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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 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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