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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.
"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.
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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