My first experiences in LGBTQ activism and advocacy go back to the Prop 8 campaign that successfully outlawed same sex marriage in California back in 2008. Here in California, Prop 8 was one of the defining political and social questions of that decade. I was in my mid-twenties and had only recently come out when the campaign started. By Spring of that year, the news coverage, campaign ads, and lawn signs were ubiquitous and overwhelming. And I still have visceral sense memories of seeing those ads day in and day out. One infamous television commercial showed ominous thunderclouds with threatening narration about the vague dangers that marriage equality posed to our children. Another showed a weeping mother expressing shock and dismay that “in my country I have to fight for the idea that children deserve a mother and a father”. Still others went on and on about the threat that public schools would have to teach all children about gay marriage, as if the nature of marriage is even a topic of discussion in grade schools. These messages were so pervasive that I had acquaintances at the time who were genuinely confused about the provisions in Prop 8, and thought it was a regulation on school curricula rather than on state recognition of marriage.
Of course, Prop 8 is thankfully long dead now. Its hateful and bigoted ban on marriage equality was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2013, and its language was officially removed from the state constitution in last year’s election. But those old ads illustrate an important point. In the fight for queer rights and dignity, everything old is new. Antiqueer bigotry has always justified itself with specious rhetoric about the need to “save the children” from the threat supposedly posed by queer equality. In the 1970s, Anita Bryant focused her campaign of forced outing and targeted harassment on school teachers in a cynical and strategic ploy. In the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, disgusting lies were concocted about gay men purposefully spreading the virus by spitting in children’s candy. And now, as the bigots turn their attention more forcefully to our trans siblings, they would pretend once again that their goal is to “save the children” when in reality they are just repackaging and rebranding their longstanding disdain for queer people.
Since retaking the presidency, Donald Trump has passed a slew of dangerous and repugnant executive orders targeting the trans community. One of these, a ban on gender affirming care for minors, was titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”. This follows years of rhetoric about the evils of drag queen story hour and absurd conspiracy theories about children “going to school one sex and coming home another one”.
If we want to understand how to fight back against this kind of rhetoric, we need to understand why bigots use it and why it is so effective. At a basic and obvious level, rhetoric about “protecting children” works because it sounds like a good thing. We all believe in protecting children as a natural and innate human instinct. And it’s precisely the way this rhetoric manipulates and appropriates that positive instinct that makes it so insidious. Not only does it falsely construe the existence of queer people as somehow being a threat to children, it pointedly refuses to acknowledge the reality that some children are themselves queer, or come from queer families.
That tension is at the heart of the deception this rhetoric engages in. Children are one of the only groups in our society who are vulnerable and in need of protection, but also often unable to advocate for their own needs and perspective. Antiqueer agitators seize on that opportunity to appoint themselves the arbiters of children’s best interests. They pretend to be advocating for children, when in reality they are using children to launder their own hate and bigotry. Whatever malicious agenda they have is sanitized to the public under the auspices of being “for the children”.
This means that in order to counter and debunk this kind of rhetoric, we need to develop a deeper, more thoughtful and more healthy approach to how we understand children and their place in the world. If we, as queer people, want to build a world where adults have dignity, freedom and self-determination, we begin by modeling those values to children. This means challenging the idea that any movement or group gets unchallenged authority to speak on children’s behalf, by empowering children to speak for themselves. It means creating safe, respectful spaces for children to share openly about their feelings, concerns, and experiences. It means recognizing that as parents, teachers, and mentors our role in a child’s life is to guide and teach them, including teaching them about responsibility and accountability, rather than controlling and coercing them. It means recognizing children as individuals with rights and interests of their own, rather than as extensions of the egos of the adults in their life.
And yes, this means that one of the ways we truly, actually protect children is by listening to them without judgment when they express their feelings about gender, and allow them the freedom to express their gender in a way that brings them joy and freedom.
If we understand our relationship to children in this way, we will see that the existence of out queer people creates a sense of possibility, openness and autonomy that all children need by showing the myriad ways that people can choose happiness in the world. And we will allow children who happen to be queer to grow up safely in their homes and communities, and to grow into healthy mature and happy queer adults.
This is possible only if we understand children as people, as individuals with their own perspectives needs and interests, rather than as props to be used in a regressive and self-serving social agenda. To truly protect children, we must empower them and respect their agency and dignity. And we must do that with all children, regardless of their gender expression.
