Earlier this week, PolitiFact (a self-described “fact-checking website”) published a piece titled “Why it’s not ‘grooming’: What research says about gender and sexuality in schools.” The piece centers on Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed by dishonest critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and argues that conversations in the classroom about sexuality and gender are not grooming because they are “done without intent to sexually abuse a child.”
As I’m sure most of my readers are aware, Florida’s law has nothing to do with forbidding people from saying the word “gay.” Instead, the law prevents educators from instructing children in K-3 classrooms about age-inappropriate subjects, including radical gender ideology, and emphasizes the importance of notifying parents (and not withholding information) when making decisions about a child’s well-being.
This last part of the law is key. Grooming consists of fostering a relationship with a child with the goal of making that relationship sexual. It usually involves securing the parents’ trust so that they will enable unsupervised access to their child. Groomers will select vulnerable children, lavishing them with special treatment and attention, and will encourage them to keep secrets from their parents. Doing so confuses and desensitizes the child so that he or she will be less likely to report the abuse when it begins.
Even if an educator’s intention is not to commit sexual abuse, urging children to keep secrets from their parents, deliberately blocking parents from being kept up to date with their students’ development, and teaching young children about sexual subjects should be considered grooming of a political nature. I can’t imagine why people would otherwise be so thoroughly invested in talking to children about their personal identities and introducing them to unscientific, ideological concepts such as “nonbinary” and “transfluid.”
Gay people have faced harmful, unfounded stereotypes regarding the propensity for child molestation, and critics of Florida’s new law are quick to remind us of that. But supporters of this law never suggested that anti-grooming efforts were meant to target gay people.
This conflation by critics, combined with the force-feeding of radical indoctrination under the guise of promoting acceptance of LGBT youth, compounds an already growing backlash that will hurt gender and sexual minorities. Erroneous claims that sexual abuse stems from power and privilege act as a distraction instead of offering solutions to end child sexual abuse.
Why on Earth would any adult wish to talk to other people’s children about sexuality, particularly if it’s without parental consent? The fact that this debate must continue on tells parents everything they need to know. And educators with nothing to hide have no reason to be defensive.
Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.
