Hear hear! It's probably worth pointing out that many people who accuse drag queens of being "groomers" don't usually mean that drag queens are attempting to molest children. They're often drawing a false equivalence, suggesting that drag queens abuse children by "perverting" their ideas about gender presentation and the appropriateness of non-straight sexual orientations.

In other words, they're claiming that children are being abused because they're learning that it's okay to be queer.

Obviously, this argument resonates with people who believe it's not okay to be queer.

To make matters worse, the most malevolent actors on the "groomer" front often deliberately fudge the definitions they use.

Chaya Raichik, who goes by 'Libs of TiKTok' on social media, has when pressed admitted that drag queens in libraries are not literally trying to molest children.

But in her tweets and other social media posts she sure looks like that's what she means. She's using the word "groomer" to imply that children are being prepped for molestation, which causes a lot of outrage and has elicited violent responses.

She knows what she's doing, which is cultivating outrage on purpose. She didn't invent the groomer slur, but she is pretty much responsible for popularizing it as a talking point on the right.

Political figures like Christina Pushaw (Governor DeSantis's former press secretary and now his campaign spokesperson) and Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Green have jumped on the bandwagon to reinforce Raichik's groomer rhetoric.

They're both pretty transparent about their hypocrisy, though.

For example, Green is in the news right now because of her support for her ex boyfriend's appearance on a morning news program in full drag for purposes of humor.

Green says she thinks it's great that her ex did that. The only apparent reason why she doesn't condemn him is that he is not a queer person. In her mind, it's okay for him to dress as a woman to be funny, but it's not okay for queer people.

Her bias is naked and unapologetic. She uses the groomer slur when it suits her, but I don't think anybody really believes she thinks drag queens are literally grooming children for molestation.

The slur is part of her homophobic schtick. She wants queer people to disappear from the public stage and from public life. She'll say whatever it takes to make that happen.

On a side note, I think the word "groomer" is losing some of its sting. The last few weeks I've seen "groom" used by people on the left and the right to mean something more like "influence" than "prepare for sexual molestation," which is how Raichik originally used it.

I've counseled people on the left to not use the word to mean influence, since that's not what people receive when they hear the slur in an LGBTQ context.

But maybe we should just let natural language development pull the fangs. Most people intuitively understand that drag queens in libraries are not trying to molest children. So they start using the word groom to mean something less sinister.

I guess that's better than the alternative.