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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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