I
understand your reluctance to think of children having sexualities.
This is why the split attraction model is used. Have you ever heard
terms like "homoromantic asexual"? The model was used for people like
that, who don't experience sexual attraction but do have romantic, but I
think it would help for you to think of everyone in those terms to
understand this. Most adults are heteromantic (fall in love with adults
of the opposite sex) and heterosexual (want to have sex with adults of
the opposite sex.) Most kids are heteromantic, but don't have sexual
feelings yet, which is why they're okay with movies like Beauty and the
Beast. But some kids are homoromantic. They don't have sexual attraction
yet either, but they do have romantic ones. If you can understand a 12
year old girl having a boyfriend, you can understand a 12 year old girl
having a girlfriend, too.
I think
you are falling into a fallacy of fundamental attribution error. You,
and other heterosexuals, have feelings which may or may not include sex.
But LGBT people are sexualized so severely that people try to assign
sexual meaning even to us just holding hands or kissing each other on
the lips. Our motivations are stripped away by people who insist we are
driven only by sexual desire. That's part of the reason "love is love"
has been such a big part of our messaging; because we have had to
convince people that we even experience love and other emotions separate
from sex in the first place.
When
we get accused of "grooming" kids (and note that they chose a word
associated with child molestation, when they could have, if they really
felt we were changing kids into something else, used "converting" which
would have worked just as well- this is deliberate) we are being made
out such that our existence is inherently that of a sexual deviant
predator.
Truth be told, that's
another insidious layer to the denial that LGBT youth even exist. If
they occur naturally, it weakens the argument that children are being
preyed upon. Only by furthering the narrative that this is an unnatural
behavior that occurs only in either adults or in children who have been
"tainted" by a perverted adult can the narrative be upheld. In other
words, people don't call LGBT people groomers because they are truly
worried about the kids; they mention the kids because it supports the
narrative they have already created.
I
hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as a Jew, I thought I would bring up
some similarities in the genocidal language and actions used.
You
are probably familiar with a certain picture of a Nazi book burning
immediately before Hitler rose to power. What you are likely not aware
of is that this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality
institute, that studied LGBT people extensively. The first successful
gender confirmation surgery was performed there. The books being burned
in that photo? They were years of studies on LGBT people.
Weimar
Germany, in the years leading up to Hitler seizing power, was known as
the best place in the world to be LGBT. Transgender people were even
allowed to get special markers on their IDs to exempt them from
gender-restricted dress codes. When Hitler seized power, those IDs were
used to imprison trans people. Trans women were treated the same as gay
men and given the pink triangle. Trans men were treated as lesbians and,
while persecuted, were not sent to concentration camps.
After WW2 ended, LGBT people in the camps were sent back to prison to serve out the remainders of their sentences. Some weren't freed until the 1970s.
LGBT
people, leading up to the Holocaust, were accused of grooming and
molesting children. Not coincidentally, Jews were also depicted as
stealing and converting children to Judaism and sinful lifestyles,
particularly in political comics and caricatures.
The
current anti-trans movement is symbiotically fused with antisemitism.
There are countless conspiracy theories that Jewish elites- particularly
George Soros- are funding pharmacies to "trans the children" so they
can make money from the medications and surgeries. Anti-semitism and
transphobia almost always occur clustered together.
The
rise of the Great Replacement Theory is also linked to both of these.
Jews are accused of bringing the immigrants into this country to replace
white people. They're also accused of pushing "the trans" so that white
children will be rendered infertile (despite the huge numbers of trans
people of color, which they ignore) and drive down their numbers. An
Idaho legislator who penned an anti-trans law explicitly says she sees
it as an extension of the pro-life debate due to her worries about
"teenagers losing perfectly healthy reproductive organs."
In
Nazi Germany, the role of women was primarily to make more good little
Aryans and raise them properly. While abortions were often performed
involuntarily on Jews and other undesirables, they were forbidden for
white women. There was a high stigma for infertile women.
Taking
all of these facts into account, I think you can see how it's hard for a
lot of people to believe that the concern over children is actually
genuine. It's something much more sinister and linked to a lot of other
forms of bigotry, and we are seeing echoes of it now.
You
don't call a group of people "groomers" if you want to live peacefully
with them. Pedophiles are seen as subhuman, as dangers to society. Not
one person on the planet wants to coexist peacefully with pedophiles.
(And despite your insistence that they mean "grooming" as in converting,
they never try to invoke that imagery. It's always claims of
perversion, of sexual abuse- pedophilia without ever actually touching a
child.) Once a group is perceived as being a front for pedophiles, it
takes decades of advocacy for them to be seen as human beings again- if they are so lucky as to not be targeted for extermination instead.
This
is genocidal language. It doesn't have to mean genocidal as in trains
and gas chambers. It can also mean things like forcing them in the
closet (which is to say: if you let Jews live, but said them going to
temple was banned, and didn't let them wear their traditional clothing
on the grounds that this was upsetting to children, that would be a form
of genocide), taking their children away (there is a growing sentiment
that LGBT couples should not be allowed to have or adopt children, and
there is only one place that line of thinking leads. If it's grooming to
tell someone else's kids it's
okay to be gay, then it's grooming to tell your own kids, too, which
means any LGBT adult with a child is now a groomer. Not to mention
Texas's new initiative to have parents of trans kids investigated by
CPS, which DeSantis has indicated he is interested in bringing to
Florida), and otherwise making their lives unbearable in an attempt to
drive up suicide rates (Trans people already have a 40% rate of
attempting suicide, and this is higher when they are in unsupportive
environments or those in which they can't access gender-affirming care,
which both Abbott and DeSantis have said they want to ban in all
circumstances in their states).
Further,
there are increasing calls for pogroms against LGBT people from elected
officials, those running for office, and/or people with heavy influence
on elected officials. This has resulted in a sustained campaign of
terror against LGBT people from the alt-right. Just twenty minutes from
my hometown, two weeks ago, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was
stopped on their way to attack an LGBT Pride event. At the same event,
there were instances of harassment perpetrated by other groups,
including, you guessed it, parents with kids being called groomers.
The
LGBT community is in danger right now. I understand people like you who
may have concerns, but the problem is that those concerns are often
used as a pretext for the alt-right to radicalize people against LGBT
people. The entire "groomers" rhetoric, for reference, started as a
campaign on 4chan a year or two ago. And look how effective it has been
just in the last six months. Five years ago, anyone who objected to
LeFou being gay in the new Beauty and the Beast movie was laughed off
the internet; if that movie was released now, there would be riots in
Anaheim. This is getting out of hand at an alarming rate, and this
really isn't a good time to be on the fence or "have concerns."