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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.
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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