Madeleine Pence
To the Editor:
One thing I find very important, especially in today’s polarized society, is to be able to critique and debate ideas in a rational manner. In last month’s spectrum issue, Talia Reiss wrote an article entitled “Opinion: Children Are Not Safe Under Republican Lawmakers.” It argued that, because Republicans support gun rights and don’t support children being able to see drag shows or obtain so-called “gender affirming healthcare,” they cannot be a pro-children party.
There are many things wrong with this article. Reiss opens stating, “The GOP markets itself as the pro-child party, aggressively working to protect America’s youth from the menacing threats of positive role models and life-saving healthcare.” This is when the article makes its first mistake, claiming that allowing children to attend shows where grown men dressed as women perform in an overtly sexual manner is somehow denying them access to healthcare and role models.
“The truth is that DQSH [drag queen story hour] is not harmless, and it is, in fact, steeped in a political and ideological agenda that targets children,” said Eve Kurilova in her blog post, "Drag Pedagogy: Grooming by Any Other Name." Kurilova, who self-identifies as “Canada’s preeminent lesbian,” went on to say, “Drag itself is adult entertainment full of sexually charged themes meant to be performed at nightclubs. It did not lose these elements when children became the audience.”
Reiss also states that Republicans don’t want children to have access to “life-saving healthcare,” which, as she clarifies later in the article, refers to “gender-affirming healthcare,” where children are given puberty blockers, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), and eventually surgeries like double mastectomies, phalloplasties, etc. This is far from “life-saving healthcare,” and, in fact, there’s good evidence to believe that it’s quite the opposite. The longest-ever follow-up study on trans people after transition says this in its conclusion: “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism” (Dhejine et al. 2011). Furthermore, this study took place in Sweden, which has a culture that is highly supportive and “affirming” of trans people.
Reiss continues, “In March, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee passed two major pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.” While she characterizes these bills as anti-LGBTQ, they’re not. In fact, I think it is anti-LGBTQ to support children’s access to sexualized adult entertainment and irreversible drugs and surgeries — both of which are advocated against by members of the gay community. Also, according to an article published in the National Library of Medicine, “Multiple longitudinal studies provide evidence that gender-atypical behavior in childhood often leads to a homosexual orientation in adulthood, but only in 2.5% to 20% of cases to a persistent gender identity disorder” (Korte et al. 2008).
Reiss makes the argument that you cannot be pro-child unless you advocate for gun control because guns shoot kids, and that, because the Tennessee GOP didn’t support gun control after the Nashville shooting, they cannot be pro-child. She states, “Tennessee Republicans don’t seem quite as concerned about child safety when 9-year-olds are gunned down in their classrooms… [they] doubled down on their attempts to weaken the state’s gun safety measures.” Standing on the graves of children to make a political point is very classy, but putting that aside, these incidents, while tragic, are extremely rare. Only 10 people, including adults, have been killed in school shootings this year. In 2022, which had a record high for school shootings, only 34 people, including adults, died.* While all of these deaths are tragic, it is extremely unlikely that a child will die in a school shooting. So, restricting people’s abilities to own weapons, which are used to prevent crimes more often than they are used to commit them, in order to maybe prevent what is already extremely unlikely, could cause crime in general to rise.
Reiss discusses the protests in Nashville following the April shooting, including the fact that three Democratic Representatives joined the protests and two of them, both Black, were consequently expelled from the Tennessee House.
Ah yes, the infamous Tennessee Three. I was wondering when she’d bring them up. The statement that the Tennessee Three were merely peacefully protesting gun control is false. I don’t fault Reiss for this—the mainstream media is heavily biased—but this is still a false claim. Thousands of students pushed their way into the Tennessee house. Videos taken at the scene show them pushing cops and blocking a doorway to prevent lawmakers from exiting. While I agree with Reiss that the expulsions were not a good idea, I think if they did expel them, they should have expelled all three.
Reiss then continues her attack on the GOP: “It is clear that the GOP cares more about power — maintaining it with support from the NRA, and exercising it by silencing those who dare to dissent — than about protecting children.” As I said, it really is not clear that the GOP cares more about power. They simply support different means to an end that we both want. Reiss writes, “The GOP will excuse the massacre and molestation of children, but they draw the line at drag queens?” The GOP doesn’t excuse the massacre of children. It wants to prevent the massacre of children by allowing measures like armed security guards at schools. It has traditionally been in favor of the death penalty for crimes such as shootings and child rape.
“Yes, advocacy campaigns are not mutually exclusive,” Reiss says. “Just because guns present the deadliest threat does not mean we can’t also combat other dangers facing our youth. But drag queens and gender-affirming healthcare are not among them.”
Whether or not exposing kids to sexually explicit content is dangerous should not be up for debate. Additionally, gender-affirming healthcare is a euphemism for castrating and sexually mutilating a gender-confused child. It is opposed by many people in the LGBTQ community: transgender man Scott Newgent, transgender woman Rene Jax, transgender woman Blaire White, and an entire organization, Gays Against Groomers. Transgender man Scott Newgent transitioned as an adult and had horrific side effects, none of which he was informed about. If a grown man isn’t aware of the side effects of these surgeries, how much more uninformed would a child be? I have sympathy for trans-identifying youth, but there are better answers to their struggles than just mindlessly affirming them and putting them on a pathway to irreversible drugs and surgeries.
Reiss later quotes Brian Mustanksi, director of the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University, who claims that there is no evidence of purported harm caused to children by drag shows.
However, drag is sexually explicit content. Kids should not be exposed to it. It is not restricting the free speech of strippers to tell them not to pole dance in front of kids. There are drag queens such as Kitty Demure and Lady MAGA who absolutely agree that drag is for adults, not children. One does not have to be hurt doing something for it to be inappropriate for them.
Reiss does make an interesting point about role models: “Drag queens actually act as role models for children, fabulously representing the joy that can accompany queerness,” she says. “They teach queer kids that we need not cower in shame, that we are allowed to occupy space in the world, to be loud and proud and flamboyant. Such role models are essential for the health and safety of queer children.”
It is, indeed, important for young kids to have open minds and good role models, especially LGBTQ kids, but there are much better ways to do this than exposing kids to sexual entertainment. Positive portrayals of queer relationships in media and exposure to non-sexual LGBTQ role models in real life will do this job much better.
Reiss closes the article by emphasizing that the GOP should leave healthcare decisions between kids, their parents, and their doctors (the ones who would make a lot of money if they would go through with these expensive procedures, which often require lengthy follow-up visits). I can’t see anything going wrong there… Next, she calls for Red Flag laws, which are a really bad idea as they turn due process on its head and resemble dystopian science fiction novels.
Thank you for reading this tome of an article. I would again like to reiterate that I have nothing against Talia Reiss.
*Editor’s Note: The statistic cited from "EducationWeek" qualifies school shootings as events “where a firearm was discharged, where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident, that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.” As well, the "Washington Post" counts a school shooting as “acts of [gun] violence during school hours.” Because of this, a number of gun-related deaths that occurred on school property but not during school hours are left out of these statistics.