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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.
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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