If Your Political Identity And Pride Celebrations Are Inherently Sexual....,

reddit | Yes, exactly- someone being the minority doesn't mean they should be out of sight, and it doesn't mean that the majority's rights are being infringed by seeing it or having to (the horror!) explain it to kids. One, kids are a lot less fragile than people think, and two, you can't shield them from everything. Like you pointed out, the same people would probably hate to explain the existence of black people, Jews, the disabled/people in wheelchairs/people with amputations/people with heavy scarring, pregnant people... Actually, really take a long think about that last one. Pregnancy is about the closest it gets to explicit sex, because pregnancy is proof sex happened at some point. And sure, you can explain the baby's presence without sex- but you can also explain attraction towards the same sex without sex, too, by describing it the way you would a straight relationship. They're in love, they're holding hands, they're kissing. If you can do one, you can do the other. (Worth noting: the same Texas GOP platform that declared LGBT identity abominations, also says that all children must be taught that fetuses are people and that live begins "from fertilization". How do you explain fertilization without explaining what sex is? The GOP's own platform undercuts their claim that this is about protecting children from sex.)

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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."

7. 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."