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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.

No, not directly but it's crowd cover and encouragement to take your paraphilia public / evolve it into an identity. No, I highly doubt that anything put on by the school is ever a spark for a kid to trans (except actual groomery grooming), but it's definitely gasoline, and a firepit.

For a lot of paraphilias including agp, the exhibitionism and humiliation is part of the excitement and can eventually sublimate into association.

A teen in the 90s who got turned on by putting on his sister's dress, would still not be caught dead coming to school like that. So it's ability and context to grow is stunted, and in many cased desisted, subsumed into hetero-erotic exploration with women, or maybe remains a mild kink. But when the teacher and school is encouraging it, and more importantly you are given examples of other people doing it and seemingly getting away with it, you now have a context to dive all in and let it consume you, and receive the positive social feedback.

TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.

Finally, returning to your initial TL;DR, again no I doubt it's causing anything outright, but certainly someone with some mild curiousity can get tickled by the idea and it's a great way to grow into an earworm.

As a guy I can tell you there are a lot of random little slightly 'strange' fleeting experiences that I can still trace certain shapes of my adult sexual-psyche back to today. Even if you want to make an argument that in every scenario, the spark was already there, I'm saying that something as ridiculous as a teacher reading a book that makes you feel weird can really feed that spark.

I’ve never personally been worried about that sort of grooming. To me, the part that’s especially grooming-ish isn’t that. It’s the schools encouraging kids to experiment with sex-related ideas at school with the school not only teaching kids to keep sexual secrets from their parents, but helping keep it a secret from their parents. They do things like having “trans clothing closets” so your son can wear a dress at school, will call your child by a different name at school, including using different pronouns and will hide all of this information from you.

This to me is the grooming. Teaching kids that parents are not to be informed of some things means that, should another adult decide that he or she would like a sexual relationship with your child, he no longer has to work that hard to convince that child to not tell. The child’s school has made it clear that if the child would be embarrassed telling his parents, or if he just plain doesn’t want to, the child doesn’t tell. Add in that we’re having kids as young as 5 being exposed to very adult sexual ideas, and it’s thus much easier to convince a kid who’s already used to thinking and talking about sex that going farther is okay.

And to add to this- the idea that institutions keep meaningful secrets about a child from that child’s parents flies in the face of literally every piece of wisdom about protecting children that has ever been realized.