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.
I absolutely love statistical analysis and the inferences for policy. I love it to the extent that I have multiple papers on it and have taught it. Let’s dig into this one a bit. Fair warning, this is completely off the cuff and I have a nice big pour of whiskey next to me, but hopefully it won’t go off the rails.
Okay, so if I skimmed the article correctly, they found a single drag queen who was convicted of sexual assault on a child. Right there we have a statistical problem because of the small number of observations. It’s literally just noise and no inferences can be made from it. I’m not being pedantic here. The statistical difference between one and zero drag queens committing SA is basically zero. Other than an amusing headline, the only inference we can make is that there is no statistical correlation between drag and sexual assault of children that any statistics, including this one, has borne out. So, other than invalidating what seems to be the central plank of the Republican Party platform, it looks like a nonsense comparison.
In the other hand, perhaps we can derive meaningful statistics from our analyses if we expand our criteria of evaluation. We do know, for instance, that about 99% of violent sexual assaults are done by men, so there’s obviously a correlation there that should be more studied. Should we legally limit the interaction between men and children to reduce sexual assaults? That would actually be much more effective than limiting drag queens.
Daughters, stepdaughters, and granddaughters are the most likely family members to be sexually assaulted. Other majority statistics indicate that it’s sisters, step-sisters, and other female family members who lead the list.
In addition, in every age range, girls and women are the most likely to be sexually assaulted. That ratio ranges from about 65% for children under 10 to about 95% for the 15-19 age range.
So the vast majority (to the point of being virtually all) of rapists are male, and the vast majority of victims of rape in every age group are female. From this, we might speculate that the majority of offenses are heterosexual, if we want to apply that label to child rapists. Given that the vast majority of drag queens are gay cis males, we can tell that they make up a negligible proportion of people committing child sexual assault.
So, prevent straight cis men from interacting with children would be the most effective way of lowering the number of sexual assaults against children, especially if we include male family members.
We could dig more, but there’s not a lot of studies on things like the number of sexual assaults committed by Christian leaders versus the general population, or republicans versus democrats. We can dig deeper, of course, and look at between state comparisons and political distributions and see if there is a correlation there (spoiler: there is) and see how that correlates with things like religion or hostility to LGBT persons, but I think I’ve given enough of a general sketch here.
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.