Earlier this month, Gov. Ron DeSantis filed a complaint against a Hyatt Regency Miami affiliated venue, the James L. Knight Center, for hosting a performance of A Drag Queen Christmas where children under sixteen were allegedly present. The show is adult-oriented with sexually suggestive themes and images. According to the complaint, the state told the venue that its previous billing of all ages was inappropriate and the venue updated its advertising to say that the show was restricted to 18 or older unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. If the complaint is successful, the Hyatt Regency Miami will lose its liquor license.
According to DeSantis supporters, this was a bold but necessary step to protect children. Much of the anti-woke/anti-trans discourse, in fact, revolves around protecting children from negative influences and predators. And it just so happens that all of the negative influences and predators are coming from the usual targets of conservative ire. America needs to protect its children.
The Miami Herald recently revealed a report by undercover agents from Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation who had attended a performance of A Drag Queen Christmas in Orlando and “did not witness any lewd acts such as exposure of genital organs.” Despite this, the state filed a similar complaint as the one for James L. Knight Center because minors were present with their parents.
DeSantis is going after these venues to pad his resume as a conservative culture warrior worthy of the White House. Hiding bigotry and prejudice behind a proclaimed goal of protecting children is a time-honored tradition, one that can even build support across the ideological spectrum. The vast majority of people want to protect kids from danger, it's a natural reaction. Weaponizing this reaction is not just cynical, it often serves to obscure the real dangers and harms that children face in this country.
Sexualization by any other name
Reactionary politicians and pundits have accused drag performers, transgender activists, medical professionals assisting in transition, and accepting parents of sexualizing kids. Sexualization is actually a very real problem for young people but not in the way imagined by conservatives.
According to the American Psychological Association, sexualization is present when one of the following conditions is met:
A person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
A person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;
A person is sexually objectified — that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision-making; and/or
Sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.
Most people opposed to trans people and drag would point to condition number four as what is happening at drag queen story hour or when parents and educators support a kid questioning their gender or sexuality. They would hopefully keep reading as the APA addresses this very point:
The fourth condition (the inappropriate imposition of sexuality) is especially relevant to children. Anyone (girls, boys, men, women) can be sexualized. But when children are imbued with adult sexuality, it is often imposed upon them rather than chosen by them. Self-motivated sexual exploration, on the other hand, is not sexualization by our definition, nor is age-appropriate exposure to information about sexuality.
This is very important to understand. There is a huge difference between sexualizing a child for others' consumption and trying to guide a child through their own sexual discovery and gender identity. It’s incredibly complicated and people can do real harm in the name of helping kids self actualize. However, sexualization has become a squishy term in conservative circles because they can’t admit that they view non-heteronormative expression as inherently sexual. A mommy and daddy kissing in front of their kids is fine and normal, while a gay couple doing the same is harmful indoctrination. This is the primary reason that so many of DeSantis’s anti-trans bills are so comically broad and confusing.
It would be hard to argue that a drag show featuring sexual humor meets any of the conditions laid out by the APA. However, many have argued that they do exist within the world of beauty pageants. All pageants are contests that turn participants into objects of desire, largely based on appearance. In child beauty pageants kids wear heavy makeup and false teeth, are coached to be as appealing as possible to the judges, and occasionally learn suggestive dances. Many parents sign their kids up without consent and pressure them to perform. Children who competed in these pageants were associated with higher rates of body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust, and impulse dysregulation in a limited 2005 study.
Beauty pageants are also an attractive event for predators. Like when a pageant sponsor suddenly entered the contestant dressing room with several underage girls topless. Despite the long running conversation about how damaging these contests can be for children, several child beauty pageants operate in Florida without a fraction of the scrutiny as drag performances.
Keeping Kids “Safe”
The right-wing use of the term groomer was always just as toxic as an industrial accident in a working-class town. But it's worth noting just how cynical and craven it really is. The implied assertion is that queer people and their allies want to normalize gender and sexual fluidity because they want more children to grow up to be like them, thus increasing the pool of potential sexual objects.
This is cruel and gross and a blatant misunderstanding of gender fluidity and acceptance. But it's also dangerous because if you were to peruse right-wing discourse, you might come away with the idea that queer positivity is the main, if not only, source of child sexual predation in this country.
In 2020 an investigation found that Florida was a prime location for the Catholic church to shuffle priests accused of sexual assault. The report found 97 practicing priests who had been accused elsewhere. Just last year a report commissioned by the Southern Baptist Commission found more than 50 Florida pastors who had been accused.
The right wing often associates queer movements with an attack on traditional families. This seems odd considering the mountains of legislation pushed by conservatives targeting trans youth and their families and no such equal legislative effort by liberals to attack the nuclear family. But tragically, traditional families have historically been the source of much childhood abuse.
The Quiverfull movement is a relatively recent development in right-wing evangelical politics. At the height of its popularity, the Duggar family had their own reality show 19 Kids and Counting, where their strict patriarchal, traditionalist, and self-sufficient lifestyle was presented as a quirky sociological case study. The Quiverfull movement is obsessed with traditional families. The female members of a Quiverfull family must not only unquestionably obey the male patriarch but any other males in the family. Women are seen as literal baby factories as the stated purpose of raising a family in the Quiverfull sense is to produce as many soldiers for Christ as possible. It’s essentially a theological response to great replacement theory with Quiverfull families aiming to out-reproduce Muslims and atheists.
Girls are taught that their very existence is sinful and that it's their job to moderate the sexual impulses of the men around them. It's a situation where children (especially girls) are not viewed as individuals in need of nurturing to become self-actualized adults, but as a literal weapon in a theoretical religious war.
The combination of encouraging families to be as “fruitful” as possible, forbidding women to work outside of the home, and rejecting any form of government assistance means that many Quiverfull families who, unlike the Duggars aren’t independently wealthy, live in poverty, creating conditions for malnutrition and physical abuse for children living in these families.
The Quiverfull movement is explicitly and purposely objectifying and indoctrinating children, and yet the stars of 18 Kids and Counting found themselves in close company with prominent conservative politicians and commentators. That is until 2015, when eldest son Josh Duggar admitted to and was convicted of serially molesting minors, including his own sisters. Who could have predicted that a social context where young girls are taught that any unwanted sexual attention is their own fault would be a breeding ground for sexual predators?
The Republican party has distanced itself from the Duggars and the Quiverfull movement in general. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they disavow its core tenants. Recently a Texas GOP lawmaker, State Rep. Bryan Slaton, introduced a bill eliminating property tax for families of 10 or more kids. In a press release, he noted that the bill would “Texas will start saying to couples: ‘Get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply.”
Slaton has no connections to Quiverfull leadership like the Duggars or the nominal head of the movement Bill Gothard, but he does have connections to people like his former intern Jake Neidert, who has called for trans people to be executed in the streets. Slaton himself has been behind a number of bills targeting LGBTQ people, including a ban on children attending any drag performances, adult-oriented or otherwise. Depending on the interpretation of the proposed bill, this could mean making it illegal for drag performers to be in the same vicinity as kids.
Let’s Actually Think About the Children
Invoking children as victims of changing social norms is a tale as old as time. We just witnessed this tactic being used with CRT, with the irony being that part of the history CRT-informed pedagogy wants to teach includes examples of conservatives sowing moral panics around school integration.
The weaponization of moral panic allows people to demonize their political enemies without engaging in serious discourse about the real threats children face in the home and in public spaces. In this case, conservatives want to use the state to enforce traditional gender roles and sexual expression, making heterosexual objectification and sexualization into an invisible norm while characterizing queer identity as inherently harmful. Just as it’s gross and unfair to paint liberal support of queer expression as a coordinated conspiracy to groom children, it would be irresponsible to claim the same of conservative opposition. But in their myopic focus on drag queens and sex-positive education, they are unwittingly or sometimes knowingly allowing sexual abuse of children to occur within spaces that they are ideologically aligned with.
This dynamic is apparent in the rhetoric of conservative commentators and politicians who vociferously argue the existence of drag queens and trans people as harmful to kids while also advocating for girls as young as 16 to get married and start having their own kids.
Child abuse, whether sexual, physically violent, emotional, or economically exploitative is a serious problem that has existed within the human condition forever. The vast majority of people, no matter their ideological position, want to protect kids from danger. The problem becomes when children are reduced to rhetorical devices in service of waging a culture war. Not only because of the harm done to parents and children who are told that affirming non-normative gender expression is just cause for the state to take over the responsibility of raising kids, but also because of the more acute ways children are harmed through objectifying beauty standards and actual abuse occurring in the home that are often ignored by this discourse.
At the end of the day, “The Children” is a manufactured class of people through which reactionary politics can obscure its hateful and bigoted positions behind a razor-thin veneer of moralistic concern. They don’t care about children, they care about creating political punching bags using children as an excuse. This may seem like a harsh characterization of right-wing discourse and parent rights advocacy groups (such as the two can be meaningfully separated), but it becomes apparent when you look at how America has historically treated children, especially poor and minority children.
Taking that stroll through American history up to the present reveals that on the long list of harms and hazards facing kids in this country, drag shows should be the least of parents worries. And that’s what we’ll do in part two.
Solidarity Forever.
this took my thinking farther than it had gone. it really helped for you to point out all the ways heteronormative sexuality, moms and dads kissing, is sweet, and the same between a different kind of pair is abhorrent and dangerous. everything outside of this one constellation is bad, and gay and trans people are the perfect target. so much of how the right approaches life, issues, power politics is zero sum... if you have any (room in the society to enjoy your own ways of loving, it will threaten my grip on the pool of people i hope to choose from. it's pretty stunning about florida as the next stop for predatory priests. the desire to prevent children from understanding the world they're coming up in, physically as well as otherwise, to deprive them of protection, your perspective that children are the target for drumming up fear and antipathy...