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This cartoon is pretty autobiographical for me, enough so that I’ve drawn myself into it. (And it’s kind of fun to draw my 1990s self. I miss that hair!)
I’ve had evangelical Christian friends for most of my life. The Evangelical Christians I’ve known, as a group, are chatty and friendly. A whole bunch of them enjoy discussing ideas and musicals, which makes them an ideal friends group for me, if they’re willing to be friendly with an atheist Jew and not try to convert.
But there’s always that lurking question – are they going to turn out to have attitudes I can’t tolerate in a friend? Are they hateful towards LGBT people? My awareness of that issue is always hovering over me anytime I meet an evangelical.
And nowadays, that same awareness hovers when I meet a radical feminist.
I don’t mean to say that all radical feminists are transphobes – that’s obviously not the case. Similarly, not all Christians are transphobes, or homophobes. (And plenty of lgbt people are themselves Christians).
But there’s a significant correlation there. The possibility of someone being a homophobe, or a transphobe, is much higher if that person is an avowed Christian. And, nowadays, the possibility of being a transphobe is much higher if a person is an avowed radical feminist.
It’s a really sucky change, and one that I hope isn’t permanent.
This one was more fun to draw than I expected. I didn’t want any big body language or any big changes in layout from panel to panel – but I also didn’t want it to look like I photocopied the same panel four times. So the challenge was to provide enough visual variety so that the cartoon is pleasing to look at even though it is, basically, the same panel four times in a row.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. Every panel shows a caricature of me, Barry, meeting a different person in each panel.
PANEL ONE
CAPTION: Meeting a Christian, 1990
Barry – a fat guy with glasses and long, big, curly hair – is shaking hands with a somewhat conservatively dressed (long sleeves, long skirt) woman with long, straight blonde hair. She’s wearing a necklace with a cross on it and is carrying a purse. Both people are smiling.
BARRY (thought balloon): A Christian? Hope she’s not a homophobe.
PANEL TWO
CAPTION: Meeting a Radical Feminist, 1990
Barry, looking the same as in panel 1 but wearing a different outfit, is making a small wave towards a woman with short hair and a buttoned-up shirt. Barry has a backpack and the woman is carrying a book.
BARRY (thought balloon): A radical feminist? Cool!
PANEL THREE
CAPTION: Meeting a Christian Today
Barry now has much less hair, tied back in a tiny little ponytail, and his beard is shorter and more salt-and-pepper than black. He'[s listening to cheerful-looking man with a full beard. The man is carrying a cell phone.
BARRY (thought): A Christian? I hope he’s not a transphobe.
PANEL FOUR
CAPTION: Meeting a Radical Feminist Today
Barry, looking the same age as in panel three, is facing a woman who is wearing a blazer over a striped shirt and is carrying an umbrella. She has short, slightly spiky hair on top, buzzed on the sides.
BARRY (thought balloon): A radical feminist? Hope she’s not a transphobe.
Has radical feminism actually changed? Or were transphobia always common amongst radical feminists, but in the 1990s it just wasn’t as overt a position because trans issues were too marginal in the public awareness for most transphobes to feel the need to make their views on the matter overt?
I honestly don’t know, because in the 1990s I was only starting my education on feminism and hadn’t even begun my education on trans issues.
I have lost more friends over this issue, I think, than over any other. Radical feminists get it in so many ways. To have them suddenly express the same sort of prejudice that they’ve been fighting against, using essentially the same arguments, and reduce women to nothing but their genitalia is infinitely disappointing to me.
Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire was published in 1978. I don’t think radical feminism has changed. What has changed is that there are more garden-variety conservatives who will say in bad faith that they are radical feminists.
@bcb: I hate to say it but I believe many of these women, with long histories of activism often going back to the sixties, really are committed feminists.
I don’t know how many, if any, people are claiming to be radical feminists in bad faith. I think there are some people for whom radical feminism is an attractive branch of feminism because of its association with transphobia, who may not understand or be interested in the rest of what radical feminism has to offer. But they probably genuinely believe themselves to be radical feminists, whether or not that’s accurate.
The more I look into this, though – and reading about the reactions to The Transsexual Empire was an interesting, if depressing, rabbit hole – the more I am convinced that radical feminism hasn’t changed in the way Barry suggests in his post. What has changed is that there has been a positive shift in the attitude towards trans people in feminism at large (and in other progressive ideologies) that makes the fact that many prominant radical feminists, and their followers, are overtly (and often aggressively) transphobic stand out more.
As a conservative, I enjoy the near inevitable othering of lifelong leftists who have been marching in lockstep for decades, because they found a topic on which there are shades of material disagreement on which they’re not prepared to move forward.
“They’re not leftists! They’re not progressive! They’re not feminist!”
Yes they are, yes they are, and yes they are. And this demonstrates the reality of what Democrats have made a cottage industry out of denying for years: The left, and particularly the American left, is becoming more extreme on these issues, and these are the people you’re leaving behind.
You can disagree, I suppose. You can call it whatever you want. But what you’re doing functionally acts like gatekeeping progressivism. And if you can gatekeep progressivism, I can gatekeep conservatism, and I’m telling you that TERFs aren’t conservative. They don’t hold conservative values, espouse conservative lifestyles, or forward conservative policy… Except in this very narrow portfolio, and while politics sometimes makes for strange bedfellows, a single topic of agreement isn’t an entire political platform.
I do think that there are plenty of lefties and righties both who are rude. But there are two key differences which, to me, makes this cartoon fair.
1) Lefties are much less likely to pretend that incivility is purely a right-wing problem. Civility-concern-trolling is a centrist and right-wing thing.
2) On the left, we still basically expect our elected politicians to be civil.
In contrast, Trump – who became prominent politically basically by screaming “unamerican! Foreigner!” at Barack Obama – was elected President. “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles” is a quote not from a Twitter rando, but from elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ official spokeswoman called Dems “groomers” in a press conference. None of these are offhand comments or slip-ups, which anyone can do now and then, especially when debates get heated; these are on purpose and form a pattern. There’s no equivalent among elected officials on the left.
The idea that radfems have been “marching in lockstep for decades” is how it looks to conservatives, but it’s really not true. As a Republican, I guess you’re not aware of intra-left debates, but take my word for it: There are NO intra-left debates that are more heated than that between radfems and mainstream liberals, and that’s been going on for decades. The porn wars in feminism were often (not always) VICIOUS on both sides.
I think 7 was supposed to go in the other thread.
To it: Biden was the one who said Romney was going to put black people back in chains. Hillary called Trump voters “a basket of deplorables” – “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, you know… whatever”.
I think there’s this illusion that Democrats are more civil because they couch their smears in more flowery language and complete sentences, where Republicans are much more direct because they’re unable or unwilling to express themselves in a less offensive manner, for whatever reason. Democrats, generally, give themselves plausible deniability for any given individual utterance, but when you take the portfolio of experience from the last couple of decades, the excuses start to wear thin and I don’t know who they’re trying to fool anymore. Again… You don’t have to agree with my perception of that, offense is taken, not offered, it’s how I think Republicans see it. I’m not a Republican, but I am conservative, and I certainly do.
8 is fair…. “lockstep” was probably too strict. “Alongside each other, generally in the same direction” is probably closer to true and still does what I needed it to.
But what I don’t understand and would maybe like to, is how these debates happen, if not publicly? How does an intra-left debate happen that a conservative couldn’t see? The friction between progressives and TERFs has been happening fairly publicly for maybe a decade, quite openly, from my perspective. I might not appreciate certain nuances, but I feel like I at least see it.
You think that’s equivalent to calling Democrats the party of pedophiles? You think that’s equivalent to calling Democrats groomers? Do you not think accusing people of being child sexual abusers is a lot worse (and a lot more violent) than calling people, based on their actual words and actions, bigoted?
I can’t begin to imagine, at my most charitable, how that could possibly work without heaping dumptruckfulls of cognitive dissonance.
Jackie O @ 10
I think it’s closer than you’re giving it credit, yes.
We’re going to disagree on this, obviously, but I think it depends on whether we’re talking about individuals or groups.
If we’re talking about groups… I think it’s almost exactly the same. When Hillary called Trump voters all the names and bumperstickers she could think of… She didn’t know. She was making assumptions based on group membership, and those assumptions are almost certainly going to fall apart at an individual level. We’ve reached the point where the labels basically amount to: “You’re on the other team and I don’t like you”.
At a personal level, I think it depends. And again… I don’t expect you to agree with me on this, but just like individuals can be racist and deserve criticism or consequences, people can be pedophiles and groomers. And frankly, some of the things we’re seeing out of the teaching profession, I think, are fairly called grooming activities. I think the teaching profession is far too cavalier about cutting parents out of the lives of their kids. I don’t think it’s healthy to build relationships based on keeping secrets from parents. Further afeild: I am thoroughly confused by the moral necessity of drag queen story hour. I think the optics on the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus singing “We’re Coming For Your Children” with about a dozen members being on sexual predator lists was abysmal.
Obviously that doesn’t mean that everyone being called a pedophile or a groomer is actually a pedophile or a groomer. But not everyone being called a racist is a racist, and frankly the left hasn’t seemed to be overly concerned about the fallout of the truth of an accusation until now. “Everyone is a little racist”, right? “Everyone is a little sexist”? “Most of the time it’s true.” “I think it’s more important to support victims.” I think it even pays to remember that until very recently… “pedophile” was in fact one of the left’s go-tos, in the context of Catholics and Scout leaders.
I’m not saying I support using the labels, I’m not saying I would use them. I would prefer a much less heated discourse. And again… I don’t expect you to agree with me. But I honestly feel like these things are very similar. I would suggest, gently, that it might not be *my* truckloads of cognitive dissonance doing work here.
If you’re gonna call me Jackie, please use Jackie O.
Being thought of as a racist isn’t the handicap it used to be, to paraphrase “Red Dwarf”. Why, blatant racists have been President as recently as January of 2021.
Being thought of as a child sexual abuser, otoh, can get you killed. But, hey, opinions differ on whether and which is the more dangerous and damaging label.
Ain’t no teens going around murdering people labeled racist these days.
On the other hand…
I mean, there’ve been an awful lot of revelations over child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and by scout leaders over the years. There’s something there. The same can’t be truthfully said about the Democratic Party’s politicians.
Lastly, and I know this isn’t civil but you can go pound sound for furthering the slur that teachers are grooming kids for sexual abuse. You should be ashamed of yourself for writing that trash. I’m ashamed for you. What you’ve written is just gross but I’ve been retaught a Lesson today about engaging with you.
Can do. Even caught the edit timelimit for that one.
I feel like this is emotional blackmail, so I’m going to respond to it, knowing that you’re probably going to hate my response, but frankly, I think using Ghey’s murder in this context was a shitty thing to do.
Are you suggesting that Brianna Ghey was murdered because someone called her a groomer? I assume you’re not. Perhaps you’re making the point that trans people are targeted for violence, with a dash of current events. That’s true, and it’s awful. But we don’t even know if Ghey’s murderers knew she was trans. Her murder was also in the UK, pretty far afield from the American context. It also doesn’t change what I said above.
Using dead kids as a “get out of argument free” card is ugly.
I’m making the point that she lived in an environment where people felt justified in killing her in no small part because trans people are accused of being groomers. But you knew that.
I’ll leave it here…
You’re spreading dangerous lies by saying teachers are grooming their students for sexual abuse. Pretending to hold the high ground after writing that when linked to an article about yet another murder of a trans woman is quite a bold move. I’m not falling for it.
You’re one of the right wingers promoting the groomer libel. I don’t believe you have anything of value to add to this discussion given that outrageous claim. You’ve told us who you are and I believe you.
Perfect. I’m happy to take the last word.
This is very similar to the “There is no Critical Race Theory in K-12” conversation. Except in that case, Critical Race Theory almost certainly isn’t being taught in K-12 classrooms. Some of the fruit of critical race theory might be, but that’s not really relevant. What is relevant, at least to the parents, is that there are things being taught in their children’s classrooms that they find objectionable, and they’re using “Critical Race Theory” as shorthand for what they find objectionable.
And instead of grappling that, instead of meeting it head on, school administrators are mealy-mouthing their way around the confrontation by asserting that “We aren’t teaching CRT”.
This is non-responsive. A concern that something the parent is calling CRT is happening is not in fact dealt with by pointing out they’re calling it the wrong thing. The question is “Is the thing happening?”, and then “Is the thing acceptable?” and then, “Is the parent’s concern valid?”
And it might not be. The parent might be crazy. The school might disagree, and at the end of the day, schools have a lot of latitude to decide curriculum. But at least have the character to stand on your principles and say that. Own it. Because failing to do so makes it look like you have something to hide.
The grooming narrative is very similar, except there’s probably actually some amount of grooming happening. Frankly, before 2020, this wouldn’t have been controversial, and all the examples of teachers having sexual relations with children would have been exhibits A-ZOINKS.
When parents are outraged because their children are being referred to doctors without their knowledge, When kids are being encouraged to keep secrets from their parents, without any reason whatsoever to think that the parents might not be supportive, when special clubs are being organized for preteens to explore their sexuality, when teachers are explaining in lurid detail their sexual escapades to children, I think it’s legitimate to ask questions, and I think it’s appropriate to take those questions seriously. That’s without even getting close to the other things I mentioned, like Drag Queen story hour, which I still don’t understand the imperative of taking young children to, almost certainly normalizes adult sexuality to preteens, and at the very least, does some of a predator’s job for them. Or the number of people with easy access to kids that aren’t subjected to Criminal Record Checks. You can spin all you want. That’s weird.
I agree, not all of what’s being called grooming is in fact grooming, I think that sex ed is important, and I like that it’s easier for kids to be comfortable in their identities. We need to do a better job at differentiating that when we have these conversations.
But so do you. The royal you, including administrators, educators and politicians. Because if you don’t separate the acceptable behavior from the egregious, it gets lumped together, and in defending it all, or spinning away from it, you look like you’re not taking child sexual abuse seriously, or that you have something to hide.
The parallels to the Catholic church are stark, I’d love it if we, the royal we, including literally everyone, did better this time.
Again… I feel like it’s legitimate to ask questions about appropriateness in these situations. Those questions are not answered by “There’s a murdered trans kid in the UK.”
I assume this refers to “deplorables.” I think the “deplorables” remark – which Clinton said she regretted literally the next day – was a bad mistake. But what you’re saying here doesn’t logically apply to it, since what she said is that some Republicans have falling into a basket of deplorable beliefs (sexism, racism, etc) and some have not. Since she expressly said that about half of Republicans weren’t like that, it’s not fair for you to suggest that she said all Republicans are like that.
But also, you’re ignoring that I said “None of these are offhand comments or slip-ups, which anyone can do now and then.” Like most conservatives, you excuse the grossest things that Republicans say, without regret, repeatedly, and as a matter of policy, by making a false equivalence with remarks that were said once and in some cases, like deplorables, publicly withdrawn. (The chains comment Barack Obama himself walked back in his public statements.)
It also says a lot that when I mentioned examples of high-up Republicans smearing people baselessly as pedophiles within the last year, you had to go back to 2016 and 2012 to find two statements you falsely claim are equivalent. The reason you had to go so far back is that there is a real difference, no matter how you deny it. The Republican Party today is gross and extreme in a way it wasn’t when Romney was running. (Not that I didn’t passionately disagree with the Republicans then, too, but Romney wasn’t going around encouraging crowds to chant “lock him up” about his opponent.)
Finally, even if you don’t admit it, racism is a real problem and it’s important to discuss. You may not agree if I say that many Republican attempts to limit access to voting are racist, but it’s not an baseless thing to say, it’s not something I’m targeting randomly when I actually have no reason to believe the policy is racist, and it’s not something I’m saying just to be gross and offensive. Representative Greene didn’t say that because she has any real reason to think that Democrats are in any general systematic way having sex with children. She just said that because she’s an asshole, and if you defend that, you’re an asshole too.
Regarding the “binders full of women,” what happened was a bit unfair to Romney. I think the closest parallel is Howard Dean’s scream. In context, it made sense that Dean was making a celebratory victory yell, and in context, it made sense that Romney said he went out of his way to find women who might be able to fulfill political positions.
But the scream and the phrase both sounded odd and funny. The first “binders full of women” memes literally appeared before that debate had even ended. And when something is funny and meme-able, there’s not much that can be done about it.
A much fairer criticism of Romney is that his “binders full of women” story was dishonest in a way that gave Romney more credit than he deserved. He claimed that he proactively went to women’s groups and asked them to suggest qualified women to hire, when he was governor of Massachusetts. But it was the opposite: A women’s group made the binders and brought them to him, without being asked (and to at least one other politician).
But I don’t generally take one-off, impromptu remarks very seriously. Maybe Romney deliberately lied, maybe he just misremembered. There’s really no substance there. (Maybe if he repeated the story a bunch of times, always getting it wrong in the same way, that would be worth criticizing, but I don’t know if he did.)
In a way, the worst victim of this sort of thing was George HW Bush. Anyone who speaks publicly live hundreds or thousands of times a year, often having to improvise because you’re always responding to new events, will occasionally say something that sounds stupid. But once the press decided that saying bizarre and stupid things described GHWB, every new minor gaff he made could be twisted to fit that narrative.
And actually, Al Gore suffered from something very similar. He really wasn’t much of a liar – he never said he invented the internet – but once the press decided he was a liar…
It’s not that conservatives couldn’t see it. The debates were public. It’s just a matter of what news sources people and their immediate social circles are paying the most attention to.
It’s the same in other directions, too. There have certainly been times when there were major debates going on in conservative spheres that most liberals were unaware of. Within conservative evangelical Christian culture, in recent years, there was a significant debate about if Christians should be withdrawing as much as possible from the larger culture and focusing instead of building their own subculture. I would bet money that 9 of 10 Democrats never heard of that debate – certainly not in enough detail that they’ll remember it ten years from now. Not because it wasn’t in public, but because internal debates of conservative evangelical culture isn’t something most of us are paying attention to.
@18 My point with going back to Hillary and Biden (not Obama, and Joe has never apologized) was to get presidential frontrunners. I didn’t talk about Harry “Well it worked, didn’t it?” Reid because both time and position, although Senate Majority leader is pretty high up there…. I suppose since you brought up MTG the squad might be an appropriate comparison, and some of the things they’ve said have been quoteable.
The other thing to note is that in the last four years, Democrats have been using “MAGA” or “Trumpish” in the way we’re talking about. Because it doesn’t even matter if the person is MAGA or Trumpy, what matters is that Trump was “literally Hitler” and otherwise the worst thing they’ve ever seen in politics, and they really need to smear their opponents.
@21 Fair. Thanks.
Just a comment going back to the point of the post: I remember reading Mary Daly and some of Adrienne Rich back in the 1980s, and while I did not pay much attention to it then–I was reading radical feminism in a very targeted way for what it had to say about sexual violence and trans issues weren’t even close to my radar–they each said some horribly transphobic things back then; and I assume they were representative of at least non-trivial minority position, if not the majority position.
Richard –
I know there were transphobes among radfems back then, too. But I think there were two differences compared to today.
First, with few exceptions (like Raymond), there wasn’t an obsession with hating and fearing trans people. Today that kind of obsessive interest seems to be common among radfems, and maybe even a default.
Second, right now, I think only radfems with unassailable positions feel comfortable being both radfem and pro-trans (I’m thinking of Catherine MacKinnon). Back then, at least among the radfems I was reading and social media-ing with, being both pro-trans and radfem was a socially viable position in a way that seems much less common today.
The idea that “MAGA or Trumpish” is even remotely comparable to “pedophile” is too ridiculous to respond to. You’re completely beyond anything reasoned here, Corso, and I don’t see any point of talking to you on this subject if your arguments are going to be this irrational.
If you can’t explicitly admit that calling someone a pedophile because they support Biden is, in fact, a great deal more dire an insult than calling someone MAGA because they support Trump, then stop posting in this thread and in the other thread where this conversation is taking place.
It’s a real good thing I didn’t do that then. It’s not that I think that it’s better or worse (of course pedophile is worse), it’s that she’s a single congresswoman, and I don’t think that MTG represents the majority of Republicans. I’m not even convinced that she represents the majority of her district, having just held her seat by the skin of her teeth in a race accurately portrayed as “My Opponent is Worse: The Campaign”. I’m more than willing to gloss over her because I think focusing on her is nutpicking.
I’m not sure I even understand the point of the discussion anymore… Are we trying to find the single worst example of inflamed rhetoric from the other side to hold up as representative?
Amp,
You are no doubt correct. I wasn’t really disagreeing with the post, since I am not reading or much in touch with radical feminists/feminism much these days, just remembering what I read back then.
Are we trying to find the single worst example of inflamed rhetoric from the other side to hold up as representative?
Wasn’t that more or less what you asked for? Your contention was or appeared to be that no Democrat was ever called anything as bad as “Nazi”. Examples were given. Lots of examples were given. If this satisfies your query, then no more need be said about it, I suppose, but it’s an odd sort of amnesia that you are taking offense at the answers to your question.
In context, it really seemed to me like you were. Thank you for clarifying.
I think being a federal congresswoman is actually pretty significant – you only get there if a plurality of voting Republicans in the primary, then a majority in the general, vote for you. It’s even more significant when you’re easily RE elected to the position, as Greene was. Denying that she is exactly what many, and possibly most, Republicans want seems like being in denial.
And sorry, you’re right. MTG won Georgia’s 14th by like 30 points. I was thinking of Boebert who scraped in by 600 votes in Colorado.
Comment on the comic: I ‘ve always heard that women are the gatekeepers of society. Cherishing one’s victimhood is the modern addiction. I don’t necessarily agree with the religious angle either. It implies that current religious people aren’t homophobic anymore. I see the point that Barry is making, I just don’t think this was the best analogy to use to illustrate it.
Corso:
Can you give an example of this happening?
That’s because you think drag is inherently sexual, and you’re just wrong about that. There is drag in literal Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 40s.
There have been incidents of inappropriate and sexualized content and behavior at drag queen story hours, but you just got done saying that we need to distinguish between what’s inappropriate and what’s not instead of generalizing and lumping things together, so I don’t need to make that argument back at you.
You were also wrong about Hillary’s “deplorables” comment. This is what she actually said:
That second half is incredibly generous to Trump voters, especially when you compare it to what Republicans say about Democrats. When was the last time you heard a Republican candidate try to put themselves in the shoes of a Democratic voter and acknowledge their legitimate concerns? That does not happen anymore.
So when you say:
This ignores everything she said after the part that right-wingers dishonestly like to focus on (much in the same way they ignored that Obama’s “bitter clingers” comment was accompanied with similarly empathetic comments toward rural Republicans). She wasn’t making assumptions and she acknowledged that many individuals–half, in fact–didn’t fit the stereotypes of Trump voters she was describing.
Maybe you can quibble and say she didn’t know whether each group made up exactly 50% of Trump’s support, but she wasn’t citing actual statistics, nor was she pretending to; she was making a point. And I don’t think
evenyou would deny that the first half describes plenty of Trump supporters. It isn’t “uncivil” or a “smear” to say that many Trump voters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic;” this is a documented fact and you know it.As for Biden’s “put y’all back in chains” comment, it’s unclear in context if that was directed toward black people as a group, or if it was intended to evoke slavery, but the context does make it unlikely that he was talking about literal chains:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-put-yall-back-in-chains/
So no, the examples you’ve chosen do not at all support your conclusions that Democrats are just as uncivil toward Republicans as a group as Republicans are to Democrats.
This is a really good catch. I’d only add that drag is inherently gendered and, like so many on the right, Corso mistakenly thinks that drag only consists of people dressing up as women. Since women are overtly and constantly sexualized, the right mistakenly believes that drag is inherently sexual. Every single thing a drag queen does, therefore, is sexualized by these people. How else could a drag queen reading “The Little Engine That Could” be thought of as sexual? The call, in other words, is coming from inside the right wing house.
We get to see the real life consequences of misogynistic thinking in that chain of logic.
Corso, left wing thought on sexuality and consent abhors both of the following, which are direct quotes from your post @18
Paedophiles going for trusted positions, like teachers, coaches, religious leaders, scout leaders, etc., to gain access to children is a serious problem in any position where adults are trusted to care for children. No one on the left denies this. No one on the left is fighting instituting background checks for people in these positions. In fact, most of the laws currently on the books to prevent and punish such abuse were initiated by people on the left, and often fought by people on the right. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with LGBTQ people, who are no more likely be guilty of such offenses than cis heterosexuals. This is NOT what this debate is actually about. These are straw men.
Amp, I respectfully ask that you come down harder on this.
Have there?? Could you link to an example or two? I am genuinely unaware of this.
Julia Serano makes this connection in her latest book “SEXED UP!” and in her essay about the way trans people get framed as moral and literal threats to girls and women.
She goes on to talk about how this influences popular discomfort with gay men (penises!) vs. lesbians (no penises!) and biphobia in lesbian communities (don’t bring that penis contamination in here!) vs. gay communities. Then she talks about how what was briefly called “cultural feminism” (a kind of essentialist framework that sees the “male role” as inherently dangerous and threatening) got submerged in “radical feminisim” and now “gender critical” feminism, all of which fall back on these
And they wind up collaborating with the far/religious Right on things like stigmatizing/outlawing porn, and attacking trans rights, because
There’s a lot more there. It’s a terrific essay.
Preferably from a mainstream news source?
What exactly would the point of linking to isolated examples be? Remember here – we are talking about making an activity ILLEGAL because of the damage it ALLEGEDLY does to children. Even if there are some anecdotes of things that were legit inappropiate* at Drag Queen Story Hours, there is no reason AT ALL to suspect that there is a systemic problem with child abuse associated with such venues, as opposed to, oh, I don’t know, the Catholic Church, the US Southern Baptist Church, Gymnastics, College Sports – to name a few recent examples. In these situations, we rightly blame the individual offenders, and the hierarchies that protected them and recognize that banning churches, and sports would be both stupid and wrong, not to mention gross violations of people’s freedom.
*I apply a – if it would be o.k. for a straight person, it is ok. for a gay person. So, I can easily believe that some Drag Queen Story hours include double entendres for the amusement of parents that go over the heads of children. I’m thinking of watching Three’s Company as a teenager with my younger sister. She laughed at the physical comedy, but had zero understanding of the sexual innuendos. Whether or not you think it is good parenting to let six-year-olds watch Three’s Company, do you think it should be illegal? Would you seriously consider that to be “grooming”?
The more I think about this, the more pernicious it becomes. At first glance “inappropriate and sexualized content” sounds really, really bad. But, it is actually totally subjective, very vague and could, in fact, probably apply to a wide range of children’s cartoons – Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, SpongeBob SquarePants…the list could go on.
We can, and probably should, argue for days about whether young children should be allowed to watch various episodes, how various tropes uphold patriarchy, and even promote rape culture (I’m looking at you, Pepe le Peu). Drag Queen Story Hour is downright wholesome in comparison to some of these shows.
Whilst there have been many campaigns from the left to pressure media to change or remove the most damaging tropes, that is not what the right is doing. The right is trying to make it illegal to watch and discuss the things they object to. While I’m sure some radical leftists have done so as well, the Democratic Party has not supported such censorship in my lifetime.
Well, the point would be to differentiate between an over-reaction/over-generalization of something that actually happened, and made-up libel.
If we don’t draw that distinction, and say “it doesn’t matter if there’s evidence for your claim because your conclusions won’t be valid anyway”, then that’s tantamount to saying “made up lies aren’t harmful because they don’t affect the conclusions”. But that’s not true.
Well, yes. Because it’s an outright lie. This guy is just legitimizing the right wing desire to eliminate trans folk. If he gets some teachers killed in service of that goal, that’s a price he seems willing to pay.
It’s more than just that. This is a veritable onion of lies, with layer upon layer. How can we fight that?
@34 I pointed out two of the most bald-faced lies in that screed. I don’t think lies that brazen should be allowed here. Anyone making false assertions like that is not operating in good faith.
And, my point @39 is accepting anecdotes of things a vague as “inappropriate sexualized context” as “evidence” plays into their hands, because even on the off chance that they can point to one or two true instances of unambiguous abuse (in any population of millions, there will be abusers so there are probably some to be found), those are totally irrelevant. They would not justify making drag illegal, any more than instances of coaches abusing student athletes would justify outlawing sports for children.
Finally, I get that the main targets today are trans people (and look how quickly it has moved from trans children to all trans people, and cis male drag performers). But, this is the tip of the iceburg. This is ultimately about outlawing all sexual minorities, and rolling back womens rights as well. Things are moving at an alarming rate and I have no idea how to contribute to stopping it.
That’s why I asked for specific examples, and Amp smartly added that they should be from mainstream news outlets. Because there’s two possibilities, either 1) examples of “inappropriate” content don’t actually exist and are a product of the rumor mill/whisper campaign, or 2) they do exist and we should be able to see just what the word “inappropriate” is being applied to so we can see whose standards are being applied and evaluate the claim for ourselves.
Because I suspect they don’t exist, and/or are not remotely the sort of thing that your average parent would worry about. And I’ll put $100 down on my bet that there is nothing like “adults showed children their bathing suit areas” or “adults touched children in an inappropriate way” or “adults simulated adults-only behavior in front of children” or anything else that is being salaciously implied by the statement.
Elusis @43, yes, I think your assessment is correct. As time goes on, it seems increasingly likely that no such reports exist.
I obviously missed a lot after replying to this a couple months ago.
Me:
Jacqueline Squid Onassis:
Ok, wow.
I assume there’s been a miscommunication here and you misattributed my statement to Corso. If you read what I said in context, I was clearly defending drag, as well as drag queen story hours, and pointing out that Corso is conflating isolated incidents with an entire art form in an unfair manner. (You agreed with and complemented the statement I made right before this quote which clarified this.)
I am a teacher myself. I have a transgender student whose father got angry at me for refusing to misgender and deadname him at a parent-teacher conference. I have transgender friends. I have been to drag shows, where my only discomfort was over the fear that a right-wing psycho could attack. Not that any of that means I can’t have anti-trans bias, but I think that accusation was entirely unwarranted, although again I think it was based on a mistake.
I don’t feel the need to find and link to specific examples. Kate is right, they don’t matter, outside of the very narrow contexts of the communities in which they occurred. To the larger questions of whether drag queen story hour should be banned (ridiculous), or to Corso’s false claim that they have the overall effect of “normaliz[ing] adult sexuality to preteens, and at the very least, does some of a predator’s job for them,” they are as irrelevant as much worse incidents are to the claim that churches do this and should be banned. It is also true that innocuous or innuendo-filled, but ultimately harmless moments have been dishonestly presented as evidence of grooming and child endangerment. My point was not at all to make that same conflation, but to point out the dishonesty of same.
My response to you, Chris, was agreement. “This guy” in my comment is Corso. I’m sorry I failed to make that clear.
I thought your comment was on the nose and important as I wrote at #33.
Thank you for clarifying, Jacqueline. I appreciate it and I apologize for the misunderstanding.