Members-Only Article
One of the things mainstream American media does a particularly bad job of is communicating to a larger public the campaigns of incitement and predation animating Republican alternative media. Over recent weeks Republicans have been pushing a new line equating any policies that support or express openness to the concerns of transgender youth to “grooming” and sexual predation. Clearly there are a lot of unsettled ideas in the society at large over how to approach, treat, support transgender youth and gender dysphoria generally. There are people who have a good faith belief that teaching kids about transgender issues or having a more open and supportive approach to kids experiencing gender dysphoria actually encourages gender identity confusion. But I want to be clear: this is different. This is the specific claim that teachers especially are “grooming” children to become transgender as part of a large plot of sexual predation. “Grooming” isn’t a neutral word. It’s part of the vocabulary of pedophilia and sexual exploitation. Thus we’ve had a growing confluence of messaging about any discussion of transgender issues in schools with claims that Ketanji Brown Jackson is “soft” on pedophiles and thus President Biden and Democrats generally are pro-pedophilia.
Are you shaking your head wondering how these things have anything to do with each other? That’s not surprising because they don’t have anything to do with each other. But they are being combined in evolving Republican messaging. Over the weekend one of the pro-Trump stars of the far right news channel OAN dubbed President Biden “the groomer-in-chief”.
“He’s open to the language of fellow groomers, but sympathy for groomers only enables them further. Look at their newly nominated Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, America’s queen of child porn apologists.”
I noticed how far this had advanced when I noticed this Twitter exchange: a phony statistic about the growth in the number of transgender youth was put forward by this widely read right-wing Twitter account as prima facie evidence of “grooming” in schools across the country.
“If it isn’t grooming, what’s it called when girls are socialized into a transgender identity by teachers?”
What this really represents is the increasing normalization of QAnon-style messaging among purportedly mainstream Republican politicians, though the connection is almost lost on mainstream media. The idea that Democrats and liberals are being a conspiracy of pedophilia and child sex trafficking has become entirely mainstream. And in fact any support for transgender youth is now on its face evidence of “grooming,” which is of course a highly charged word tied to pedophilia and sexual predation.
If you didn’t know this that’s not surprising. But it’s ubiquitous now in Republican alternative media. It’s the wind and energy now driving the Trump/Tea Party GOP ship.
