Origins of the Anti-Trans “Groomer” Slur

a timeline, plus historical context and future implications

most of these headlines are described in the text; the trans flag in the background is from Flag Color Codes

Content warning for non-graphic mentions of child sexual abuse (and false accusations thereof). Also, this is not an especially long read—if it is listed as such, that’s because of a lengthy timeline in the middle of the piece that you are free to peruse, skim over, or skip entirely.

Back in 2022—the year that prominent U.S. Republican politicians began referring to trans people as “groomers” on a regular basis—I wrote an essay entitled Anti-Trans “Grooming” and “Social Contagion” Claims Explained. In it, I made the following points:

• There is no credible evidence to support the idea that today’s trans children have been “groomed” by trans adults or “infected” by their trans peers. In a subsequent 2025 essay, I compiled even more evidence (with over a dozen peer-reviewed studies) refuting the “social contagion” hypothesis.

• Similar claims of queerness being “contagious” can be found as far back as the late 1800s and seem to arise from people unconsciously viewing stigmatized outgroups as a “contaminating” or “corrupting” force that threatens the imagined “purity” of the dominant/majority group (and especially its children). I’ve come to call this the Stigma-Contamination mindset.

• Unlike other anti-trans talking points or imagined causes of transness, the “grooming” and “social contagion” allegations are especially nefarious, as they provide a convenient excuse for “quarantining” trans children and eliminating trans adults from the public sphere in order to ensure that their transness doesn’t “spread” any further.

• In addition to defaming trans people, these baseless accusations of “grooming” have the unfortunate effect of diluting or weakening legitimate claims of child sexual abuse.

Given how the concept of transgender “social contagion” arose seemingly out of the blue, in 2018 and 2019 I conducted a series of advanced Google searches to uncover its origins. The timeline I created, Origins of “Social Contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” chronicles how the concept was invented by a trans-skeptical mother on the anti-trans parent website 4thWaveNow in February 2016, then quickly spread throughout conservative media outlets before reaching mainstream audiences. The timeline also provides a good overview of how the current anti-trans backlash initially coalesced and garnered momentum in the mid-to-late 2010s.

In the years since, I’ve carried out similar advanced Google searches for claims that transgender people are “grooming children.” The first of these searches was done in 2021, as I was working on Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators: What the Data Say. That essay contextualizes recent claims that trans people are “grooming” or “sexualizing” children within the long history of stigmatized minorities being caricatured as “sexual predators”—this includes Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s that smeared lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people as “child molesters” who were supposedly “recruiting children.”

I conducted further searches in 2023 and 2024, but never got around to publishing the results. But with the recent announcement that Google is phasing out its traditional link-based searches, I figured I should release this now, as future researchers might not be able to replicate this work.

What follows is a timeline beginning in 2015 with the first examples I was able to find and ending in April 2022 when the “grooming” charge exploded in U.S. politics and mainstream media. Here are my main findings:

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, the earliest instances I found specifically referring to children being “groomed” to be transgender appeared in 2015–16 on 4thWaveNow, the same website that gave us “transgender social contagion.” Interestingly, some of these early mentions of “grooming” have since been deleted, although they still appear in archived versions of the same posts (see timeline for more details).

• From the start, these “grooming” accusations seemed to evoke and conflate two very different definitions of the word: groom as in “prepare for a position” (such as grooming someone for politics) and groom as in “to condition or manipulate a victim emotionally over time” (as often occurs in child sexual abuse). The first definition implies that trans kids would have turned out “normal” if it were not for meddling adults (trans activists, teachers, doctors, parents, etc.) actively encouraging them to adopt trans identities and to transition (read: trans is a “fake/coerced” outcome). But why on earth would any adult do such a thing? Well, the second definition suggests a nebulous motive: These adults must want to “sexualize” these children (read: they are “sexual predators”). The power of this allegation is two-fold: 1) it can be levied against anyone who is supportive of trans kids and trans-inclusion in any way, and 2) “sexualize” is deployed in such a vague manner here that it could mean practically anything—this is why accusers never feel compelled to provide any evidence that actual child sexual abuse has occurred. As I’ve previously argued, these claims primarily stem from the Stigma-Contamination mindset, which imagines cis-hetero people as “normal” and “pure,” while trans and queer people are by nature “spoiled” and “sexually corrupted.” Thus, when a child comes out as trans, people will automatically presume that someone or something must have “sexually corrupted” them.

• At first (circa 2015–18), these “grooming” accusations were largely confined to discussions of trans youth, as the groups who pushed them (“gender critical” activists and trans-skeptical/anti-trans parents) tended not to be explicitly anti-LGB. Indeed, they often claimed that these children would have turned out to be “naturally” gay or lesbian had they not been “pushed” or “pressured” into being transgender (data contradicting this premise can be found here).

• Around 2018–19 this exclusive focus on trans youth began to shift, as U.S. evangelical groups began protesting Drag Queen Story Hour events, and larger conservative media outlets such as Fox News began covering these developments. These latter groups broadened these “grooming” accusations to cover virtually any instance in which children are potentially exposed to the existence of LGBTQ+ people, no matter how indirect or abstract (this includes mere displays of Pride flags).

• In March 2022, during national debates about Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw called people who opposed the bill “groomers” on Twitter. This is when the floodgates really opened, with many prominent Republican politicians and pundits coming out of the woodwork to make similar allegations.

• I have seen people retroactively claim that the anti-trans/LGBTQ+ “grooming” campaign was initiated by Christopher Rufo (the conservative activist who weaponized “CRT” and “DEI”), QAnon, or the intellectual dark web. Hopefully, this timeline will correct that record: The “grooming/groomer” slur originated in gender-critical/anti-trans parent settings, only to be later taken up by the religious right and Republicans in their attempts to undermine LGBTQ+ rights more generally.

After the timeline, there is a final section: “Where Things Stand in 2026.” It examines the ramifications of the “groomer” myth, how it still shapes anti-trans/LGBTQ+ legislation, and how we might counter it. It’s definitely worth reading—feel free to skip ahead to it if you don’t want to pore over the entire timeline.

THE TIMELINE:

April 29, 2015: 4thWaveNow publishes On the trail of the GID diagnosis, 2000: Into the heart of the homophobic beast
Searching with various combinations of “groom” and “trans/transgender,” this was the earliest result I found. The post is authored “by 4thwavenow,” which means it was likely penned by Denise, the website’s founder. The post refers to a blogger as “likely one of those who would have been groomed to be a transboy instead of growing up to be a lesbian, had she been born later.”

December 4, 2015: 4thWaveNow publishes Parents, keep listening to your gut—not the gender therapist
Once again, authored “by 4thwavenow” (likely Denise the founder). In the archived version, it said: “You can also bet that I’m going to continue shedding light on the frankly insane practice of labeling very young children as transgender, grooming and conditioning them as preschoolers to believe their own bodies are somehow wrong and alien, that they must undergo teasing and torment from other children, that they must wear prosthetics to amplify or hide their own genitalia to be accepted as they are.” Sometime between August 12, 2019 and May 7, 2020 the word “grooming” was edited out—see next entry for more thoughts about this.

January 15, 2016: 4thWaveNow publishes Groundbreaking study: Kids mean what they say
Once again, authored “by 4thwavenow” (likely Denise the founder). In the archived version, it said: “In other words, these kids are don’t conform to the stereotypes of their birth gender. But does it then follow that they should be groomed and conditioned to believe they are the opposite sex, leading them in the near future to puberty blockers and on to sterilization and surgeries?” Sometime between November 6, 2022 and March 14, 2023 the word “groomed” was edited out.

What should we make of these 4thWaveNow edits? 1) They occurred in a piecemeal fashion—at different times, and in the case of the first entry, not at all—rather than as part of a systemic purge of the word from the website. 2) If there were further edits outside of these two posts, then my Google searches in 2021, 2023, and 2024 may not have uncovered them. In other words, there may have been even more posts that originally claimed children were being “groomed” that I was unable to detect. 3) These edits suggest that the author came to recognize that their use of the word “groom” was too extreme or provocative, or that it might reflect poorly on the website.

sometime in 2016: Judith Reisman publishes The Origins of the Transgender Phenomenon: The Challenge and Opportunity for Training Lawyers, Judges and Policy Makers in the Historicity of Alfred Kinsey’s Pansexual Worldview
Reisman has been described as an “anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist” and this article seems to have been uploaded to the evangelical Liberty University website rather than published in an academic journal. It is a batshit attempt to link contemporary trans people to Alfred Kinsey (who passed away way back in 1956) via claims of “grooming” children.

May 14, 2017: 4thWaveNow publishes MtoF tells trans kids to dump moms on Mother’s Day and join the “glitter-queer” family of adult trans activists
Variants of the word “groom” do not actually appear in this post. But it came up in my searches because, in the comment section, someone named Cindy remarked: ‘The “glitter” stuff smells suspiciously like paedo grooming to me.’

August 4, 2017: Jennifer Bilek tweets about the “trans lobby” “grooming” kids
Jennifer Bilek is an early anti-trans activist whose involvement in the movement is chronicled here. On this date she tweeted: “The trans lobby has an agenda of destroying ppls fundamental relationship 2 their bodies, grooming entire generation of kids 2 dissociation.”

June 20, 2018: David Grisham posts Transgender or Trans-grooming?
Grisham’s byline describes him as a “Pastor at the Last Frontier Evangelism-Repent Alaska.” The post is about a “Story Time with a Drag Queen” event he attended, which he described as “a sexual molestation of the minds of children for the sole purpose of grooming them for future sexual immorality” and a “blatant display of sexually deviant grooming.” When I was doing research for my Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators essay in 2021, this was the top Google result when I entered “transgender” + “groom” in the search bar.

August 17, 2018: Tey Meadow’s book Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century is released
Sociologist Tey Meadow researched the rise of advocacy for trans kids and gender-affirming care for trans youth during the 2000s and 2010s. Trans kids, their parents, and doctors who provide or gatekeep trans-related care are central to the story. Notably absent are trans adults “grooming” children, as this never took place (outside of contemporary anti-trans activists’ fever dreams). At one point, Meadow even states: “Older transgender adults initially resisted the efforts of the parent activists and advocates who first began agitating for support from schools and doctors in the late 1990s and early 2000s, fearing political repercussions from the public endorsement of social transition for young children” (p.140). So much for the “grooming” hypothesis.

June 4, 2019: Fair Play for Women publishes Pronouns are Rohypnol
This was a widely cited and celebrated blogpost within U.K. “gender critical” circles at the time. It bizarrely claims that trans people’s pronouns essentially function like a date rape drug (rohypnol is better known as “roofies”). Unsurprisingly for an essay that equates trans people’s pronouns with “rape,” it ends with a reference to “grooming”: “And more than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts.”

June 9, 2019: Transgender Trend publishes Breast Binding, Sexual Objectification & Grooming
Transgender Trend (along with 4thWaveNow) is one of the original anti-trans parent websites that helped to spread the “transgender social contagion” conspiracy theory. This post, relying entirely on conjecture, claims that “breast binders pose a potential ‘in’ for the sexual grooming of teenage girls.”

Up to this point, anti-trans “grooming” claims were largely relegated to “gender critical” and anti-trans parent online spaces. But during the summer of 2019, these claims make their first appearance (that I’m aware of) on Fox News.

June 25, 2019: Media Matters publishes Fox guest says that drag queens and LGBTQ people are grooming youth “into their unhealthy lifestyle” that includes “HIV and AIDS”
This wasn’t just a rogue guest making such claims, as Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum herself “questioned whether Drag Queen Story Hour events ‘aim to indoctrinate and unnecessarily expose children to sexuality,’ said drag queens are ‘very provocative,’ and claimed that ‘there’s a sexualization element to it, no matter how tame it is.’ Later in the show, Kim Hall from 500 Mom Strong, a group aimed at opposing the events, said drag queens and LGBTQ people ‘want to groom our children into their unhealthy lifestyle,’ which includes ‘HIV and AIDS’.”

October 5, 2019: Heritage Foundation publishes We Must Fight the Sexualization of Children by Adults
This article begins by raising more general fears about pornography, sex trafficking, and “child grooming by sexual predators” on social media. But then it abruptly pivots to drag queen story hours, the Equality Act (which would amend the Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity), trans-inclusion policies, and gender-affirming care, in a ridiculously ham-fisted attempt to suggest that all of these varied things constitute the “sexualization of children.”

December 2019: Gender-critical activist Graham Linehan (aka, “Glinner”) begins responding to pro-trans accounts on Twitter with “ok groomer”
The link above is to a Linehan post from April 2022 where he shares and brags about a screenshot of him doing this on numerous occasions in December 2019 and February 2020.

May 7, 2020: Graham Linehan/Glinner accuses Grace Lavery (a professor at UC Berkeley) of “grooming” her students.
The entire saga is documented in the link. The idea that teaching college students (who are adults) trans and queer studies (classes that they’ve elected to take) is tantamount to “grooming” demonstrates that these allegations have nothing to do with protecting children; their primary intention is to remove trans and queer people and perspectives from the public sphere.

Apr 11, 2021: Katy Montgomerie and Christa Peterson release the video Gender Critical is painting LGBT people as paedophiles
A drawback of my Google searches is that, while they uncovered many articles and blogposts, they rarely picked up social media posts. And up to this point, the lion’s share of these “grooming” charges were being made by gender-critical activists on Twitter. Thankfully, this YouTube video provides a deep-dive into how routinely terms like “grooming” and “pedophiles” were applied to trans people and pro-trans organizations on gender-critical Twitter.

May 4, 2021: The New Republic publishes The Right-Wing War on Trans Youth Was Hiding in Plain Sight
Journalist Melissa Gira Grant reports on how conservative groups—who had been protesting Drag Queen Story Hour events since the summer of 2019—had helped foment a legislative backlash against trans people, which (at the time of writing) consisted of “at least 35 state-level bills meant to block access to gender-affirming health care for trans youth . . . along with dozens of other bills meant to exclude trans kids from student athletics, by far the most anti-trans legislation seen in a single year.” She goes onto say: “The core elements these groups are using to advance anti-trans bills were all present in their attacks on Drag Queen Story Hours: associating drag with ‘sexualization’ and ‘grooming,’ interchangeably referring to drag and trans identity, depicting people who support LGBTQ youth as predators.”

June 7, 2021: I publish my essay Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators: What the Data Say
I mentioned this essay in the Introduction. It debunks the myth that trans people and trans-inclusion policies pose a threat to women and children in public restrooms and other sex-segregated spaces. I also show how recent claims that trans people are “grooming” or “sexualizing” children follow the same playbook as past attempts to smear Black, Jewish, and gay people as “sexual predators.”

In late July and early August 2021, I was interviewed by the Guardian U.S. and the NPR show On The Media about this issue. In the former, I provide a brief comment about the “recent rise in false accusations of grooming and pedophilia against trans people.” The latter is a more extensive interview with me about the anti-trans movement and its varied tactics, including its parallels with Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign of the 1970s.

November 2021: Right-wing crank James Lindsey (aka, ConceptualJames) makes a big deal out of being temporarily banned from Twitter for posting “ok groomer”—he would later brag that he “started the ok, groomer thing,” even though Glinner had pulled the exact same stunt almost two years earlier. Then Lindsey launched a five-part podcast series entitled “Groomer Schools” that supposedly covers “the long history of the sexual grooming that has come into our schools through Critical Gender Theory and Queer Theory as they have crept into educational programs.”

January 24, 2022: Far-right outlet The Federalist publishes Why Accepting Child Transgenderism Will Pave The Way For Accepting Pedophilia
Variations of the word “groom” appear 5 times in the article.

As seen in several previous entries, the right-wing’s “grooming children” campaign had increasingly broadened to include all LGBTQ+ people by this point. So it’s not surprising that the mainstream explosion of the “groomer” slur was instigated by Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

March 4, 2022: In a series of tweets, Christina Pushaw (press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) said: “The bill that liberals inaccurately call “Don’t Say Gay” would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.” “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”
The Florida Parental Rights in Education Act (its formal name) banned discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. It was signed into law by DeSantis on March 28, 2022 and has since been expanded to cover grades K through 12. It garnered a lot of national attention, likely because it affected LGB people in addition to trans folks. Pushaw’s tweets are routinely cited in subsequent articles below, as she appears to be the first prominent Republican politician to wield the “groomer” slur. Many more would follow over the next few weeks.

March 9, 2022: Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham describes public schools as “grooming centers” engaged in “sexual brainwashing”
According to Media Matters (see link), here is Ingraham’s full quote: “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals? As a mom, I think it’s appalling, it’s frightening, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable. Florida just passed a bill to keep this type of sexual brainwashing out of schools. Democrats, though, claim the bill is bigoted, branding it as the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill.’ Well, nice try. The real controversy, though, isn’t this bill. It’s that schools are peddling gender ideology when our international rankings in math, science, and reading are down across the board.”

March 16, 2022: Xtra Magazine publishes ‘Grooming’ narratives return to the forefront of anti-LGBTQ2S+ campaigns
This article by Zack Ford connects recent accusations of “grooming” to “the nefarious tropes of the 1970s and ’80s.”

March 17, 2022: The New Republic publishes “Grooming” Is Republicans’ Cruel New Buzzword for Targeting Trans Kids
In addition to covering the aforementioned Christina Pushaw and Laura Ingraham comments, journalist Melissa Gira Grant discusses how “‘grooming’ is being teed up as the next ‘critical race theory’”—the latter is a reference to the GOP’s ongoing campaign to ban discussions of racism in schools.

March 29, 2022: Associated Press publishes ‘Grooming’: The ubiquitous buzzword in LGBTQ school debate
The article discusses Christina Pushaw’s tweets, comments from country musician John Rich claiming that books with LGBTQ characters “groom” children, and an Oklahoma school choice advocacy blog “alleging that public schools are sexualizing children” and claiming that “Groomers are gonna groom.”

April 5, 2022: Salon publishes: Tennessee Republicans push to abolish age limit on heterosexual marriages amidst “groomer” outrage. The bill’s sponsor wants to give Tennesseans “an alternative form of marriage” for people who want to marry minors
This article perfectly captures the hypocrisy of Republican “groomer” and “pedophile” accusations, as their party routinely enables or condones statutory rape provided that it occurs within a heterosexual context.

April 05, 2022: The Washington Post publishes: Teachers who mention sexuality are ‘grooming’ kids, conservatives say

April 5, 2022: VICE publishes: Conservatives Are Smearing ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Opponents as Pedophile ‘Groomers’

Around this time, a right-wing campaign to associate Disney with “grooming children” began garnering steam, largely based on the company’s opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

April 05, 2022: Far-right outlet The Federalist publishes Disney’s Obsession With Grooming Children Is Nothing New, But Their Openness About It Is

April 5, 2022: Republican Congressperson Majorie Taylor Greene tweets “Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics. #SaveTheChildren”
The tweet is accompanied by a video in which Greene conflates both Disney and Democrats with “pedophiles.”

April 5, 2022: Far-right social media influencer (with 1.7 million Twitter follows at the time) Jack Posobiec tweets a photo of a T-shirt he was trying to sell that pairs the Disney logo with the words: “Boycott Groomers, bring ammo.”

April 6, 2022: JD Vance (currently Trump’s Vice President, but he was running for Ohio Senate at the time) tweets “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.”
Vance made a similar comment three days later (April 9th) in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “If you don’t want to be called a ‘groomer,’ don’t try to sexualize 6- and 7-year-old children. It’s really that simple.”

April 6, 2022: Media Matters publishes: On Facebook, right-leaning pages are dominating discussion of Florida’s new anti-LGBTQ legislation
The subtitle reads: “Right-leaning pages are earning millions of interactions by amplifying a long-debunked myth that LGBTQ people put children in danger.”

April 8, 2022: Media Matters publishes “Doom & Groom”: Fox News has aired 170 segments discussing trans people in the past three weeks
170 news segments about trans people (less than 1% of the population) in 3 weeks is a shit-ton!

April 8, 2022: VICE publishes ‘Anti-Grooming’ Rally at Disney Is Latest Stop for Culture War Traveling Circus

April 11, 2022: Dame magazine publishes The GOP’s Dangerous Lies About “Grooming”
This article (like many that would follow) presumed that Christopher “Rufo and his ilk have created a new buzzword.” While Rufo did play a role in boosting the #DisneyGroomers campaign, there is zero evidence that he helped to “create” the “groomer” slur (which is several years old by this point).

April 12, 2022: According to Peterka-Benton, Benton, and Penney’s 2025 academic article From conspiracy to normalcy: The mainstreaming of QAnon in “Disney grooming” messages online (an accessible pre-print can be found here), this is the day that Twitter posts about “Disney” and “groom/groomer/grooming” reached its peak. While their paper has some interesting findings, I disagree with their premise that QAnon was central to the anti-trans/LGBTQ+ “grooming” campaign. Once again, these anti-trans/LGBTQ+ “grooming” accusations had been happening for years spearheaded by anti-trans activists. As far as I can tell, QAnon only became involved when MAGA Republicans began publicly embracing it.

April 12, 2022: NBC News publishes ‘Groomer,’ ‘pro-pedophile’: Old tropes find new life in anti-LGBTQ movement

April 13, 2022: Media Matters posts this video to Twitter. It’s a montage of right-wing pundits saying the words “groom,” “grooming,” or “groomers,” emphasizing how rote this talking point had become on the right by this point. Some of the pundits featured include: Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, JD Vance, Laura Loomer, Lauren Boebert, Matt Walsh, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Steven Crowder, and Tucker Carlson.

April 13, 2022: VICE publishes Democrats Are Doing Basically Nothing to Counter the GOP’s ‘Pedophile’ Attacks
I discuss this article in the “Where Things Stand in 2026” section at the end of the piece.

Several weeks into the U.S. “groomer” explosion, the real-life consequences of this campaign become increasingly apparent.

April 14, 2022: The Independent publishes GOP ‘groomer’ smears are sparking a new wave of anti-LGBT+ violence: ‘This is going to lead to tragedy’
The subtitle of this UK article is: “As American conservatives wield baseless accusations of ‘grooming’ against political opponents, trans and gay people say they have been harassed or attacked by strangers shouting the same words.”

April 18, 2022: Media Matters publishes OAN’s anti-LGBTQ hatred reaches new lows in the right-wing war against teachers
The subtitle of this article is: “OAN recklessly accuses people of pedophilia and flirts with eliminationist rhetoric about ‘punishing’ the LGBTQ community: ‘We can no longer be afraid of getting canceled and called a domestic terrorist’.”

April 18, 2022: The Washington Post publishes Florida’s vile ‘groomer’ law may soon blow up in DeSantis’s face

April 19, 2022: The Washington Post publishes Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine
Few people helped to propagate the GOP’s 2022 “groomer” campaign than the social media influencer known as “Libs of TikTok.” This Taylor Lorenz exposé reveals that Chaya Raichik is the person behind the account. It also chronicles Raichik’s tactics and the harm they cause: She would typically single out and amplify random LGBTQ+ individuals that she found online, the overwhelming majority of whom had done nothing wrong other than being “out” as trans or queer. Then her more-than-half-million followers would reliably unleash a harassment campaign against that unsuspecting person.

April 22, 2022: CNN publishes Republicans build momentum as they drive anti-LGBTQ legislation nationwide

April 22, 2022: MSNBC publishes America is drowning in anti-LGBTQ attacks. Where is the Left’s lifeboat?
This Katelyn Burns opinion piece is subtitled: “It’s scary to be queer in America right now. Democratic lawmakers need to stand up for us.” I discuss this article in the “Where Things Stand in 2026” section below.

April 26, 2022: The i Paper publishes ‘Groomer’: How the dangerous new anti-LGBT slur from America is taking hold in Britain

This is where I stopped chronicling the spread of the “groomer” slur, as it had become ubiquitous by this point.

Where Things Stand in 2026

The anti-trans/LGBTQ+ “groomer” slur still persists. A few examples of headlines from just last year include “Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Sarah McBride a ‘groomer’ and ‘child predator’ for reading to kids”; “Parent accuses Satellite High teachers of ‘grooming’ teen to transition”; and “Republicans accuse PBS of ‘grooming’ children with Sesame Street Pride post.” As for anti-trans legislation, well, that has increased roughly ten-fold since early 2022, with many of those bills invoking the false accusation that trans people are “grooming” or “sexualizing” children.

Take for instance, West Virginia bill SB 278, which was introduced by Republicans in 2023. It proposed expanding the state’s indecent exposure laws (which typically cover people exposing their genitals or engaging in public sex acts) to include “transvestite and/or transgender exposure in performances or displays to minors.” Based on that language, if I were simply playing guitar or giving a lecture, and a minor happened to be present, I could face jail time.

A year later, Republicans unveiled Project 2025, their blueprint for what they would strive to accomplish during a second Trump administration (and they have since implemented quite a bit of it). The document is over 900 pages long, but they made sure to address transgender people right up front, on page 5. Here is the relevant passage:

passage from page 5 of “Mandate for Leadership,” the document outlining Project 2025

So according to this passage, I am “pornography” and a “child predator,” and I shouldn’t be granted any First Amendment protections. It would also categorize this article—the one you are reading right now—as pornography. And if you were teaching a class on free speech and censorship, and you included this article in your curriculum, you could be registered as a sex offender!

While that Project 2025 passage is (thankfully) not on the long list of anti-trans/LGBTQ+ measures the Trump 2.0 administration has implemented thus far, it’s not for lack of trying. Just recently, Republicans in the House of Representatives introduced H.R. 7661—literally called “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”—that would essentially be a nation-wide book ban on “sexually oriented material.” And of course, their definition of “sexually oriented material” explicitly includes anything that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism” (aka, anything involving trans people).

Given all this, it is beyond frustrating that many mainstream Democrats are still expressing “concerns” about trans athletes, as though we were still back in 2021 when that was Republicans’ main anti-trans talking point. They have blown way past that in the years since. They are now restricting trans healthcare for adults, and passing laws that censor, disenfranchise, and criminalize us. And much of this latter legislation hinges on the notion that trans people constitute “sexually oriented material,” “pornography,” “indecent exposure” and “sexual predators.”

The “groomer” slur explosion of early 2022 was a low hanging fruit that Democrats failed to grab. The average person finds these sorts of accusations irrational and despicable. It was the perfect opportunity to highlight how defamatory and extremist Republican rhetoric on the issue has become. But instead, most Democratic politicians failed to counter at all, as Katelyn Burns lamented in “America is drowning in anti-LGBTQ attacks. Where is the Left’s lifeboat?” (from April 22, 2022 in the timeline).

The VICE article “Democrats Are Doing Basically Nothing to Counter the GOP’s ‘Pedophile’ Attacks” (from April 13, 2022 in the timeline) includes this quote from current House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries that sounds indistinguishable from similar feckless boilerplate statements he makes nowadays: “the best thing Democrats can do is ignore the attack and focus on the pocketbook issues that polls show Americans care about the most.”

When bad actors do something demonstrably harmful and beyond the pale—and I believe that smearing an entire minority group as “sexual predators” clearly rises to that level—then you need to denounce that behavior and refuse to tolerate it!

A few months ago, Boston Review published my essay, Trans rights aren’t tanking the Democrats, which included this advice:

Democrats can counteract Republican anti-trans talking points in a variety of ways: critique them as baseless fearmongering, as government overreach, as interfering with personal family decisions, or . . . as part of Republicans’ more general assault on science. While [Democratic consultants] tend not to be fans of calling Republicans “weird,” when they constantly post selfies of themselves “defending restrooms,” or when they propose trans sports bans that include genital inspections of children, perhaps that approach is apt.

I would add to that list that Democrats must directly challenge the “groomer” smear that undergirds much of Republicans’ anti-trans/LGBTQ+ legislation. While conservatives accuse us of “sexualizing children,” the truth is that they are the ones sexualizing trans and LGBTQ+ people—conflating us with “pornography,” “indecent exposure,” “sexual predators,” and so on. As I put it in my book Sexed Up (which ironically came out in May 2022, on the heels of the “groomer” slur explosion): “If we truly wish to eliminate anti-LGBTQIA+ prejudice, then [we] must confront sexualization head-on.”

Until we (all of us!) explicitly, repeatedly, and loudly condemn the “groomer” myth and everyone who propagates it, LGBTQ+ people’s rights and our ability to freely participate in society will continue to be at risk.

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