One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has been raised from his coffin and given access to the internet again. If anyone has the number for his carer please send it to us immediately.
Instead of doing his job, which is to fearmonger vulnerable Aussies into feeling disenfranchised with popular “woke” forms of government and in turn support the far-right One Nation party, Roberts has decided to make a Facebook post that will fearmonger vulnerable Aussies into feeling disenfranchised with popular “woke” forms of government and in turn support the far-right One Nation party. Oh well… I guess he’s doing his job after all.
Roberts took to Facebook on Tuesday to weigh in on the drag queen debate — you know, the one that claims all drag queens are somehow groomers after our children? Yeah, that one. He claimed that drag queens reading stories for kids is a “gateway to grooming”. I’m here to tell you why that’s utter horseshit with a cherry on top (the cherry is also made of horseshit).
The idea that a drag queen is somehow extraordinarily more sexual than the average person comes from the idea that queerness and displays of femininity are sexual, which in turn is rooted in the mistaken notion that women are inherently sexual beings.
Part of the reason straight people find queer people so offputting is because we bring “feminine” traits into “masculine” spaces. Nothing disgusts a heteronormative cis man more than femininity.
Femininity is what men like Malcolm Roberts lean on to identify themselves, after all. It is the absence of femininity that informs their entire identities. This is why so many cis-straight men have no idea who they are — they only know that society has told them to be the opposite of what a woman is.
Queer men using femininity to empower their own identities scare men who cannot see passed rigid binary forms of gender. Hell, words like “rigid binary forms of gender” scare them too, because, without the binary, there is no singular form of identity that they can be the opposite of. They lose everything.
Not to go all university essay on you, but what I’m saying can extend to so many things that challenge the norm. The idea of a “woke” takeover of literally anything comes from the fear that the norm is changing, and a change in what people are used to threatens their safe, simple ways of identifying themselves and behaving. People don’t like things to be mixed up and different. People want one way of doing things.
However queer people, especially drag performers, cannot exist by the rules of any norm. From birth, we’re already different, and have to find our own way of existing — sometimes even our own families.
Queer forms of expression can be sexual, in the way that literally anything can be sexual given the context.
Reading to children, however, is not sexual. If you see a man adopting feminine traits for a performance as “sexual” or “sexy”, that’s on you, chief. If you think children will listen to a drag queen and suddenly adopt queer sensibilities into their own lives — ideas of acceptance, love and understanding — what scares you about that?
Are you worried that drag queens are “grooming” your children or are you really worried that your child won’t exist by the same restrictive parameters that make you feel safe? Or, to put it simply, will become gay themselves.
Someone being queer isn’t supposed to evoke a sexual response from anyone. To simple-minded outsiders, maybe it does, because all they see us as are people who like the same sex, instead of actually seeing us as valid, extraordinary and beautiful human beings.
To people like Malcolm Roberts, we will never be equal to everyone else. It’s cheap tactics like fearmongering people into believing drag queens are after our kids that keep him and his position in life safe.
Well, queer people have never felt that kind of safety, and we sure as hell aren’t going to give it up for a man who looks like he’d lose a fight with a pigeon.
