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Notes -
Didn’t drag queen story hour predate trans as a culture war battlefield?
Per Google, DQSH first started in 2015 in San Francisco. The first big national-news-grabbing fight over trans bathroom access was in 2016 (North Carolina), but there had been several state- and local-level squabbles over trans issues in the years before.
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I don't think so? It wasn't until several years after the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner, and the general topic of bathroom drama, that I even heard of drag queen story hour. Maybe in some deep-blue strongholds?
I'd speculate that what actually happened here wasn't "deep-blue strongholds", but the opposite - an increasingly noteworthy phenomenon of deep-red strongholds who somehow managed to ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand their way through the entire LGBT activist phenomenon until recently. They can wind up thinking of things like drag queen story hour as opening blows in the conflict because they weren't paying attention before that.
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