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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.
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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