It’s become a core tenet of far-right Republican politics that drag queens and trans people need to be kept away from children to prevent sexual grooming and other crimes. In reality, at least seven times as many Texas Republican political figures have been arrested for child sex offenses as Texas drag queens.
The only Texas drag queen that had committed a child sex crime RA News could find in its research was Alberto Garza, also known as Tatiana Mala Nina. Garza had been convicted in 2008 for assaulting an 8-year-old boy. The conviction and sex offender registry was discovered by an anti-LGBT hate group called Mass Resistance, who found Garza working at the Houston Public Library’s Drag Queen Story Hour. Garza was expelled from the program following the revelation.
This remains the only verifiable instance of a Texas drag queen assaulting a minor we could track down. It was far easier to find Texas Republicans who had been arrested for the child sex acts.
It’s interesting to me that people who assume that there are no inherent behavioral differences between the sexes usually simply ignore how much more likely men are than women to commit violent crimes.
My guess is that you’re correct and the disproportionately frequent victimization of male children under 10 (compared to the fraction of men who are gay) is due to pedophilia being independent of sexual orientation, but even in the 15-19 age range the fraction of victims who are male is roughly equal to the fraction of men who are gay. The data doesn’t support the conclusion that gay men are less likely to commit child sexual assault than straight men are.
Great reply, and I completely agree with your points. I also have to say I know of no reason why sexuality would affect rates of pedophilia one way or another. I suspect that they’re completely independent of each other. I also suspect that we’re going to be seeing a surge in self-identifying gay men in the next 20 years which might be a better background indicator than current self-assessments. In other words, many people of my generation would never have responded as gay if asked in a survey. The Gen Z LGBT numbers are surging, though. We would have to demonstrate a reason for this change, which might simply be as LGBT becomes more accepted, more people are willing to answer “yes.”
So I wasn’t actually arguing that gay men, drag queens or not, are less likely to offend (except maybe in a sarcastic sense). I do think there’s a correlation among hyper-religiosity (becoming a priest/pastor, belonging to an extremely enthusiastic church, etc) and pedophilia because I believe that a significant percentage of that class consists of individuals who have internalized feelings of shame and self-loathing, possibly over their pedophilia and/or homosexuality.
The only study I generally see that’s cited as indicating there’s no correlation between priests and pedophilia turned out to be funded by the religious organization, if I’m thinking of the right study.