Leave drag queens alone. They're a sideshow to the real culture war

Drag queens have traipsed into the culture wars and drawn the ire of Republican lawmakers who want to shut them down when they perform for children.

The issue got rolling in Texas. A gay bar there invited parents to bring their children to see a drag show to celebrate Pride Week.

Someone took videos with their cellphone and soon images were flying across the internet.

They showed small children laughing as drag performers vamped and contorted in skin-tight outfits. The kids reached out with hands filled with cash.

To conservatives it looked like a strip joint on Sesame Street, the Peanut Gallery at the apocalypse. It made Republican politicians fume from one end of the sunbelt to the other, from Arizona to Texas to Florida.

Now lawmakers in all three states are contemplating how they might stop drag queens from interacting with kids.

Stop drag queens? Don't even bother

“We will be damned if we won’t fight like hell to protect the most innocent from these horrifying and disturbing trends,” Arizona Sen. Vince Leach, R-SaddleBrooke, said.

Leach is working on a bill to stop this, he said, “as we do with X-rated movies, as we do with strip joints, and as we do with bars.”

Policymakers react:Republicans want to ban kids from drag shows

Senate President Karen Fann and three other GOP senators – Sonny Borrelli, David Gowan and Rick Gray – have joined Leach to try to craft policy, reported The Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern.

If I had their ear at the water cooler, I’d tell them don’t bother.

Drag queens are a sideshow to the real culture war. Confronting them is like fighting the skirmish at Picacho Peak when the Battle of Gettysburg is about to begin.

A different scandal lies on the horizon

On our horizon is a scandal of enormous proportion that involves children and the internet and an American health-care industry that is exploiting them. When Americans wake up and finally understand what happened they will be horrified not only at how we damaged children, but created an environment so oppressive it became almost impossible to talk about.

Two months ago, a thoughtful, careful writer at The New York Times wrote a long essay headlined “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.”

As a conservative Catholic, the rarest of creatures at The Times, Ross Douthat made an extraordinary admission to his readers. He was throwing caution to the wind on the issue of gender care:

“I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.”

He then warned his mostly progressive readership:

“If you are a liberal who believes as much already, but you don’t feel comfortable saying it, your silence will eventually become your regret.”

Gender dysphoria is skyrocketing among girls

Journalist Abigail Shrier was among the first to boldly tell the story that a huge number of adolescent girls are deciding they need to change gender. In her book, “Irreversible Damage,” she describes how only a few decades ago gender dysphoria was almost unheard of among that population.

Today, adolescent girls make up two-thirds of patients with gender dysphoria and many come from the same peer group.

It should be noted that Shrier has been widely criticized for her book. Activists tried to stop its publication and have harassed her ever since.

But she has the chops to tell this sweeping story. A freelancer who wrote for the Wall Street Journal, she holds undergraduate degrees from Columbia and Oxford and a law degree from Yale. She is better educated than most journalists in America.

What she wrote should have raised bright red flags in the medical community. But doctors continue putting adolescent girls on a pathway of gender affirming care, treated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and eventually, if they choose, double mastectomies.

'I think it's gone too far,' psychologist says

Given the newness of the phenomenon it is not yet clear if we are looking at a more accepting environment that allows teenagers to honestly explore their doubts about gender or a social contagion that through the internet is egging girls on to transition.

On June 15, The New York Times Magazine took up the issue with “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” a massive report eight months in the making by reporter Emily Bazelon.

Bazelon reports that 300,000 American young people now identify as transgender. “A decade ago, there were a handful of pediatric gender clinics in the United States and a dozen or so more in other countries,” she wrote. “Now there are more than 60 comprehensive gender clinics in the United States, along with countless therapists and doctors in private practice who are also seeing young patients with gender-identity issues.”

In April, clinical psychologist Erica Anderson, who is herself transgender, has helped hundreds of teens transition and “until recently led the U.S. professional society at the forefront of transgender care,” told the Los Angeles Times: “I think it’s gone too far.”

“For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant. Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’ ”

According to The Times, “(Anderson) has also come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media and that some clinicians are failing to subject minors to rigorous mental health evaluations before recommending hormones or surgeries.”

Look to Britain for how this might play out

More and more parents are speaking up. So are their children. Shrier has noted that when she published her book in 2020, the sub-Reddit page devoted to “detransitioners” – people who regret their gender change and want to turn back – had 7,000 members. Since then it has grown by 400%.

In England, the controversy is far more advanced and raising serious questions about that nation’s largest gender care clinic. Some 35 psychologists resigned in three years, reports Sky News.

They cited “lack of credible research into gender dysphoria and treatment and why there has been such an increase in cases,” reported British investigative journalist and feminist Julie Bindel at Unherd.com.

One British doctor told her:

“As demand surged for under 18-year-olds, it became clear that these young girls, in particular, had some very serious psychological problems, but were almost instantly affirmed as being ‘gender dysphoric.’ That diagnosis is all that is needed to be rubber-stamped for testosterone, and subsequent surgery. Many of us that resigned over this are very worried indeed where it is leading.”

The culture war is not about drag queens. And it’s only getting started.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Drag queen debate is a sideshow. This is the bigger concern