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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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#”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.

TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.

No, not directly but it's crowd cover and encouragement to take your paraphilia public / evolve it into an identity. No, I highly doubt that anything put on by the school is ever a spark for a kid to trans (except actual groomery grooming), but it's definitely gasoline, and a firepit.

For a lot of paraphilias including agp, the exhibitionism and humiliation is part of the excitement and can eventually sublimate into association.

A teen in the 90s who got turned on by putting on his sister's dress, would still not be caught dead coming to school like that. So it's ability and context to grow is stunted, and in many cased desisted, subsumed into hetero-erotic exploration with women, or maybe remains a mild kink. But when the teacher and school is encouraging it, and more importantly you are given examples of other people doing it and seemingly getting away with it, you now have a context to dive all in and let it consume you, and receive the positive social feedback.

TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.

Finally, returning to your initial TL;DR, again no I doubt it's causing anything outright, but certainly someone with some mild curiousity can get tickled by the idea and it's a great way to grow into an earworm.

As a guy I can tell you there are a lot of random little slightly 'strange' fleeting experiences that I can still trace certain shapes of my adult sexual-psyche back to today. Even if you want to make an argument that in every scenario, the spark was already there, I'm saying that something as ridiculous as a teacher reading a book that makes you feel weird can really feed that spark.

I’ve never personally been worried about that sort of grooming. To me, the part that’s especially grooming-ish isn’t that. It’s the schools encouraging kids to experiment with sex-related ideas at school with the school not only teaching kids to keep sexual secrets from their parents, but helping keep it a secret from their parents. They do things like having “trans clothing closets” so your son can wear a dress at school, will call your child by a different name at school, including using different pronouns and will hide all of this information from you.

This to me is the grooming. Teaching kids that parents are not to be informed of some things means that, should another adult decide that he or she would like a sexual relationship with your child, he no longer has to work that hard to convince that child to not tell. The child’s school has made it clear that if the child would be embarrassed telling his parents, or if he just plain doesn’t want to, the child doesn’t tell. Add in that we’re having kids as young as 5 being exposed to very adult sexual ideas, and it’s thus much easier to convince a kid who’s already used to thinking and talking about sex that going farther is okay.

And to add to this- the idea that institutions keep meaningful secrets about a child from that child’s parents flies in the face of literally every piece of wisdom about protecting children that has ever been realized.