Neo-Nazi protesters at an anti-trans rights rally in Melbourne in March 2023 (Image: AAP/James Ross)
Neo-Nazi protesters at an anti-trans rights rally in Melbourne in March 2023 (Image: AAP/James Ross)

In recent months, a regressive sentiment has reared its ugly but regrettably familiar head in political discourse, linking a series of disparate events and echoing a movement bubbling for years in the UK and US. It’s the emergence — or dusting off — of an opportunistic weaponisation of child sexual abuse vernacular by increasingly vocal anti-queer campaigners.

In November 2022, it was South Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic accusing the ABC of “grooming children” with “adult content” after a segment aired on Play School featuring drag performer Courtney Act reading a picture book about a young girl who learns she prefers trousers to skirts.

In February 2023, it was Sydney-based rapper Spanian’s Instagram tirade to his 264,000 followers over Sydney WorldPride, after which he was dropped by his management. His rant included statements such as “I’m fucking sick of this fucking perverted, putrid shit, like a bunch of deadset paedophiles hiding behind some fucking gay pride” and “We are done with these child groomers. Times up”.

And in March 2023, it was the Melbourne leg of UK anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s speaking tour, where her cohort of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) was joined on the steps of Parliament House by neo-Nazis. Keen-Minshull and her supporters maintain they had no knowledge of the neo-Nazis’ affinity with her work, but it clearly resonated with the attending Nazis enough that they brought along a hand-painted banner that read “Destroy Paedo Freaks”.

It’s not always clear whether the use of the word “grooming” by anti-trans and anti-queer campaigners — when referring to the interaction of adult queer people with children — is meant to be interpreted within the context of child sexual abuse. The more pernicious proponents argue their use of the term bears no relation to claims of sexual abuse; rather, children exposed to “gender ideology” are being menacingly “groomed” into a catastrophic proto-queerness or gender transgression of their own.

But even this generous reading would require people to both understand such a double meaning and then treat it with an appropriate level of respect and caution. And seeing as Nazis are already holding up signs calling trans people “paedo freaks”, the time for semantics has passed.

Imported hysteria

In the UK, a small minority of TERFs have spent the past several years gaining media attention, including ultra-famous children’s author JK Rowling, who in June 2020 penned a 3000-word essay claiming the push for gender-inclusive spaces, such as gender-neutral bathrooms in the UK, was “playing fast and loose with women and girls’ safety”.

Just months before, Janice Turner, a regular columnist for The Times, used her column to accuse Mermaids, a charity that supports transgender youth, of “grooming” children. That same charity, the subject of hysterical beat-ups in a separate national broadsheet, The Telegraph, saw staff routinely receive death threats.   

In the US, moral panics over what is bizarrely termed “gender ideology” have transmogrified into state-based attempts to limit queer expression and education.

PEN America, the national literature and human rights organisation, reports that in the 2021-2022 school year, 1648 individual books were banned across 32 states. Of these books, 41% “explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+”. PEN further identifies more than 300 groups advocating for such bans, 73% of which appear to have only recently formed in 2021 or later.

In March 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implemented the Parental Rights In Education law, which prohibited “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity”. Opponents nicknamed it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, given its effective silencing of queer education and support. If there’s any confusion as to the true motivations for passing such a law, DeSantis’ own press secretary, Christina Pushaw, gave it a nickname of her own: the “anti-grooming” bill.

And the state of Tennessee, following years of nationwide handwringing over local drag queens conducting story time in community libraries, recently passed a law banning drag performances from occurring in places where minors are present, may be present, or within 1000 feet of a school. An injunction has been temporarily granted by a federal judge, but the bill is one of at least 32 (and counting) introduced to legislatures across America, alongside another 110 pieces of legislation restricting gender-affirming care for trans people.

Saviour complex

This is not a new phenomenon. The accusation of sexual malintent towards children has been circulating in the public domain in some guise or another for decades. Its modern form can be traced to 1977, with the formation of Save Our Children, Inc., in Miami. This biblically motivated coalition came together under the ignoble banner of attempting to overturn an ordinance in Dade County, Florida, protecting people from housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Save Our Children was fronted by the now infamous Anita Bryant, living proof of the orange-juice-saleswoman-to-Christian-fundamentalist pipeline. Bryant pounded the pavement for years, whipping up fears of lascivious homosexuals snatching innocent children. On the dangers of allowing gay men to work in schools, she once famously stated, “Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach.”

Save Our Children was hugely successful at poisoning the groundwater of queer civil rights movements. And as with many concerted vilification campaigns, people died: some by suicide, some murdered by bigots.

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s denial of any connection to or responsibility for the neo-Nazis who crashed her rally — “I’ve never done anything with those men, ever, in my life, ever” — echoes Bryant’s own response to reports of violence. “It made me sad and shocked me that anyone would think I had anything to do with it, but my conscience is clear,” Bryant said. “I can’t be responsible for how people react.”

It hardly requires stating, but there is no credible evidence suggesting queer people are more likely to molest children. Researchers like Professor Gregory Herek, from the University of California at Davis, who conducted literature reviews collating decades of international studies, have shown there is no higher concentration of abusers among self-identified queer people. And of the few studies that do, Herek has shown them to be innately biased, methodologically unsound and conducted with the integrity of a wet paper bag.

Harm’s reality

As any queer person could tell you, it doesn’t actually matter what the science says — certainly not to the TERFs on international speaking tours or the children and adolescents who inherit their rhetoric.

I know this language intimately. I attended a fairly innocuous all-boys Catholic high school in suburban Sydney in the 2000s. A handful of my classmates interchangeably nicknamed me either “faggot” or “paedo”. Eventually both were replaced by “rock spider”, a moniker usually reserved for child molesters in prisons. It was used so routinely over several years that even a teacher occasionally joined in.

This poisoned my relationship with children; I hated being around them. I worried about the way my queerness would be perceived at the birth of my siblings’ children, about whether I could hold them in public spaces or babysit them alone, and if my presence in their lives would make people fearful and uncomfortable. It’s only as an adult that I’ve come to recognise what I experienced as hate speech.

The association between queer people and child abuse is not an abstract harm. It’s real, corrosive and eats at a person’s sense of self. And though this “grooming” discourse — while historically aimed at same-sex attracted people — is now principally targeting trans people, it’s an issue for all queer people regardless of their gender expression. Those who fear and distrust queers often lack the necessary context or will to understand the distinctions between different identities.

Effect on children

But this discourse doesn’t just affect queers. “Grooming” itself is real, with vulnerable children and adolescents affected across Australia. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse revealed shocking numbers of cases (including more than 8000 individual stories shared resulting in 2575 referrals to authorities) and staggering failures to prevent instances of abuse, born partially from a collective illiteracy on what “grooming” actually is. 

As Grace Tame — former Australian of the Year and herself a survivor of child sexual abuse — has said, grooming is a careful and considered six-stage process of targeting a vulnerable child, building their trust over time, exploiting children’s emotional needs to seem indispensable, isolating them from their networks, gradually introducing the prospect of sexual contact, and maintaining their power over the victim once the physical abuse has occurred.

It is not a drag queen reading a picture book on Play School.

The language of child sexual abuse has power and its misuse is disastrous. Aside from the psychic damage wreaked on queer people, flippantly crying “grooming” puts all children everywhere in danger. The more the word is bandied about, the more abstracted it becomes from its true meaning. Once this occurs, how can we expect children and the adults around them to identify when it’s actually happening?

It’s not too late for Australia, but it’s incumbent on all of us, especially well-meaning allies, to stamp this vile nonsense out.

Survivors of abuse can find support by calling Bravehearts at 1800 272 831 or the Blue Knot Foundation at 1300 657 380. The Kids Helpline is 1800 55 1800. In an emergency, call 000.