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The Grammar of Grooming
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-April-23 05:52:45, Tuesday|
Grooming has become a central term, developed in the rhetoric of Child Sexual Abuse and now redeployed in the rhetoric of the trans panic. The rhetoric resisting the CSA narrative – our rhetoric – and the rhetoric resisting trans panic have both struggled to address the role “grooming” has played in these two different, but related, social upheavals. Those who resist the trans panic are forced, on pain of becoming pedo apologists, to argue that “grooming” legitimately stigmatized sexual opportunism exploiting youth from the 1970s until recently, but was then misappropriated by the anti-trans lobby in an attempt to stigmatize transkids. Many within our own movement find themselves making the opposite argument: that while grooming, as used by the CSA industry, was a false or at least misleading construction designed to justify imprisoning and placing on sex registries men who did nothing worse than successfully woo people younger than 18, in the context of trans it represents an appropriate label for recruiting youth into a malevolent program of gender reassignment that contravenes natural law. In fact “grooming” in both contexts means exactly the same thing: an assertion that young people lack the capacity to make their own decisions about sexuality and gender, and an effort by adults to substitute their own opinions about how young people ought to behave for the choices young people are actually making. Sex with an adult is not always the right choice for a young person. Neither is gender transition. But there is no general rule available in either case. No one can tell a given youth that their choice about sexual behavior or gender transition is right or wrong. It’s too personal. It depends crucially on things that only the young person involved – if anyone -- is able to understand and evaluate. The first duty of those of us who wish the best for young people is to avoid attempting to substitute our own judgement for theirs – and especially not to attempt to formulate a general rule. In the case of a particular young person well known to us, we might be able to provide informed advice. But even there we should proceed with caution. These are not matters in which parents, doctors, or the state can helpfully promulgate guidelines. They are matters in which young people’s agency should be honored and respected. Grooming is a rhetorical device for dishonoring and disrespecting youth agency. No young person’s choices about sexual behavior or gender identification should be overridden on the basis that the young person was “groomed.” A recent opinion piece in The Telegraph (UK) makes it clear that the same logic that underlies sexual age of consent laws is behind the recommendations of the Cass Review. The writer (link below), speaking of Hilary Cass, the author of the review, says: Neither she nor people like me want to take away the right for adults to transition. Either cult members accept there is a difference between adults and children, and begin to understand safeguarding, or they will have to operate a dark, underground web of selling drugs to children. Before attaining the magical age of 18 (though in fact the Cass Review suggests 25 might be better!), young people are better off, with respect to sex and gender (and by implication pretty much everything else as well), having choices made for them by parents (but not parents who support their transkids), doctors (but not the doctors who greedily promote transition), or, as a last resort, the state. This is the grammar of grooming. If kids make choices we don’t approve of, that must mean they were groomed. Will kids empowered to make their own choices make mistakes? Of course they will. We all make mistakes. That’s life. We make choices and we live with the consequences. Are parents (but only if they agree with us) or doctors (but only Hilary Cass, not trans promoting doctors) or the state capable of making better choices for kids than they are themselves? Are you? Am I? The grammar of grooming says yes. Youth liberation, at least as I understand it, says no. hugzu ;-p
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