If you live in the United States and interact with the news at all, you have likely read countless articles like this one talking about so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills that have passed in Florida and been introduced in other States, or the Texas Attorney General’s policy memo regarding transgender affirming care for minors or legislation that has been passed around transgender athletes in high school sports in Utah. If you read much at all into the rationale behind these bills and the support for them, it often comes back to the fear that children will be indoctrinated into a life of queer hedonism, groomed by adults who want to sexualize and abuse them. I recently read a comment thread where one mother asserted that this exact thing had happened under the guise of a club being kept secret from the child’s parents. For the record, if that was indeed what happened, as a way to “indoctrinate” the child in question and in essence “turn them queer,” I absolutely agree that should never happen.
One of the things that often gets missed in these conversations are that children are not heterosexual by default. Allowing a moment for your mental record-scratch, what often seems to be the prevailing theory is that if a child exhibits any non-heterosexual or gender-non-conforming behaviors, that they have to have learned it from somewhere. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in research around the globe, people still believe that being any stripe of queer is a choice, or is something that spontaneously manifests after a person reaches the age of majority, and that persistent belief is killing queer kids, especially transgender kids, a statistic cited by Utah’s Governor in his veto statement.
People express the concern that their children will be indoctrinated into being transgender, or gay, or lesbian, while ignoring a critical hole in their argument: every queer adult you meet was once a child. We’re not trying to indoctrinate your cis and straight kids; we’re trying to make it safe for the gay and trans ones whenever they realize who they are, and that might not be when they’re in their twenties.
I know far too many people who knew who they were at a young age, and whose parents tried everything, up to and including significant physical, mental, emotional, and religious abuse, to make them be straight or cis. Some of them are unwelcome at home and wind up on the streets, with LGBTQ+ youth being significantly over-represented among the homeless population, and somehow this does not dissuade them from being queer. These people grow up and find themselves fighting an uphill battle to protect—actually protect—the children that society accuses them of indoctrinating.
The idea that queer adults are trying to seduce your children isn’t new, and it continues to be categorically incorrect. If after an entire childhood of abuse, your trans kid still comes out trans—and now with significant trauma from your treatment of them—then that should answer the question right there. If you can’t indoctrinate us to be straight, we certainly can’t indoctrinate your children to be gay, and we’re not trying to. We just want them to live. Don’t you?
Daniel K. Sheff 