When gender ideologues get accused of pursuing your children at school, public libraries, and online with the goal of radicalizing and sexualizing them, they vehemently deny being groomers.

But just because these activists are not actually sexually molesting children physically certainly doesn’t protect them from the charge of being groomers. Groomers can also target your children and abuse them psychologically and emotionally because grooming is deliberately sexualizing and manipulating children. This leads to distorted thinking about their identity, relationships, family, and sexuality.

The end result? Young children and adolescents adopt unhealthy self-identities, often leading to aberrant and harmful sexual behavior.

Many parents have unfortunately experienced this for themselves as they see what their children are being taught in schools, in their community libraries and online. But very few parents have been able to experience just how boldly gender ideologues admit to grooming your children psychologically when they are communicating among themselves.

A dramatic example of this was published last year in an academic journal for educators. The article, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” was referenced by Daily Citizen earlier this month. After publishing that story, our staff had the opportunity to read this article in full. Its brashness is shocking.

Specifically, this article is highlighting the mission of Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) which takes place in public libraries and schools all around the country and world. They have likely held readings in your community. You have a right (and a responsibility!) to know what this effort is really all about.

Both authors admit in the article “we make no effort to hide our bias: we are both supporters of this programme” with the secondary author being a drag queen who proudly works in the leadership of DQSH under the provocative stage-name Lil Miss Hot Mess. They write, “Our purpose … is to make use of our unique positions as scholar-practitioners to highlight the pedagogical elements of DQSH that may not be immediately obvious to its audiences.”

The Daily Citizen wants you to hear directly from these advocates, in their own unguarded words, about the larger intentions of drag queens reading stories to your children at your local libraries and schools. Each is a direct quote from the article.

  • We propose that DQSH offers a particular kind of queer framework – what we call drag pedagogy – for teaching and learning that extends beyond traditional approaches to LGBT curricular inclusion.
  • We emphasize that drag pedagogy … artfully invites children into building communities that are more hospitable to queer knowledge and experience.
  • We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children? [emphasis in original]
  • DQSH creates spaces for young children and families to immerse themselves in LGBT-themed stories, and does so in ways that seem to genuinely reflect queer ways of being and relating.
  • DQSH grew from queer author Michelle Tea’s personal desire to connect her toddler with queer culture.
  • At many events, organizers invite kids to create their own drag name…
  • We argue that [DQSH] creates a pathway into the imaginative, messy, and rule-breaking aspects of drag for children without necessarily watering down queer cultures.
  • Though there are many layers to drag, its most immediate process of denaturalizing gender and culture happens on the surface…
  • While drag has some conventions, it ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible. Thus drag can be thought of as a kind of queer praxis that may be especially well-suited to early childhood education.
  • Many elements of DQSH are common to early childhood schooling: bright colors, music, art, and imaginative play. … What is different though, is that the teacher is a drag queen. … She encourages children to think for themselves and even to break the rules. …She is a queer

And finally …

  • Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education.

And …

  • In turn, drag queen teachers have much to learn from interactions with children: many queens reflect that DQSH allows them to build relationships with young people that otherwise would not be possible.

This is grooming, straight up.

Destroying Children’s Natural Inhibitions and Norms

And they are not shy about their desire to aggressively attack and break down natural and humanly universal sex-based inhibitions in your very young boys and girls.

  • For example, Lil Miss Hot Mess’s (2020) picture book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish encourages kids to move their hips in ways often coded as effeminate. This not only breaks the taboo of acting effeminate or identifying with queer figures, but also opens space for children to study drag as a source of creative inspiration.

Rebellion against norms is also paramount to their mission.

  • DQSH performers demonstrate a refusal to be told what to do.
  • DQSH is organized differently than the usual classroom experience. The art of drag is defiant, playful, unruly.
  • Drag may offer insights into how educators might support a practice of strategic defiance.
  • DQSH presents a queer relationship to educational experience. The traditional role of the teacher, transformed in a loud and sparkling queen, becomes delightfully excessive. She is less interested in focus, discipline, achievement, or objectives than playful self-expression. Her pedagogy is rooted in pleasure and creativity borne, in part, from letting go of control.
  • Instead, drag is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self-fashioning.
  • In a broader context, fostering collective unruliness also helps children to understand that they can have a hand in changing their environment … drag may help elucidate the arbitrariness of rules.
  • In many cases, drag queens may not respond with answers [to questions like “Are you a boy or a girl?”], but with questions meant to complicate perceptions of gender and society.

From Mere Empathy with Others to Adoption of New Self-Identity

These authors proudly explain that Drag Queen Story Hour boldly goes beyond the typical LGBT curriculum inclusion of teaching kids about important contributions same-sex attracted people have made to history. That’s old school.

DQHS helps young children experiment with “queer ways of being” themselves. They say it bluntly, “Ultimately, we suggest that drag pedagogy offers one model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to live queerly.” (emphasis in original)

These authors explain,

  • Rather than building empathy from a set of presumed straight or cisgender children, then, drag pedagogy might enact a mode of queer kinship that acknowledges that there is already queerness within the classroom.

DQSH Redefines the Family Itself

And finally, their intention to replace and redefine the nature of family and kinship is also crystal clear. DQSH literally advertises itself as “family friendly” fun and that is how it slips in among unsuspecting librarians and teachers. These people readily admit they have a very different meaning of the word “family.”

  • Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.
  • It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.
  • [W]e suggest that DQSH offers a queer relationality with children that breaks from the reproductive futurity of the normative classroom and nuclear family.
  • Many performers study their craft in an adoptive drag family, wherein drag mothers (or fathers, sisters, aunties) guide their children in anything from how to glue down one’s eyebrows to delivering a flawless lip-synch.

These authors end their article with this revolutionary view toward the future, and they do so very much with your child in mind.

As we write this article, DQSH continues to draw public enthusiasm and is set to expand. Of course, we are excited about that. Yet, we also wonder how DQSH can continue to exist … engaging with the power of young children’s imaginations today to begin to envision alternate tomorrows. Playing with drag can be a way to remember that … “We’re already here, moving.” We’re dressing up, we’re shaking our hips, and we’re finding our light – even in the fluorescents. We’re reading books while we read each other’s looks, and we’re leaving a trail of glitter that won’t ever come out of the carpet.

Yes, this is grooming. Pseudo-academic jargon does not change the authors’ evil intentions to corrupt and sexualize children.

It is a concerted effort to come after your children and grandchildren so they participate in and adopt sexual and gender radicalness.

As Rod Dreher has said of all this, “This is not innocent, the drag phenomenon. It is grooming. They perfectly well know it, and are lying to us. They don’t care what they destroy.”

But they do care what they destroy. They care very much. It is their intention. Listen to their own words.

 

Photo from Getty.