- I had a situation where my father
was constantly speaking down to me.
Every time I would wear something that made me feel good,
made me feel at home in my body,
he would attack it.
So I couldn't be myself around him,
I couldn't be myself around my friends,
I couldn't be myself at school,
but I could be myself with that man.
I could run away to LA every weekend
and spend time in his studio
where I was never attacked for wearing what I wanted to wear
or expressing myself in the way I wanted to express myself.
And what this man did is he waited
until I felt like he was the only person in my life
who saw me, supported me, and validated me,
and then he took advantage of me.
(tense music)
Hey guys, it's Kat,
and it's time for another episode of True Tea.
I want to thank you guys for joining me
for yet another episode of True Tea,
and the first one back on YouTube.
Thank you so much for joining me for True Tea
over the past couple of months.
As we've changed formats, True Tea is now a podcast,
and I appreciate those of you guys
who have been patient with me as I explored new things.
I think we have finally settled on a format
and a schedule that I really like,
and I wanted to share with you guys
what is to come for True Tea before we get into this topic.
I've decided that I want True Tea to be something monthly,
as opposed to weekly,
so what we're gonna do
is we're going to upload a new video episode of True Tea
every first Saturday of every month
and host the call and show the following Wednesday
at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.
So if you have something to say about this topic,
keep it in mind for next week,
where we will be discussing the topic of this video.
And boy is it one hell of a topic.
So as for usual, I would suggest do you go to your kitchen
and grab yourself something to drink.
Personally, I am drinking an Arnold Palmer by AriZona tea.
Did you guys know that you can buy
like big jugs of AriZona tea?
I'm recently discovering this,
even though I certainly do not need more sugar in my diet,
but I do enjoy a good old Arnold Palmer,
so we'll let it slide.
Anyway, I'm gonna take a sip of this
and then let's get right into this conversation.
Oh, let's not spill the tea so soon.
Oh, my God.
So can we talk about something?
Recently, there has been...
an increase in antagonism against LGBTQIA+ folks
in education.
There is a bill in Florida that recently got passed
called the Parental Rights in Education Bill.
It's a bill that many are describing
as the Don't Say the Gay Bill
because it seeks to ban all conversations
about gender identity and sexuality
from classrooms between kindergarten and third grade.
Now, it's important to note
that sex ed is already banned in Florida
where this bill comes from,
but this is a bill that is essentially targeting
what many people on the right
will describe as activist teachers,
teachers who are essentially just not cis or heterosexual
and acknowledge as much in their classrooms.
People who support this bill
support it on the premise that those conversations
amount to grooming.
And as a transgender woman
who experienced grooming as a teenager,
I have a lot of things to say about this
because I think a lot of people
are not calculating how rhetoric like this, in all reality,
creates the perfect storm for groomers.
Let's talk about it.
Now, before we start this conversation,
I wanna start by saying
that I do indeed feel quite uncomfortable
with the concept of discussing sex with children.
Personally, I don't think it's a bad idea
to ban those conversations from children who are too young
to even understand that sort of stuff yet.
So, on paper, I agree with this bill in theory,
but I'm not naive enough to believe that this is a bill
that's actually about protecting children.
Now, if these laws were simply
about banning all conversations about spouses
or even particular ideas around gender from classrooms,
I think I could probably get on board with it.
However, it's really not about that.
It's really about criminalizing teachers, mostly,
who aren't cis or heterosexual
and we've already seen the impact of this
across the country.
There are many other states passing similar laws.
There are several situations where teachers have been fired.
There are even laws being passed
where kids can't actually discuss their sexuality at school
without it bidding back to their parents.
And for me, as a person
who came into their understanding of self
especially during my teenage years,
which, side note, even though that particular bill
is about kindergarten to third grade,
this has certainly influenced
a lot of high schools across the country.
As a person who really needed that sort of space and time
to figure themselves out away from my parents,
I really don't love the situation
that this is probably going to create,
which is one where students who are queer
already feel far more alienated from their communities,
and what frustrates me about this rhetoric
is that it's using the fear of grooming,
the idea of adult abusing children as this sort of...
I wanna say scapegoat,
but I don't think that's the right word.
It's using it to kind of win this argument, right?
Like I said, I agree
that kids shouldn't be talking about sex.
I feel incredibly uncomfortable around people
who express a cavalier attitude towards those conversations.
But that being said,
that's not really what we're talking about here.
If a queer teacher
is grooming their children
by acknowledging the fact
that they have a partner of the same gender, for example,
it's also then grooming for a heterosexual teacher
to acknowledge their wife or their husband, right?
Now, if we were talking about banning
all of these conversations universally,
I would kind of be on board with you there.
I don't think that a teacher needs
to talk about their relationships
or their life outside of the classroom.
I don't think that's necessary
for a kid to get a good education, right?
But that's not really what this is about, is it?
This is a very clear communication
that queer people and their relationships are political,
whereas heterosexual and cis people
have gender identities and sexualities that are not,
they are the standard, they are expected.
And, of course, I know the people who support these laws,
promote these laws, are spreading these laws,
are people who very much would support the idea
of overtly heterosexual cis person
being a role model for their children.
They view that as non-political, normal,
what is expected, and everything else as other.
And what messes me up again with this
is that that's a very strange way of looking at grooming.
As a person who experienced grooming,
I know that a very central aspect of being groomed
is isolation from your community.
It's hard to groom a child who has people around them,
adults, who are looking out for their wellbeing.
Now, growing up, we had a GSA
at my high school.
We had a Gay-Straight Alliance,
and this was like a couple of kids.
I don't think there were ever more than 10 kids
hanging out in a room,
the teacher was just sitting there grading papers,
kind of just opening up their room.
And we would all just hang out.
There was no discussion about,
"You need to be this player."
That way, it was just a bunch of kids
who were probably some shade of queer and allies
who wanted to support.
That's really all it is.
I say allies in quotation
because several of those allies later came out
as some shade of LGBTQIA+.
But I don't ever remember, in that context,
a queer teacher influencing us in any way.
We simply had a space where we could organize,
and speak, and hang out,
and that was kind of that.
And that kind of community is so important
for a lot of queer kids
because you feel generally rejected by society.
Most queer kids grow up
with a very unique understanding of the fact
that they are different from most people.
And hey, this is reflected back to them
when they have teachers who are heterosexual,
when their role models never reflect
who they know themselves to be.
And I've often spoke about how, for me,
when I was younger and I had suicidal ideation, especially,
a lot of that related to me having a really hard time
imagining who I could be in the future.
It's hard to be idealistic about where your life is going
when you know that you are so different from everyone else
that you can't even imagine existing in this world
past a certain point.
It's hard not to have those thoughts
if you don't feel like there's a space for you
in your community.
When I was younger and I felt isolated in my own community,
even though I had
that tiny little Gay-Straight Alliance to go to,
I turned to the internet.
I turned to the internet to find people like me,
and I did find people like me,
but I also found a lot of perverts;
perverts who were looking for kids just like me
who were not being watched by their parents,
who felt rejected,
who felt isolated, who needed someone,
anyone in their lives to say that they are valid.
And so, what happened?
I started having these private conversations
with these creepy men.
Eventually, I would end up meeting one of these men.
He was able to see the exact
void I had in my life
and fill it.
I had a situation where my father
was constantly speaking down to me.
Every time I would wear something that made me feel good,
made me feel at home in my body,
he would attack it.
So I couldn't be myself around him,
I couldn't be myself around my friends,
I couldn't be myself at school,
but I could be myself with that man.
I could run away to LA every weekend
and spend time in his studio,
where I was never attacked for wearing what I wanted to wear
or expressing myself in the way I wanted to express myself.
And what this man did is he waited
until I felt like he was the only person in my life
who saw me, supported me, and validated me,
and then he took advantage of me.
I won't get into the full story.
If you've followed me for a while,
you already know the story,
I've told it several times on here.
But long story short,
I would not have been in that position
if I had people in my community
who I felt seen and understood by.
The little GSA that I was part of was great,
but it wasn't really what I needed.
And when I think about what I would've needed back then
to not be in the position that I was in,
I think about how life-changing it would've been
if I had a space where I felt that I could come
and be myself.
That's what I wanted more than anything back then.
I wanted not to feel like I had to compartmentalize myself.
Back then, I felt more at home
with the man that was abusing me
than I did within the actual house I lived in,
the actual parents that raised me.
I felt so much better being abused than I did being at home,
and that's a position that a lot of queer kids are in.
And unfortunately,
when you support things like this that make it so
that these kids can't express themselves at school,
that they don't have teachers
that support them outside of the home,
that they don't have grown adult role models
who tell them, "You are valid."
"There's nothing wrong with you."
"What makes you happy makes you happy."
"If that's who you love, that's who you love."
When these people don't exist,
you feel isolated from everything.
And unfortunately,
there will always be perverts on the internet
who want to take advantage of that.
I can only imagine
that this kind of rhetoric
is going to make stuff like this more common.
And what's frustrating about that is that
when the environment is one
that is antagonistic towards queer folks,
it's also one
that puts queer people who are in positions
where they're being exploited and abused
in a situation where they are seen as...
less valuable.
It dehumanizes them in a way
where the abuse they experienced is somehow not as bad.
It's interesting because when I think
about some of the older stories
that I would hear of about queer folks,
it wasn't terribly uncommon for,
especially during times where homophobia and transphobia
was far more intense than it currently is even right now,
where minors would find older queer folks
who would, on one hand,
give them support to be themselves,
but would use that support that they gave them
as leverage to abuse and harm them.
What's fucked up about this
is that there are people who are queer who do groom people.
My argument is never going to be
that queer folks can't ever groom people.
That's not real or true.
It's just that they're not grooming these people
because they're queer
and that their queerness on its own
isn't what grooms people.
It's the actions.
But the point I'm trying to make
is that at the end of the day,
when you alienate a child,
when you alienate a kid who is some shade of queer
from their support systems,
from the people in their lives
who are supposed to care about them the most:
their teachers and their parents,
it just creates a situation
where that kid is gonna be looking for an older role model.
And unfortunately, those role models
might take advantage of them.
I would so much rather
a teacher who's being monitored by a school system,
be that affirming person
over a person who is not being monitored in that way,
over a person who is not
going through all of those various checks and balances
to make sure that they're not violating a child.
I prefer the rainbow in the classroom
over the person down the street,
who has that young man who comes over all the time
who he may or may not be abusing.
I feel sort of silly talking about this
because, on one hand, I'm having this conversation
in hopes that people will get
that grooming is not exactly what they're describing it as,
but I also know for a fact that
these people are only pretending to care about this stuff.
These people don't give a fuck
about the queer kids who are exploited,
not really, because they would not be trying to fight
for a situation where
this would be more of a possibility.
This would be more of a likelihood.
I promise you that making it so that these kids
can't be themselves anywhere
is only going to push them further and further,
away from the people who are in their lives,
who do indeed care about them:
their parents, their teachers, et cetera,
and into the arms of an abuser,
of a person who knows that they can exploit
the way that they've been rejected.
And that's really what I wanted to say.
That is truly what I wanted to say.
Again, if we make this
just about talking about sex with kids,
I am totally on board,
but you hear in the disdain
that Ron DeSantis has in his voice
when he says things like transgenderism
that this is a law put forth
because he inherently has disdain
for people who are LGBTQIA+.
So,
I think people
are being a bit silly when they try to make it,
"Oh, so you wanna talk about sex with kids?"
No. I don't think anyone is advocating for that.
And we've already seen that it's not just that.
We've already seen that in other states,
there are teachers who just publicly acknowledge
that they are in queer relationships
who lost their jobs
because they acknowledge their sexuality out loud.
That's not the same as talking about sex with kids.
I grew up knowing that my teachers had relationships.
I grew up sometimes meeting the spouses of my teachers.
If we are going to ban all of those conversations,
I get it, I'm on board with you,
but I know that that's not what's gonna happen.
What's actually gonna happen
is that we're only gonna ban the queer ones
because the heterosexual cis ones are the role models.
That is what we should all be aspiring towards.
And if that's how we're defining grooming,
well, aren't we all groomed by cis hetero ideas, right?
If grooming is representing a thing
to children that relates
to somehow just gender or sexuality,
well, most of us have been groomed
throughout our whole lives to be cis and heterosexual.
People aren't really wanting to talk about that
because that's obviously not what grooming means.
But, of course, like I said,
it's a buzzword that people try to use
in these conversations
to make it seem scarier than it actually is.
Again, I get why these conversations
will be challenging to people,
but that's not the same as grooming.
But if that's me giving way too much credit to...
the bad faith basis of this conversation.
But anyway, I really wanna hear from you guys,
how you feel about this.
Please call in and give me your True Tea.
We will be hosting the Call-In Show on June 15th
at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time,
and I'm really looking forward to getting your guys' brew.
Anyway, on that note, I will talk to you guys next time.
Bye!