"Gays Against Groomers": "Transphobic" Organization, or Mainstream, Moderate Voice for LGBT Rights?

Why is a Fast-Growing Movement of LGBT People Making the Case that Issues Such as the Transitioning of Minors, Do Not Reflect their Core Concerns and Values?

Photo by Jordan McDonald on Unsplash

Jaimee Michell, founder of Gays Against Groomers, explores her conviction, and her fast-growing movement’s view, that outside forces are exploiting the LGBT movement as a cover or as a proxy for an agenda that is not organic to the vast majority of LGBT people. She is especially concerned about the recent focus under the aegis of the LGBT movement, on minors - whether the issue is “gender-affirming care” for minors, or what she and her members (many of them parents) sees as inappropriately sexually explicit material in school curricula and libraries.

She tracks the money flow to such issues and campaigns, from such groups as the Pritzker family. The Pritzker Family Foundation, indeed, has spent millions to support the formulation and promotion of such campaigns. This promotion of “gender-affirming care” to minors, she argues, creates pressure to engage in transitioning surgery and taking (lifelong) hormones for “gender reassignment”. She is concerned that “trans teens” are not fully informed or mature enough to consider adequately that they in many cases will never be able to have pleasurable sex or orgasm as adults, and that can be very difficult for “transitioned” men and women to conceive and bear children.

She makes the case that many vulnerable teens who would otherwise grow up to be gay men and lesbian women, or bisexual adults, but who are uncomfortable as they mature into those sexual identities, are being targeted by a destructive message that by simply becoming “trans”, this journey of adjustment to an adult not-always-accepted sexual identity will magically disappear.

“Save the Gay” is the motto of her group, and she argues, strikingly, that “gender-affirming care” for minors is the “conversion therapy” (a disgraced psychological intervention aimed at doing away with gay and lesbian attraction) of the present. She says that most LGBT people share her alarm at the actions of what she calls an extreme subset of trans activists who are focused on kids, though they are often silent because they fear cancellation.

As she puts it, “We want a divorce.”

She discloses that groups such as Human Rights Watch and GLAAD – groups that began with the mission of simply defending the legal rights of LGB and later T citizens, face having to close their doors, or deal with declining donations, because, as she states, “We won.” As a result of this business model, she argues, these groups seek ever-new claims of oppression, moving on, as she argues, to “save trans youth” since equal legal rights for LGBT adults, she asserts, have been secured. (Indeed GLAAD’s mission statement on its website now includes “cultural change”, which is an indefinable, ever-moving target.)

Michell sees her group and the larger movement supporting it, as being one that defends gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and values, and attributes its rapid growth to the fact that many LGBT people object to what she calls an “extreme activists’ agenda” focusing on youth, and on what she sees as side, cultural issues unrelated to the longtime primary goals of the LGBT movement to secure legal rights to sexual minorities. “The LGBT Agenda”, she jokes, “is to order pizza and watch Netflix” — meaning, to be treated as anyone else is treated, legally and otherwise.

Gays Against Groomers has been called an “anti-LGBT” group, despite the sexuality of its members, who are gay, lesbian, bi and transgender people. Wikipedia positions it as far-right and transphobic, stating that GAG held an “Anti-LGBT Rally.” Michell vehemently rejects this characterization and sees such attacks, indeed, as anti-LGBT slurs themselves, as such attacks presume, as she puts it, that LGBT people as a whole wish to target minors.

GAG, in contrast, calls itself a “coalition of gays against the sexualization and indoctrination of children”, with the purpose “to protect children from harm being done in our name and by those who have hijacked our community”.

Who is correct? Who more authentically represents the majority, mainstream, and entirely diverse voices of LGBT Americans?

Watch and decide for yourself.

Jaimee Michell, “Gays Against Groomers”: