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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.
(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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