I’m a mom using social media to sound the alarm on radical, politicized, and sexualized content for kids. I accrued over 26 thousand followers on Twitter after the teachers union sued me for submitting public records requests about gender theory and critical race theory in school. Before that, my own school district threatened to sue me by putting me on trial in a public school committee meeting. I have overpowered every attempt to silence and bully me.

Now Twitter has permanently banned me for this quote tweet: 

According to Twitter, my tweet violated Twitter’s rule against “hateful conduct.” The rule states:

You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. 

Is it “hateful” to disagree with adults teaching children to perform as drag queens with the public support of state legislators? Is my opinion that children are being groomed to perform as adult drag queens indisputably, “hateful?” 

There appears to be a new coordinated effort to crackdown on conservative social media accounts whistleblowing grooming. James Lindsay was shortly suspended for tweeting about groomers (after tweeting it about a million times) and then quickly released from Twitter exile. The parent group, Moms for Liberty, was also locked out of its account after a tweet that criticized California’s gender transition bill, which provides refuge to parents from other states seeking “gender-affirming” care they cannot legally obtain in their own state. The phrase “ok groomer” blew up about six months ago but grooming as a psychological concept has been around since the 1980s. 

Dr. Lisa Rocchio is a clinical instructor at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and expert witness who testified about the five stages of grooming minors in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Grooming is “the use of coercion or manipulation short of physical force to sexually abuse children.”

Reporter Adam Klasfeld live-tweeted the five stages of grooming as testified by Rocchio.

Maxwell’s defense argued that the grooming behaviors identified by Rocchio can also be behaviors by people who do not intend to sexually abuse children and Rocchio agreed. But this still does not justify grooming that does not end in sexual abuse. The problem is that every drag queen who turns children into child drag queens normalizes grooming behavior that would otherwise be considered a red flag. It gives cover to those who do have the intent to sexually abuse children.

In my initial appeal to Twitter I stated:

Nothing about my tweet was hateful. Drag is gay sexual fetish which is written about extensively in scholarly publications and Colorado State reps support a nonprofit applying this fetish to children. The only hate comes from people who hate the truth.

Try researching these scholarly publications about drag and you will run the gamut of intersectional, navel-gazing theories on the gender politics surrounding drag. Judith Butler, the leading scholar on drag, insists that drag is primarily an exploration in gender as opposed to sexuality but the decoupling of gender and sexuality is not scientific or societal consensus. There is even a distinction between drag queens and transvestites – transvestites are men who derive sexual pleasure from dressing as women whereas drag queens are exploring the politics of gender expression. But how can a child decipher that distinction between two men dressed as women offering to dress him up in women’s clothes for a transformative experience on a “safe stage?” 

Even queer writer, Joe Corr, concedes the intellectual dishonesty surrounding the cultural phenomenon of “family-friendly drag.” After being sexually assaulted at age 17 while wearing drag in public for the first time at a Pride event, he says what we all know is true thanks to having our own eyeballs:

“it would be remiss to say that drag and sexuality don’t have any sort of correlation…Visit any local drag show and you’re likely to experience performances of sexuality at some level — whether that be the crude jokes spat out by drag queen DJ’s in any popular gay bar, or the plethora of burlesque and sex positive performers in alternative and underground drag spaces. If you can’t make it to a local show, watch any season of Rupaul’s Drag Race, and tally up the number of times ‘sexy’ or any variation thereof is used as a descriptor.

This is why you must be at least 18 to see drag shows at most venues. New York drag shows require you to be 16 years old and other drag shows require you to be 21-years old. Introducing children to drag as performance art and pretending that drag is not inherently sexualual blurs the lines between children and adults interacting with sexual content. 

If you help a child perform as a drag queen, then you desensitize a child to adult sexual content, making that child more vulnerable to sexual predators. It is the effect of grooming on a child that matters, not the groomer’s intent. Behavior that falls short of sexual abuse does not absolve you of the sin of grooming children. 

Corrupting a child’s radar for sexual predation is just as reprehensible as committing the sexual predation because you created the conditions for sexual abuse. And that was the point of Ghislaine’s Maxwell’s trial – to hold her accountable for facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of children, which may not have happened but for Maxwell’s meticulously coordinated supply of children she groomed to surrender to Epstein’s sexual advances. 

All of this is to say that my tweet was not “hateful” by any reasonable standard of moral judgment because it so clearly posits drag as the adult sexual content society has always regarded it as and rejects this new application of drag (with government support) to children.

The truth is that drag cannot be safely integrated into the world of children without risking the safety and welfare of children. We can split hairs on whether drag queen story hour is as harmful as debuting children as drag queens, but the point remains: drag is adult sexual content that cannot be normalized for children’s consumption without a society’s radical and dangerous erosion of adult/child sexual boundaries. That is something we cannot allow to happen, but without mass public outcry like mine, it will happen. Make no mistake – society is being groomed to normalize the sexualization of children every time we don’t push back on allegations of “hate” against mothers like me protecting childhood innocence. 

And why is childhood innocence so important? Because innocence provides stability. The more stability a child is provided, the more likely a child will overcome adversity in his teen years and adulthood. 

No adults are harmed in the preservation of childhood innocence. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.