The misunderstanding behind Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill
Some old tropes resurface by the bills' defenders. Shut up.
A lot of ink has been spilled on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill already, and you can read Tim Miller’s excellent run down here, as well as Gabriel Malor’s tweets on the issues with the bill. Neither Miller nor Malor are Resistance-libs who resort to hyperbole — they’re conservative or libertarian-leaning people who are generally skeptical of liberal outrage.
My interest is less about contributing to the body of work about what the bill does in practice than a recurring annoyance I have about the way the bill is framed by its defenders. DeSantis’ press secretary/habitual poster Christina Pushaw defended the bill as an “anti-grooming” bill, implying that anyone against it is pro-pedophilia.
And it’s not just Christina — on Laura Ingraham, Connecticut’s worst export described those against the bill as “grooming.”
This gets to a fundamental misunderstanding about gay and trans people that relies on old tropes repackaged for a 2022 audience. The key misunderstanding here by straight people is the assumption that any gay person is inherently sexualized, while any straight person is not. A straight couple does not conjure images of sex for a child while seeing a gay couple will suddenly make children spontaneously transform into sexual deviants.
Straight people are allowed to be both sexual and romantic, while gay people are only seen through the lens of sexual intercourse.
This might come as a shock, but most straight couples with children had sex at one point to produce said children. And most gay couples have had sex too. That’s how adult relationships work. And if this were simply a bill saying that you couldn’t discuss sexual intercourse with children at school until they’re in 5th or 6th grade, okay!
But that’s not what this bill does.
The bill purposefully sees any discussion about “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” as inherently sexual. But sexual attraction should not inherently make the mere existence of your relationship sexual to those who are viewing it. Pete Buttigieg has the sexual energy of a tree stump and his relationship to Chasten shouldn’t necessarily conjure images of them going at it. Your six-year-old will probably just ask something like “what background as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana gives Pete the authority to be the Secretary of Transportation?” Wise child!
Until you actually discuss sex with your kid and what sex is, children don’t think about relationships in the context of sex. They think about them in similar ways as how they view their parents. The idea of sex never really crosses their mind because they don’t have any concept of what sex even is.
When the DeSantis administration refers to this bill as an “anti-grooming bill”, they’re relying on the trope that gay people are somehow recruiting children to be gay by their mere existence. This is one of the oldest homophobic tropes out there, that gay people can’t reproduce so they have to recruit.
That’s not how being gay works. We don’t know the exact mechanism that creates someone's sexual orientation but we do know that it’s probably a mixture of both genetic, biological, and environmental factors, and also that it’s usually solidified before the child is even aware of what sexual attraction is. One of the most likely predictors of a non-traditional sexual orientation is non-gender-conforming behavior of a young child. A three-year-old boy who wears their mom’s shoes when she’s not around doesn’t need any recruitment to be gay. They’re probably already going to be gay (or trans!) and there’s not a lot any parent can do about it besides loving and supporting them.
But that’s not every child, and some children who come out as gay and especially bisexual later in life don’t show any gender non-conforming behavior as young children. That doesn’t mean that they were somehow recruited by the alphabet mafia, it just means that the brain is complicated. What we do know is that most people who are gay or bisexual knew from an early age that something was “different” compared to their peers of the same sex, even if what that difference was couldn’t be fully articulated at the time. And changing someone’s sexual orientation is close to impossible, though it can fluctuate on its own throughout one’s life.
Look — if you have all of these dreams for your kid and how their life will go, and suddenly you find out your child is gay, that might make you feel like you don’t know your child anymore or that you raised them incorrectly. If you’re a father and you have a gay son, you might think that this is your fault or that this is somehow an attack on your masculinity.
The good news is this has almost nothing to do with you. It’s not about you not playing catch with your son or that you hugged him too much or weren’t around enough. It just is what it is. The defenders use pretext here, but the actual fear behind this bill is that if your child is exposed to gay people, they too will become gay, and that would ruin your child’s life and your relationship with their child. I’m sympathetic towards parents who find out their child is gay and fear what their relationship with their child will be like going forward, and I’ve been there with my own parents. But if your kid is gay, it’s out of your hands.
The other argument I’ve heard for this bill is that parents have nothing against gay people, they just want to explain to kids on their own terms who gay people are. But this places the burden on the wrong group of people. Gay people exist — they exist on TV, they exist in ads, they exist in government, they exist at your school — and trying to hide them until you feel comfortable talking to your children about them for your own comfort is neither fair nor realistic. This goes back to the inherent misunderstanding about sexual orientation: straight people uncomfortable with gay people think that having to explain gay people to their kids means they have to explain gay sex. You don’t. “Some mommies like daddies, some mommies like other mommies” is very simple for children to understand without having to divulge into sapphic sexuality with your five-year-old.
The genesis of this bill is probably based on more anti-trans animus than any homophobic animus (though that’s still a component), and the shrewdness of labeling the bill “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents attacks as much more popular minority to the bill when I’m convinced this bill is yet another part of our current anti-trans moral panic.
It’s true that a lot more teens are coming out as gay and bisexual and gender non-conforming or trans compared to when I was in high school. On one hand, it’s probably true that teens are searching for identity and trying different identities on to see what fits and where they belong. Trying on certain identities to see if they fit won’t always lead to something more enduring. That’s okay. That’s how being a teen works. Don’t ask me about my emo phase (actually, it’s not a phase mom!).
But it’s also true that there are plenty of bisexual and trans people my age who were too scared to come out. If you’re a bisexual guy and the world views bisexual men as more feminine or secretly gay, you don’t really have as much of a reason to come out as a gay person who literally is only attracted to people of the same sex. Similarly, being trans and living your life authentically meant that you might have to live a life where you could struggle to get a job and a home.
That’s changing. As trans people become more accepted in society, more trans people will come out simply because they don’t see coming out as limiting their ability to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. This is an unambiguously good thing. But it also means that yes, some kids will wonder “am I trans?” Most probably are, some are not, but they’ll figure it out! But it doesn’t mean that a child seeing a single trans person will bestow upon them seventy pronouns. There’s almost eight billion people on this Earth. Have the humility to understand that with that many people, not everyone will fit into the binary of male or female, or that everyone will not feel that their gender perfectly aligns with their assigned sex.
All this bill does is tell gay and trans people that they have to silence themselves for the comfort of others. It tells the children of gay and trans people that they should have some inherent shame about their parents.
When I see Ron DeSantis with his wife, my first thought is not “damn I wonder how they look having sex” because that would be weird! It’s okay not to view every gay couple or trans person through the lens of sex or their genitalia. And your kid won’t either. They’ll probably just want to go back to playing Fortnite.
I originally made a copy and paste error and didn’t link to Gabriel Malor’s tweet thread. That has been rectified.