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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.
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.
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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