Attacking Drag Queens Will Not Save Your Children
Confronting those who scapegoat the LGBTQ community
Attacks on drag performers in the U.S. are escalating. The LGBTQ community barely had time to mourn the victims of last month’s mass shooting at Club Q when attackers fired on the power grid in Moore County, North Carolina, allegedly (but very likely) to shut down a local drag show. Such sabotage, which plunged over 40,000 people into darkness, is not an act of protest; it is terrorism.
Why are people so afraid of drag queens? These performers — often, but not always, gay men who don hyper-feminine attire — aren’t harming anyone, whether they are lip-syncing to pop tunes at a bar or reading books to children at a library.
But merely by appearing in public spaces, drag queens are accused of “grooming” by those who fear they are corrupting children with their so-called gender ideology. As trans writer Julia Serano explains in her recent blog post, this “stigma-contamination mindset” is not only harmful to the LGBTQ community, but counterproductive:
In addition to defaming the groups in question, these accusations have the unfortunate effect of diluting or weakening legitimate claims of child sexual abuse (CSA). […] While anti-trans/LGBTQ+ campaigners may frame their interventions in terms of…
