Grow up, Senator! Kids reading about a girl in pants is not grooming

Last Sunday I emerged from a blissful 10-day silent meditation retreat to learn I’d been brought up in a Senate estimates hearing. Liberal Senator Alex Antic held up an image of me reading a children’s book on ABC Kids’ Play School Story Time. He asked David Anderson, the ABC managing director: “Why is the ABC grooming children with this sort of adult content?”

Thankfully, Anderson, alongside Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, shot down Antic’s words. Hanson-Young, echoing the vast majority of Australians’ views, couldn’t have said it better: “Grooming is a really serious matter. It is not for being played with by conservative senators to make headlines.”

Courtney Act appearing on Play School Story Time.Credit: ABC

Antic’s concern was that the book I read, The Spectacular Suit, was “about a female child wanting to wear male clothing”. It was about a girl who wanted to wear pants, not a dress, to her birthday party. It’s 2022. Surely this point seems absurd to everyone but Antic. Katharine Hepburn already kicked down that gender door in the 1930s, and the action was made so much easier because she was wearing pants.

I was read the usual books growing up, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Possum Magic and Oh, The Places You’ll Go. I was weaned on TV that only contained heterosexual characters, albeit smurfs, crime-fighting turtles and a talking bath mat. I loved playing dress-ups, like all kids do, and was raised by loving heterosexual people who occupied traditional gender roles.

Yet somehow, despite it all, I turned out to be a flaming, proud, successful and balanced queer person. Really, anyone born before the year 2000 grew up in the same world and plenty of us turned out lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans. So showing queer kids straight content won’t turn them straight. And showing straight kids queer content won’t turn them queer. Your queer kids will be queer regardless of whether you show them examples or talk to them about it. It just depends on how much shame you want them to carry into their lives.

A vocal minority say kids are too young to learn about sexuality and gender, that they are adult concepts, but kids learn about heterosexual relationships and binary gender roles from the moment they are born. Is what people really mean when they say kids are too young to learn about sexuality and gender that they are too young to learn about queer identities? Kids shouldn’t be exposed to age-inappropriate material. That is not in question. To be clear, I am talking about age-appropriate content adjacent to what kids learn about straight identities.

Senator Alex Antic questioned ABC Managing Director David Anderson about drag performer Courtney Act appearing on Play School.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Is all drag appropriate for kids? Absolutely not, but that doesn’t mean that none of it is. Is drag inherently sexual? No. It’s performance that uses the heightened costume of gender to entertain. Kids see colour, fun and sparkles. They are not sexualising it. That’s something adults do.

Rather than acknowledging our shared humanity, detractors zoom in on the thing that makes queer people different – who we have sex with. Of course, queer people are much more than our sex lives but this preoccupation reduces us to “adult content”. Straight people have sex too, of course, but their identities are not sexualised because their sex is seen as “normal”. If you’re the status quo, it can be challenging to understand yourself independently of that, such as when you ask an American, “Where’s your accent from?” and they reply, “I don’t have an accent.”

When kids can’t have open, honest conversations with caregivers and teachers, when they don’t learn about themselves in the toys they play with, books they read, and TV they watch, they go looking for answers elsewhere and for people who will listen. Kids looking to be heard can often find people willing to listen in chat rooms and inappropriate corners of the internet. To ensure the safety of children, we need to create environments where they feel affirmed, free to ask questions and talk about their feelings. Lack of diverse examples means we develop with an inability to understand, to be empathetic and accepting of experiences different to our own.

There is an increasing trend in the US for some extreme Republicans to use the term “grooming” when referring to Democrats who support LGBTQ+ people’s rights. Demonising their enemy by accusing them of doing the universally agreed most heinous of things, sexually abusing children. Grooming is a psychological process through which an abuser builds a relationship with a young victim so they can sexually abuse them. Grooming is not drag queen story time. When you use language of abuse where none exists, the words lose meaning, endangering young people. This tactic is also anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice, breeding hate for queer people by conflating our identities with paedophilia (a long used, and baseless, trope).

Illustration: Simon Letch.Credit:

Antic referring to my Story Time as grooming is a political tactic to weaponise the protection of children to win political points. It’s ripped straight from the right-wing American culture war playbook. I normally wouldn’t respond and give this fringe opinion more oxygen, but I’ve seen this tactic deployed increasingly in Australia and it needed to be debunked.

In Australia, LGBTIQ+ young people experience significant health and wellbeing disparities due, in part at least, to stigma and discrimination. They are five times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide and six times more likely to experience depression; almost one in four have experienced homelessness; and a devastating one in two trans youths has attempted to take their own life. The conversation needs to shift away from homo and transphobic dog-whistling about drag queens, and onto how we can continue to protect all of our kids, including queer ones.

We help all kids flourish and stay safe by sharing more types of stories, not fewer. When we offer them as many options as possible, they find what authentically fits and fine-tune it from there.

It’s five years since marriage equality passed, it’s Trans Awareness Week, and the largest Pride celebration in the world, Sydney World Pride, is coming to town in February, so it bears repeating: We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.

And on that note, I’m off to write a children’s book.

Courtney Act is a singer, presenter, drag artist and author of the best-selling memoir Caught in the Act.

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