQ+ crowd than they are the mainstream right.
As others have noted, there is a distinctly predatory scent that these people seem to give off, and it's interesting that both the woke left and alt-right seem fixed on discrediting anyone who deigns to point it out.
I don't recognize the name Cole, but didn't Milo originally step in shit because he spoke publicly about his first gay consensual relationship being when he was like 9?
I thought Milo got in trouble for describing his above local age of consent, but under 18 gay relationship with a Catholic priest.
This is at least closer to accurate, but still not right. Milo was involved in an extended discussion; the cancel squad clipped two separate comments out of context and slapped them together. The first was a bit of dark humor thanking the Catholic priest who taught him how to perform oral sex at a young age (about 13, IIRC), and the second was discussing in sincerely positive terms his relationship with an older man (not a priest) when he was 17ish. The edited version conflated both the tone and topic of two quite separated statements, and framed Milo as an advocate of child molestation.
Milo's comments are open to criticism (and should be criticized, IMO), but the deliberate misrepresentation behind this particular bit of character assassination was vile.
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A new low for you, truly. Are you going to offer any evidence or analysis to refute any of Cole’s claims? Hell, do you have any evidence to substantiate your accusation of Cole (a Jew) as “Nazi-adjacent” or “homosexual”? Or will this be yet another comment where you just lazily wave in a certain direction to add another epicycle to your tortured take on Horseshoe Theory?
What claims would those be? That people worrying about the trans stuff today are equivalent to those who were worried about satanists sacrificing babies?
Fine here's my analysis. The thing that sets more recent instances of organized sexual abuse like Rotherdam, Epstiens Island, or trans-activists advocating the permanent disfigurement of children (often against wishes of one or both parents) is that unlike the Satanic panic of the 80s there is ample physical and video evidence that this actually happening. In short, it's not "paranoia" if somone's actually out to get you, and the people telling you to relax and ignore the red-flags are not acting in your interests.
Likewise Cole coming from a Jewish background, doesn't preclude him from being nazi-adjacent, or from being a 60 year-old confirmed bachelor who seems weirdly preoccupied with teenage boys.
As for my allegedly "tortured" take horseshoe on theory, at least I have something that seems to cleave our current political realities at the joints
You’re suggesting that the Rotherham grooming gangs - a cartel of Pakistani Muslims who have no relationship to the academic/medical complex whatsoever - is the same phenomenon as “trans-affirming healthcare”? Please explain the link. How are these two things connected, other than that they both resulted in bad things happening to children?
Again, Hlynka, nobody here is arguing that doing trans stuff to children is good, and certainly nobody here is arguing that it’s not happening. The argument is about whether or not it’s child molestation, and if not, why is it happening? Cole’s argument, which I basically agree with, is that the creepy gay men with a thing for little boys represent a tiny sliver of the people actually doing the day-to-day work of sustaining the trans-ing of kids. The vast majority of these people are women, who are doing what they do because of reasons that have nothing at all to do with being sexually attracted to kids. It is just simply not credible to accuse some mousy 23-year-old female elementary school teacher of wanting to rape little kids. The “groomer” discourse is laser-focused on a small and distracting side issue. That’s the argument. David Cole is not a friend to “the LGBTQ movement”, and he wants to see it defeated by actually good and true arguments.
No I'm suggesting that woke sexually libertine academic types running interference for rape gangs is the same phenomenon as woke sexually libertine academic types running interference for other flavors child molestation including that perpetrated by trans-activists.
As @hydroacetylene observes: concerns about grooming are at least directionally correct, and a lot of these schools(like loudoun county) have chosen respecting trans ideology over protecting kids when the choice was stark and real, not merely theoretical.
Accordingly, as both a conservative and a parent, hearing yet another woke sexually libertine academic type playing silly definitional games while asking me to please stop talking about groomers reads as yet more interference running.
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There are best practices for institutions working with kids to prevent child sexual abuse, and the 23 year old mousy female elementary school teacher is violating all of them and advocating that they be changed to benefit progressive pets.
If the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America was loosening its child protection standards to enable children to be more exposed to priests/scoutmasters, this would ring obvious alarm bells- and by those two organizations’ stated standards, exposure to priests/scoutmasters is more important for child development than exposure to drag queens is by progressive standards. Public schools also have a higher rate of child sexual abuse than at least the Catholic Church did(although possibly not a higher rate than the BSA at its worst). Yet anyone making the obvious criticism- this will lead to more child abuse- gets accused of transphobia.
I don’t think most of the people advocating for this stuff are personally grooming kids. But concerns about grooming are at least directionally correct, and a lot of these schools(like loudoun county) have chosen respecting trans ideology over protecting kids when the choice was stark and real, not merely theoretical. ‘Groomer’ might be a stretcher, but it’s not an outright lie.
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Well, probably not (but we don't know because we aren't mindreaders, and the content of her actions is not different than if she wanted to rape them). Still, she is breaking down their sexual norms without knowledge or consent of the parents of the kids, and probably encouraging them to do and imbibe things that are inappropriate for their (or often any) age. All of which makes them particularly vulnerable to any "real" groomer that stumbles upon that broken down kid. Oh, and by the way, she will find it hard to bring herself (if she even can) condemn her successor because that other evil human is probably part of her favored subset of humans.
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If the mousey elementary teacher is advocating for porn and sex instructions to be available to children in the school library, talking to kids about how great being gay/trans/etc is compared to being straight/cis, talking to kids about sex and asking them to hide it from their parents, and inviting in the group that seems to consist of creepy gay men wanting to flaunt themselves in front of kids, should they be considered as groomers even if they aren't the ones who actively want to molest the kids?
Can you provide evidence that there is a epidemic of teachers logging onto PornHub and trying to show it it kids?
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More and more there's a clear trend of "vibes" as legitimate source of political motivation.
I'm confused by the implication that there was ever a time that "vibes" were not a legitimate source of political motivation.
I'll echo Pongalh here and say that I think there at least used to be a pretense of relying on hard evidence. For example, the first wave of environmentalism in the 1970's wasn't merely about vibes, there were things people could point to as proof that we had enshittified America The Beautiful and needed to start cleaning up after ourselves.
In the 70s, the "serious people" were insisting we shouldn't believe the stats or our lying eyes and that progressivism wasn't driving crime in the cities, nor single motherhood.
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People seem to be abandoning the ideal of not relying on that. It's an anti-intellectual move.
"Where's your evidence?"
"I don't know, they're just like, ugh."
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I find it fascinating that this is a claim that's being talked about. When I was a child/young adult in the 90s and 00s, the very concept of "moral panic" was considered a distinctly right wing phenomenon, associated with stuff about fear mongering violence in video games or evangelical Christian busybody Moral Majority types. Perhaps in the back of our heads, we acknowledged that it could happen on the left, but a left wing moral panic was basically considered an oxymoron. Things sure have changed since then, to reach this point where the left wing owns the concept and it's a revelation that the right wing can be just as bad. The thing about history being cyclical or a pendulum might have some truth to it.
The moral panics of the 80's and 90's were bipartisan, seeing as Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman were two of the most prominent figures in various panics (music and video games).
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I don't really agree. This reads more like a boomercon trying to insist that we remain respectable to our enemies and simply lose with grace and honour, which is all boomercons know how to do.
If you've seen the Discord servers where most of the grooming happens, poked around tranny reddit or watched videos of the fanatic teachers, you'll know it's not an inaccurate label. And that's part of why it's working, it clearly gets under their skin, which is why they're so bothered about it, and why handmaidens like Cole need to be told to shut up. This isn't the 80s, this is memetic warfare. The rules are different.
Yes. This is why it's an effective weapon. Same as being accused of being a nazi, racist, whatever. You're asking for unilateral disarmament. That is suicide.
It might be a moral panic, but so is everything these days. Refusing to go as low as your enemy will only see you lose by denying yourself tactics they'll use willingly.
Then he's internalised the boomercon "noble failure" modus operandi. Same difference.
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Context for those who don't know: David Cole in Auschwitz, though Cole gives himself too much credit for the impact of his Revisionist work.
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Another instance where Team Liberal realizes it's a fair weather friend to Team Right and Team Left.
There are just not very many people for whom truth matters. Most just grope around for issue sets, decide what and who they don't and do like, and then go full sacking of intellectual integrity in order to promote or bash their particular feelz.
I wouldn't say truth doesn't matter to me, it's just that truth matters less than winning. It does me no good to smugly claim the right of truth from the sidelines after being thoroughly trounced by an underhanded enemy, as I watch them implement disastrous policy counter to all my intuitions and preferences.
Clinging to the righteousness of truth might be a comfort to you in such a situation, but not to me.
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I don't see the connection. Whatever the truth is, when you're in a war, you're in a war. Perhaps stripping boxing gloves and picking up a bowie knife isn't a good tactic for the right — there may be social dynamics at play that allow the prog left to use slander but call for an asymmetric response from the right. However, there's nothing inconsistant between personal good faith truth-seeking and publicly using slander against opponents who are trying to destroy you. An anti-militarist can take up arms when the homeland is invaded. A person who seeks cooperate-cooperate can defect when playing against a defectbot.
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Maybe caring for "truth" is just another way to justify one's feelz. Elevating "truth" or "freedom" as values of some higher order because their pursuit aligns more closely with one's personal preferences.
Even if it is a justification, seeking truth still has far more utility than any other option.
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But those "personal preferences" for abstraction are more difficult to map on to any given object-level thing directly in front of you.
Are you making a kind of critical race theory notion that objectivity is actually just very much interested subjectivity?
"There's his opinion, her opinion and then there's the truth."
No no, the truth is just another opinion?
My point is mostly that it's easy to claim truth, but hard to prove, and easy to appear like you're just pretending to be truth-seeking out of self-interest, and even easier for others to convince themselves that that's what you're doing.
I.e., truth is an early casualty in culture war, and it quickly becomes very difficult to make out object-level facts when everyone cherry-picks their preferred factoids.
Nothing new.
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I just think trans is a mental health disorder and a bad thing to teach anyone but especially kids while doing long term body transformations that will damage their entire life.
Probably some pedophiles involved to because it’s a useful movement for them.
I don’t view trans people and promoters for the most part as bad people or my enemies. I think they are mistaken and feel bad for them.
Why do you think trans is a mental health disorder.
I really need to explain why a man thinking he’s a girl is a mental health disorder? Isn’t it obvious.
If you crux with 90% of trans people, they aren't going to have object level disagreements about the facts.
They'll agree that trans women do not have wombs and so on.
And if you break down their claim that they are a girl, it's probably going to boil down to their definition of 'girl' being different than yours.
I do think it's common for trans people, particular youth, to lack nuance with regards to this.
I do think fearful people (as in the case of many trans women) are susceptible to clinging to safe, oversimplified un-nuanced defensive ideologies. ("trans women are women")
I do think this has led in many cases to unfair expectations of how other people have to treat them to be ethical.
And- this is a 'mental illness', in the sense that it would be good for them and for everyone else to fix those issues. But those mental failure states occur in most of the human population around various hangups. It's hardly a trans thing. Removing the 'illness' would stop the trans twitter presence from being cancer, but it wouldn't change the fact that they like taking estrogen and getting f*****.
Trans girls know that they have XY chromosomes and no wombs, but they also know that they have Breasts, Soft Skin, Fem Voices, and that they feel euphoria when they are refereed to using the pronoun "she" and treated in accordance to the norms historically afforded to people with XX chromosomes.
There is a category that splits reality at the seams here. "They are just men" is not a very practical use of language. "Men" don't inject themselves with estrogen and pop Spiro. "Men" don't have a girl-smell. And I don't go looking for them when I want a good time.
I admit gladly, that "they are just women" is just as inaccurate. The based trans girls I know wear the trans label with pride and will gladly differentiate themselves from cis women among their dating group.
Their definition is usually incoherent, because their position is that the word 'girl' under current usage doesn't have one place where it cleaves reality at the seams. Question, is Barbie a Girl? No. She's a simulacra of a girl. But we call her one. If we can call a plastic simulacrum a girl, then we can call a male simulacrum a girl.
But you don't want to. I'm trying to empathise and understand myself.
I wonder if it's that you're holding onto it tightly because people have tried to forcibly pry you away from it.
Perhaps things would have gone differently if it had been a friend of yours politely asking the first time, just to make a small exception in how you treat men for them.
lol. look. it's fine. I don't think any of this will matter in a decade. And I don't think your language should be policed.
But when you look at a trans girl, please don't be too cruel when calling her a boy?
All I can think of is a girl named Alice, who lives alone in a small cabin secluded behind a group house, recovering inch by inch, from the scars the gay conversion camp left her with. Reading 'Men Trapped in Men's Bodies' of all things. And swearing by it. I get unreasonably caught up sometimes. With the trans people I've met. It's been very nice, heh. annoying? chatting here. The prediction error you see. When the people here describe their experiences with the contemporaries of the Alices I've met.
This argument pushes me the opposite way. I'd rather just stop calling Barbie a girl. If you're going to use my previous charity to grasp for more concessions, I'll rescind it all.
If you ask me for 50p, and I give it to you, and then you ask me for 50p more because "you already gave it to me once, how hard is it to do it again", well fuck you.
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Because it makes you reject the material reality of your own body, and compels you to modify it in ways that are detrimental to your health.
I don't buy this. I don't think choosing to trade off life expectancy for something you value more constitutes a mental illness.
Even if you go full natural law I don't think you can reasonably argue that maximizing lifespan to the exclusion of exploration or ideals is man's nature.
Hell, I took estrogen for years just because I perceived the world as having two Ice cream flavors that I was only allowed to have one of, and I still endorse having done that, even now that I've stopped. It seems like depriving yourself to me if you don't try the other feel at least once in your life. Do you really want to die without knowing how that flavor you've had in front of you your whole life tastes?
And- the material reality of the body is that you can alter it with hormones. Why pick on people who take hormones instead of people who work out to get buff? They're also battling a material reality.
What would make you consider something consider a mental illness then? Depression driving you to suicide is "trading off life expectancy for something you value more" under your approach.
As long as you're aware of what you're signing up for, it's fair enough, but under the current ideology "trans women are women", which implies the material reality of the body is not accepted.
Yeah, depression is an illness. I could posit my standard natural law argument (the human telos throughout western history and each human life has been that of ascension and transcendence, which subverting gender is another example of, whereas depression is a lack of motivation that drains that telos- yada yada) But really I know it when I see it.
"I, a trans women need to transmute myself such that I am a perfect cis woman in order to be able to function."
That- is a mental illness. That's the sort of thing that leaves Contrapoints in a ditch for months.
"I, a trans women need to transmute myself such that I possess a perfect cisgender female morph. I will not stop. I'm working on my bio doctorate. That Y chromosome's days are numbered."
That- is Metal. Get me more girls like that I want to marry those. A whole start-up of them. We'll build our children together like proper engineers.
So even as a trans advocate I appreciate people attacking the precept that "trans women are [cis] women!" ... in theory.
The thing is- the way the lines are drawn right now,
I don't think any of the people trying to tear that down have any real interest in helping trans people find the replacement I'd like them to have.
And if it were torn down, I don't think it would be followed with a reasoned, evidence based cultural conversation on the safest place to redraw lines for bathrooms or sports.
I think, if either side gives an inch right now, the other will take a mile. So naturally, no-one gives an inch.
Fair, but so do others, and they might draw the line somewhere else.
You're mostly right, but there's a handful of people who are trying to have a reasonable and compassionate approach to this issue. I don't rate their chances of being listened to when the whole thing comes to a head particularly high, but they are out there.
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Because the behavior of the pro-transers is indistinguishable from pedophile grooming. That is why it is accurate as a descriptor even if 7/10 Transers are not interested in banging a trans kid at 14. Doesn't matter, what they are doing looks the same. And on top of that, it both 1) Provides cover for pedos, and 2) Desensitizes children to grooming behavior, thus enabling any pedos in their vicinity. Regarding 2, "oh nice teacher Clippy tells me all about her sex life and vagina and her lesbian encounters and that I shouldn't tell mom and dad what we talk about"... 2 years later creepy Mr. Dippy is telling me all the same stuff, but also he's touching my places. Well...
It is very distinguishable. In that as you point out they are not themselves trying to bang the kids. Thats the key aspect of CSE grooming.
Lots of people teach kids about various things to do with sex at various ages. The vast majority of them are not grooming kids into CSE.
And teaching kids that they shouldn't talk about sex and its shameful (the traditional approach) also enables people to take advantage of that shame so kids are too scared to cone forward. Thats what i have seen to be enabling abuse in practice.
Did we discover some newfound mindreading powers?
This is not an accurate depiction of trans advocates. They explicitly pair sexual discussions with secrecy and blocking out parents from being informed or consenting.
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On the other hand, teaching kids that it is shameful to report being molested, because only homophobes would be uncomfortable with it, also enables abuse in practice.
And who is advocating kids not reporting abuse like that?
I didn't say advocating kids not reporting it, I said teaching kids it is shameful to. By associating discomfort with being touched with homophobia and teaching that homophobia is bad, they end up teaching kids that their feelings of discomfort being touched are shameful thus making them afraid to report it.
That doesn't follow. We teach kids about bad touching regardless of who from.
This is a laughable assertion. If even 10% of the 10% least troubling trans tictok stuff was adult men doing the same with little girls we'd call a spade a spade.
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I strongly disagree. We teach kids about bad touching in certain situations (notably straight men touching girls) and completely downplay and excuse it in others (notably women and gay men touching boys). Or, at the very least, that's what my experience was growing up being repeatedly told that such touching (including on multiple occasions directly grabbing my penis) wasn't sexual and I was being too sensitive. Maybe the movement has gotten better in the years since, but I don't see it from my perspective.
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Right. This is a much more defensible position, and one that has cross-spectrum appeal. I’d bet a lot of people over 30 have a nagging discomfort with the idea. Yeah, it’s not quite as much as I expected, but 15% of Democrats think it’s “gone too far.”
But that won’t make numbers on Twitter, and the other team’s activists are going to tar you as a Literal Murderer anyway. So hyperbole is the name of the game.
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I don't think these are necessarily all the same people. Some of the most prominent figures on TikTok who do this sort of "trans outreach" to children, like Jeffrey Marsh, give off insane pedophile vibes, and I'm not someone who throws that word around lightly. I'm also at a loss to come up with a generous explanation for Dylan Mulvaney play-acting as a 6-year-old girl named Eloise. Certainly a lot of the gay men who dress up and call themselves trans engage in behavior around children that would never be tolerated from any other demographic, because it's such an obvious red flag for predatory intent.
But as for actual women, like schoolteachers and the like, I suspect their great overrepresentation among trans-child advocates is for the same reason the overwhelming majority of Munchausen-by-proxy cases are also women - it plays on similar tendencies towards vicarious attention-seeking in the female race.
I concur that it can’t all be the same people. Same goes for trans suicide stats—those are a useful weapon to deploy in the high-speed culture war, but the majority of left-wingers think about trans suicides roughly as much as every other suicide which doesn’t personally affect them. Not at all.
I feel like there are a lot of assumptions going into this phrase.
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