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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.
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.
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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