Since his takeover of Twitter, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has been outspoken in his disapproval of gender-transitioning minors on several occasions.

In a post on Twitter this week, Musk cited a study conducted in Sweden that found individuals with “transsexualism” after undergoing sex changes have “considerably higher” risks for suicidal behavior.

Comprehensive study in Sweden shows *increased* suicide!

Death for sex-reassigned persons was higher than for controls of same birth sex, particularly death from suicide. They also had increased risk for suicide attempts and psychiatric inpatient care. https://t.co/hIakkEJvJb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2023

“The Swedish study says ‘sex-reassigned transsexual persons of both genders had approximately a three times higher risk of all-cause mortality than controls,'” Musk said.

“If we take as given that the other study 2–3X suicide rate is correct, then doing surgery or chemical sterilization on minors gain nothing in reduced mortality,” he continued. “My position is simply that we should wait until an individual is mature enough to make their own decisions before other adults make permanent serious physical changes to them.”

Musk then doubled down the argument often cited in media and among trans activists that increased suicide rates among transgender youth is a reason to affirm such an ideology.

“The counter to my position would be that if we don’t make the changes when they’re a minor, they may never reach adulthood due to suicide,” Musk said. “However, that counterargument does not hold water if mortality is essentially unchanged, which it is.”

The Tesla CEO then added: “[By the way], I regard cisgender as a slur.”

Study Details

The Swedish study, published by the National Institutes of Health, concluded that individuals with “transsexualism” after “sex reassignment” have an increased risk of mortality, self-harm, and psychiatric morbidity.

“Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population,” the report states. “Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”

However, it has to be noted that the study Musk cited was published in 2011. The report’s objective was to estimate the “mortality, morbidity, and criminal rate after surgical sex reassignment of transsexual persons” of 324 “sex-reassigned persons” in Sweden for 30 years. Each of these participants was matched with 10 population controls matched by birth year and birth sex or “reassigned (final) sex.”

Other studies, meanwhile, have shown that the vast majority of children who experience gender identity issues and dysphoria simply grow out of it, given time.

As previously reported by The Epoch Times, two separate studies found that 88 percent of boys and girls (2 to 12 years of age) who experienced gender dysphoria—who did not undergo transitioning—reported when they were adolescents and young adults that it was no longer an issue and they accepted their biological gender.

In this week’s social media discussion, Musk echoed similar sentiments, posting on Twitter: “Every child goes through an identity crisis, but leaping to a permanent solution that sterilizes them for life before they could possibly consent for themselves is wrong. Plain and simple.”

‘Most Permissive Country’

A report published by the Williams Insitute in 2022 estimated that 3 percent of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 identify themselves as transgender, a 100 percent increase over the number in the organization’s 2017 report.

Dr. Michelle Cretella, an expert in adolescent sexuality, believes the rate is significantly higher than the Williams Institute report estimates.

“A rise this dramatic is most certainly due to indoctrination,” she told The Epoch Times in April.

Meanwhile, the United States is the “most permissive country” for legal and medical gender transition of children, according to a report released in January by Do No Harm, a group that seeks to insulate the health care profession from “radical, diverse, and discriminatory ideology.”

The report compared the United States with 11 Northern and Western European countries on metrics including legal requirements to change gender, provisions for medical transition, the minimum age for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and the number of youth gender clinics.

Speaking Up

Musk has a child himself that identifies as transgender. The SpaceX founder has been outspoken in his disapproval of gender-transitioning minors in the past.

His open critiques, meanwhile, have also met with backlash from those who feel children are capable of making such decisions for themselves.

Taking notice of some Twitter users’ critiques of Musk’s latest April 25 tweets, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stepped in to voice her support.

“Passing my bill Protect Children’s Innocence Act makes it a felony to perform sex reassignment surgeries on kids under 18,” Greene commented on Musk’s post. “Republicans must pass it.”

While speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March, the congresswoman vowed to reintroduce the bill now that Republicans control the House.

“It couldn’t pass last Congress because, like I said, Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House, and she doesn’t believe in gender at all,” Greene said. “But we have a new Speaker in our Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and I’m going to be introducing my bill … that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender-affirming care on children.”

“This isn’t just a right-wing extremist idea, everyone, that we should protect children from making a horrible mistake, because many of these kids do realize it’s a mistake and they hate what they’ve done to themselves,” she added. “There [are] independents, Democrats, Republicans all over America that agree that we need to let kids be kids.” (read more)

Hillegass believes that DeSantis’s democratically approved higher-education reforms are a form of “fascism” and that the new slate of conservative trustees at New College, including me, are dangerous “sycophants” and “chuckleheads” who have “terrified the students and faculty.” Hillegass has been teaching at New College for only three months, but the reforms—designed to improve the struggling college, which ranks dead-last on Florida’s state performance metrics—were too much.

On Saturday, he resigned, releasing a dramatic public statement that compared DeSantis with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. “I love New College, but for the good of our nation, I hope the school fails miserably and conspicuously,” he wrote. “If I were more patriotic, I would burn the college’s buildings to the ground.”

These stunts are designed to drive left-wing media narratives (“Professor Resigns in Protest of DeSantis’s Fascism”) and to boost the profiles of their attention-seeking authors. The playbook is well-worn, and yet Hillegass, a data scientist, made a simple mistake. In his rhetoric about “burn[ing] the college’s buildings to the ground,” he revealed the ugly truth about modern “anti-fascism”: it believes that violence against the right targets is perfectly legitimate.

This appeal to violence is part of a larger pattern. When I first visited New College to hold a conversation with the campus community, an unidentified individual made a death threat against my fellow trustee Eddie Speir, and administrators tried to shut down the public forum, citing the threat. The following week, after our first board meeting, in which we terminated the contract of then-president Patricia Okker, student protesters screamed and menaced outside, requiring police to provide a protective barrier and shuffle us into a van.

The howling mob, like Hillegass, accused the new board of “fascism.” They might consider a remedial history course. Some notable characteristics of fascism include contempt for democratic governance and the use of street intimidation to achieve political objectives. Hillegass and his supporters should ask themselves whether that better describes the newly appointed board of trustees or the left-wing protesters.

Hillegass, apparently, had some guilty feelings. After an uproar in the press, he backed away from his violent statement. He claimed that it was a “poetic flourish,” clarified that he would “never burn a building down,” and then played the victim, arguing that “academic freedom” was under threat in Florida. But Hillegass never bothered to substantiate his argument. Had any policies limited his ability to research, write, and teach data science at New College? Had any restriction been made on his speech inside or outside the classroom? Pending any evidence, the answer is no.

Hillegass’s rhetoric might be over the top, but it reveals something fundamental about the nature of contemporary politics. The American Left, which has achieved hegemony in academia, would rather destroy a university than cede control of it to the Right. They do not believe conservatives are wrong; they believe conservatives are evil, and that this evil should be violently opposed. Without such resistance, Hillegass argued, Florida would descend into totalitarianism. “When a governor guts the leadership of a state school in an effort to make a facsimile of Hillsdale, that is fascism,” he wrote. “Not the shocking Kristallnacht-style fascism, but the banal fascism that always precedes it.”

This is fantasy. Hillegass and the young protesters, who work, live, and study in unprecedented peace and prosperity, are play-acting an imaginary historical drama designed to win fawning coverage on MSNBC, not to stop Governor DeSantis from building concentration camps on the beaches of the Sunshine State. In contrast to his fevered rhetoric, Hillegas feels no sense of practical urgency. In his resignation note, he states that he wants to stick around until his contract expires in August. But if Florida is perched on the verge of fascism, shouldn’t he get out now? If he truly believes the college is irredeemable, why continue to teach in its buildings until the semester ends?

I would encourage Hillegass to get on with it. At New College, we are building a classical liberal arts institution, in which there is no place for those who cannot differentiate between classical liberalism and political fascism. The faculty of New College need to be stewards of a great tradition, not arsonists of an eternal present. (read more)

The company has lost over $6 billion in market capitalization since the partnership with Mulvaney was announced.

Jay Brown, a senior vice president at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, has sent a letter to Anheuser-Busch’s head of human resources calling the company “cowardly” for attempting to back away from the scandal.

“In this moment, it is absolutely critical for Anheuser-Busch to stand in solidarity with Dylan and the trans community,” reads the letter obtained by The Hill.

The Hill reports, “according to the HRC letter, the group is preparing to lower Anheuser-Busch’s long-standing 100 percent Corporate Equality Index score, a national benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices and benefits relevant to LGBTQ employees.”

HRC is demanding that executives from the beer company meet with them and that the company release a public statement “reaffirming its full support for its transgender customers, shareholders, and employees.”

“Anheuser-Busch has declined several meeting requests from HRC in the wake of right-wing pushback over its partnership with Mulvaney,” the report added.

Mulvaney, an adult biological male, has become controversial over his “Days of Girlhood” series on TikTok and meeting with President Joe Biden on “Day 222 of being a girl” to advocate for allowing minors to transition.

The activist-influencer said at the time, “I’m ready to step up and show that trans people are not going anywhere and that trans kids deserve a fighting chance to be their true selves.” (read more)

There’s dignity and honor in work.

I was raised to value a good day’s work and to have pride in what you bring to the table. To be skilled at a craft was an honorable way to make a living whether you were a dishwasher or a surgeon. Work gave each of us a greater self-worth, purpose, and pride.

My father was the youngest master plumber in Montana’s history, and he came from three generations of men who valued and mastered their trade. I still feel pride when an old timer stops me in the street to tell me about the time my dad or grandad helped repair their home.

But now, well outside the global pandemic [of lies], our workforce has shrunk to levels not seen since the 1970s, far lower than during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. More than a third of men are out of the work force – the lowest in recorded history – thanks in part to the massive regulatory and welfare state created under COVID and the public health emergency.

Not a day goes by in Montana that you don’t walk down Main St and see a restaurant or shop with a handwritten sign that says “closed today due to staff shortage” or have to wait four months for a vehicle repair. That is not the sign of a strong economy. It’s the sign of a struggling workforce.

Requiring able-bodied adults who do not have children to work 20 hours a week if they receive government benefits is prudent and hits at our core American value of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Plus, it saves taxpayer dollars and grows the economy. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Medicaid work requirement for childless adults ages 18 to 64 could save the federal fisc nearly $170 billion over 10 years.”

You’ll see the president taking victory laps because unemployment is low; well, it’s low because under his policies people are being paid not to work. People are being incentivized with lax unemployment benefits and other welfare to stay at home and not contribute to our community and economy.

That has to end. COVID is over. Our nation is tens of trillions of dollars in debt, facing crippling inflation, a broken supply chain and labor shortage, insolvent senior benefits, and is about to run headfirst into a financial crisis. 

House Republicans have put forth a plan to make America work again, reduce the deficit, and put our nation on a healthy fiscal path. It’s called the Limit, Save, Grow Act.

This act, sometimes described in the media as a debt-ceiling plan, addresses the looming Democrat-created debt crisis by cutting excessive COVID spending, cutting regulations, and implementing pro-growth policies like a work requirement and energy permitting reform.

Limit, Save, Grow pulls back unspent COVID funds, saves money in areas where Democrats have continued to be frivolous which has caused spikes in inflation, and increases the flow into programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The work requirement, also known as the America Works Act, which I sponsored, falls under the “grow” area of the bill by incentivizing those who can work to pay into the programs to the caliber of their capability so they can continue to serve the purpose they were created for.

Work requirements aren’t new – they were implemented in 1996 and helped pull people up and out of poverty, lending folks a hand up while giving them the important work experience they need to grow a career and the American Dream. 

It encourages independence through employment. It makes able-bodied Americans a part of our economy and feeds the Social Security and Medicare programs until they are at least 65 and are eligible for benefits themselves. Reestablishing and enforcing the original system provide security for those who have continued to persevere and keep those programs alive and gets able bodies on the manufacturing and shop floor and off the couch.

When Americans work, our economy is strong. Our communities prosper and the programs that rely on strong employment like Medicare and Social Security are strong. Not to mention, the quality of life for those who get jobs improves for the long term.

There are a handful of vulnerable Senate Democrats in states that value a good day’s work – Montanans included. Voters in Wisconsin were just asked in a ballot question if able-bodied adults without children should look for work in exchange for benefits. It passed with nearly 80%. The House is set to pass this plan in the coming weeks, and I encourage the Senate to follow our lead.

A former US Army psychological warfare officer says that Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News because of the regime’s agenda to maintain an “uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population.”

The remarks were made by US counter-terror expert Scott Bennett.

Carlson and Fox News “parted ways” on Monday with speculation still raging as to the specific reason why the network canned its highest rated and most popular host.

According to Bennett, Carlson posed too much of a threat to institutional power because he turned Americans into proper “researchers and thinkers”.

Carlson offered an “intellectualism, truthfulness, and an analytical depth that no other news personality has ever done in the history of the United States as far back as I can remember,” said Bennett.

Tucker needed to be “silenced” because he represented too big a threat to the “powers and principalities, institutions and agendas that seek an unenlightened uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population that do not question, do not research, do not analyze but simply digest and follow instructions,” according to Bennett.

“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies,” Bennett told Sputnik.

The ex-host’s anti-regime rhetoric “could no longer be tolerated by the corrupt American media and political establishment,” said Bennett, adding that his exit signals “the death of American media”.

The former US army psyops officer suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer had threatened to utilize the CIA and the FBI to deploy secret government operations against Tucker to get him off air unless he was fired.

Schumer previously called for Carlson to be taken off air after he broadcast footage showing the January 6 ‘riot’ leaders were actually allowed into the Capitol and chaperoned around by authorities.

As we highlighted earlier, one of the reasons behind Tucker’s dismissal is a lawsuit fired by former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claims she was bullied and subjected to sexist and anti-semitic harassment.

However, Grossberg’s own lawyer revealed that she has never even met Carlson. (read more)

[Anti-gun & climate-crazy] Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Friday that “mega-billionaires” like Bill Gates are using climate change to implement “totalitarian controls on society.”

The World Economic Forum took place in January, with many world leaders and top business executives arriving at Davos, Switzerland, for panel discussions and speeches. Speakers at Davos have touted cities where people didn’t need cars, claimed the world did not need “growth or development,” called for censorship and demanded commitments from government and business to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions.

“They’ve given climate chaos a bad name, you know, because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and to, you know, to enrich billionaires and I for 40 years, have had the same policy on climate and engineering, you can go check my speeches from the 1980s and I’ve said, the most important solution for environmental issues, not top down controls is free market capitalism,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to launch his bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the 2024 campaign April 5, joining writer Marianne Williamson.

“What we have in this country now is not free market capitalism it’s corporate crony capitalism. It’s capitalist, it’s cushy kind of socialism for the rich and a brutal, barbaric, merciless capitalism for the poor,” Kennedy said. (read more)

Two recent polls have found that despite relentless propaganda promoting the man-made global warming narrative, climate change skepticism is growing globally.

A survey conducted by a group within the University of Chicago asked Americans whether humans were causing all or most of climate change.

Whereas 60 per cent held this belief five years ago, that figure has now slumped to 49 per cent.

A recent IPSOS poll which covered two-thirds of the world’s population also found that nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes.

“Perhaps the most surprising statistic from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) survey is that 70% of Americans are unwilling to spend more than $2.50 a week to combat climate change,” writes Chris Morrison.

“Nearly four in 10 Americans said they were unwilling to pay a couple of dimes. Despite decades of relentless green doomsday agitprop designed to corral populations into living under a collectivist Net Zero-ordered society, it appears that the vast majority of Americans are unwilling to pay even the chump change in their back pockets to stop the climate changing.”

Such skepticism is quite frankly astonishing given that the ‘official narrative’ on man-made climate change has been vehemently amplified by every single major government entity, corporation, media outlet and cultural institution in existence.

The fact that ‘the regime’ is still struggling to convince huge numbers of people that climate change is both the fault and humans and representative of an existential threat represents a massive failure of re-education and brainwashing.

As we highlighted yesterday, social media giants are now increasingly characterizing any skepticism of climate change as a forbidden opinion.

TikTok has become the latest platform to announce that any content challenging the sacred dogma of global warming will be ‘fact checked’ and removed. (read more)

Drag Queen Story Hour—in which performers in drag read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores—has become a cultural flashpoint. The political Right has denounced these performances as sexual transgressions against children, while the political Left has defended them as an expression of LGBTQ pride. The intellectual debate has even spilled into real-world conflict: right-wing militants affiliated with the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters have staged protests against drag events for children, while their counterparts in the left-wing Antifa movement have responded with offers to serve as a protection force for the drag queens.

Families with children find themselves caught in the middle. Drag Queen Story Hour pitches itself as a family-friendly event to promote reading, tolerance, and inclusion. “In spaces like this,” the organization’s website reads, “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” But many parents, even if reluctant to say it publicly, have an instinctual distrust of adult men in women’s clothing dancing and exploring sexual themes with their children.

These concerns are justified. But to mount an effective opposition, one must first understand the sexual politics behind the glitter, sequins, and heels. This requires a working knowledge of an extensive history, from the origin of the first “queen of drag” in the late nineteenth century to the development of academic queer theory, which provides the intellectual foundation for the modern drag-for-kids movement.

The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.

Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.

“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. . . . Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”

Rubin’s project—and, by extension, that of queer theory—was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction. “The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to” the view that sex is a natural and pre-political phenomenon, Rubin wrote. “Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.” In other words, traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political.” Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image.

There was some reason to believe that Rubin might be right. The sexual revolution had been conquering territory for two decades: the birth-control pill, the liberalization of laws surrounding marriage and abortion, the intellectual movements of feminism and sex liberation, the culture that had emerged around Playboy magazine. By 1984, as Rubin acknowledged, stable homosexual couples had achieved a certain amount of respectability in society. But Rubin, the queer theorists, and the fetishists of the BDSM subculture wanted more. They believed that they were on the cusp of fundamentally transforming sexual norms. “There [are] historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized,” Rubin wrote. “In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” And, following the practice of any good negotiator, they laid out their theory of the case and their maximum demands. As Rubin explained: “A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.” Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy—“transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers.”

Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum—pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex,” Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria,” rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains. “Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Rubin wrote fondly of those primitive hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea in which “boy-love” was practiced freely.

Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult–child sexual relationships in France. Like Rubin, Foucault haunted the underground sex scene in the Western capitals and reveled in transgressive sexuality. “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” Foucault once told an interviewer on the question of sex between adults and minors. “And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new niggers, the new witches.” For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. “You can’t liberate children and adolescents without disrupting the entire hierarchy of adult power and coercion and challenging the hegemony of antisex fundamentalist religious values,” she lamented. All of it—the family, the law, the religion, the culture—was a vector of oppression, and all of it had to go.

The second prerequisite for understanding Drag Queen Story Hour is to understand the historical development of the art of drag. It begins with a freed slave named William Dorsey Swann, who dressed in elaborate silk and satin women’s costumes, called himself the “queen of drag,” and organized sexually charged soirées in his home in Washington, D.C. Over the course of his life, Swann was convicted of petty larceny—he had stolen books from a library and dinnerware from a private residence—and then, in 1896, was charged with “keeping a disorderly house,” a euphemism for running a brothel, and sentenced to 300 days in jail. From the viewpoint of modern sexual politics, the story has all the elements of the perfect left-wing archetype: Swann was a man who liberated himself from chattel slavery and then from a repressive sexual culture, despite the best efforts of the oppressors, the puritans, and the police.

Drag became explicitly political seven decades later, during the Stonewall riots of 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar in New York City rioted against police and began a wave of gay and lesbian political activism. As writer Daniel Harris explained in the counterculture journal Salmagundi, traditional drag performances from William Dorsey Swann until the mid-1960s were sensual experiences, “an innocuous camp pastime,” but with the onset of the sexual revolution, they became forms of resistance and revolution. “After the 1960s,” Harris wrote, “ideology [tightened] its grip on the aesthetic of drag when gay men began to use their costumes to reevaluate the whole concept of normality and thus carry out a crucial part of the cross-dresser’s agenda: revenge.” Drag performers increasingly saw their vocation as political and started street organizations such as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in order to join the wave of activism rising through their communities in New York, San Francisco, and other hubs.

Suddenly, drag was not a private performance but a statement of public rebellion. The queens began using costume and performance to mock the fashion, manners, and mores of Middle America. In time, the need to shock required the performers to push the limits. “Men now wear such sexually explicit outfits as ball gowns with prosthetic breasts sewn on to the outside of the dresses, black nighties with gigantic strap-on dildos, and transparent vinyl mini-skirts that reveal lacy panties with strategic rips and telltale stains suggestive of deflowerment,” Harris noted. “The less drag is meant to allure, the bawdier it becomes, with men openly massaging their breasts, squeezing the bulges of their g-strings, sticking out their asses and tongues like porn stars in heat, and lying spread-eagle on their backs on parade routes with their helium heels flung into the air and their virginal prom dresses thrown over their heads.”

The next critical turn occurred in 1990, with the publication of Gender Trouble, by the queer theorist Judith Butler. Gender Trouble was a bombshell: it elevated the discourse around queer sexuality from the blunt rhetoric of Gayle Rubin to a realm of highly abstract, and sometimes impenetrable, intellectualism. Butler’s essential contribution was twofold: first, she saturated queer theory with postmodernism; second, she provided a theory of social change, based on the concept of “performativity,” which offered a more sophisticated conceptual ground than simple carnal transgression. Gender Trouble’s basic argument is that Western society has created a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism,” which has sought to enforce a singular, unitary notion of “sex” that crushes and obscures the true complexity and variation of biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and human desire. Butler argues that even the word “woman,” though it relates to a biological reality, is a social construction and cannot be defined with any stable meaning or categorization. There is nothing essential about “man,” “woman,” or “sex”: they are all created and re-created through historically contingent human culture; or, as Butler puts it, they are all defined through their performance, which can change, shift, and adapt across time and space.

Butler’s theory of social change is that once the premise is established that gender is malleable and used as an instrument of power, currently in favor of “heterosexual normativity,” then the work of social reconstruction can begin. And the drag queen embodies Butler’s theory of gender deconstruction. “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance,” Butler writes. “When such categories come into question, the reality of gender is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal. And this is the occasion in which we come to understand that what we take to be ‘real,’ what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality. Call it subversive or call it something else. Although this insight does not in itself constitute a political revolution, no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.”

By the 2000s, the performance of drag had absorbed all these elements—the social-justice origin story of William Dorsey Swann, the carnal shock-and-awe of Gayle Rubin, the ethereal postmodernism of Judith Butler—and brought them together onto the stage. The queer theorist Sarah Hankins, who performed extensive field research in drag bars in the Northeast, captured the spirit of this subculture and its ideology in a study for the academic journal Signs. Drawing on the work of Rubin and Butler, Hankins describes three genres of drag—straight-ahead, burlesque, and genderfuck—that range from stripteases and lap dances to simulations of necrophilia, bestiality, and race fetishism. Hankins describes the world of drag as a “sociosexual economy,” in which the members of “queerdom” can titillate, gratify, and reward one another with cash tips and money exchanges. “As an audience member, I have always experienced the tip exchange as payment for sexual gratification,” Hankins writes. “And I am aware that by holding up dollar bills, I can satisfy my arousal, at least partially: I can bring performers’ bodies close to mine and induce them to touch me or to let me touch them.” Or, as one of her research subjects, the drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova, puts it: “I’m literally out there peddling my pussy for dollar bills.”

The goal of drag, following the themes of Butler and Rubin, is to obliterate stable conceptions of gender through performativity and to rehabilitate the bottom of the sexual hierarchy through the elevation of the marginal. “The act of paying a dominant/domineering woman, a male supplicant, a hapless wage slave, or a boy allows the audience member to temporarily embody one or more of a number of ‘bad/unnatural’ social positions, for instance the pedophile, the closeted gay chickenhawk, the predatory female cougar, the sugar daddy or momma, even the sexualized youth/child themselves,” Hankins writes. And the discipline of “genderfuck” takes it a step even beyond adult–child sex. As Hankins describes, this style of performance “foregrounds tropes of primitivism and degeneracy as tools of protest and liberation” and seeks to subvert taboos against “pedophilia, necrophilia, erotic object fetishism, and human–animal sex.” These performances constitute the end of the line: the culmination of more than a century’s work, from the silk-and-satin drag balls to the hyper-cerebral politics of deconstruction to the annihilation of traditional notions of sex.

The final turn in the story of drag is, in some ways, the most surprising. As the dark side of drag pushed transgression to the limits, another faction began moving from the margins to the mainstream. Some drag queens—most notably, the drag performer RuPaul—toned down the routines, pushed the ideology deep into the background, and presented drag as good old-fashioned, glamorous American fun. Television producers packaged this new form of drag as reality programming, softening the image of the drag queen and assimilating the genre into mass media and consumer culture.

This provided an opportunity. As the queer theorists’ vanguard intellectual project was running aground on incest and bestiality fantasies, the most enterprising among them took a different tack: using the commercialization of drag and the goodwill associated with the gay and lesbian rights movement as a means of transforming drag performances into “family-friendly” events that could transmit a simplified version of queer theory to children. The key figure in this transition was a “genderqueer” college professor and drag queen named Harris Kornstein—stage name Lil Miss Hot Mess—who hosted some of the original readings in public libraries and wrote the children’s book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. Kornstein sits on the board of Drag Queen Story Hour, the nonprofit organization that was founded by Michelle Tea in 2015 to promote “family-friendly” drag performances and has since expanded to 40 local chapters that have organized hundreds of performances across the United States.

Kornstein also published the manifesto for the movement, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” with coauthor Harper Keenan, a female-to-male transgender queer theorist at the University of British Columbia. With citations to Foucault and Butler, the essay begins by applying queer theory’s basic premise of social constructivism and heteronormativity to the education system. “The professional vision of educators is often shaped to reproduce the state’s normative vision of its ideal citizenry. In effect, schooling functions as a way to straighten the child into a kind of captive alignment with the current parameters of that vision,” Kornstein and Keenan write. “To state it plainly, within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.”

To disrupt this dynamic, the authors propose a new teaching method, “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” As Kornstein and Keenan explain, this is an intellectual and political project that requires drag queens and activists to work toward undermining traditional notions of sexuality, replacing the biological family with the ideological family, and arousing transgressive sexual desires in young children. “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,” they write. “This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.”

For the drag pedagogists, the traditional life path—growing up, getting married, working 40 hours a week, and raising a family—is an oppressive bourgeois norm that must be deconstructed and subverted. As the drag queens take the stage in their sexually suggestive costumes, Kornstein and Keenan argue, their task is to disrupt the “binary between womanhood and manhood,” seed the room with “gender-transgressive themes,” and break the “reproductive futurity” of the “nuclear family” and the “sexually monogamous marriage”—all of which are considered mechanisms of heterosexual, capitalist oppression. The books selected in many Drag Queen Story Hour performances—Cinderelliot, If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It, The Gender Wheel, Bye Bye, Binary, and They, She, He, Easy as ABC—promote this basic narrative. Though Drag Queen Story Hour events are often billed as “family-friendly,” Kornstein and Keenan explain that this is a form of code: “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. 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.” That is, the goal is not to reinforce the biological family but to facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family.

After the norms of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family are called into question, the drag queen can begin replacing this system of values with “queer ways of knowing and being.” Kornstein and Keenan make no bones about it: the purpose of what they call drag pedagogy, or the “pedagogy of desire,” is about reformulating children’s relationship with sex, sexuality, and eroticism. They describe drag as a “site of queer pleasure” that promises to “turn rejection into desire” and “[transform] the labour of performance into the pleasure of participation,” and DQSH as offering a “queer relationality” between adult and child. They litter their paper with sexualized language and double entendres, blurring the lines between adult sexuality and childhood innocence. In fact, as the queer pedagogist Hannah Dyer has written, queer pedagogy and, by extension, drag pedagogy seek to expose the very concept of “childhood innocence” as an oppressive heteropatriarchal illusion. “Applying queer methods of analysis to studies of childhood can help to queer the rhetoric of innocence that constrains all children and help to refuse attempts to calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire,” Dyer writes.

The purpose, then, is to subvert the system of heteronormativity, which includes childhood innocence, and reengineer childhood sexuality from the ground up. And drag performances provide a visual, symbolic, and erotic method for achieving this. Kornstein and Keenan’s language of the discipline—“pleasure,” “desire,” “bodies,” “girls,” “boys,” “glitter,” “sequins,” “wigs,” and “heels”—gives it away.

Of course, the organizers of Drag Queen Story Hour understand that they must manage their public image to continue enjoying access to public libraries and public schools. They have learned how to speak in code to NGOs and to appease the anxieties of parents, while subtly promoting the ideology of queer theory to children. While many of Drag Queen Story Hour’s defenders claim that these programs are designed to foster LGBTQ “acceptance” and “inclusion,” Kornstein and Keenan explicitly dismiss those objectives as mere “marketing language” that provides cover for their real agenda. “Though DQSH publicly positions its impact in ‘help[ing] children develop empathy, learn about gender diversity and difference, and tap into their own creativity,’ we argue that its contributions can run deeper than morals and role models,” they write. “As an organization, DQSH may be incentivized to recite lines about alignment with curricular standards and social-emotional learning in order to be legible within public education and philanthropic institutions. Drag itself ultimately does not take these utilitarian aims too seriously (but it is quite good at looking the part when necessary).” In other words, as a movement, Drag Queen Story Hour has learned the dance of operating a cash-flow-positive activist organization, winning government contracts, and securing access to audiences, while providing a plausible rhetorical defense against parents who might question the wisdom of adult men creating “site[s] of queer pleasure” with their children.

This gambit has been remarkably successful. Drag Queen Story Hour began with voluntary programs at public libraries, which are required by law to provide equal access to organizations regardless of political affiliation or ideology. But within a few years, those state-neutral events have turned into state-subsidized drag performances for children. The New York City Council and New York Public Library have provided taxpayer funding directly to the Drag Queen Story Hour nonprofit, sparking a trend of state-subsidized drag readings, dances, and performances across the country. Next, the New York City Public Schools, with more than $200,000 in funding from the municipal government, began hosting dozens of drag performances in elementary, middle, and high schools in all five boroughs. Other political figures seem to want to go even further. The attorney general of Michigan has called for a “drag queen for every school.” California state senator Scott Wiener has suggested in a tweet that he might propose legislation to offer “Drag Queen 101 as part of the K–12 curriculum” and mandate that students attend Drag Queen Story Time as a way to “satisfy the requirement.” Both might have said this tongue in cheek—but in any case, these things have a way of going from joke to reality at the speed of light.

Though the spread of sexually charged drag performances has an aura of inevitability, one should keep in mind that transgressive ideologies always contain the seeds of their own destruction.

As the movement behind drag shows for children has gained notoriety and expanded its reach, some drag performers have let the mask slip: in Minneapolis, a drag queen in heels and a pink miniskirt spread his legs open in front of children; in Portland, a large male transvestite allowed toddlers to climb on top of him, grab at his fake breasts, and press themselves against his body; and in England, a drag queen taught a group of preschoolers how to perform a sexually suggestive dance.

Scenes from drag events hosted across the United States in bars, clubs, and outdoor festivals have been even more shocking and disturbing: in Miami, a man with enormous fake breasts and dollar bills stuffed into his G-string grabs the hand of a preschool-aged girl and struts her in front of the crowd; in Washington, D.C., a drag queen wearing leather and chains teaches a young child how to dance for cash tips; in Dallas, hulking male figures with makeup smeared across their faces strip down to undergarments, simulate a female orgasm, and perform lap dances on members of a roaring audience of adults and children. Newspaper headlines have also announced abuses: “Tucson High School Counselor Behind Teen Drag Show Arrested for Relationship with Minor”; “Houston Public Library Admits Registered Child Sex Offender Read to Kids in Drag Queen Storytime”; “Drag Queen Charged with 25 Counts of Felony Child Sexual Abuse Material Possession”; “Second ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ Reader in Houston Exposed as Convicted Child Sex Offender”; “Drag Queen Story Hour Activist Arrested for Child Porn, Still Living with His Adopted Kids.”

Advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour might reply that these are outlier cases and that many of the child-oriented events feature drag queens reading books and talking about gender, not engaging in sexualized performances. But the spirit of drag is predicated on the transgressive sexual element and the ideology of queer theory, which cannot be erased by switching the context and softening the language. The philosophical and political project of queer theory has always been to dethrone traditional heterosexual culture and elevate what Rubin called the “sexual caste” at the bottom of the hierarchy: the transsexual, the transvestite, the fetishist, the sadomasochist, the prostitute, the porn star, and the pedophile. Drag Queen Story Hour can attempt to sanitize the routines and run criminal background checks on its performers, but the subculture of queer theory will always attract men who want to follow the ideology to its conclusions.

When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily—and recklessly—abandoned. They will draw a bright line between adult sexuality and childhood innocence, and send the perversions of “genderfuck,” “primitivism,” and “degeneracy” back to the margins, where they belong. (read more)