Who is "Grooming Our Children?" Not The Queens But The Preachers {by Kristen Browde}

 

(by Nico Lang on THem)

 

Kristen Browde has amassed over 380,000 followers on TikTok by debunking the anti-LGBTQ+ “groomer” myth, and no one is more shocked by her success on the platform than she is. “TikTok is supposed to be this app where teenagers do dance moves, but it turns out it's an incredibly effective political organizing tool,” she tells Them in an interview. “I am delighted that people are finding this useful information and are sharing it.”

Browde, an attorney and former correspondent for CBS News, posts weekly videos aggregating local media reports of children being targeted by sexual predators, sourced from keyword searches on Google and DuckDuckGo, as well as tips from followers. (She posts all her data at her website WhoIsMakingNews.com, where it's available for anyone to download.) In the six months since she created her first TikTok video, she has noticed a continuing trend: that very few of the perpetrators who are being arrested for preying on kids are drag queens or trans people, the targets du jour of the right. Instead, Browde found that the individuals who are responsible for the vast majority of reported incidents hail from the very groups pointing the finger at the LGBTQ+ community, from religious leaders to Republican politicians. “They’re the ones who are committing the crimes,” she says. “They’re the ones who are doing this.”

The subject is a personal one for Browde, a 73-year-old trans woman who recently relocated from New York to Miami to help combat attacks on LGBTQ+ equality led by Gov. Ron DeSantis. TikTok has played an important role in that effort in more ways than one: Browde’s account now brings in about $1,000 a month on the platform, and she donates the proceeds to advocacy groups like Equality Florida. In a year that has seen DeSantis sign bills into law that limit trans youth medical care and further restrict LGBTQ+ education in schools, she tells Them in a 40-minute phone conversation that she will continue to do whatever it takes to be an ally in the fight: “Anything I can do to help, I’m all in.”

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What inspired this series calling out people who are convicted of sexual abuse cases across the country?

For a year and a half, the drumbeat has been louder from the right wing, and the anti-trans rhetoric has been extreme. One of my volunteer jobs is the vice president of the LGBTQ+ caucus of the Florida Democratic Party. The outgoing president, Stephen Gaskill, made a speech, and he said, “They're accusing us of being groomers. DeSantis is coming after us, and you would not believe the number of pastors in the past week who've been arrested or charged with sex crimes involving children.” And I was like, “OK, how many are there?” He told me, and I said, “Oh, my God, that’s astonishing.” There were 17 arrests of religious-oriented people, of whom 11 were pastors. There were a couple of priests and a couple other people who worked in churches. I was stunned. I threw together a TikTok and it blew up. The first one had 1.7 million plays in just a matter of a few days, and the next one was 2.1 million.mmn

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So I started a research effort to look at it every week, and what we were seeing was shocking. The people who were — time after time after time — going to jail for this were pastors, Catholic priests, people who were senior officials of churches, and Mormon bishops. What it wasn’t was anybody who was a drag queen, and what it wasn’t — for the most part — was anybody transgender.

Your plan is to continue this project for a year. To date, what does the specific breakdown of pastors and priests who have been arrested or convicted of sexual abuse look like, versus the number of trans people and drag queens who have been charged for doing so?

We just finished week 21, and as of today, we have 1,216 cases, of whom 202 are in the religion business. Out of those 1,216 cases, we have 104 who are pastors. We have 37 priests. We have 21 politicians — of whom 17 are Republicans, three are Democrats, and one was non-partisan. We have no drag queens, not one. Three of those 1,216 cases have been transgender people. Three out of 1,216 is about one quarter of 1%. Now compare that to the population of transgender people in the United States. If it’s where we think it is — which is somewhere between 1% and 2% — then [the number of abuse cases] is a quarter to a sixth of where you would expect it to be, if it was based on pure percentage of population. But if you look at pastors, there are about 600,000 pastors in the United States. They are committing crimes disproportionately to their number in society.

So who’s the risk here? Well, it’s not the drag queens. They haven’t committed a single one of these crimes. It’s not the transgender people. They're committing them at a rate dramatically below their incidence in the population. It’s the pastors. Their crime rate is so astronomical that it’s a real risk factor to take your kids to their churches. Instead of passing laws that say you can’t have transgender care before age 18, you ought to not be able to take anyone below the age of 18 into one of those churches. That’s what the data shows, but instead, we’ve got this fear campaign that’s being waged by these right-wing politicians and preachers. 

Among the data that you've been able to pull, do you see any other commonalities or trends among people who commit this kind of abuse?

They are overwhelmingly cisgender and male. There’s also a second theme, that it is family members and family friends, particularly boyfriends of women who have children from previous marriages. There’s a lot of that. There are a lot of teachers and school employees. They’re disproportionate to their incidence in society, but not dramatically so. But the one that’s the standout is the religious people, the ones who claim that they're on a mission from God. They’re the ones that are doing this stuff. It's over and over again. There has not been a week that has gone by without pastors and priests dominating the news, and that’s not counting the cover-ups that are reported on. We’re just talking about people making news with sex crimes involving children.

“I can afford to have this fight, but that imposes upon me an obligation to have this fight for those who can’t.”

When it comes to denominations themselves, are there any that are disproportionately represented? There's been press coverage for a number of years about abuses within the Catholic Church, but what you're suggesting is that it’s not solely a Catholic problem. It seems to be a religious problem.

It's actually a much wider religious problem than the Catholics. If you look at the percentages, priests are 37 of the 1,216 cases — that's 3.04%. Pastors are 8.5% of the cases — or 104. So is it one particular sect? No, but it does tend to be evangelicals. It’s just across the spectrum, and it isn’t just small churches. It’s large churches, small churches, all together. They’re everywhere.

Why do you think that having this data and being able to illustrate where the abuse is actually happening is so important right now?

It's for two reasons. Number one, our community needs to know what's coming at them is bullshit. They might think, “Oh, that’s not us,” but here's the data to actually show it’s not them so they can feel better responding to people who have come at them with this. And number two, here in what we call DeSantisland, a state legislator went on a rant and called us demons and imps, creatures of Satan. We’re going to be throwing the actual data right in their faces and coming right at them with facts.

Now, will that be enough to change outcomes in elections? I don’t know, but you better believe that for every one of these state legislators who starts in on this, the people on the other side are gonna be armed with facts. Hopefully, it’ll change some minds. 

If this idea that LGBTQ+ people are groomers — or that they are disproportionately pedophiles or abusing kids — is a lie, which your data has proven, where did this myth come from?

God, I wish I knew the answer. It has always been out there, but of late, it’s exploded. Everybody from the extreme right wing to these pastors is pushing this in an attempt to divide us, and it’s been successful. This is inflaming passions and has divided the nation. That’s really unfortunate, especially when you factor in that this division is based on a lie. It’s based on a huge lie. I don’t know who’s profiting from it, but this division isn’t good for us.

Everybody likes being told what they want to hear, and this is a nice convenient way for them to rally the troops. Everybody wants to defend children, so it’s a message that's just plausible enough, on its face, to attract followers. I’d really love to sit down with [right-wing leaders] and say: Look at the facts. Don’t trust my data, gather it yourself. Go look at it. Go to the media reports. Go to every police department in the country. Go to every prison in the country. Go to anywhere you want and find out for yourself who's actually committing these crimes, instead of spewing this nonsense about people who aren’t.

 

“I don't know about you guys but I don't think this is about protecting kids.”

What's it been like for you personally, to see your own community be demonized and attacked? It's not even just anti-LGBTQ+ groomer rhetoric. There’s a historic number of laws targeting the trans community right now that rely on this exact kind of rhetoric about trans folks being predators.

You may be hearing — I expect within a week — about another lawsuit against DeSantis and the company. I’m 73 years old. My gender-affirming care consists exclusively of me using a transdermal estrogen patch. I change the patches twice a week. They’re the same patches that millions of postmenopausal women use. Under the new law that DeSantis just signed, they are requiring me as a transgender woman to be under psychiatric care; have a bone density scan every two years; and not get my prescription not from a nurse practitioner, who was a drag queen, and what it wasn’t — for the most part — was anybody transgender.  

If this idea that LGBTQ+ people are groomers — or that they are disproportionately pedophiles or abusing kids — is a lie, which your data has proven, where did this myth come from?

God, I wish I knew the answer. It has always been out there, but of late, it’s exploded. Everybody from the extreme right wing to these pastors is pushing this in an attempt to divide us, and it’s been successful. This is inflaming passions and has divided the nation. That’s really unfortunate, especially when you factor in that this division is based on a lie. It’s based on a huge lie. I don’t know who’s profiting from it, but this division isn’t good for us.

Everybody likes being told what they want to hear, and this is a nice convenient way for them to rally the troops. Everybody wants to defend children, so it’s a message that's just plausible enough, on its face, to attract followers. I’d really love to sit down with [right-wing leaders] and say: Look at the facts. Don’t trust my data, gather it yourself. Go look at it. Go to the media reports. Go to every police department in the country. Go to every prison in the country. Go to anywhere you want and find out for yourself who's actually committing these crimes, instead of spewing this nonsense about people who aren’t.

You may be hearing — I expect within a week — about another lawsuit against DeSantis and the company. I’m 73 years old. My gender-affirming care consists exclusively of me using a transdermal estrogen patch. I change the patches twice a week. They’re the same patches that millions of postmenopausal women use. Under the new law that DeSantis just signed, they are requiring me as a transgender woman to be under psychiatric care; have a bone density scan every two years; and not get my prescription not from a nurse practitioner, which is the most efficient way of doing it, but from an MD. 

There's a series of other steps: I have to promise to have my blood monitored every six months, and all sorts of additional conditions that they’re seeking to impose. It is precisely discrimination on the basis of sex. It’s an equal protection violation, and it was found to be unconstitutional when they sought to impose those conditions on transgender children. We’re going to be seeking to enjoin the state of Florida to do that for adults as well. We’re gonna have to fight this state by state, unless there’s a change in the Congress and the Equality Act goes through.

I’m a lawyer. I’m well off financially. I can afford to have this fight, but that imposes upon me an obligation to have this fight for those who can’t. There are so many people who are scared, who have to run away. If those of us who can don’t fight, who will?