Conservatives have zeroed in on the T in LGBTQ as part of the ongoing culture war. But many may not realize the Q from the acronym stands for an even more extreme theory that defends pedophilia, incest, and bestiality, and advocates for a complete destruction of traditional sexual norms.
Q, which stands for queer, is rooted in queer theory, a sexuality ideology that began gaining popularity in the 1970s. Many philosophical founders and perpetrators of the theory have argued in favor of normalizing pedophilia and worse.
The recent conservative focus on transgender ideology has left the queer movement to quietly grow. National organizations such as teachers unions and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, along with global organizations such as the United Nations, advocate for sex education for children as young as kindergarten age.
At the same time, queer theorists embrace the idea that sexual consent laws should be eradicated for all children, even infants.
In the United States, although gender ideology and transgenderism have grabbed the most attention, conservatives and liberals alike have been sounding the alarm about queer theory, which has flown under the radar.
Commentator James Lindsay, author of “The Marxification of Education,” told The Epoch Times that queer theory has hijacked the gay rights movement.
Mr. Lindsay considers Michel Foucault, a French postmodern philosopher who wrote “The History of Sexuality” in 1978, the father of queer theory.
Foucault, accused of having sex with prepubescent boys as young as 8 in a graveyard in Tunisia, rejected all sexual labels and boundaries.
“It’s considered abnormal for an adult to want to have sex with a child,” Mr. Lindsay said. But pedophiles consider sex with children as normal. So for queer theorists, where anything goes, pedophilia is acceptable, he said.
Derrick Jensen is a lecturer and author of more than 20 books, mainly on environmental issues. At one point, the California resident would’ve considered himself an old-school environmental activist.
But, now, the left hates him because he dared to speak against queer theory.
“The left left us, and it’s like I am politically homeless,” he told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Jensen said queer theory is influenced by postmodernism, which doesn’t believe in truth or reality.
Similarly, queer theory examines what is normal and who that hurts or helps. He said the answer is simple: Normal is oppressive.
“Anything that is sexual must be acceptable,” he said, adding that means any type of fetish, or even rape.
Queer theory argues that the violation of the child doesn’t cause the harm done by adult–child sex—it’s caused by a society that makes the child feel guilty for having sex, Mr. Jensen says.
Like others, Mr. Jensen agreed that Foucault, who died in 1984, embraced pedophilia.
Foucault had sex with boys and “argued for the elimination of age of consent laws as in down to infants,” Mr. Jensen said.
Queer theory contributors such as Foucault and Gayle Rubin, another founder known for developing sex and gender political theories, contributed to an ideology that would rationalize “fetishes,” he said.
Allen Ginsberg, a well-known poet who died in 1997, embodied some of the movement’s ideas before queer theory came into being, Mr. Jensen said.
Ginsberg was a supporter and member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and wrote a 1994 essay defending child sex.
Some critics of queer theory believe it’s only a matter of time before pedophilia becomes acceptable.
The Paris fashion house Balenciaga faced backlash last year after running an ad campaign depicting little girls holding teddy bears wearing bondage gear. One ad showed pages from a child pornography court ruling. Balenciaga later apologized for the advertisement, but it demonstrated a growing trend.
Proponents of queer theory see it as a political tool to fight a patriarchal, oppressive system that has marginalized people with different sexual preferences than heterosexuals.
Normalizing Pedophilia
Jaimee Michell, the founder of Gays Against Groomers, a group that’s fighting against the use of gay culture to sexualize children, told The Epoch Times that queer theory is part of the gender ideology that has made its way into schools, where students use pronouns to “socially transition” while keeping it secret from parents.Ms. Michell is convinced that it’s all leading in one direction.
“I believe the goal has always been to break down those barriers and to normalize pedophilia,” she said. “Some of the earliest proponents of queer theory and gender ideology were pedophiles.”
Allowing minors to make decisions on transgender surgery that would alter their lives forever is one step closer to allowing children to consent to sex with adults, Ms. Michell said.
“I think the push for queer theory in the classroom and gender ideology, indoctrinating them with pronouns, different genders that don’t exist in reality, is to push them toward and normalize them being able to consent,” she said.
Sexual Oppressors
In academic circles, the push is intensifying to classify pedophilia as another sexual orientation, instead of a mental disorder.The term “minor-attracted person” grabbed headlines after transgender professor Allyn Walker used it during a discussion on pedophiles in November 2021.
Ms. Walker, a woman who transitioned to live as a man, was discussing her book: “A Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity.”
And in May, transgender Minnesota lawmaker Leigh Fink, a Democrat, was successful in getting a key sentence removed from a state law—a change that critics say paved the way for pedophilia to become a sexual orientation.
The sentence that was struck from Minnesota’s Human Rights Act stated that “sexual orientation does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult.”
Elisabeth Taylor is an Australian professor with a doctorate in medieval history from Cambridge who served as the director of research for the Australian Christian lobby. She has been studying and writing about queer theory since 2016.
Like others, Ms. Taylor told The Epoch Times that queer theory aims to destroy norms.
She sounded the alarm in Australia when queer theory showed up under the “Safe Schools” program, much like gender ideology had infiltrated American schools.
Ms. Taylor said that children are taught that sexuality is malleable and fluid under queer theory and gender ideology.
She said that according to queer theory, heterosexuals oppress their own sexuality. But since they are in power, they are the oppressors of those who are sexually diverse.
Exchanging ‘Truth for a Lie’
Queer theory, in part, came out of the feminist movement, Ms. Taylor said. The links between the two can be traced to Ms. Rubin, who wrote the 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” she said.“Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she wrote.
Ms. Rubin described a hierarchical system of sexual value that placed married reproductive heterosexual couples at the top, followed by unmarried monogamous heterosexuals, with stable, long-term gay and lesbian couples coming next. At the very bottom are transsexuals, sadomasochists, and pedophiles, Ms. Taylor said.
“You might wonder how anyone could ever advocate pedophilia as a positive social good,” Ms. Taylor said. “All you need to do is exchange the truth for a lie in strategic places.”
Queer theory gives cover to pedophiles, she said, adding that its beginnings can be traced back to the 1940s.
Kinsey, who died in 1956, viewed sex as a bodily function that responds to stimulus, much like the stomach responds to food during a meal, Ms. Taylor said.
Any social or psychological meaning attached to sex is, in Kinsey’s view, the product of culture, which is what scholars today call “socially constructed,” she said.
“Kinsey reasoned that if we don’t lock people up in prison because they have exotic tastes in food, then why should we lock people up in prison because they have unconventional sexual preferences?” Ms. Taylor said.
In Kinsey’s view, children are sexual beings from birth who are capable of sexual response, she said.
The official story of his study included input from pedophiles who assured him that children could have pleasurable sexual experiences, Ms. Taylor said.
In his 1948 book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Kinsey described “adult observers for 196 pre-adolescent boys” during sex.
The children, with ages listed as young as 5 on his chart, were “groaning, sobbing or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children),” according to the book.
Another passage said that the boys would “fight away from the partner.” However, they “derived definite pleasure from the situation.”
The theory blames society for stigmatizing sex in any capacity—children wouldn’t feel traumatized having sex with adults if society thought it was acceptable, according to queer theory, Ms. Taylor said.
Parents who want to protect their young children from sexual predators or sexual knowledge are considered “phobic,” she said.
“It creates the ideological justification for the complete collapse of moral boundaries that are necessary to protect the vulnerable from sexual predation that causes trauma,” Ms. Taylor said.
“If you can’t tell who is a man and who is a woman, then you can’t distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and in the gender confusion that results, norms are blurred, and all sexuality is queered.”
Queer Anarchy
Mr. Jensen predicts this period in American history under queer theory will be considered “insane,” much like lobotomies performed in past decades are now viewed as barbaric.Future generations will wonder why society celebrated children surgically removing healthy body parts, potentially ruining their sexuality and ability to have children, he said.
“I think it’s an absolute atrocity,” Mr. Jensen said, adding that the only way to defeat the ideology is to speak out and refuse to use language such as “gender-affirming care” or preferred pronouns.
“My career has been destroyed by standing up for women and standing up on this issue,” he said. “But what I do know is crucial is for some of us to keep telling the truth as much as we can.”
Queer theory advocates for anarchy, where rules and norms don’t exist, he said.
In reality, queer theory is a far-left political theory tied to German philosopher Georg Hegel, who influenced Karl Marx, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto,” Mr. Lindsay said.
It goes beyond sex to embrace any fringe idea, he said. In religion, queer theory embraces Satanism; with body image, it supports Fat Studies; or with disabilities, it advocates for Crip Theory, an abbreviation of the word “cripple,” meaning disability.
“You can see how this thing becomes a sort of all-consuming monster because there’s absolutely nowhere you can stop,” Mr. Lindsay said.
He said there are two goals to queer theory: dissolve everything down to where there’s no definition of normal, and empower abusers.
“If the queer theorists got their way, our society would be anything goes,” Mr. Lindsay said.
“Nobody gets to define anything as right or wrong except them, conveniently. So every single individual becomes, you know, a standard unto himself.”
