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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.
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.
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.
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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