There is a real cruelty in being accused of the very thing that is being done to you. And there is a political strategy in making that accusation loudly enough and often enough that the truth gets buried under the noise.
This Pride Month, I want to talk about the grooming accusation. Not because it deserves the dignity of a serious rebuttal from people who already know it’s a lie, but because the data behind it is so clear and so damning that it needs to be said plainly, and because understanding what the accusation is actually doing, who it protects and who it exposes, is part of understanding exactly what’s happening to queer people in this country right now.
Project 2025, the 920-page governing blueprint driving this administration’s agenda since day one, does not speak in code about this. Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, wrote in the document’s foreword that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He then went further, writing that transgender ideology is itself a form of pornography, that it should be outlawed, and that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” That is not a fringe position buried in a footnote. That is the stated goal of the organization whose blueprint two-thirds of Trump’s day one executive orders were drawn from. The people calling queer teachers and librarians sex offenders are the people currently running the country.
The on-the-ground implementation has followed the blueprint. Since January 2025, the administration has signed executive orders declaring only two sexes, banned transgender people from military service, stripped anti-discrimination protections from schools, worked to remove LGBTQ+ content from school libraries, sued the Minnesota Department of Education over transgender student inclusion, moved to strip the rights of transgender people to safe housing, and attempted to compel hospitals to hand over the health records of transgender youth who received gender-affirming care. The accusation is that queer people are a threat to children. The policy is the removal of every protection queer children have.
Now look at the data. The CDC reports that one in four girls and one in thirteen boys in the United States experience child sexual abuse, and those are reported numbers. Only about 7% of American adults identify as LGBTQ+. Statistically, there are not enough queer people in the country to account for the scale of child sexual abuse even if every single one of them were a predator, which they are not. The research is consistent: straight adults commit the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse, and the demographic most statistically likely to abuse children is straight men in positions of authority, coaches, teachers, family members, and clergy.
Nearly 7,000 credibly accused Catholic clergy in the United States alone. A study of 38,000 personnel files found 4.4% of all Catholic clergy were alleged abusers. An independent inquiry found approximately 216,000 victims of French Catholic Church clergy between 1950 and 2020. The Catholic Church, one of the loudest voices in the anti-LGBTQ+ culture war, has produced one of the most extensively documented records of child sexual abuse in any institution in history. Peer-reviewed research confirms that Republicans are significantly less likely to penalize their own candidates facing allegations of sexual misconduct than Democrats are. Matt Gaetz, nominated by Trump to be the nation’s Attorney General, faced a congressional investigation into sex trafficking allegations involving a minor. Trump called him a warrior.
The people calling queer people groomers are statistically the people most likely to be doing the grooming. That is not a political opinion. That is a documented pattern. It’s also clear projection.
The grooming accusation is not about child safety. If it were, the people making it would be responding to the actual data and prosecuting the actual perpetrators, not simultaneously dismantling every protection queer children have. What it is doing is strategic. It makes queer people radioactive in public life. A teacher who might otherwise be an ally goes silent because the accusation is career-ending regardless of its truth. A librarian removes a book because the alternative is being publicly labeled a sex offender. The accusation doesn’t need to be true to be effective. It just needs to circulate.
It also isolates queer youth specifically, which is the most dangerous part. The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ youth is significantly higher than among their straight peers, and research consistently shows that having one supportive adult in their lives dramatically reduces that risk. The policy being built around this accusation is explicitly designed to remove those adults. That is not child protection. That is child endangerment dressed up as child protection.
And every news cycle spent arguing about whether a drag queen reading a picture book constitutes grooming is a news cycle not spent on the 7,000 credibly accused clergy, or the man nominated to be Attorney General, or the sitting president who had to deny being a rapist and a pedophile on national television.
The facts are not on their side. The projection is visible. The record is public. And every queer person who stays visible, who refuses to disappear, who shows up as a full human being in their community, is doing something that directly counters the strategy being deployed against them. That strategy requires our erasure to work.
Our presence is resistance.
Happy Pride.
Pixie Saavedra is the founder of Grunge Luxe, a lifestyle brand at the intersection of punk aesthetics, political resistance, and intentional living. This post is part of Rebel Dispatch at grungeluxe.com
