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Notes -
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
There's a lot of different interpretations of that going on in this thread. Let me attempt to summarize/categorize them (I'm probably missing some options?):
["Pedophilia"] They are literally going to rape children.
["Encouraged transition"] They are going to convince children to become gay/trans.
["Acceptance"] They are going to convince children it's okay to be gay/trans, resulting in more of them behaving as such.
["Liberalization"] They are going to convince children to have liberal values, including being accepting of gay/trans people, but also things like not attending church.
(Giving these names to try to be less confusing than referring back to the numbers.)
I think the people chanting meant the some mixture of the last two. It sounds like the right is most vocal about being concerned about (2) "encouraged transition". Which the left generally believes is not really a thing ("born this way"); of course, whether the chanters believe it's a thing and whether it actually is are two separate questions. Although there's some wiggle-room there for (3) "acceptance" for things like bisexuals deciding whether to engage in homosexual behavior or not.
I doubt it's any of these. I think it's edgelording. I think it's Iron Maiden feeding on Christian Satanic Rock panic by releasing Number of the Beast. I think it's Joe Biden doing Dark Brandon memes in real life. I think it's 4-chan making the left turn the OK sign into a white power symbol. It's meant to tweak the ideological opponents by saying the thing that will trigger them the most. In which case, well done fellas. Too bad the message was muddled by, you know, having people twerking in front of kids. Message discipline across broad coalitions is a lofty goal.
In general, my opinion on the groomer stuff is that I really, really doubt that the vast, teeming majority of the LGBT community is trying to convert the straights or their kids. Most gays alive today still remember how shitty it was to be a young, closeted gay before the mid-2000s and would prefer to spare kids nowadays the shittiness, so being more open and accepting about it is a good thing, but they don't mind the straights having their preference.
There are, however, a not insignificant number of predatory activist allies who want to collect exotic people like rare Pokemon. The more exotic the better (a shiny Trans kid is the winning card these days.) These people are overrepresented in media, influencer-types and, apparently, the education system. A lot of them don't mind if they make a kid's life measurably shittier as long as they are bolstering their collection. They're the left's version of conversion therapists.
There are also the actual pedos who wear activism like a convenient skinsuit, but I suspect those are mixed in with any group that provides easy access to kids proportionally based on how easy that access is.
The trick for LGBT is how to shed the predatory activists and police against the actual predators. The predatory activists tend to run a lot of the LGBT organizations, so it's a fair amount of cutting off of one's nose to get rid of the predatory activists. And getting rid of the actual predators entirely is a quixotic feat for a group as disorganized as "all of the gays."
One thing that would be really, really, really easy to do, though, is to stop supporting sexy drag shows for kids and stop advertising Folsom Street Fair stuff as being family friendly. If they were to take that really simple, easy step, it would go a long way toward convincing normies that the behavior is not, in fact, "groomy."
And the trick is that this is actually impossible. Right now, they have '50s Boy Scouts (or Catholic church) privileges where "society understands" that the collateral damage inherent to adult-child interaction is acceptable because of what the group does.
If society stops understanding this (or for bonus points, goes through another round of batshit insanity like they did in the '80s) you can expect them to return to predator status just like those groups did. It doesn't actually matter that their rates of abuse were far lower than public schools (the ultimate example of an organization that has a permanent pass for this), and it won't save the LGBT if and when society decides it doesn't want to play with them any more no matter how hard it polices itself.
They have the power right now, so they could
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Does "neglecting to purposefully seek out such cases in order to decry them" count as "supporting"? Do you think it's fair when the progressives demand the conservatives - the common people ones - police each and every edgelord on their side?
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Motte, meet bailey indeed. “The QILTBAGs include people who would fuck your kids” is true. “They’re cool with harboring people who would do so” is less likely, and “most of them are invested in it” is almost certainly not.
Care to elaborate on the nuance of “Jews will not replace us?” It seems pretty straightforward, especially when heard at a white-identitarian event.
I don't know if this is true, and I don't think it's very likely, but it would be hilarious to me if "jews" turned into a dogwhistle for "the cultural elite".
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“They’re cool with harboring people who would do so” seems like it is probably true, however. That’s the whole point of this thread.
Now the average gay has no interest in doing so- actually it seems like the average gay man would rather not be in the room with a child, at any point, ever- that’s true, but it certainly seems true that alphabet soup activism pushes organizations towards harboring people who would like to fuck kids, even if not directly, and that the movement as a whole seems to shrug their shoulders about that and write it off as a cost of doing business.
I don't think this is very good evidence of such a write-off. If one thinks that the chanter really is a diddler, and people there know it, and they're covering anyway, then sure. It's those middle links that are missing. Why think that the other marchers are "shrugging their shoulders?"
You have Griffin, who wants to sweep such statements under the rug as a provocative strategy. He doesn't seem to think the chanter is actually a pedophile, just like he hasn't actually killed any mayors. Then there's Fussy, who was uncomfortable with the chant and specifically started an alternate. Again, not exactly shrugging.
It's like going on to /v/ and saying "this guy called himself a faggot! and no one else really argued! the community must be really gay-friendly!"
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How is it not absolutely self evident that the trains are coming for the children? I feel like you would need to be almost literally insane to think otherwise.
If they’re not coming for the children, then what is the purpose of states passing bills to make themselves trans sanctuaries or whatever? Why is pride stuff being put in schools? Who was the one that made the “protect queer children” sticker I saw this morning?
The idea that any person could reasonably say, in 2023, that gender fetishists are not coming for children is absurd. They are very clearly, very well fundedly, literally putting pride gear in major retailers, coming for your children.
I mean, that depends on the meaning of 'coming for the children'. Trans activists see themselves as benevolent saviors, swooping in to protect innocent trans children from being tortured into suicide by evil Christians. In that sense, of course they would not be embarrassed about it. But you probably don't mean it in the same way.
I think the way that Christians see “coming for your children” is what the trans activists are doing. That’s why it seems so bizarre to me that they are trying to claim both at the same time. “We’re coming for your children” seems like it could practically be the header text of every pride event.
(I’m paraphrasing this is not an actual quote):
“We are coming for your children, but don’t worry we aren’t going to sexually assault them, we are just going to cut off parts of their body, mutilate others, give them hormones which will irreversibly sterilize them, and convince them that you, their parents, are trying to commit genocide if you try to stop us XOXOXO”
This is funny to me because Christians have been and still are guilty of doing all of those things: cut off parts of genitals, "sterilization", and IMO teaching eternal punishment in hell is at least as bad as convincing them their parents are trying to commit genocide.
And of course the child grooming.
A secular humanist could maybe make this argument. A christian should attend to the beam in their own eye.
That's really reaching.
That's not really a Christian practice. Literally no one I met was circumcised. Also, as horrible as the practice is, the big difference is that the genitals remain functional.
I think you need to put a lot more quote marks around that one. By that logic every woman that doesn't immediately drop her pants when I demand it is sterilizing me.
A problem that afflicts Christian churches less than it does public schools by at least an order of magnitude, last I checked.
Nope, they're doing just fine.
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Dont forget: They still want to have sex with "your children" as a group. That some of them dont identify an individual 10 year old they want to bang at 10, 12, 16, or 18 is still only a small defense. If a bunch of heterosexual men started going to girls schools espousing the merits of unprotected sex and then we saw a spike in teenage mothers, few in the media would fail to recognize the connection.
Same thing I said to @firmamenti. There seems to be some feeling going around that suddenly one group or another is okay to make inflammatory, unsupported generalizations about because they are generally unpopular here.
You've provided zero evidence that "they...as a group" want to have sex with children. You may not assert that any "they...as a group" wants to do something bad without supporting such an inflammatory claim with proportional evidence.
You just came off a three day ban for this exact thing, after I had previously warned you to stop, after a long string of similar behavior. So now you're banned for a week.
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You've stretched this far beyond any reason. "Some of them might want more sexual partners so that might be an incentive to convince more kids they're gay but even if they aren't grooming that kid specifically and aren't interested in anyone below 18 they're pedos because children were involved at some point in this nebulous chain of events".
By that logic any man who tells your kids that girls marry boys is a pedo, and a woman a female accomplice fetishist.
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Who are these abstract, Platonic pedophiles? Are they, by any chance, made of straw?
Abstract, platonic pedophiles and other horrors from beyond the stars
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What are you talking about? It is well documented that there are large discords dedicated to "hatching eggs" which means convincing kids they are transgender.
There was a question posed in my post you didnt even attempt to address: Is there a sexual incentive for gays and trannies to convince more kids to be gay and trans? Answer that, and I can answer you further.
Look at this from a transgender person's viewpoint:
when I transitioned, it was a good thing, my life immediately improved
if I had transitioned even earlier, it would've been even better
thus, when I help people realize they could have been born in the wrong body, show them the way out, and they transition at 12 instead of 32, I do very good things
Do you think this transgender person has a right to groom other people's children into outcomes that they believe are beneficial?
If a pedo thinks back very fondly on being diddled by his uncle, does that make it okay to diddle your kid?
I don't care about groomer logic, do whatever you want to your own disgusting body as an adult but stay away from children or face the chipper
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Extremely Online teenagers convincing each other that they're trans is still not pedophilia.
You didn't pose that question, either. You just sort of took it for granted.
Is your claim that those discord servers are populated by 100% teenagers? If not I don't see why this is relevant.
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You're failing the intellectual turing test. They see themselves as saving children who were born trans. It isn't obviously mutilation if the child is born trans and the diagnosis is accurate. Thus the phrase "coming for the children" has a relatively innocent interpretation here.
On the other hand, nobody has yet performed a randomized controlled trial on outcomes for different treatments for (or diagnostics of) trans children. (I looked very hard for papers on this last year. The only RCTs are on adults, and in non-RCTs measuring suicide rates in teenagers the effect sizes for surgery and for social transition were about the same. A trans rights activist I was conversing with argued that to perform an RCT would be unethical.)
It's mutilation even if those concepts exist in the real world and the child fits them, because we do not have a sex change operation which is not mutilation.
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If you believe that gender is sufficiently innate, then there is no recruitment. There is only whether or not you let them suffer.
How they justify it doesn't change whether or not they're coming for your kids.
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Lots of posts get reported for "consensus building" because someone asserts a proposition that the reporter disagrees with.
This post is an actual example of "consensus building." You are framing your assertion as something one would have to be "almost literally insane" to disagree with.
You are allowed to argue that trans activists are "coming for the children," but you need to actually argue it, not just say "It's obvious, it's absurd to think otherwise."
Also, do not use reddit/rdrama euphemisms like "the trains." Speak clearly (and you can feel how you feel about trans people, but you cannot use generalized pejoratives directed in a way that includes other posters here).
Let's be fair, "trains" is a necessary circumlocution on most platforms, and therefore not necessarily a pejorative - just a circumlocution.
But it's not necessary here, and it's never used in a non-derogatory sense. So don't use it here.
I’m saying you’re wrong, it is used in a non derogatory sense, because circumlocutions are the only way to talk about that subject in many places.
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Did you read the rest of my post? The examples I gave of trans people “coming for your children” were:
Several bills passed to make states like Minnesota trans sanctuaries.
Work done by trans activists to get retailers like Target to prominently display trans affirming fetishes in their stores, specifically targeted towards children.
“Pride days” in schools
Phrases like “protect queer kids” and the associated paraphernalia.
How is it consensus building to cite examples that support my claim that trans people are openly targeting, coming for, and recruiting children?
Yes, I read the rest of your post.
You did not link any of the things you cited to "the trains." Moreover, you can argue that individual trans people and groups are doing what you claim. If you want to say "the trains" are doing it, you need a lot more evidence. Same as with any other group that people are fond of broadly accusing of all sorts of nefarious activities and ideologies.
Also, you still may not assert that it's "almost literally insane" to think otherwise. Whether you intended it as hyperbole or not, it is the kind of consensus building language we explicitly discourage.
I want to make sure I understand this, but first I’d ask you to stop using Reddit drama language like “the trains”.
There must be ground realities that we can agree on to be able have a discussion, right? Like for instance: trans people exist? If somebody claimed that the existence of trans people was an elaborate psy op and that none of them were real and they were all holograms, it would be appropriate to say “you would have to be suffering from some sort of paranoid delusion to believe this.”
Or no? The point that I’m making here is that the people claiming both that they must come for the children and you are a bigot to stop them, but also that they aren’t coming for the children and you are a bigot to suggest they are, are trying to create a sort of insane (in the technical sense) delusion in people’s minds.
Again this isn’t consensus building. This is a description of what I perceive these people to be doing.
This stuff has been well, well discussed here, hasn’t it? Are you disputing that these things are happening at all?
... Are you trying to be funny? I quoted you (hence the quote marks), because I told you in my initial warning to stop doing that.
No, I am not. I spelled out the problems with your post clearly and explicitly. That you are pretending that we're disagreeing about "ground realities" like whether or not trans people exist, combined with whatever you are doing above, suggests to me that you are not engaging in good faith. You've been warned several times in the past for low-effort comments like this, and every time you have pushed back insisting that everything you said was right and reasonable. This is of course not an uncommon reaction, but your reaction in particular is really doing you no favors. You are not going to gain any traction by saying things and then claiming you didn't say them or that you actually said something different.
You said not to use Reddit drama phrases, then continued doing so, presumably to be antagonistic. I asked you to stop.
This seems relatively straight forward to me.
What am I claiming I didn’t say? That seems like a bit of a silly thing to do, since the posts are all right here for anybody to read.
It doesn’t seem like you’re trying to argue in good faith here. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere.
You can yell at me more if you want or misquote me or mischaracterize what I said or even continue being unnecessarily antagonistic, but I won’t reply to you any more in this thread.
Have a nice day.
No, I quoted the phrases you used to explain why your post was unacceptable.
I believe this was straightforward to you and you are being intentionally difficult and disingenuous. The only reason I have continued to reply to you this long is because in my capacity as a mod, I try to make sure everyone understands why they are being modded. I think you understand perfectly well why you were modded, and you're attempting some kind of rhetorical jujutsu here that isn't going to work.
You are not required to reply to me at all. You are only required to post in accordance with the rules.
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This is an odd request since you literally used the phrase "the trains" in your original post.
He’s doing that to be antagonistic. He said not to say “trains” (which I don’t agree is a Reddit thing but whatever), so I stopped, but he kept using that term.
I don’t think it’s an odd request. Im asking him not to be unnecessarily antagonistic.
Here’s another example of him misquoting me, then arguing with his own misquoting: https://www.themotte.org/post/499/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/102514?context=8#context
He’s doing this, presumable again, to be antagonistic.
(But this is way off topic sorry to anybody reading along. I does get annoying when people mischaracterize what you say)
He kept mentioning it, which is quite different.
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where?
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It seems to me that the problem is not that you "cite[d] examples that support my claim that trans people are openly targeting, coming for, and recruiting children" but rather that you insist that your interpretation of that evidence is the only rational one.
Take "protect queer kids," for example. Leaving aside that queer refers to a lot more than just trans, my understanding is that that phrase is meant to mean "protect queer kids from [bullying, suicide, etc]. Even if you disagree, surely you can see that some might interpret it that way, can you not? Or even that it is possible that that interpretation is correct, and that yours is incorrect?
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There's two equivocations here, what does coming for your children mean?
Is it persuading children to be trans or is it persuading children to have sex with adults?
Is it persuading children being trans is okay or is it persuading children to be trans?
Some of these are obvious, others aren't and within the coalition that pushes this there are various levels of agreement and desires about the exact meaning, as every political movement with broad appeal has to pretend to serve as many masters as it has currents.
As someone with deep sympathy for the experience of trans people I still think all of these possible meanings are terrible however. Being trans is fucking awful and wishing it on anybody or seeking to increase the number of trans people in the world is about as straightforwardly evil as you can get. And even the most charitable reading of teaching love and acceptance is at least terrible in the way it's expressed. Loving people do not sneeringly say they want to turn father against son.
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Especially when the people defending this seem to have no ability to muster a convincing denial of ‘coming for your children’.
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People have a way of sarcastically saying extreme versions of things they actually believe. It lets them probe how far they can go and gives them plausible deniability if they go a little too far since they can always claim to be sarcastic.
It's a way to get an estimate on the boundary of the Overton window while pushing it in their preferred direction. And if it goes bad, as per the plausible deniability you mentioned, they can claim that the jokes on you and other lame bigots, they were only pretending to be retarded.
Maybe in some sense, they're right. Perhaps they're on the right side of history, so chants like "we’re coming for your children" are only wrong in that they manifested too early.
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Well "people" as in people the current political regime likes. Otherwise you actively have to avoid getting anywhere near telling people what you truly wish to fedpost in Minecraft.
I find it's a good heuristic to believe people when they tell you who they are and what they want to do. On every side.
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The grooming accusations feel like a motte and baily to me, where the motte is "Trans people want their culture to be normal enough that people aren't worried about their kids seeing a trans person and considering being trans too, the same way they might see a firefighter and decide they want to be one." and the baily is "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children."
There's also the facet where- forget the baily- people actually are afraid of the thing I just described as the motte as well. But when the "groomer" rhetoric is used, it often still seems like an exaggeration and catastrophisation of this fear into the "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children" implication.
I do like how people here on TheMotte will actually come out and say it when what they care about is that they don't think queer culture should be normalized and explain their reasons. I wish the greater culture war would focus more on object level concerns.
At least for me, it's on a bit of a different vector. My concern is activists who want people, including kids, to be self-critical of their identity characteristics in a social, cultural and political fashion. Everything else comes after this point. It's the symptoms of that original cause.
Self-deconstruction is inherently very unhealthy. It's not something that should be encouraged in any way, shape or form. Yes, I'm talking from personal experience about this. And yes, I do think it makes kids vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
This is something I've been convinced of for quite a while now. A combination of the observation that most people don't actually have a "gender identity" but simply recognise what they actually are, and watching a (now former) friend navel-gaze his way into transitioning (helped along by taking on a trans housemate who acted as Grima Wormtongue, no doubt).
I'm currently thinking that this excessive introspection is some kind of manifestation of narcissism.
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Would you mind expanding on this with examples of what you mean, especially any examples outside of trans stuff?
I think you're getting at something interesting here but I'm not fully understanding it.
I actually do think it manifests in a lot of ways, especially in a gender fashion, although it also pops up from time to time in regards to race. For example, encouraging men to not speak up and to let women speak, because historically women don't get a chance to speak. Or the whole diAngelo approach to race relations.
What makes this hard, is that I don't think that most people actually internalize/actualize these ideas in this way of course...especially advocates for these ideas. They really don't self-deconstruct, and this is why this isn't a recognized danger. However, I do think there are some people who are vulnerable to these messages. And I do believe this is one of the big reasons why we see links between autism and a desire to transition...they're people who are more likely to internalize these messages and self-deconstruct. And again, there's no shade being thrown here on this. I'm one of those people.
My take on a lot of the culture wars, especially when it comes to kids, is that Progressive ideas need "guardrails" to prevent vulnerable internalizers from taking these messages too seriously and personally. As well, they need help after the fact in being "deprogrammed" from these messages. The problem is again that this isn't a recognized problem, so there's very little ability to get effective help out there.
Personally, to be blunt, I don't think there's much interest in actually putting up said guardrails. Which is why I think kids shouldn't be exposed to this stuff. But I'd be OK with these ideas put forward alongside alternatives if those guardrails were there. (The truth is, the alternatives themselves might be effective guardrails on their own).
As a side note, to maybe throw some fuel on this fire, much of this I believe goes for the whole Incel thing as well. People argue about how to fix that problem, and a lot of it is deprogramming the anti-male/anti-masculine rhetoric that's been common for a few decades now.
Thank you for elaborating!
Yes, absolutely. On the more serious side, this brings to mind Scott Aaronson's comment quoted in Untitled, on the less serious side of this David Mitchell bit.
Unfortunately I believe you're right. To the extent the trade off is even acknowledged (and it is generally treated as though it does not exist), it is acknowledged as being worthwhile.
Yup. Like I said, I really do think, especially in the Aaronson case, we're talking about very much maladaptive socialization.
My experience is always being blamed for taking this shit too seriously. Just to make it clear. The response is something more like you're just messed up, go get therapy. (Even though there's a good chance the therapy is going to reinforce these ideas)
I think the problem is a desire to maintain Kayfabe, the idea is one side is good, and the other side is bad. I do think this is almost a necessary function of a power-based political movement, be it left right or center. You simply can't acknowledge costs and trade-offs, or find ways to mitigate them. So what happens is that the costs are simply excised as much as possible to whatever out-group you have.
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Now that's a succinct way to explain where the problem lies!
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I can throw the same against you. Trans and Queer activists say they only want to normalize their way of life so that kids can consider being trans/queer too (Bailey). And they do that by getting books like Gender Queer into school libraries with scenes like this in there (Motte). And if parents object that this is not appropriate for school aged children, then suddenly the are "book banning bigots" who attack vulnerable queer community. Oh, and also chanting "we are coming for your children" is obviously a joke.
So my position is that to promote books depicting oral sex on strapon to elementary school children by adults behind parents back is literally grooming. Then lying about it, mocking any outrage against it and fighting to keep that book in the schools is if not grooming at least facilitating grooming.
Lmao. Reminds me of my own school textbooks apart from the dicks and absurd gay sex were added by students who would get a detention for their vandalism if they were caught. What do naughty kids do now, add clothes to the characters and turn the dicks into cans of beer?
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I think you got your parts of the medieval keep confused.
...
(insert Anakin and Padme meme)
Yep
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The motte is "they're trying to turn the children trans". The bailey, if there is one, is "they're trying to turn the children trans so they, personally, can have sex with them". The motte is quite sufficient.
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I’ve posted before about this- grooming is directionally correct even if some of it is probably an exaggeration. And the only objections from the LGBT lobby are accusations of bigotry, sophistry, and lack of denial of the meat of the accusation.
So no, it’s obviously something that is at least close enough for government work. That’s why it sticks.
It can even be defended against the exaggeration charge. The American Left - contrary to the medical establishment in Europe - has decided to die on the puberty blockers hill.
We know two things: most people with GD desist and the few studies done on kids who've had puberty blocked...showed an atypically high level of non-desistance.
Now, you can say that those cohorts were just subject to especially good screening. I'm skeptical (especially due to the advocacy of blockers as a "pause button" so kids can figure out what the hell is going on).
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Well it's weird, its a word with a Rape affect but that is overloaded. "They groomed the prince to be king- those horrible, horrible groomers." Suddenly it seems silly to use as an insult
"You're teaching my kids things that affect how they behave and prepare them for a world where gay and trans and queer are things they can be!"
"chad-yes.jpg, gay and trans and queer are things they can be. Do you have a problem with that? Why?"
(I know why. We talk about it here all the time. But my point is to display how- without the affect it devolves back into the reasonable version of the debate that we tend to have here.)
But I won't argue that it hasn't been effective. Tools of war and all that.
I think a lot of the efficacy has come from the word being overloaded with rape affect though.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect when describing gang members "grooming" kids to act as runners for their gang, or when people talk about cult members "grooming" prospective converts into going along with questionable practices by the cult leadership, or when people talk about an emotionally abuser grooming their victims into rationalizing their reactions to abuse.
Nobody worries in these contexts, because "groom" as a pejorative has a long and entirely uncontroversial use to refer to a specific sort of abuse of trust, whereby a person in a dominant position induces a vulnerable individual into granting them a special and unaccountable position of trust, increasing the victim's vulnerability and isolating them from others who might object or intervene. One of the more pernicious examples of this is grooming for sexual abuse, but the pretense that grooming kids for rape is the only possible meaning of the phrase is absurd to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on google.
This lie persists because it is rhetorically useful to progressives, and for no other reason.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
Building secret relationships with a kid* outside the circles of trust of their parents, family and other authority figures, for purposes of encouraging them to take actions that that their parents and family would not approve of. That's the understood, central definition of "grooming" across all contexts, from sexual to emotionally abusive to criminal to fringe-ideological, and always has been. It is a profoundly fucked-up and hostile thing to do, completely irrespective of the reasons why one chooses to do it, because it is a direct attack on the parents' relationship with their child. There is no context when any authority figure should be encouraging and assisting my kid in keeping secrets from me, ever, under any circumstances. That this fact even needs to be stated is a complete travesty. They are my kids, not the teacher's, and while we have all accepted that some parents are so bad that the government needs to step in, that is emphatically not the case here or the teachers would be reporting the parents to the cops rather than lying to them.
*The same principle generalizes to adults as well, as seen in discussions of emotional abuse in relationships and cult recruitment, but with adults it's murkier because they are empowered to make their own decisions. This doesn't actually prevent them from being groomed, but it makes the situation murkier than it is with kids, at least from the outside.
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I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
Medical transition involves HRT and not just surgery. There are trans people who choose to only get HRT and to never have genital surgery.
There are many trans people who voluntarily have genital surgery and are happier afterwards. There are no (or negligibly few) children who voluntarily have sex with adults and are happier afterwards.
Medium and long term HRT use can cause permanent sexual dysfunction and sterility.
Although no cutting or crushing is involved I’d still classify it as “mutilation” in the sense that you are purposefully permanently damaging healthy tissue to the point of dysfunction.
For example, if you purposely induced a fever in a baby for long enough to cause brain damage, you’ve certainly “mutilated” that child although no scalpels came out.
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Citation needed. Lots of teenagers agree to have sex with adults. Many of them later regret it, but many of them do not. I doubt there are any good statistics on it because of the highly controversial nature, but I would be willing to bet that the number that are "happier" is nonnegligible, if you're measuring happier based on the same sort of self-report that the trans children are using. Go ask a fourteen year old girl with a 30 year old boyfriend, or one who's sleeping with her gym teacher, whether she'd be "happier" without them. And for some of them they might actually be right. My ballpark guess, pulling numbers out of my ass, would be somewhere between 30-70% of underage people who have uncoerced sex with adults would "be happier" being allowed to do it, conditional on not receiving significant social or legal backlash from society, or being pressured to lie or cognitive dissonance themselves. Which is also where my ballpark guess for children who undergo medical transition is.
There isn't some magical force of nature that causes all relationships that pass the magic barrier of 18 years old to be automatically predatory and unhealthy, such that they are all actually harmful. However, I think that as a society it's useful to have Schelling point of "do not have sex with anyone under 18 for any reason", because it safeguards the significant portion who are coerced or groomed into it, or just have bad judgement and don't consider long term consequences properly because they're kids/teenagers, even if that harms the few who would be fine. If the potential harms are 5x greater than the benefits (compared to the outside option of waiting until they're 18), then from a utilitarian perspective it's worth preventing all of them if the proportion of those who would regret it are at least 1/5. We're not dooming people to never have sex ever, or never transition ever, just wait until they're 18 and have the mental and emotional maturity to figure out what they actually want long term.
If there's any situation where the idea of false consciousness may be legitimate, "14 year old thinks she wouldn't be happier without her 30 year old boyfriend" has got to be it.
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Supposedly Joel Schumacher became sexually active at 11 and doesn't seem to regret it.
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I don't think this is as true as you think. It brings to mind an interview with a woman who recounted how she lost her virginity at the age of 14 to David Bowie. She sure seemed to enjoy it, and revel in the memory. Of course, the taboo means you don't hear about it, but not hearing about it is not the same as not existing.
Not to be a neckbeard, but that’s technically ephebophilia and not pedophilia. I think you can find no shortage of men and women who had sex with adults as teenagers and don’t regret it years later.
It seems completely negligible that actual preadolescent children have sex with adults, and then look back fondly on the memory.
I don't think you'll find many people who will call a 14 year old a woman, instead of a girl.
I take your point, but this is also the age range that we're referring to with regards to hormones and surgery.
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Part of the problem is that the American age of consent is a bit ludicrous - by the time you're 18 you've already spent a third of your life sexually aware, and most people lose their virginity long before then. So it's very important to clarify whether one is talking about a) actual rape of prepubescent children, or b) mutually consensual sexual encounters that are biologically normal, legal in most of the world, and just happen to be called "statutory rape" in America.
I find it particularly concerning that progressives hold the position that teens are capable of deciding they're trans (complete with devastatingly life-altering physical interventions) when they're young but not capable of deciding they want sex (which is a hell of a lot safer, done responsibly). This just seems incoherent.
Keep in mind that the American age of consent is mostly fairly sensible in most places, but California's uniquely insane "18 or illegal, no exceptions" rule is the only one people hear about because Hollywood.
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The Junior Anti-Sex League's position is fundamentally "straight men having sex bad"; I feel to see how their pro-eunuch stance (intentionally uglifying men and women alike isn't increasing the above, that's for sure) or their other attempts to problematize straight sex is inconsistent with that outlook. The first clear modern example of this bloc gaining power is the imposition of an "age of consent" concept in the first place.
Newspeak; it's an attempt to conflate "non-coercive" with "doesn't offend the sensibilities/interests of the above group".
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Sure you do, just not from women or straight men (i.e. "those most in need of/most likely to adopt this crimestop reflex"); you tend to hear positive reviews a lot more about this on the gay male side of the aisle (Milo Yiannopoulos, George Takei).
And given what they have to say about it (I also know of one particular man who had nothing but good things to say about his straight relationship in his early teen years), the assertion that it's 100% a net-negative is clearly false.
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As problematic as the "groomer" smear is, I hope it's at least understood that it is also a product of many years of every nuanced, reasonable expression of concern over gender-affirming care being ignored, gaslit, and ostracized as bigotry while medical professionals and academics (plus all sorts of recruited activists from the normal world with no domain experience) ran full steam ahead with their fingers in their ears.
It is not my first preference to 'go there' with hyperbolic and catastrophizing language when discussing these issues, partly because I do have a worry about its spillover on regular LGB people who don't support giving puberty blockers to children. But since the smear seems to be the only thing that has drawn blood, forced my opposition to ocassionally pause or walk things back, and has produced a swelling of support from a subset of 'normal folk', I would be an idiot to urge for its retirement.
So, I do have to appreciate it as an argumentative tactic. Take the example of a conversation between a conservative and a TRA I posted in another comment:
"You're teaching my kids things that affect how they behave and prepare them for a world where gay and trans and queer are things they can be!"
"chad-yes.jpg, gay and trans and queer are things they can be. Do you have a problem with that? Why?"
Now, the next comment by the conservative in a reasoned fair argument is to simply give their reasons why. but you'll note that the second comment is already getting close to calling the conservative a bigot.
So often, this is where it happens, the TRA short circuits the rational debate by calling the conservative a bigot. It switches things to a winning emotional battleground, and operates as a well poisoning attack for the conservatives motives.
So what does the "Groomer" argument do? It just does the same thing- but it does it first. By phrasing the first complaint as "You're grooming my children" you get to do the same well poisoning attack before the TRA has a good place to call you a bigot. You get the preemptive strike and first mover advantage, AND you can defend your claim with the motte and baily.
In fairness, this has been a common tactic across debates. If you can’t win on the merits, imply or even outright state that the opponent is in some way morally deficient. One thing I see happening more often is that those opposed are less likely to be cowed by such claims.
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Just wanted to say thanks to you and @DTulpa because this 3 comment chain did a better job at communicating my frustrations with the use of the term groomer while also communicating the frustrations of those who use the term groomer than basically the whole of the interactions I've seen on the Internet since the term gained popularity in the culture war.
This is why I'm so fond of this place, I love when it actually lives up to its name.
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Controversial, but I suspect that sissy hypno porn etc viewed by terminally online males is responsible for more MtF conversions than what middle aged LGBTQ activists are advocating in schools.
The former has a direct pipeline to transition (along with programming, nerdy pursuits, being an incel etc). The latter doesn’t seem to, it seems unlikely that some fuddy duddy old teacher interrupting the usual sex ed lessons students don’t pay attention to anyway in order to talk about whatever trans activists want them to somehow leads to large numbers of otherwise completely normal boys deciding they’re transwomen.
The material responsible for the huge uptick in trans identification isn’t taught in class, it’s available freely online in huge volumes and dealing with it is much more difficult than banning kids from attending drag performances.
TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.
Autogynephilia is also not nearly as important. The MTFs are mascots for the 'T' of LGBT because they are the meanest, most aggressive, and most visually provacative. Don't you find it odd that almost all the important mascots/members of the trans community are MTF? Jenner, the Admiral Biden promoted, Dylan Mulvaney, etc, when, stats show its the teenage girls who are most afflicted by this social contagion? Well the reason is that those girls, Ellen Page being the only famous one I can recall, end up turning into very meek, depressed, sterile persons that kinda pass as a not very masculine boy. The MTFs are all just visually men wearing a get up. And this is important. They are forcing the potentially on the fence people to pick a side. Those liberal ladies that found Rue Paul amusing and a bit funny? They now are forced to decide between admitting they've been enjoying some insane thing (instead of a comedy show), or siding with a Republican.
I think it's also simple demographics: FtMs are mostly anxious/depressed teenage girls, while MtFs are a mix of terminally online losers and older men with successful careers (Kaitlin Jenner is a prime example of the latter, arguably Rachel Levine too).
So for someone like Joe Biden, if you want to promote an openly transgender but still qualified person, you probably have much more MtF than FtM options.
Also I've noticed that a lot of passing FtMs, like Buck Angel for example, actually seem critical of a lot of ideas the trans movement is pushing (e.g. Angel opposes giving MtFs free access to women's bathrooms, arguing for unisex toilets instead). It's probably because as women they understand that women don't want to compete against Lia Thomas, don't want to be locked in a cell with Karen White, don't want to wax Yessica Yaniv's balls, and don't want their six-year-old daughter exposed to male genitalia in a women-only spa.
It's probably quite hard to find mature FtMs who are willing to fight for the right of MtFs to invade women's spaces, and that's the front of the battle currently.
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There's something to be said for low-hanging fruit.
Like, we know the internet is a cesspool and will always wrestle with that. Parents shouldn't have to fight a two-front war because the supposed reasonable adults acting in loco parentis in Grassland are teaching...controversial things.
We can use the progressives' own retort to "what about black crime?": it's different when it's being done with the authority and force of the government.
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No, not directly but it's crowd cover and encouragement to take your paraphilia public / evolve it into an identity. No, I highly doubt that anything put on by the school is ever a spark for a kid to trans (except actual groomery grooming), but it's definitely gasoline, and a firepit.
For a lot of paraphilias including agp, the exhibitionism and humiliation is part of the excitement and can eventually sublimate into association.
A teen in the 90s who got turned on by putting on his sister's dress, would still not be caught dead coming to school like that. So it's ability and context to grow is stunted, and in many cased desisted, subsumed into hetero-erotic exploration with women, or maybe remains a mild kink. But when the teacher and school is encouraging it, and more importantly you are given examples of other people doing it and seemingly getting away with it, you now have a context to dive all in and let it consume you, and receive the positive social feedback.
Finally, returning to your initial TL;DR, again no I doubt it's causing anything outright, but certainly someone with some mild curiousity can get tickled by the idea and it's a great way to grow into an earworm.
As a guy I can tell you there are a lot of random little slightly 'strange' fleeting experiences that I can still trace certain shapes of my adult sexual-psyche back to today. Even if you want to make an argument that in every scenario, the spark was already there, I'm saying that something as ridiculous as a teacher reading a book that makes you feel weird can really feed that spark.
I’ve never personally been worried about that sort of grooming. To me, the part that’s especially grooming-ish isn’t that. It’s the schools encouraging kids to experiment with sex-related ideas at school with the school not only teaching kids to keep sexual secrets from their parents, but helping keep it a secret from their parents. They do things like having “trans clothing closets” so your son can wear a dress at school, will call your child by a different name at school, including using different pronouns and will hide all of this information from you.
This to me is the grooming. Teaching kids that parents are not to be informed of some things means that, should another adult decide that he or she would like a sexual relationship with your child, he no longer has to work that hard to convince that child to not tell. The child’s school has made it clear that if the child would be embarrassed telling his parents, or if he just plain doesn’t want to, the child doesn’t tell. Add in that we’re having kids as young as 5 being exposed to very adult sexual ideas, and it’s thus much easier to convince a kid who’s already used to thinking and talking about sex that going farther is okay.
And to add to this- the idea that institutions keep meaningful secrets about a child from that child’s parents flies in the face of literally every piece of wisdom about protecting children that has ever been realized.
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At least this explanation comports with "homosexuals reproduce through child abuse," in that sexually deviant exposure affects sexual development. It also reinforces the social contagion theory.
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Regarding trans children at least, I don't know how many parents take their cues on child-rearing from online porn. I think there's a general heuristic that the internet is a crazy place, and whatever hot new fad or kink that is expressed from online spaces is just "that weird meme crap my kid ocassionally references that I don't understand or feel like understanding, because the 'net is crazy". It's hard to separate it from "The Grimace Millshake Challenge" or whatever bizarre FOMO meme is being reported on, and you can see your Mom's face screw up in judgmental confusion as you attempt to explain it.
If this is just crazy internet shit, you can hold onto the hope (somewhat reliably) that the fad will pass and all you need to do is hold down the fort as the storm moves past you. Codifying it into education sanewashes and perpetuates the phenomenon, because you can't so easily dismiss an army of smart-sounding educators who supposedly knows what's best for your child and are 'experts' on teaching kids - since you're just some dummy that has the humility to understand some things are beyond your understanding and intellect, so might as well to defer to your betters even if it makes you uncomfortable
I think many people are wising up to the idea that this trusted dynamic has been utterly abused. And resisiting the trans push into education is 'holding down the fort'.
The idea is that the child will take a lot of cues from online porn, and considering the child is the one who might transition, that's more relevant than whatever the parent thinks. Consider teenage socialists - are they getting that socialism from their middle or high school teachers? Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet!
I think the number of kids who would want to transition is within 1% of where it would be if schools didn't mention trans issues at all, and political incentives to get parents (potential R voters) riled up plus whatever caused the moral panics about satanic child abuse explain the focus on trans in schools.
They aren't? It seems to me that over the last 15-20 years there has been a massive influx of teacher-activists whose entire raison-d'etre is to turn their students into activists for progressive causes, with LGBTQ+++ only the current fad. A key part of the Left's slow march through the institutions over the last 70 years has been through the education pipeline, trickling down from academia to grade school (and younger), and that the current credentialing system for emerging teachers is essentially a factory line for producing good little socialists. This is not, IME, dissimilar from how higher education has done the same to journalism programs, leading to the current situation with a media that is 90+% ideologically captured. Control the narratives through school and TV, and even the kids who aren't political will grow up with the socially approved understanding of the world. By the time the teenagers are being riled into activism by their cool young green-haired teachers (at my kids' charter school a few years back, they all worked on a class project to obstruct drilling at Standing Rock, even though we are thousands of miles away) they've already been primed with 8 years of socialist righteousness.
Go back to the 1990s and you will find socialist-driven environmental messaging seeping into every pore of the public grade school experience. A bit farther back, at my large suburban American high school in the late 1980s, the advanced history class used as its primary textbook Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This isn't new; on the contrary, it's just so normal it's hard to notice.
I said that from personal experience with teenage socialists over the past decade. The specific far-left tropes and sayings they repeat do not come from their teachers, they come from places like twitter or discord, or youtube, or possibly their classmates who got them from the internet. I agree that there are left-wing teachers, but they are not the direct cause here.
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This was almost completely absent from my education in the 2000s.
Since I didn’t take AP enviro science, I got more environmentalist messaging from Magic School Bus than from actual school. Honestly, I find it kind of odd to label that as socialist rather than just…left-wing.
Government was a civic religion class with a focus on judicial review. Same for US history. Even world history spent far more time on the ancients than on anything post-Marx. The closest to endorsing socialism was probably the AP Econ admiration for Keynes.
Wait. South Carolina state history was openly apologist for the South, both for the John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond periods. That’s as political as I remember it getting.
I don’t think I’m just putting my head in the sand here.
Well, maybe location matters. I'm in Oregon, part of the "left coast," to be sure. And the 1980s -- when I was in high school -- and through the 1990s there was a massive influx of Californians looking to escape the results of hard-left politics while recreating them somewhere else. I imagine the American South was quite different.
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And my point is that assuming children's gender identities or sexual orientations are being shaped by exposure to online porn, then we are from and away from 'born this way', and parents may feel they have a duty to restrict and deny access to such material, its relatives, and all their associated theorycrafting if they they deem it ultimately harmful for their offspring - without having to deal with a decentralized mass of sneering 'betters' who repeatedly/fraudulently cite The Science as being on their side, and who will utilize any mass of power they've accrued to culturally coerce you into behaving differently, up to calling CPS (and why believe it would stop there, left undeterred?).
Parents are often reliant on the integrity and validity of our institutions so they know what to expect, preempt, encourage, or ameliorate when it comes to the acculturation of their children. Instinct can probably get you far, but in a complex society with layers of social/economic/political abstractions, parents are looking for a consensus guard rail that reinforces their beliefs, gently reminding them "Yes, encourage that!" and "No, do what you can to curb that!". Validating the trans phenomenon as 'just some other way of being' after saying something that layman's ears might interpret as "The porn is mind controlling your kid and nobody should be concerned because #Pride" is seriously messing with the credibility of that rail, and the more it is emedded and officiated, the more concerned parents will be left out to dry, because...
"...Holy shit, I can't believe you disagree with the doctors and the teachers and about 75% of politicians (see, this is a totally non-partisan thing!) about the utility of teaching gender fluidity in Kindergarten! You still think it's a memetic contagion run amok? That is soooo 2023. Jordan Peterson is calling, and he wants you to clean your room! Haha."
I'm not sure if the above counts as uncharitable or inflammatory. But I was compelled to write it out and illustrate my point because these are very real conversations I've had too many times to count. I'm not too keen on the consequences of that dismissive disregard getting heavier.
nobody is calling CPS over parents preventing their kids from watching porn. there is no culture war over parents preventing their children from watching online porn. This is because 'kids and sexuality' is a taboo pressure point for almost everyone in the US. Which is why conservatives try to associate trans with child + sex (grooming!). The culture war issues are all about trans in schools, drag queen story hour, etc.
If your concern is that schools or institutions embrace trans, then ... they embrace trans because everyone does, so we circle back to the original 'is trans real and good' debate, 'society as a whole' isn't going to suppress something most people think is good. If your concern is your kid becoming trans, then said institutions have basically no causal role in an individual kid deciding they are trans (other than 'not explicitly opposing it it', which brings us back to the first point). Nowhere does it make sense to specifically attack schools. The entire 'trans in schools' issue is based on a bunch of false premises that spread because they rile up disconnected but concerned parents.
I think they embrace trans because they want to, and they have Bostock vs Clayton County gave them a fig leaf to push through in every space they could.
Everyone certainly does not embrace trans.
This is only true if it is not a social contagion. I think it is a social contagion, much like suicide or anorexia, so I think schools are actively making more children trans just via exposure.
My proposed alternative was 'Schools? no. Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet', which is as if not more compatible with social contagion than teachers.
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The entire thrust of my post wasn't a concern over the porn, but how we expect society to react to it and its attendant psychologies. You do not need to put some bizarre scenario in my mouth about 'CPS being called because the parents don't show porn to their kids'. You can ready my post again, notice that the 'CPS' comment was in reference to the generic 'coerce you into behaving differently' (which does, can, or may soon include affirming your child's stated gender and using their preferred pronouns at home, depending on where you are) - and since you are a regular poster here, you could probably reasonably assume that's what I was referring to, instead of inserting an absurd caricature of my statement.
The existence of leather fetish porn does not necessitate a Grade School level understanding of fetishism and sexuality for young children, nor does it require some passive acceptance and validation of every strange, oddball choice or behavior a child may exhibit. It's not that I want children who are soon-to-be fetishists to be locked out of any understanding of themselves. But if social contagion is real and the teachers are installing 'Leather Week' on the calendar where they dress up and make the whole thing a fun game and are way too interested in preemptively identifying their student candidates and absentmindedly 'nudging them along the path', I don't think it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Consider that reality, and then compare it to another one where every PTA or school faculty member might say "Hey, your 6 year old probably doesn't know what they're doing, but it might best if he doesn't wear the Kink Boots/Dog Mask/Ass Chaps he steals from your closet to school every week". If you are concerned that the internet is leading your kid astray (and quite likely is), it is of no help to you when all your institutions shrug their shoulders and ask what the big deal is.
And of course, I consider this whole thing to be an element of a multi-part problem. Candidly, I think a world where everybody is 'OK with trans' is a world where huge swathes of the population (if not a majority) have been so buried under propaganda and deprived of sound critical arguments (that do exist); to such a degree that they have to delude themselves and preempt serious argument to maintain their views, or are too brow-beaten and self-preserving to argue against it. I say that based on what I see today as extremely flimsy evidence with a disproportionate level of dismissiveness of counter-arguments and emotional blackmail ("If you don't affirm, your kid will commit suicide"). Now, should these people be catered to any way? Maybe so! That is certainly a valid possibility! But 'the majority decides what's right and just' is so boring and obvious. I am interested in separating good ideas from bad ideas, to the best of my ability. And if society wants to gorge itself on a bellyful of bad ideas, I can't stop it, but I can record it.
My point is that the state is not preventing you from taking the kinds of action that might actually prevent a child from wanting to transition, they are doing things like 'sometimes awarding the pro-trans parent the child in custody disputes'. So the entire character of the oturage over this just doesn't make sense. And I am not sure if 'not giving a child gender-affirming care who wants one in an otherwise normal household' is/will be a legal reason for CPS/similar to take a child away in any US state? If it is, I'd appreciate a link, I couldn't find anything with a quick google. If not, then with the only similar thing I'm aware of, I don't think 'taking your child away because they are trans' is a particularly useful way to represent 'considering trans acceptance in custody disputes'. Even if I disagree with that, it's much less obviously EVIL than weighing evidence in a custody dispute, where there are two parents' 'natural rights' in conflict as opposed to a clear violation of one parent's 'natural rights'
This is like worrying about getting covid from surfaces and ritually washing your hands. I'm sure one person got covid from a surface, but it was much less common than airborne transmission by like 1000x. Leather week (does that exist in a school? I'd be surprised, leather is a very bdsm-adjacent/kinky queer subculture) isn't, causally, anything if every child is watching porn by age 12 and has seen /r/egg_irl a few times by age 14.
No, what I'm saying is if most people, including those in power, believe something, and are acting on it, the only argument of interest is 'convincing them otherwise'. Side-arguments like ' is in our schools and brainwashing our children' don't really help you, because the people in the schools and most of the parents in the schools authentically believe being trans is vaguely good and think said brainwashing is probably fine as a result. You can't not brainwash a child who will just mimetically absorb whatever they see.
California here I come, right back where I started from:
The bill hasn't passed yet and they are still adding and deleting parts, but in general Scott "Leather Man" Weiner is co-sponsoring this little gem:
"Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the health, safety, and welfare of the child.
This bill, for purposes of this provision, would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
"SECTION 1. Section 3011 of the Family Code is amended to read:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."
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Everyone does not embrace trans. Even pro-trans people spend a lot of time denying that the trans things that are happening, are happening, which would indicate lack of support.
How do you know that? I've heard stories of troubled kids that were more neglected by the school system, and the moment they came out as trans, they got full support of all the adults in the school. Do you think that sort of behavior plays no role?
There's also the small issue of hiding it from parents, which a lot of schools are doing.
Everyone was flippant, most people are vaguely pro-trans, especially most 'elite' people. As a result, the 'cultural background' is vaguely pro-trans. I don't understand how not supporting fake penis surgery for 15yos makes one anti-trans in the context of 'a cultural background of being pro-trans' that leads to schools supporting it.
This doesn't even allege the school played a role in the student coming out as trans, which was (presumably) related to the influence of the internet or their friends? The same goes for hiding it from the parents - note that the child is already intentionally hiding it from their parents, and the school is just continuing that.
I dunno, I would think that myself, but all the pro-trans people seem to be attacking anyone who's criticizing penis-surgery for 15yos, and calling them transphobic. I'm taking their word for it.
You said what the school has zero impact on the kids decision. I'm saying, maybe Tumblr put the thought in their head, but the response they're getting from their immediate environment, including the school staff, can indeed contribute to them taking the step.
Same for the school hiding it from the parents.
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But the problem is it's not "dumb old teacher droning on to fourteen year old boys who aren't paying attention anyway", it's Drag Queen Story Hour for three and four year olds upwards. Teachers online bragging of the Pride flags in their classroom. How to make maths class more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities. Guest speakers invited to school who say there can be as many as 72 genders and teachers taking kids outside for a 'quiet word' if they don't accept that:
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"Responsible" is a weird thing to say. I don't think it has zero contribution, but I think it's pretty far downstream. The causal chain all starts with the idea that it's possible to do any of this and like it. This is what causes people to make the sissy hypno porn, and what causes people to watch the sissy hypno porn.
"Social Contagion" has some implications of negative affect because it implies a disease. I think reasonable people can disagree on whether queerness is a disease based on what they've experienced. (though I think... people are wrong if they think it's innately bad, because my experiences indicate that it doesn't have to be.) But the property of ideas spreading and causing the people who see them to consider them as possibilities? That's just memetics and culture. I think reasonable people should agree that queerness is subject to those forces.
So I do think, "cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom" are enough to move the idea of transness from 'unthinkable' to 'thinkable'. And that's part of the process. It does have an effect. Obviously trans people need their existence to be 'thinkable' and not 'unthinkable', so it's completely understandable why they would be for that. But if you really think of transness as a memetic disease- then it's understandable why you would want it to remain 'unthinkable' for as long as possible and then dissuaded.
Oh, I completely agree with you. It’s part of it, but I think it’s the lesser part of it. The bigger part of it is young people becoming disaffected with their romantic and personal lives and pursuing transition as a result, and in my opinion porn and porn culture is part of it. Maybe I’m too much of a TERF to see past that, though!
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True, although in fairness we have several terms for the concept of "coming to believe X because people around you believe X" and none of them as far as I'm aware have positive affect. TRAs would hardly react more positively if the spike in FTMs was attributed to "peer pressure", "groupthink" or "radicalization". Everyone wants to think of himself as the master of his own destiny and beliefs, and reacts with understandable offense when someone says otherwise (even if they're right; even if the beliefs he's arrived at are harmless, good or pro-social ones).
Some of them do have a positive affect. "Becoming Cultured" is an example. "Learning Manners" is an example. "Education" is an example.
Of course we have reasons why we think the things we're transmitting are good and not 'just' peer pressure, but so do the TRAs obviously.
I think "learning", "becoming" and "education" are describing a directed process in which the subject is an active participant, which make them therefore distinct concepts from the other terms, which portray the subject as weak and impressionable for falling victim to it. This may just be a matter of emphasis (or even a Russell conjugation). I take your point.
I can see the connotation you're pointing at but I don't think it alone makes for a fine line that really cleaves reality at the joints. You can 'just say no' to drugs in the prototypical peer pressure case. Doing a cigarette with your friends requires you to take the cigarette and ask your friend how you smoke it. (Or watch and learn.) You can't always 'just say no' to education. Most children end up in school whether they want to be or not. So Peer Pressure is also Learning, Education is also Indoctrination.
I think the affect is actually doing a lot more work than that. 'Kids are smoking cigarettes because of peer pressure' is literal, but you wouldn't say 'education is indoctrination' unless you're being edgy, because the affect is also shorthand. In this case a shorthand for- 'we shouldn't let kids smoke cigarettes but they are, and its spreading.'
I think how we use affect in 2 dimensional ways really can be quite important, because its holding information. In order to figure out whether we should let kids smoke you have to think about a whole bunch of questions. "Is the person wise enough to discern the good from the bad? Are they being exploited? Will this actually help them? Is this actually necessary to society? Will they retroactively endorse it after they're done? Does the fact that they want to do it matter?"
But you don't need to do all that math every time smoking comes up, you can cache the optimal policy result dynamic programming style as a single affect bit. Letting kids smoke=bad.
And this saves a ton of processing power.
... I feel like I've dipped a toe into a whole other world of implications just now, where thinking through your beliefs can be a cost and asking you to examine your beliefs can be enemy action. It's a tangential insight that just occurred to me that I need to think about so I don't want to go off on it but... this model feels like it sticks to a lot of things that happen in human culture war.
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So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
It’s not slightly sanitized. The point is that sissy hypno stuff seems to trigger autogynephilia in some males, and plenty of very online transwomen on Reddit, 4Chan etc have admitted it played a role in their growing feelings of dysphoria. The porn makes being trans seem attractive, it triggers the autogynephilic feelings in some men that can eventually lead to transition. By what mechanism does garden variety activist trans acceptance make men sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman? I don’t see it.
Nick Fuentes, to make the point clear, is more like the porn in this example than he is like the school book. Fuentes is extremely good with memes, has a great shock jock persona, hammers home the same message consistently, and most importantly makes having his views seem cool, edgy and counterculture to his viewers.
Something like this:
School holds a function celebrating Trans people as exemplary and people against Trans as bigots.
Kids who don't want to be called bigots outdo each other with effusive praising of trans people. This is a feedback loop of increasing intensity.
Puberty-adjacent kid with low self-esteem who gets no affirmations at home see affirmations of trans people, and at his age the desire to be cool/affirmed is more powerful than his sexual desire, so he wants to be Trans.
After a year or two of getting teachers and fellow students and parents to celebrate him as a her, once the real sexual desires kick in, it would be immortally embarrassing to make a 180-degree turn. The desire to not be embarrassed socially is more powerful than seuxal desire, so he sticks with it.
Likely, once the kid announced as Trans they digested a ton of Trans-confirming sexual messaging online and from peers which assimilates into their sexual development. Maybe at the point it's hard to tell what is organic sexual attraction and what has been formed by other influences.
My nephew is older, but his story goes something like this:
Socially awkward young man with a speech impediment from a religious family (dad is a reverend) gets a job as a software engineer and spends a lot of time remote-working from his dark apartment. Makes a lot of money but gets depressed and quasi-suicidal.
Goes to therapy -- provided by his work, I believe. Therapist suggests that social awkwardness could be gender-related, tells him that transitioning genders will alleviate suicidal ideation.
Transitions, comes to some family parties in dresses and apparent top surgery, has a new name. Everyone is polite to him (except for some of the young children who refer to him as "that weird boy"). Is also the only one wearing a Covid mask. It's like a case study of a misfit making extra effort to not fit in to affirm's one's identity as a misfit.
Year later complains to therapist that it didn't work and that he is still suicidal.
His parents reach out to him, but he tells them that their dead to him and if he kills himself it's their fault.
Turns the most sympathetic family members against other family members for not being effusive in their praise of something that looks like a mental health trainwreck.
No one wants to know what his actual sexual feelings are, and I would doubt even he knows at this point. At least he hasn't killed himself yet, but I won't be surprised when the call comes in.
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Are you familiar with the research demonstrating a huge uptick in trans-identified female teenagers in the last couple of decades? If they watch sissy hypno porn, that's news to me.
Transmen are a separate issue but nobody seems to care much about them. 95%++ of the culture war around trans people is about transwomen, from sports to bud light to prisons to women’s shelters and from JK Rowling to Caitlyn Jenner. Almost every prominent trans person is a transwoman. The vast majority of trans activists who are themselves trans are transwomen. Transmen are essentially written off; they’re mostly just butch lesbians who consoomed some bad memes.
Trans women are, by nature of the transition much more visible. A man wearing women’s clothing is obvious and easily clocked as trans. A woman wearing men’s clothing simply looks like a short man without a beard. Elliot Paige doesn’t look that far off from a 16-year old man, put her in an average high school and she’d be seen as perhaps a weak man, but a man. Put Dylan Mulvaney anywhere in public and he’s a man in a dress and heels. If you’re looking for a spokesperson for a social group, it seems like you’d want people who are obviously part of that group. A very light white passing black person isn’t a good choice for a black rights activist simply because they don’t appear black and thus the public can’t see this person as an aspirational black person.
My sister’s best friend is a trans man as of quite recently. I knew her as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups. Still, you wouldn’t clock him as a woman, and he seems to be having a great time. Honestly, he’s probably one of the very happiest people I know.
I confess I find this strange, and I hope (truly) that he doesn’t regret his transition eventually, but it is less grating to me than MtF. I think it’s aesthetic, as you suggest. There is an Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon to MtF that doesn’t exist with FtM.
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A lot of the culture war about grooming seems like it’s about trans men.
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Agreed on all points, but it would still suck to undergo a mastectomy and sterilize yourself only to realise too late that you'd made a huge mistake (just ask Keira Bell). I don't necessarily disagree with your claim that most MTFs are autogynephiliacs, but that doesn't address the rising proportion of trans people who are FTMs, nor the possibility that they arrived at the conclusion they were trans men as a result of their education.
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Not quite. The anti-trans side is very concerned with trans men. Almost every prominent trans person is a trans woman, but statistically the majority of young trans people (and due to the exponential increase in referrals to gender clinics in recent years, most likely the majority of trans people overall, but I haven't checked) are trans men. As a result all talk of detransitioners is overwhelmingly focused on women to the point that guys who fell victim to the trans trend are barely more than an afterthought. The two things are mirror images of each other, and come from quite classical views of each sex (men are scary and women are harmless, hence the reaction to trans women and lack of reaction to trans men - women are to be protected and men are disposable, hence the reaction to detrans women and lack of reaction to detrans men).
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Even though I was just arguing with people further downthread that you can't rely on "men and women are just different" as an explanation... men and women are different, and MTF transsexualism is a pretty distinct phenomenon from FTM transsexualism. MTF has a stronger sexual/fetishistic component and is more likely to be subjectively experienced as an innate need. FTM is better analyzed through the lens of social contagion / social status and has a similar structure to e.g. cutting or bulimia considered as social epidemics. Of course there will always be individual cases that run counter to these general patterns.
(That being said I don't think you can draw a simple causal link from sissy porn -> transition. But FTMs aren't really relevant to the behavior of MTFs in this case.)
I get you. My point was that, even if most MTFs are autegynophiliacs who consumed too much sissy hypno, it's still possible that school textbooks and educational programs could be contributing factors to the spike in MTF identification. I don't know if this is the case, but it could be.
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One thing not covered here is let’s say you are a smart (perhaps Motte poster) anti-pride activists is it ethical to signal boost this video with the caption yes they are saying the quiet part out loud that they are groomers. It’s probably fair to say they’re being cheeky but they really do want to indoctrinate you kids into trans ideology.
Now motte style posting doesn’t win elections. And while I think it’s uncharitable to just show the video and say groomers - it seems like a necessary thing to do if you want to wield political power and stop pride. The message is much simpler for the median IQ voter to get the message.
I think there is a line where politicians should hold back and not show out of context or the one racists in Kentucky to paint adversaries as truly awful people but this feels usable to me.
On the other hand, these people are literally saying ‘we’re coming for your children’ and refusing to disavow it, and pride highers up aren’t disavowing it either.
The one racist in rural Kentucky would get disavowed, I’m pretty sure.
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They can be joking, or "reclaiming," but the joke is the same direction as their intent. There's only so much "jokes on them I was only pretending," can do when there are people who already think you are
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They do want to turn kids into atheist leftists. I don't think any of them would really deny that. That's what the chant means. The chant does not mean "We want to rape your kids".
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Textbook (Blogpost?) case of toxoplasma. The closer you get to the "too far even for the ingroup" line without crossing it, the further your statement will spread, as the outgroup will signal-boost it in disgust and outrage and your ingroup will signal-boost the outgroup disgust and outrage towards something that is in their eyes actually still okay if somewhat edgy (if they are this up in arms about that, can you be sure they will tolerate things nearer and dearer to your heart?).
I nevertheless appreciated the quote from an activist saying they thought it was stupid, tried to shout over it, and don’t want it to represent the movement. That’s a much more sensible response.
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It seems unlikely that lesbians, in particular, would molest enough girls to create the next generation of lesbians for the ‘far-right’ / conspiratorial theory to be true. Even for males, the evidence for the “gays reproduce by molesting kids” canard seems quite limited.
The mechanism by which this is suggested to happen, in particular, is usually some framing of highly discredited Freudian psychology that, perhaps ironically, proponents of this theory would rail against in any other form.
Lets, instead, do an experiment. The most sexually interested heterosexual men get lots of private time with girls age 10-18 with little other adult supervision. See how that turns out.
If the teen pregnancy and STD rate plummets, we experiment with the gay and trans equivalents.
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I'm given to understand that the original version of the much-acclaimed "Vagina Monologues" had a section about what sounds damn like lesbian rape: an older woman got an underage woman (or girl) drunk then had sex with her, and this is recounted in later years as a glorious 'sexual awakening' which put the narrator on the path to being a lesbian.
That was later scrapped as it didn't fit in with more modern sensibilities, again as I understand it.
It’s certainly true that older butch lesbians often seem to pursue younger femme ones (Amazon’s Transparent, in its hatred of TERFs, actually depicts this as a pretty central story component of its second or third season), but the young women in question are typically already lesbian or bisexual-leaning-lesbian women, the equivalent of older guys pursuing college girls or, at a stretch, high school seniors. The ‘groomer’ allegations typically suggest much younger victims.
That's why the fictional portrayals that don't reflect reality get to stick around, while the fictional portrayals which stray too close to the truth must be excised. Or to be more charitable, any fictional portrayal must depict a positive or neutral impression, and cannot allow any of the true stereotypes to be reinforced.
Precocious sexual experience affects and can determine sexual orientation, which is another reason to be suspect of drag queens who insist on having an audience of children.
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Maybe lesbians are created when straight men molest girls.
Perhaps, but unless you’re suggesting that lesbians are encouraging the above to produce more lesbians (which seems quite ridiculous) it doesn’t change the argument.
It’s not so much the rape (which is relatively rare, but not rare enough). It’s the cultural transformation to a society where sexual urges and expression are supported in social studies classes in elementary school, long before most children will be feeling any of the urges and don’t know the personal meaning of the things they’re being taught to parrot.
Add trans-supportive education to the natural inclination of pre-sexual children to stick with peers of their own sex, and they’ll interpret their first urges as homosexual or transsexual urges as often as heterosexual.
That’s the “grooming” motte, compared to the “rape” bailey.
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How does that make any sense? What’s the causal mechanism there?
It's just noise intended to distract from the earlier proposal.
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Straight man molests girl, permanently damaging her trust and comfort with men. She then becomes either asexual or lesbian in practice.
This is what some lesbians (usually of second wave feminism flavor) say, at least, and I do believe it's plausible that something like that could bump some Kinsey 4s up to 6s.
But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?
(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)
I used to know a woman who got raped in the past and continued to regularly have casual sex with strangers in an attempt to "regain control" of her sexuality (unsurprisingly a psychology student in the same year as my wife, yes all the stereotypes about different study topics are true). She occasionally admitted that it's mostly stupid and never actually led anywhere good, several of these encounters even have ended up kinda rapey and made everything worse. But she just couldn't not do it, as I understood her she constantly feels threatened by men and going partying, targeting a specific guy, getting him to buy you drinks, getting him to focus on only you the entire night, and then "rewarding" him at the end, all completely on your own schedule made her feel powerful. Especially if he afterwards gets obsessed with her.
I'm mostly rephrasing @Terracotta here, but there's always different ways to deal with a perceived threat. If you get beat up, you can either get buff - fight response - or forever avoid - flight response - every situation where it might possibly happen again. And the more extreme the (perceived) threat, the more extreme the reaction is usually.
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Traumatic experiences can have that paradoxical effect, though, where some victims become intensely avoidant while some victims go the opposite direction and obsessively repeat the trauma. Show a bunch of 5-year-olds a scene from a scary monster movie, and some will become so terrified of monsters that they can't even handle* Sesame Street*, while some others will get painfully hyperfocused on that type of monster and deliberately seek out all the possible media about it that they can find- not joyfully, but with an anxious kind of obsession. I've personally observed both reactions, and both make sense in their way. One effect of fear is to focus the attention, so it makes sense that kids would develop a compulsive interest in processing or making sense of the trauma by repeating it on their own terms.
Mapped onto sexual trauma, that would mean that a boy molested by a man might become a sexually voracious gay dude, or might flee into borderline asexuality. A girl molested by a man might become a sexually compulsive straight woman, or might flee into lesbianism. All four of which do seem to match at least my anecdotal sense of the real-world outcomes for these cases.
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Well, no, as a matter of fact I don't.
To be fair you did make the argument that sexual abuse leads to homosexuality.
No, I made the argument that it leads to loss of attraction to the opposite sex, provided the abused belonged to it.
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Probably because boys are not girls and girls are not boys and there's no reason to think that they are equivalent or interchangeable, especially when it comes to sex.
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Male and female sexualities are asymmetric in more ways than one, so I wouldn't consider it the most shoddy prior that males and females are more/less likely to come away with different experiences of the same thing.
Yes, I agree that men and women are different. But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to? Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then? Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"? It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.
My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards. So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.
Now this is an honest question and not meant to be snarky: When?
I just genuinely cannot think of a single situation in which men and women behave the same. Not one. Not when studying in school, not when walking to the bathroom, not when sitting down for lunch, not when speaking in a business meeting. Maybe I'm just not thinking broadly enough?
Currently though, I'm liable to think the proper heuristic is "men and women literally never behave the same in any situation ever, and if anyone says they do they're either smoothing over differences or autistic." If there are some weird exceptions then those seem to fall more under the "exception that proves the rule" than anything else.
This doesn't give unlimited explanatory power, but it does require every single generalization about people to be split into two more specific generalizations, which I feel will cleave reality much closer to the joints.
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The little bit of data I've found seems to align with the original hypothesis (that homosexual molestation is much higher for both sexes):
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Speaking of QAnon, the focus there seemed to be Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk, or a bunch of wealthy straight guys diddling young girls. How has that morphed in the last few years into an obsession with drag queen groomers?
Is the continuity just a focus on the intersection of children and debaucherous sexuality that just follows where the news and vibes go, almost unconsciously?
No.
QAnon wasn't concerned with Epstein much. More with Pizzagate, a scandal quite distinct from Epstein and focused very much around suspicions of actual child abuse by well connected people.
Sounds like Epstein is 100% what they're looking for. The real deal. Drag queens far more speculative.
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I was totally with you…
Until I listened to the martyrmade episode on Epstein. The last couple of hours he spends talking about that story and it gets pretty difficult, imo, not to agree that there does seem to be something there.
I’ve said before around here: martyrmade is an unbelievable treasure of a history podcast. The episodes I’m talking about (about Jeff Epstein) take about 6 hours tracing a path from sexual abuse allegations in Ireland, to Belgium, and finally working its way through DC and the US. I highly recommend it, but also sort of caution it because it’s a bit of an info hazard. You might someday end up replying to people talking about the absurdity of pizzagage with “welllllllll actually…”
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And the widespread child sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church was something I didn't believe, either, because I couldn't believe it was real.
Too many instances of the powerful, the rich, and the important covering up things and relying on "but that can't possibly be happening, it's too crazy, it sounds like conspiracy theory" to outright dismiss anything.
"Child porn ring in a pizzeria, yeah right" - believe it like the Satanic Panic and daycare abuse of the 90s? Or dismiss it like the cases where it turned out prominent people were abusing their positions? Either way you're out of luck.
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Take another whiff, Comet Ping Pong Pizza stinks to high heaven, and so does James Alefantis.
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So, so many things didn't meet the smell test there. Hotdogs costing $100k ? Gay man's instagram being full of photos of children, sometimes taped to tables ?
You can look up the details and tell yourself it was all entirely innocuous.
Powerful people interested in kids isn't anything unusual. Justice minister ordering early release of a psychopathic sex criminal, well.
In any case, when it's a 'Pizzagate' but in Belgium, even NYT can afford to write about it.
/images/16879624277005746.webp
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I suggest this MartyrMade blogpost for a quick summary. Whatever's going on with Podesta, Comet, and that group's taste in art, it's pretty weird. My guess is that they're cringey, sophomoric jackasses that enjoy shock value, but the enthusiasm for child-rape "art" still marks them as a bunch of creeps in my book.
I'm on your side in this (and wanted to thank you for that article about Patricia Piccinini, her sculptures are incredible and I am annoyed I had never seen her work before) but I don't think it's that outlandish for a punk band to use pedophile imagery - punk is about shocking the establishment, and you can't shock the establishment by biting the head off a bat or pretending to worship the devil any longer. My guess is - if the symbol is really a pedophile symbol - it was poorly thought out edginess. And I am highly suspicious of the symbol's veracity, because I've spent most of my life on the dark side of the internet (and am fluent in hobo code) and never saw it before.
I expect it probably was a symbol used by a group of pedophiles at some point, but it's almost certainly not a common or universal one since there is no single pedophile community and instead lots of small groups and individuals that don't associate with or even know about each other.
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A child sex ring run buy a guy whose Instagram feed looks like this iand who somehow makes a 50 most powerful people in Washington despite no real obvious qualifications beyond dating David Brock is a good bit smellier, no matter what his day job is. Cheese pizza is old chan slang for child porn; they are a bit over sensitive.
Is he probably just a gay matchmaker in a pre-Grindr world with a very dark sense of humor, yeah, but there's plenty of smoke in his online tracks. And you beat any smoking embers you find in a political campaign. Brock was one of the loudest voices against Trump. So going after him through a sketchy personal connection is political hardball and has been standard procedure for a long time in Washington.
I don't want to say too much because she is/was a minor, but the girl is the daughter of a former business partner of Alefantis and there were a bunch of other photos of her in weird poses with captions like "Hotard."
I'm not alleging anything, just supplying additional information. I don't know how to interpret the facts. I do know one theory was that the girl had been one of many kidnapped, but that is not the case.
I once wrote a quality contribution (tm) on my opinions around pizzagate at https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jv161w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_16/gcw167l/?context=3&sort=best
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I'd like to see the results. Let's start with Jose Andres the other DC chef who was on the same 50 most powerful people in Washington list. I'm curious what the most bizarre posts you'll find will be.
https://instagram.com/chefjoseandres/
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A year ago there was a kerfuffle around A Message From the Gay Community AKA "We are coming for your children" song, which was pretty blatant call that they are the ones who will educate kids into whatever their idea of "tolerance" is - and there is nothing you as a parent can do about that. Of course I think that this is all about clash of ideologies or one can say religions. Of course everybody thinks that they are projecting what is good into the world. There are people who think that books like Gender Queer or surgical transition of 15 years old kids is what tolerance means. So I'd say that "we're coming for your children" can be absolutely terrifying even if taken at face value by the criteria of said group - LGBTQIA+ pride protesters in this case. Radical Muslim imam proclaiming that he is going to teach your children how to interpret the Quran and spread goodness into the world, would probably be taken as a threat, despite his best intention of bringing them to heaven in his own mind.
The same for me. In my mind the LGBTQIA+ movement is now indistinguishable from radical religious cult. For me it is not unlike Scientologists infiltrating government institutions. So for these radicals to chant that they are going for my children is akin to Scientologists saying that they are going for my children (meaning they will "help" them by using scientology auditing method on them etc.).
Anyways, what is interesting is that there seems to be some self-awareness among these people that maybe they have shown their cards too soon and that they maybe overestimated their grip on our culture to some extent, given the current backlash. A year back there was a song by gay chorus about how they are going for our children, now it is a single voice in pride parade that is viewed as cringe by fellow marchers.
The gay choir song was just bad taste, plainly mocking the normies (until the last, saccharine verse about 'teaching belonging and love' in order to cover their asses).
So I just thought they were idiots (as well as some unkind thoughts about "what's all this stuff about it's unfair to stereotype gays because there isn't a distinct look or way of behaving, when these guys are every bit the stereotype of San Franciscan gay?")
I think the marches and chanting are meant to provoke, in a "ha ha only joking but not" way. Problem is, they may provoke someone to do something stupid (like beat up a marcher) and then it'll be all "this is the kind of homophobia that is still threatening gay people!" and not "okay, when you dare someone to punch you in the face, sometimes you do get punched in the face, and that's on you as much as on them".
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On religious cult. Found this yesterday. I haven’t found the source of it on whether it’s performatively making fun of Catholics or something else.
If you don’t want to click thru it looks like a mass in Catholic firm that replaces various creeds and parts of mass with pride/woke ideologies.
https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1673776078807240710?s=20
Nah, not performatively making fun of Catholics. Either it's one of the WomenPriests crowd, or it's one of the mainstream Protestant churches that went all-in on the women clergy, LGBT clergy, etc. Places like Episcopalians and Lutherans claim to be liturgical churches so they follow a particular order of service that still has roots in original Catholic liturgy.
One of the tiny, trendy, progressively liberal Christian bunches. Not mocking anyone but themselves with this silliness, because it's not going to bring in the LGBT people to fill the pews, and it's only driving away the more theologically conservative.
I feel like I’m being slow but I can’t figure out the “Jesus Christ who had two dads reference” especially if god had plural pronouns. Joseph is one dad though non-biological.
I feel like I want to save this video for next time I feel like making an argument that “woke/pride” is really a religion as an example.
Well, that's because they're Protestants and downplay the role of Mary 😁 (I've had worse arguments online with hardline Reformed/Calvinists who treat Mary as nothing more than an incubator; she pops out the sprog and that's it, her role is over and done with, and she wasn't that big a deal as mom anyway because any woman would have done).
Mostly it's them trying to be clever (and missing) at conservative/orthodox Christians in general about "oh you are all hung up about the gays, and protest the likes of 'Heather has two mommies', well your boy Jesus has two daddies, how do you like that?" It's an oldie but a (not) goodie that's floating around for a while.
They take God the Father and then Joseph as the foster father. They're pretty dumb theologically (and every other way). It's just them being dickheads (er, am I allowed say that?)
How is that tied to downplaying Mary? They're just going for connecting it to gay marriage, as you said.
In any case, as a "hardline Reformed/Calvinist" myself, Mary clearly had a bigger role than merely being pregnant with Jesus—she was his mother, raising him. I suppose we also see her at the cross. That's a lot less than the excess of devotion that Roman Catholics practice, of course, but it isn't nothing.
"Two daddies" displays the role of Mary as mother.
I mean, sure, but they're downplaying for a political point, not for a religious point.
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I think the Isla Bryson scandal in Scotland and the consequent damage it did to Nicola Sturgeon's political career was a real wake-up call for many TRAs: yet another reminder that Twitter is Not Real Life and the goodwill and tolerance of the general public has its limits. The near-constant accusations of "fascism" and "far-right sympathies" from TRAs in the last few months are textbook tactics of a group who knows they've overplayed their hand and are now on the defensive.
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Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.
A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.
There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.
*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.
(1) I think the paedophiles (and I'm not messing around with any soft euphemism like Minor Attracted Persons; if the idea of sex with kids is what gets your motor running, it's a problem and you have to face up to it) will try and use any excuse, any cover they can get in order to normalise their pathology. So when it was all sexual liberation and gay rights and "it is unjust that the age of consent for gay sex is higher than the age for straight sex", they crept right in with "oh yeah we are all about adjusting age of consent laws on the basis of justice!"
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're trying to infiltrate the trans activism movements either, especially the creepier/nuttier ones.
(2) Mermaids, or the people running it/the public face of it, always struck me as crazy and creepy. Susie Green was way too pushy about using her influence at the Tavistock and other public bodies to get what she wanted (a woman who brought her 16 year old out to Thailand for sex change surgery). No surprise someone else there turns out to be dodgy.
(3) Not the only 'real trans person' to be dodgy, either. The best move trans rights groups could make to help raise the view of their movement in the public eye is put out an announcement that "no, someone who is visibly male looking just calling himself a woman now does not mean they're trans and we disavow them".
And, to note, this seems to happen in every iteration of the LGBT+ movement- there are a bunch of assorted bigwigs who say creepy sounding things, claim they’re just trying to trigger the normies, and then turn out to actually be giant creeps who were 100% serious. And the LGBT+ movements seem to have no interest in preventing it from happening in the future.
Say what you will about the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America’s history, they did improve and take significant efforts to keep this from happening again, and senior leaders seem to have been genuinely horrified and have a sincere intention to make sure it doesn’t happen again because they don’t want kids to get raped. Various LGBT bigwigs seem to simply not care.
How much of the activist segment isnt at least on some level prone to being creepy? I mean in order to be a full time activist of any cause you have to have made it a rather large portion of your identity. You cannot be a pro-gay activist and have the “gay” part be some minor part of how you see yourself. It’s also true of other things; being an advocate of science means that science and science education are central to your identity more so than other parts of your whole. If it wasn’t, you’d probably be finding other ways to spend your time.
The other part is that radical overstep is a useful tool. If I have people in my movement that are 5-6 steps ahead of where I want society to end up, I can push forward with my real agenda and it won’t seem that radical. I can advocate for using AI in crafting legislation to vote on and have a much easier time if some guy over there is saying “let’s turn over all government decisions to AI.” I can call him crazy, but at the same time, I can sane-wash my position of having AI write the laws and giving Congress only the power to vote up or down on those laws. I could advocate for radical police reform— and sound much saner than the people saying “disband the police and replace them with social workers.”
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I can understand the LGBT movement to an extent; first, a lot of the activism and politics came out during the 60s/70s when sexual liberation was a big thing (even for normies, you may have missed the thinkpieces about parents should be naked at home around their kids so that the kids can become familiar with what human bodies look like and will grow up without hangups. Them were wild 'n' woolly times, my friend!)
Laws about age of consent were out of line with the age for gay sex being a lot higher, especially as for straight sex it got lowered but the gay sex was unchanged. So age of consent laws were up for revising, there was the psychological/social/political/liberationist guff around children being sexual beings and sex being normal and natural and stop calling non-vanilla sex perversions and all the rest of it. You must also bear in mind that the politics of the sexual liberation movement and the gay liberation movement were not at all interested in being conventional or fitting in with wider society, they wanted to break it all open (marriage was slavery, the roots here of 'sex work is real work' and 'queering the paradigm' and so on).
Of course the paedophiles jumped aboard the bandwagon and used the excuses of "you're oppressed and we're oppressed, we should make common cause!". LGBT (more so the gay movement) also being accused of being paedophiles and under legal restrictions, on top of all the social attitudes need to be changed stuff, weren't going to start acting like morality police themselves about someone's messy, kinky, queer sex life. They didn't want to be forced into the closet of "look like and act like the straights" anymore, they wanted to be accepted as-is. Gay marriage was not on the agenda, it wasn't even favoured (until time passed and it became more politically advantageous to present the nice picket-fence view of gay life as 'we are just like you and just like you, we want the right to marry the person we love' in order to get social approval and acceptance).
So the weird and the perverted came in under the umbrella of the movement because you can't afford to turn away any allies. Besides, you normies are accusing these people of being kiddy-diddlers? Yeah, you say that about us too, and it's not true, so why should we believe you?
This led to a lot of egg on certain faces later on, and a lot of whitewashing the past (see Peter Tatchell for one such "I never said anything like that, if I did I was tricked into it, and I'll sue if you keep bringing this up" reaction.
So there's the lingering attitudes of "we can't afford to throw anyone under the bus because we too were considered disgusting perverts back in the past" when it comes to not condemning the trans (who are busy re-writing history themselves about Stonewall in order to lay claim to historic legitimacy) and the MAPs types who are still sneaking around.
There still remains the fear that "if we agree with the bigots about this issue, then they'll turn on us afterwards".
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Again, once the evidence and pressure became overwhelming.
The Church has put policies and safeguards in place. The response, whenever the next trans or gay person is found to possess child porn, is still "but what about the Catholic church anyway???"
We've changed. You have no excuse now not to clamp down on self-identified trans people who are also paedophiles. Better in the long run to admit it, own it, and do something about it than to deny it happens and cover it up. Take it from a Catholic.
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It's kind of ironic in a way. Conservatives have long argued that conservative organisations ought to be hypervigilant against entryism, to prevent themselves being subverted from within by bad actors or undercover enemies. Throughout history, organisations have come up with various countermeasures designed to prevent entryism e.g. gang tattoos (especially on the face) are an expensive signal that you're not a cop.
To the extent that those "trans people just trying to live their lives in peace" we keep hearing so much about are an organized faction, insisting on self-ID as the preferred standard for demarcating the trans from the cis was an incredibly short-sighted unforced error, as it left the group wide open to entryism by all manner of bad actors. "Anyone who says they're a member of this group is a member of this group, no questions asked" means no countermeasures against entryism at all. If the trans community hypothetically eventually came to be made up of "1 trans person trying to live their life in peace for every 99 perverts", the architects of self-ID will have no one but themselves to blame.
I find it impossible to consider it an unforced error. Not unlikely or improbable, impossible. Leaving aside the fact that this outcome was obvious to anyone with even an autist's grasp of social psychology, it was spelled out by advocates over a decade ago. Those advocates were called bigots and transphobes even if they were themselves trans - they simply became truscum. They knew what they were doing.
Mmm... no... It wasn't a coincidence, but- here's my model.
The queer community is made up of people who were rejected by society and decided to make their own society. Trans people are used to being gatekept by doctors and not allowed to get the procedures they want.
Their cultural norms are a reaction to their life experiences and that reaction is "gatekeeping=bad"
They call it "transphobic" because "you're just doing to them what everyone did to me!" is the most salient connection to them.
It's a reactionary overcorrection to gatekeeping. You can also model wanting kids to be allowed to transition the same way. It's a reactionary overreaction to gatekeeping.
('over'reaction insofar as it causes more problems than it solves. I do think society 50 years ago had too much gatekeeping on this issue. And personal grievances about having been gatekept too much remain valid. But there are tradeoffs at the societal level to consider.)
I'm sure that was the issue for some people, and as a nerd I sympathise. But the thing is, every trans person didn't overreact in that way, and of those who did not, practically 100% were the ones who had the professionally diagnosed medical condition the entire movement was built on. Kicking a bunch of gender dysphoric people out of the only support system they had as an overreaction to gatekeeping would be completely insane if the trans movement was about providing care and compassion for trans people. Less insane though, for a genuine community of sufferers co-opted by narcissists with a fetish.
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So you think the self-ID policy was dreamed up by the bad actors, and the good actors, somewhat reductantly, came along for the ride (at least for awhile)?
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The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that. Which means either you have to reject the Baptists outright or accept them and everything they want to do. This hurts the Baptists because people don’t want strange adults teaching their kids sexual content, especially without their consent.
Not only can we not point it out, but they can't point it out either. I've seen numerous L's and G's trying to point out the bootleggers, only to find themselves kicked out, because it turns out the bootleggers are the core of their coalition. Turns out after you get all the rights you always wanted, the people who stick around and don't go back to living their normal lives like all the slogans claimed, are bootleggers.
The metaphor just fails completely. The whole point is that babtists and bootleggers are manifestly opposed to each other. Not that one is a less extreme form of the other. That's a motte and Bailey.
A better example of a babtists and bootleggers coalition in this space would be "Sex Ed is bad because I don't want my daughter to have sex and get knocked up" aligning with "We need to get birth rates up."
Or more hypothetically, "Sex Ed is bad because it teaches kids about sex" lining up with a covert faction of Dr. Pedofascists' friends saying "sex Ed is bad because it teaches kids about consent and boundaries."
I would assume that the baptists in my metaphor would be horrified were they to learn why the bootleggers were so gung-ho on normalizing medical transition for children, or were they to learn about the mixed evidence on the efficacy of same, or the rate of desistance without medical intervention etc. I've personally met several advocates for trans children, and while I don't agree with all of their policy proposals or arguments, they seemed like earnest and well-intentioned people: I never suspected they were Big Pharma stooges or closet paedophiles.
Perhaps a more illuminating metaphor would be that the "baptists" are useful idiots carrying water for the bootleggers.
The more appropriate historical metaphor is probably racist Union soldiers, many of whom went Copperhead after the Emancipation proclamation. "We didn't fight for this." Or maybe German traditionalists who picked Hitler to defend against communism, only to lose it all.
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Maybe the reason why I keep getting baffled by all those "actually this elite progressive is a pro-paedo" is that on the ground level, I see pretty much no increase in tolerance towards paedos. In fact the age gap taboo keeps expanding to cover age gaps between adults. If all those elites are pushing LGBT for the nefarious purpose of adding P, they don't seem to be doing a good job at all. Their successes, if any, of 50-100 years ago are completely negated.
Tolerance and enacting justice against are not always the same. If the surrounding edifice of the movement means one guy gets 10x the sentence he would have, but 100 that would have been detected slip on by, the criminal movement, as a whole, prospers. And that seems to be the result of the LGBT ideology. They engage in actions indistinguishable from true sexual grooming and molestation, unless you have a mind probe and a camera in the room.
Be specific. What actions and how are they connected to the LGBT movement?
Distributing erotic literature featuring sex between adults and children, that is so raunchy that members of the school board interrupt reading from it, out of concern for the children who might be present at the meeting.
It is connected to the LGBT movement because the literature is written, published, distributed, and defended when it comes under criticism, by LGBT activists.
Sounds more like 1 guy slipping by reading raunchy literature, while 100 guys get 10x sentences for anything more serious.
I don't follow what you're even saying? The person reading was a woman trying to raise awareness about the books available in school libraries... how did she slip? Who is getting 10x sentences? What does that have to do with actions indistinguishable from grooming?
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It's not baffling to me. If a 30yo dating a 20yo becomes taboo, it is essentially put in the same category as a 30yo dating someone even younger.
It's already there in some ways with the taboo on admitting attraction to literally anyone younger than 18. Both a person attracted to a 16yo and a person attracted to a 6yo are called pedophiles.
That baffles me. A 12 year old is mature enough to be sure of their gender identity and sexual orientation and so can ask for puberty blockers.
A 22 year old woman who sleeps with a 40 year old married man who, surprise surprise, does not dump his wife and kids to marry her is a poor little blossom who was groomed and taken advantage of by an older man.
Make up your damn minds. If 14 year olds are mature enough to fuck, get pregnant, and get abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent, then 22 year women are mature enough to realise that 30-50 year old men are not interested in them for their brains.
You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".
It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"
That's true. Incoherence is no barrier, it's a weapon.
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Isn't this more a problem with the overloaded term "groomed"?
I feel comfortable saying that the 22yo was taken advantage of, that it was a bad thing, and also that there should be no criminal and limited social consequences. That's because, as you note, she had the maturity to know better, or at least to carry on without lasting damage.
Calling that "grooming" is fine, but it doesn't make it equivalent to the other use of the term: soliciting underage kids for sex. The same 40yo hanging out by a playground and convincing children to get in the van is categorically different and should be condemned in the strongest terms.
These two positions are consistent. It's conflating the two terms, or defending against such a conflation, that leads to mental gymnastics.
I don't think that a 40 year old guy having sex with a 22 year old woman is grooming in any sense. It might be taking advantage of her, it might be even murkier depending if she's a vulnerable person (is emotionally fragile, has been misused in the past, etc.) or if the older man is in a position of power/authority (I don't think Bill Clinton was right in what he did with Monica Lewinsky, even though Monica was old enough to know that fooling around with a married man was wrong).
Grooming children is a much more serious matter.
Agreed on all counts.
I'm saying that misuse of the term "grooming" is a side effect of the definitional fight, rather than people refusing to make up their damn minds.
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So is this elite person a 16yo-pedo advocate or a 6yo one?
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Ultra progressives still believe the latter is worse than the former, and this is reflected in the law, in discourse, in wider society.
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Isn't housing convicted male sex offenders (who have raped or assaulted children) in women's prisons when they claim to be transgender (even if they have made zero effort to medically or even socially transition) a perfect example of the increasing tolerance afforded towards paedos under this rubric?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/11/karen-white-how-manipulative-and-controlling-offender-attacked-again-transgender-prison
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11193987/Judge-sends-serial-sex-abuser-born-man-not-legally-recognised-female-womens-jail.html
https://reduxx.info/toddler-killer-quietly-moved-to-new-york-womens-prison/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150531080143/http://www.tamworthherald.co.uk/Sex-change-man-abused-young-girls-jailed-16-years/story-26584788-detail/story.html
https://reduxx.info/exclusive-rapist-quietly-transferred-to-washington-womens-prison/
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/woman-appears-dumfries-sheriff-court-8566714
No. That's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims, not towards paedos.
It's a vulnerability towards fake trans claims which numerous paedos have benefited from.
Nevertheless, it does not benefit them because they are chomos. This sounds like a soldier argument against LGBT policies and not a real attempt to get at the mechanism of what it does.
Well, it would put my and a lot of other people's minds at ease if male convicts serving time for sex crimes were expressly forbidden from applying for transfers to women's prisons, a policy which was recently implemented in England and Wales. There is precedent for more women-friendly and less pedo- and sex offender-accommodating revisions to these policies. The failure of other jurisdictions to do the same does little to assuage my concerns that the trans lobby takes concerns about the effects of their policies on women and children seriously.
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No, because I doubt any protagonist thinks of being housed in a women's prison as a perk or mercy or thinks much of the involved perpetrator at all. The thinking is that this is a great opportunity to grandstand for the principle of trans acceptance (further amplified by toxoplasma), and anyone trying to distract from this by making other considerations more salient (such as the nature of the crimes committed and what other principles they may pertain to) is concern trolling/not arguing in good faith.
I don't understand your comment. A convicted paedophile doesn't think being housed in a women's prison is a perk or mercy compared to being housed in a men's prison?
I contend that those in society that approve or argue for such housing don't think of it as a perk or mercy (because they don't think about the reason the person was imprisoned to begin with at all). Therefore it being offered does not imply a softening of societal attitudes towards convicted child abusers.
I think if you took a poll and asked people "would you prefer to spend 1 year in a men's prison, or 2 years (or 3, or 5 etc.) in a women's prison?", you would be hard pressed to find a respondent who would willingly select the former. Everyone knows they'll have an easier time in a women's prison. Child molesters presumably weren't the intended beneficiaries of the policy of housing trans women in women's prison, but they're often beneficiaries nonetheless.
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If he’s not attracted to adult women then why would it be a perk? The only answer I can think of is so he doesn’t get beaten or killed by the other male inmates in a revenge attack, but in any case progressives (and many non-progressives besides, myself included) believe that extrajudicial prison violence is an embarrassment on the US prison system anyway, so that’s not a specific enough argument.
The canadians put a guy who raped a baby to death in a prison housing mothers with their babies. And then threatened the mothers who reported that he was telling them how much he wanted to rape their babies, because they were being transphobic, which is a crime.
There is no limiting principle to any of this. Any extreme thing you can imagine is already happening.
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Sounds like a pretty big perk to me!
"Alright, but apart from completely negating my likelihood of being penetrated by a fellow inmate against my will; effectively nullifying my likelihood of getting beaten up or murdered by a fellow inmate; and affording me copious opportunities to intimidate, assault or rape fellow inmates - what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Even if these groups think it's an embarrassment, progressives need to justify why, in determining whether a given male inmate should be exempted from the possiblity of this happening to them, the sole deciding factor is "do they have the audacity to claim to be trans?"
Child molesters don't necessarily target children exclusively, and several of the people listed above had been convicted of raping/assaulting both children and adult women. "Karen White", for instance, has convictions for raping/assaulting both children and grown women, was incarcerated in a women's prison, and then (shockingly) assaulted several of his fellow inmates.
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????
That's a big perk.
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Straight women (who play a critical role in setting progressivism’s sexual agenda) are incentivized to keep the acceptable age gap range as narrow as possible. A 30 year old doesn’t want to have to compete on the free market with a 21 year old. So that’s another reason to expect LGBT to not turn pro-P.
There’s plenty of room for straight women to support, condone, tolerate, or turn a blind-eye to big P Pedophilia while playing the bootlegger when it comes to older-man younger-woman relationships, especially when there are LGBTQIA+ or other ipdol considerations in play. Hence why online discussions of Henry Caville, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Elon Musk often feature female seething, but it was crickets from the women when it came to discussions on Rotherham. Always funny when the guy who literally plays Superman, a generation-defining actor known for smashing supermodels like clockwork, and the richest man on the planet and father of ten get accused of being creepy de facto incels for dating younger women.
Targeting pre-pubescent children is the central example of pedophilia and the actual dictionary definition. However, pre-pubescent children are not a source of sexual competitive threat and anxiety for 30-year-old women like 21-year-old women are.
Just-so arguments can easily be made on a Who? Whom? basis. Drag queens wanting to mix with preschoolers is Stunning and Brave, because drag queens are valid and beautiful and children (especially those of other people) should learn as such. Thirty-year-old men wanting to mix with 21-year-old women is Gross and Problematic; such men are pathetic losers who can’t handle a woman their own age so they just want someone easy to manipulate (but at the same time, young women are totally Strong and Independent #GirlBosses). After all, everyone who’s not a creepy incel knows that 30-year-old women are just as beautiful and fertile as 21-year-old women, plus their additional education and experiences only make them more desirable partners.
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This argument seems like begging the question. We allow some classes of minors to do tons of things without reflecting on attitudes re sex: a fifteen year old can consent to a colonoscopy (sometimes requiring guardian sign off), without the law or morality throwing away any concerns about sexual abuse with physical parallels.
Two points:
A colonoscopy is a routine medical examination which, under ideal circumstances, has no permanent effect on the child's body. As the child is generally sedated during the procedure, it is entirely painless and the child will have no conscious recollection thereof. This is quite obviously not the case with mastectomies, penectomies, phalloplasties, puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
You are correct to note that the child's parent or guardian must give their consent before the child undergoes a colonoscopy. Trans activists are notorious for their belief that medical transition is a fundamental right for children, which any child can and should undergo even without their parents' knowledge or even in specific contravention of their wishes. For instance, the aforementioned Mermaids charity was embroiled in scandal when they agreed to send a chest binder to a journalist posing as a fourteen-year-old trans boy, who had explicitly stated that their family did not accept their trans identity and were unaware of their desire for a chest binder. California just passed a law which makes affirming a child's stated gender identity (or not) a factor governing whether parents are entitled to custody of their children. Again, there's a big difference between "we support the right of children to undergo this medical procedure provided their parents consent to it" and "we support the right of children to undergo this medical procedure even if their parents are unaware that their child wants to undergo it, or knows about it and has explicitly said they don't want their child to undergo it."
On the latter point, one could draw an analogy with children being taken into care because their parents don't consent to their receiving life-saving treatment (as in Jehovah's Witnesses) and the child's doctor seeks a court order to overrule their guardianship. The analogy doesn't quite work, however, as a) the extreme trans activists I'm talking about generally support a child's right to transition regardless of whether they have been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria (in which case medical transition might be medically indicated) and b) most children with gender issues desist without any need for medical transition, the evidence base for the efficacy of medical transition in alleviating psychic distress and suicidality is decidedly mixed, and trans activists have consistently overhyped and muddied the waters on the efficacy thereof (e.g. "I'd rather have a live daughter than a dead son"). For the above reasons, taking a child out of their parents' custody for refusing to "affirm" them is nothing like taking them out of their parents' custody because the parents don't consent to a lifesaving blood transfusion.
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Just because the "Jews will not replace us" chant was meant to be provocative, and even playful on some level, does not mean it wasn't saying something meaningful- it was. The ingroup doesn't interpret it the exact same way as the outgroup, but it was still a slogan that spoke to the relationship between demographic change and Jewish cultural influence as interpreted by the people who were saying the chant. Likewise, "We're coming for your children" is saying something very real... no, the people that said that aren't all trying to physically abuse children, but the statement means they intend to influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement in defiance of their opposition.
Imagine you go to the library, pick a book that is ostensibly about the adventures of the cute pig on the cover, only to get home, start reading it to your children, and realize that the message the story is... Jews will not replace us. I can say it has now happened 3 times our nanny has brought home a book from the public library that seemed completely innocuous on the cover, only to turn out to be LGBT propaganda geared towards toddlers.
They are coming at my children with their propaganda, there's no denying it, all you can do is hope they won't be influenced by it despite the mounting social pressure. As of two days ago, Obergefell v. Hodges was only eight years ago when the country was very much still divided on the question of gay marriage. The present state of the culture proves that all those decades of conservative tropes were correct, and yes, they are coming for your children in order to influence them positively towards that culture.
Which, unlike child molestation, is a perfectly legitimate goal in a democratic society. Just as those who lobby for or against teaching all sorts of things do all the time.
Also, if your nanny is not familiar with the saying, "you can't judge a book by its cover," or is too lazy to leaf through a book for toddlers, you need a new nanny. And some people want their kids to read those books. That is why the library carries a variety of books, some of which appeal to some people and some of which appeal to others.
Stay away from children or experience the consequences.
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Right, so the Conservatives who said that this entire thing was about reaching their children were correct. You can say "it's a legitimate goal in a democratic society", whatever that means, as if social propaganda isn't common to all societies everywhere. But the conservatives saying "if we allow gay marriage next they are coming for our children" were right, and it took less than 8 years from the Supreme Court decision. We apparently could not allow gay marriage without our children shortly thereafter being inundated with LGBT propaganda, they were right.
Our nanny is great, we go through dozens of books at the library and let them pick it out. She comes from a place and is of a generation where this propaganda would be unthinkable and she lets her guard down occasionally. It's no big deal, she puts the book aside when she sees where it's going.
Attempting to change people's beliefs is a legitimate goal of citizens in a democratic society, as opposed to non-democratic societies, where that right is reserved to the state.
Although I am sure you can dig up some outlier, I don't recall Conservatives arguing that gay marriage would lead to our children being inundated with LGBT propaganda. Probably because that makes little sense, and also because:
The right of LGBTQ persons to lobby for their goals like other citizens is inherent in the First Amendment, and if there was any question in that regard, it was dispelled not by Windsor, but in 1996 by Romer v. Evans.
Regardless, what does any of this have to do with OP discussion about pedophilia? A claim that "the gays" are secretly trying to molest our children is qualitatively different than your claim that they are trying to "influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement." As I said, the former is illegitimate, but the latter is not.
Conservatives use the word "grooming" to mean that they are trying to bring children into the fold of that culture, which they are openly admitting to here.
You can argue all day that this doesn't fit some dictionary definition of the word, and of course it's foremost propaganda, but then again so are all the accusations of "-phobia" which actually have actually acquired social credibility as weapons against someone's reputation. It's pure culture war, the dictionary has no weight in matters of culture war.
"You can't call me transphobic because I have first Amendment Rights", yeah try that one out for size. These words are used to energize the side you are on and demoralize and smear your opposition, I find it completely laughable that the LGBT community, which is quick to smear everyone who does not agree with their ideology, is now complaining about being on the receiving end of this tactic.
Assuming:
It's harmful for children to become transgender, i.e. they have worse psychological, health, and social outcomes if they identify as transgender.
The LGBT community intends to create propaganda geared towards children that will influence more children to identify as transgender.
The Conservative movement is completely justified in using the "grooming" accusation and viewing this propaganda as an attempt to harm their children.
Dude, you made a very, very broad claim: that "influenc[ing] the perception of children towards the LGBT movement" is somehow illegitimate. Now, you are making a very much narrower claim. It is a classic motte and bailey. And, I note, even that narrow claim it is still very, very different from the OP's initial reference to child molestation. Because that is what OP said: "Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles".
I have no interest in speaking in terms of legitimacy or democracy, what I said was:
Where did I say it was illegitimate? I said it is affirming the behavior that conservatives are denouncing when they use the word "grooming." When conservatives are talking about grooming, they are not merely talking about "people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity" they are talking about people who want to influence their children into embracing or even identifying with LGBT culture. That's what they mean when they use that word. The "we're coming for your children" is meant to provactively admit that, yes, this is what they are trying to do- although they of course see nothing wrong with that.
So, you are saying that, unlike said conservatives, you do not find it illegitimate?
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What's your understanding of the word "homophobe"? Or is that different because it's a propaganda term you like?
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No, it isn't. The binding force of Democracy is not infinite, and this is one of the things that will exceed it handily. Every cooperative system we have assumes we've achieved values-consensus, that the systems are being used to pursue at least a rough approximation of common goals. This is not a common goal, not exactly, not roughly, not within a million miles. This is the weaponization of shared institutions for antithetical goals. Better to remove those systems, and any systems that can be used likewise.
Democracy is simply a form of politics, and politics is nothing if not contestation over competing and often antithetical goals. The idea that democracy requires agreement over goals is the complete opposite of reality; democracy is a means of peacefully managing disagreement over goals.
Not all disagreements over goals can be managed peacefully; hence war. I have not claimed that democracy requires agreement about all goals, for that level of agreement would mean no negotiation or compromise was necessary. I am claiming that there is a minimum level of agreement necessary for Democracy to function, and "we're coming for your children" is an expression of its absence.
Except that what I said was a perfectly legitimate goal in a democratic society was attempting to "influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement." Not molesting children. That was the entire point.
Man this democracy thing just keeps sounding worse every day.
What regime can I get that doesn't have totalitarian aims to brainwash my kin? Monarchy?
Any regime where you're not part of the selectorate would do.
But be careful what you wish for. The only thing worse than a regime thst cares what your kids think of it is a regime that doesn't care what your kids think of it.
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Only if you're the monarch.
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Attempting to shape children's values and worldviews in ways their parents consider abhorrent is not a legitimate goal in a democratic society. If you are interested in persuasion, persuade the parents. Abusing a system established for the common good to ends that are not agreed to be the common good is a serious defection, and doing so by exploiting blind spots in our legal and social systems doesn't make it any more acceptable. Failing that, don't be surprised when people withdraw their consent to such social systems wholesale: you've already proven yourself incapable of good-faith cooperation, so when that cooperation is withdrawn you have no one but yourself to blame.
Again, it is inevitable that government will shape children's values and worldviews in ways which some parents will find abhorrent. That might be in school lessons, or books available in libraries, or even in failing to censor TV programs. Negotiating those competing values is what politics is all about. Once again, if labor unions, and Nazis, and Communists, and segregationists, and flat earthers, and Hindu nationalists and Mormons can legitimately lobby schools in an effort to change students' views of their movements, why is there a special rule for LGBTQ people?
Edit: And again, schools are in the business of inculcating values and what values should or should not be inculcated is a subject of political contestation. In a democratic society
everyone gets to make their case about what those values should be. They don't, however, have the right to win, obviously. Hence my initial point that attempting to influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement, unlike child molestation, is a perfectly legitimate goal in a democratic society.
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Arguing against teaching something at school still allows for things to be taught at home, or other contexts that parents have control over. Setting out to influence someone else's children against the parents' wishes is qualitatively different from that. It might still be legitimate, but there's no way to claim these things are similar.
I don’t understand the difference. Isn't that true of everything that is taught at school? If I argue against the teaching of creationism, I am "setting out to influence someone else's children against [some] parents' wishes," am I not? Ditto re arguing against teaching "CRT." Ditto re "influencing the perception of children towards the Civil Rights movement" and "influencing the perception of children towards the BLM movement" (in either direction), and "influencing the perception of children towards free market economics." Why should there be a special rule re "influencing the perception of children towards the LGBT movement"?
More importantly, as I said, trying to "influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement" is not secual assault.
Well if Lil Ms Hot Mess can come into school and teach four year olds about being fabulous, then it should be just as fine for Preacher Billy-Bob to come into school and teach four year olds about creationism, right? We're not advocating for one set of values over another, we're not encouraging acceptance of a lifestyle, we're just letting kids see the wide range of opinions in the world.
Some people are queer. Some people are creationists. Don't be prejudiced and bigoted!
But we all know that in reality, parents who object to Preacher Billy-Bob will not be accused of bigotry or anti-religious prejudice and they will be supported if they don't want their kids learning that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
Again, the issue is not what should be taught. It is whether LGBTQ people can advocate for the teaching of fabulousness, and whether creationists should be permitted to advocate for the teaching of creationism. IMHO, the answer to that is yes, in both cases.
And, not that it matters, but IMHO creationist theories should be taught, and evolutionary theory should be taught, and students should be given evidence and trained how to use evidence and logical reasoning to assess which theory is more accurate.
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No, you're not. If you were arguing for teaching creationism you'd be doing that. Arguably you'd be doing that if you argued for teaching evolution as well, which is were the drama around the topic came from, and which is why I said depending on the situation it could be legitimate.
In any case forbidding something, in a context where attendance is mandatory, is clearly not the same thing as demanding something be mandatory.
How is that a meaningful distinction? Schools teach for things all the time. Some teach that Christopher Columbus was a great hero, even though some parents think he was a genocidaire. Most teach that Jim Crow was wrong and that the Civil Rights Movement was a moment of great progress, even though some parents disagree. Economics classes often extol the virtues of the free market, even though some parents disagree. Some schools teach patriotism and "family values," even though some parents disagree. When teaching sex ed, some schools teach "abstinence only," even though some parents disagree. What to teach is always subject to disagreement, and all sorts of groups try to influence what is taught. So, again, why should there be a special rule re "influencing the perception of children towards the LGBT movement"?
Have you missed the part where I said "Arguably you'd be doing that if you argued for teaching evolution as well, which is were the drama around the topic came from, and which is why I said depending on the situation it could be legitimate"?
How do you not see the distinction between mandating something be taught, and demanding something not be taught in mandatory schools?
For the same reason there's a special rule re "influencing the perception of children towards Jesus Christ being our lord and savior".
As I just said, that is a meaningless distinction.
That would be a violation of a very specific prohibition regarding freedom of religion. Which is why, although schools cannot teach that homosexuality is wrong because the Bible prohibits it, they are free to teach that it is wrong because it undermines the family, or for 1000 other reasons. And if your school district is teaching that, you are free to lobby it to teach instead that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, or that people should be tolerant of homosexuality.
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Not if you want your child to remain mentally and physically intact.
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Like the Bible? Certainly schools do very much not approve of having people reading the Bible on the premises! 😁
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They're the same
picturebook.This is a bad comment that is nothing more than a culture warring sneer. Speak plainly. If you want to argue the unoriginal claim that "Jewish cultural influence" promotes LGBT, you have to actually argue it and bring evidence, not just assert it.
Four warnings for low-effort inflammatory drive bys, and you haven't stopped, so this ban will be for three days.
Jews run Hollywood: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jews-in-hollywood-kanye-west-dave-chappelle-rabbi-explains-1234645366/
Hollywood promotes LGBT: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/lgbtq-tv-characters-glaad-report-2022-1235094632/
Anything endorsed by Hollywood is endorsed by Jews, as they run Hollywood, which is gay and getting gayer.
BlackRock promotes LGBT: https://www.investmentweek.co.uk/news/4025048/blackrock-steps-push-lgbt-equality-inclusion-joining-lgbt-great
BlackRock is a Jewish asset managing company that happens to be the largest in the world. It's very gay, and pays others to be gayer, blacker, more disabled, uglier, etc.
QED Jewish cultural influence promotes LGBT, among other things, all of which are very progressive. It would be fair to say that it's not all Jews, but the ones that do promote it just happen to have the most power.
The "why" is I feel the most debatable area, right-leaning people would say its to destroy the West, left-leaning people would say its oppressed minorities fighting to protect others on the right side of history, or something.
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Come on now, this is against the spirit of this place. You could at least find out what you’re asserting before you make that assertion.
The "spirit of this place" (as well as the written rules) require the previous commenter to be clear about what they mean in the first place.
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Why?
Thanks for linking that, didn't know about Superman's name being Jewish. His arguments as to the motivations of his creators seem very well thought out in this comment. What exactly do you disagree with there?
Glad kids don't really give a fuck about Superman anymore after reading that.
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The problem is that "LGBT propaganda" and "propaganda about Jewish cultural influence" are both two very large and heterogenous categories.
Do I have a problem with children reading books which feature gay or lesbian characters? Absolutely not. Do I have a problem with children reading fictional books which feature trans characters? No. Do I have a problem with children reading textbooks that tell them that "sex is a spectrum", that even banal and harmless gender nonconformance may be indicative of transgenderism, that puberty blockers are harmless and reversible, and which more-or-less actively encourage them to seek out invasive irreversible surgical procedures which will render them sterile and unable to achieve orgasm? Yeah, I do.
Do I have a problem with children reading books which (correctly!) point out that Jews are overrepresented at the tops of many industries (like the news media or Hollywood)? I mean, that would make me a little uncomfortable, in the same way that I'm uncomfortable with educational content which aggressively highlights the fact that white people are overrepresented at the tops of many industries and fields. Woke people, as a rule, don't have a problem with that kind of content, so extending the same treatment to Jews would just be an exercise in consistency - "what's good for the goose is good for the gander". Do I have a problem with children reading books asserting that the Holocaust never happened? Yeah, I do.
Frankly, I think the latter kind of LGBT propaganda is far more insidious than the former kind of propaganda about Jewish cultural influence. The latter kind of propaganda about Jewish cultural influence is more insidious than any kind of LGBT propaganda you care to mention.
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I'm pretty far from OPs worldview, and I don't know how to judge which is more insidious, but "Hey little girl, you like playing with trucks? Have you considered a double mastectomy?" feels like it's playing in the same league as "Doesn't the president of the local bank have a funny nose?".
This is an example of a concise and even cheeky comment that is not low effort and actually makes a clear point without being verbose. Just wanted to give credit where due, and also highlight this for those who keep accusing us of modding for verbosity and against brevity.
Yes they are.
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You said pretty much exactly what I was trying to say in my reply, using 10% of the words. I commend your succinctness.
Thank you, I strive for efficiency! Though I think longer responses tend to come of as friendlier, and you also supported your argument with a link, so on the other hand your comment made me think I should have put in more effort.
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