CW: child sexual abuse, homophobia, transphobia.

"I'm not trying to ban any books. I'm trying to stop an indoctrination campaign against kids. Any person in this county that has children knows full well what I'm talking about" (SC Senator Josh Kimbrell, emphasis mine).
“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases… one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them” (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language).
“We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crime” (Aldous Huxley, “Words and Behavior”).

The pro-censorship, transphobic narrative around “grooming” starts, like a lot of propaganda and disinformation, with the (probably deliberate) misuse of an important concept. RAINN defines sexual grooming as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught”. This is obviously a phenomenon people from across the political spectrum should acknowledge and want to address.

But in the extreme political framing, grooming includes “sexualizing” children by exposing them to “inappropriate sexual material,” whether or not this is intended to manipulate them into undergoing abuse.

And which sexual material is inappropriate? According to the pro-censorship narrative, pretty much all sexual material.

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But what is sexual material? According to the pro-censorship narrative, sexual material is now pretty much anything that involves sexual activity of any kind, sexual feelings and relationships, or, crucially, any acknowledgement of gender or sexual identity (even without any direct reference to body parts or sexual activity) other than a strict binary that includes only straight cisgender males and females.

This is a hard to talk about.

In my own life, I’ve know too many people— friends, loved ones, and students— who have suffered abuse, including sexual abuse. I believe our society—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not— systematically protects abusers, and that, partly because abuse is so difficult to confront on an emotional level, we tend to explain it away or to distract ourselves. We collectively ignore and even censor the reality of who perpetrates abuse, and who their main victims are.

We collectively ignore this reality in the same way we ignore and censor the reality of systemic racism.

This is why the choice by pro-censorship politicians and groups to exploit both our fears of abuse and our reluctance to confront it honestly, and to use baseless allegations of abuse as a kind of dog whistle for homophobia and transphobia, is so deeply offensive and dangerous.

As a teacher, being told I am part of a system that systemically exploits children is hard to take, particularly when those making the accusations rarely seem to care a fraction as much about actual children as do the teachers and staff who show up to work with children every day.

We currently live in a political reality in which these charlatans exploit the anger and fears of the community in ways that recklessly put school employees in danger. In which former Trump administration secretary of state Mike Pompeo can say, “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing,” and get applause from many conservatives. In which Pompeo can explicitly claim that the head of the American Federation of Teachers is somehow more responsible for indoctrination than authoritarian leaders and dictators. In which my state can elect a superintendent of education who declines to speak with actual journalists, but who sat down for interviews with people who have called for censoring books and thwarting diversity efforts, people who have spread disinformation about schools and have targeted teachers and librarians for harassment.

What is worse is that this exploitative rhetoric hurts the most vulnerable and makes it harder to protect them from the very abuse it claims to target. It distracts from and often prevents efforts to address very real problems of student mental health and child abuse. According to a recent UCLA study, almost half of principals surveyed reported that “community-level conflict” over issues like LGBTQ+ rights increased during the last school year; it’s difficult to believe this conflict isn’t being both encouraged and exploited by extremists. (There’s a great deeper dive into this data by writer Anne Lutz Fernandez here.)

During the April 27, 2022 meeting of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey argues on behalf of a proviso by Josh Kimbrell defunding services for transgender youth at MUSC, saying, “it says that if there is a clinic for pediatric transgenders, they can’t have one”. Still of video from official archive.

In the same meeting, Senator Josh Kimbrell defended his proviso with his usual rhetorical nonsense, feigning outrage that he would try to deny care to transgender children, while also calling them “children who are gender confused or going through a phase in their life”. Kimbrell acknowledged that the clinic he wanted to defund provided counseling to transgender youth, but still moved to block funding.

LGBTQ+ people, who are far more likely to be victims of abuse and violence than their straight and cisgender neighbors, continue to be made scapegoats for sexual crime. But according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, gay and lesbian people are twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes as straight people, and transgender people are 2.5 times more likely to be victims than cisgender people, yet the thrust of much of the pro-censorship legislation from the past few years is that it is the LGBTQ+ “agenda” which is threatening students.

Last week, after a shooter killed five people and injured seventeen others during a drag queen’s birthday celebration in a Colorado nightclub, a member of the group “Gays Against Groomers” tied the deaths and injuries to dangerous rhetoric about “the evil agenda that is attacking children” (according to this excellent and heart-wrenching piece by Paul Bowers). In this all-too-common-framing, the victims become the scapegoats and the groups at highest risk for violence are presented as violent predators.

Last April, while waiting for a department meeting to begin at my school, I made the mistake of starting a conversation with coworkers that touched on the previous night’s moves by the SC legislature to censor books that Senator Josh Kimbrell and his ilk have called “pornography”. The amendment explicitly targeted books which “appeal to the prurient interest,” but of course that language was probably designed to be overly broad and confusing, in order to give cover to efforts to censor and ban books that simply acknowledge the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people.

During session that month, Kimbrell probably got closer to revealing his specific goals when he compared the presence of books recognizing the complexities of gender identity to the life depicted in George Orwell’s 1984, saying (according to the official Senate journal), “I was born in 1984 and I feel like (right now) we are living in 1984 with some of the issues happening around the State”.

It has been long-established, of course, that irony is dead, and I don’t know if Josh Kimbrell even hears half of the words that come out of his own mouth, but there is also something incredibly sinister about the appropriation of anti-totalitarian art to advance a pro-censorship agenda aimed at stripping protections and services from vulnerable groups. 1984’s soul-dead protagonist Winston Smith works in a building called the “Ministry of Truth” and spends his days burning documents the regime has disavowed; his ever-changing style guide changes the meanings of words in order to gaslight the public. To put it in terms Kimbrell might be able to understand, 1984 mocks censorship— especially government censorship— because it is an anti-censorship novel.

Kimbrell went on to share alleged parent complaints from constituents about the book Making a Baby: an Inclusive Guide to How Every Family Begins, by Rachel Greener, and connecting his efforts to censor that book to the ultimately successful efforts to pass a bill prohibiting transgender students from participating in school athletics on the teams that align with their gender identities.

The book will probably disappoint anyone seriously looking for indoctrination or grooming. It does contain some cartoon nudity, in the context of providing health information. Some parents may not want their children to see nudity like this, but that does not make it “pornography,” nor do the excerpts I’ve seen appeal to the “prurient interest” of any reasonable person.

I have a strong feeling that the “inclusive” part of the book bothers Kimbrell much more than tasteful, educational drawings of body parts. Kimbrell, in a letter to the Spartanburg County Public Library, contradicted his earlier statements that he didn’t want to “ban” books by saying the book was “wholly inappropriate in a public library” and suggested that the books he didn’t like had an “anti-parent agenda” (which seems like a pretty loud dog whistle for “gay agenda” in this context).

Screenshot of a letter, dated April 7, 2022, which Senator Kimbrell shared on his official Facebook page.

Kimbrell, about as transparent a bigot as I have seen in South Carolina politics (where open-mindedness of any kind is a fairly high bar) made a point of saying, in those remarks on the Senate floor, “Now regardless of one's position on issues related to gender identity or any of these issues, I think we can all agree that children, as young as five and six, should not be exposed to that, particularly without parental consent.” (I am very confused about how Josh Kimbrell imagines children aged five and six get to the public library.)

Of course, this kind of rhetorical trick is very old, intentionally ignoring the fact that a great many parents and other concerned adults would like for children to be aware of the existence of gender identity, and intentionally obscuring the obvious fact that any discussion of “boys and girls” is also a discussion of gender identity.

As I suggested last week, this kind of have-it-both-ways approach to anti-trans rhetoric recalls the Southern Strategy of the 1960s, when guys like Lee Atwater and Richard Nixon used the racist backlash against Civil Rights gains to power right-wing politics while pretending to stay above the fray. Kimbrell and others claim they aren’t banning books just because they’re removing them from public library sections. They’re protecting children (by banning books)!

Over the past six months or so, folks like Kimbrell and the SC House “Freedom Caucus” have moved more and more aggressively to ban books from both public and school libraries— going beyond moving them to another section and beyond using vague threats to funding to intimidate libraries— and their most common targets have been books dealing with issues of systemic racism— especially Jason Reynolds’ Stamped— and books that address gender identity— especially Gender Queer.

While Gender Queer contains a few explicit (illustrated) depictions of sexual activity, this, again, does not make it “pornography” (if it did, then many canonical works of art and literature would also be considered pornography and could not be displayed in public) and many of the books these creeps have challenged aren’t explicit at all, and are being labeled inappropriate simply because, in the framing of the censors, only parents should be able to discuss the existence of LGBTQ+ people. For people who yell about the Constitution a lot, these extremists are not fans of the First Amendment, which protects students’ “right to receive information” from taxpayer-funded institutions like school libraries (and, while he may have trouble believing so, not just their right to receive the information Josh Kimbrell would like for them to receive).

Governor Henry McMaster’s most recent political attack on school content was a Scholastic essay, written by a student, about the student’s experiences with their own gender identity. The essay, written for a younger audience, involved no descriptions of sexual activity, but McMaster’s letter suggested the article assignment was a form of “health education” (here, a euphemism for sexual education) and that covering such topics should be at the “sole discretion” of parents (the usual talking point of “parental rights” conservatism). Through a series of implied slippery slope fallacies, an essay about personal identity is framed as an essay exposing minors to, once again, inappropriate sexual content.

Of course even this framing would put McMaster on the wrong side of the Constitution. As NBC reported in 2020, South Carolina’s law removing discussion of gay and transgender people in sex education was overturned by a federal judge, thanks to a lawsuit brought by a Charleston GSA. It is illegal to provide sex education for one group of students (in this case, straight, cisgender students), and not to another (in this case, everyone else). And South Carolina law requires sex education, and although it is, predictably, written in a way so as to require indoctrinating students with certain cultural and religious concepts— such as abstinence until marriage— and even explicitly (and unconstitutionally, and unenforceably) prohibiting discussion of “alternative lifestyles”— it requires instruction intended for “the purpose of maintaining, reinforcing, or enhancing the health, health-related skills, and health attitudes and practices of children and youth that are conducive to their good health and that promote wellness, health maintenance, and disease prevention”. We can’t claim to do any of that by excluding LGBTQ+ students and students from diverse families.

McMaster has made it very clear that he views this framing as part of a larger agenda, saying in the final debate of this year’s midterms, “Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think marriage ought to be between a man and a woman, just like I think boys ought to play in boys’ sports and girls ought to play girls’ sports”.

Two obvious and counterproductive hypocrisies in the argument that censoring discussions about gender and identity protects children are that 1. LGBTQ+ children arguably need protection perhaps more than any other single group of children, and 2. conservative lawmakers have done little in recent years to protect any children.

In the same 2020 NBC article, Liam Knox wrote,

…South Carolina’s public schools have room for improvement, according to a 2017 National School Climate Survey from LGBTQ advocacy group GLSEN. The survey found that 88 percent of LGBTQ students in South Carolina regularly heard homophobic slurs or remarks, and 76 percent said they’d been verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation. LGBTQ youth in general, many surveys have shown, are already significantly more likely to be bullied or have suicidal thoughts than their heterosexual peers.

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, McMaster and other SC politicians frequently and disingenuously cited parental abuse/ neglect and mental health concerns as reasons to prematurely return to in-person learning (after McMaster himself closed schools for several months via emergency order). When schools returned to in-person instruction, almost nothing was done to address these concerns, and the rhetoric shifted to “parental rights,” an agenda which rests on the premise that parent decisions about children’s educations and wellbeing should always take priority (and the implied premise that some parents have more rights than others, because “parent rights” groups insist on censoring and/ or requiring content over the objections of other parents).

The groomer argument is very much the same, with anti-LGBTQ politicians feigning concern about child sexual abuse, while doing next to nothing to address either actual abuse risk factors, or to address student health and safety in other areas.

According to Kids Count/ the Annie E. Casey Foundation, South Carolina, in 2022, ranks 43rd in the country for education, 43rd for child health, and 37th for economic well-being. In South Carolina, the suicide rate for people aged 10-24 ranks in the top half of the country according to the CDC. South Carolina’s elected officials have responded mainly by continuing to underfund schools, family services, and youth mental health services, and by demonizing teachers and school staff during a historic teacher shortage.

As I said to my coworker during that meeting last year, the worst part about the “groomer” narrative is that it is part of a move— at times deliberate, at times incidental to bigger political motives— to erase both LGBTQ+ people and their experiences, and to play word games with issues of real consequence, like grooming for the purposes of sexual predation, and indoctrination for the purposes of sexual coercion. In doing this, these politicians and political groups make it harder to actually protect all children from sexual predation, because they deeply confuse the issue of what grooming and indoctrination actually look like. And they move us further and further into a systematic disenfranchisement of LGBTQ+ citizens.

My colleague who expressed his concern about “grooming” actually conceded pretty quickly that actual grooming— not allowing books or therapy, but manipulating children into inappropriate sexual relationships— is a real issue, and something which schools have a special responsibility to address.

In fact, in SC and other states, teachers have a legal obligation to report abuse, and sometimes to make decisions to protect students that might go against what their parents might prefer (especially if their parents are perpetrators of abuse or neglect). At times, schools are even legally required to act in loco parentis, to stand in for a child’s legal guardian while we supervise them for eight or more hours a day. As McMaster was quick to point out when it was politically expedient, schools are in a unique position to report signs of abuse and neglect— including parental abuse and neglect— and this, he argued, was an important enough role to supersede even the need to keep schools closed to mitigate the spread of coronavirus.

According to the most recent (2000) data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Almost half (49%) of the offenders [which were reported to law enforcement] of victims under age 6 were family members, compared with 42% of the offenders who sexually assaulted youth ages 6 through 11, and 24% of offenders who sexually assaulted juveniles ages 12 through 17”. While most parents and guardians of children, in my experience, have children’s best interests at heart, some parents and guardians are the cause of serious harm to children.

Politicians like McMaster and Kimbrell expect us to simultaneously believe that parents, as a group, are both perpetrators of violence against children at a great enough rate that schools have to fulfill the role of reporting it, and that parents, as a group, are also the sole arbiters of information about gender and identity that may be helpful in preventing abuse.

I’m not sure Josh Kimbrell has read 1984, but if he did read it, he might recognize the kind of political doublespeak going on here. Just as teachers and school staff, or librarians and library staff, can’t be painted with a broad brush as “indoctrinators,” parents can’t be painted with a broad brush as universally correct in matters of education and child wellness. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need schools or doctors or counselors or departments of social services or laws protecting children, because parents could do it all alone.

To see a recent high-profile American example of actual grooming and coercion, look at the trial against Keith Reniere and other leaders of the NXIVM cult and their efforts to psychologically manipulate, sexually coerce, and physically brand women and girls. One member was sentenced to three years in prison for her efforts to “recruit and groom” women and girls to have sex with Reniere. Reniere used his authority as head of the community to coerce women and girls to have sex with him, and to recruit and groom other women and girls to have sex with him. Reniere himself was sentenced to 120 years in prison for crimes that included “racketeering, sex trafficking, conspiracy, forced labor, identity theft, sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography”.

Similarly, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison this summer for her participation, with Jeffery Epstein’s, in sexually abusing and trafficking girls. Epstein and Maxwell used their money and connections to systematically traffic and harm children.

These people— and many others like them— have used power and manipulation to harm women and girls; they are, literally, groomers and indoctrinators. Using these words to describe books you don’t like makes you complicit with a culture that allowed these people to systematically hurt people, including children, for many years.

And to be sure, there are actual groomers in school buildings, in religious institutions, in athletics programs, in scout programs, in homes, and in many other places that should be safe places for vulnerable young people. That’s what makes this rhetorical con job of making dedicated and law-abiding librarians, teachers, and others out to be “groomers” and “indoctrinators” merely for providing students with access to information, so morally reprehensible: it distracts from real instances of grooming, and from society’s repeated failures to protect children from real harm, and it drives people who actually care about and protect kids out of the profession. When we should be doing everything we can to make schools safer spaces for students, these bad actors are instead deflecting attention from the obvious factors that increase child exploitation and harm.

Teachers and school staff have a special obligation to create and model healthy boundaries for children, and it’s something that we can never have too much reflection about. The popular refrain on the fringe right is that teachers should stick to “reading and math,” or as SC Representative Melissa Oremus opined, “stick to the bare bones and the facts”.

But there is no way to spend hour after hour with a group of children and not form personal relationships— that is, after all, how school staff members were able to recognize those abuse cases McMaster was so concerned about, that one time. When these relationships are appropriate, they involve setting clear boundaries with students. When these relationships are inappropriate, they are often best stopped by giving children clear information about healthy boundaries, so that they know when they are actually being groomed.

Some teachers and school staff have crossed lines they shouldn’t cross. That is a problem that must be addressed. But a witch hunt focused on censoring books and ideas, predicated on a hateful political goal, won’t help with that.

Josh Kimbrell, who was once formally accused of the sexual abuse of his own child, and who said “Being falsely accused is terrifying,” seems to have learned little from the experience. The accusations— which were dismissed due to what the Solicitor called “insufficient evidence”— described physical sexual abuse. Yet Kimbrell has regularly accused teachers and librarians of “indoctrinating” students, often merely for providing access to optional books, without much evidence beyond passages from books he doesn’t like, or the same kind of vague references to nebulous “complaints” which the SC “Freedom Caucus” has used— along with a truly bizarre video— to support its allegations against Lexington School District One. And he has accused medical workers at state-funded hospitals of providing gender reassignment surgeries for children simply on the basis that he hadn’t seen any proof they didn’t, chilling the ability of theseproviders to assist some of our state’s most vulnerable kids.

I certainly don’t have a solution to this problem, and I don’t think there is one magic bullet, obviously, but the most obvious solutions must involve cooperation between adults in each child’s life— at home, at school, at the doctor’s office, and anywhere else’s children are supervised by adults. Leaving the responsibility to handle all aspects of education about gender and sex to any one group doesn’t work; it never has.

Even more to the point, demonizing LGBTQ+ people is harmful to adults and perhaps even more harmful to children, and that it is counterproductive to addressing the problem of sexual abuse against children and minors.

In 1984, Orwell explored the way that governments can use the redefinition of basic terms—“WAR IS PEACE/ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY/ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”— to literally indoctrinate citizens (by replacing their individual, reality-based beliefs with irrational state doctrines, to reshape their understanding of the underlying realities and concepts related to those words.

Perhaps Josh Kimbrell was trying to get at this with his not-so-veiled transphobia on the Senate floor, to express his bigoted belief that to ignore the biological reality— as he sees it— that “gender” is not biologically determined is to somehow use doublespeak against gender truthers like him. That’s probably giving him too much credit. But re-labeling teaching and open exchange of information as “indoctrination” and “grooming” gets much closer to of the threat Orwell was trying to express in the book.

The only true defense against indoctrination is information and openness. Protecting children’s “innocence” at the expense of information and openness is counterproductive, often unethical, and at times unconstitutional. In private, even folks like Representative Adam Morgan of the SC “Freedom Caucus” will acknowledge that there should be nuance in these kinds of decisions; unfortunately, in public, such nuance doesn’t play as well as fear-mongering.

Our children—especially our LGBTQ+ children, who exist whether or not Josh Kimbrell or Henry McMaster or “Moms 4 Liberty” or the “Freedom Caucus” want to acknowledge them, and who face likely challenges more dangerous than those facing many other groups of children— deserve our protection, not from information, but from bigotry, closed-mindedness, and threats to their existence, health, and safety. Sadly, it seems like extremists are intensifying a political fight which puts these children at even greater risk, and that creates a moral imperative for us not to look the other way, but to be ever more mindful of creating safe spaces for these children.

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"Groomers"