By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As someone who proudly self-identifies as an aggressively open genderfuck anarchist, I get called a lot of ugly words and I’ve made something of a tradition of owning most of them. In fact, coming from the Eazy-E school of pejorative reclamation, I actually take a great deal of joy in picking up the slurs that bigots hurl at me like stones and hocking them right back in their pig faces. Truth be told, I’d much rather be tarred and feathered as a carpet munching tranny faggot any day of the week than to pass for another normie vanilla breeder. I work hard to stir up the status quo like a cocktail and I welcome their hatred with arms wide open and a kiss on each cheek.

But if there is just one word that I cannot fucking stand for even one withering second, it is the toxic title of “groomer” and this is the new pejorative of choice for those pious cunts in the so-called Christian Right as well as their limp dick Zionist flunkies in the GOP who they ride like a bumper car. According to current popular Republican lore, fierce queens like me are little more than mincing sexual predators, targeting their children so we can indoctrinate them into becoming unwitting participants in our perverted lifestyle. It’s an insane and downright evil conspiracy theory that triggers the high holy hell out of me like a shotgun because it couldn’t be farther from reality if were scribed by Roald Dahl.

I spent over a decade of my childhood being groomed and violated by legitimate sexual predators in a tiny country Catholic school in more ways than I can count, and I was targeted specifically because of my disharmony with the gender identity written on my birth certificate. I have jagged fractured memories of faceless adults putting their hands on my naked body in anger and being too terrified to say ‘no’ because I honestly believed that they wouldn’t let me go home if I did. I was four years old, and these traumatic flashbacks are the only memories that I have from my childhood in which it was quite literally painfully clear that I was a little girl that just happened to have a penis and they hurt. Those papist cunts got exactly what they wanted. I spent the rest of my childhood numb from the neck down and when puberty finally awakened a storm of rage in my soul, I got called a monster, and I believed them, because I was groomed to believe them.

I wish I could say that I was alone. This is the one time when I honestly do. And I wish that I could say that it’s just the Catholic schools too, but it’s not. Queer kids are groomed every single day by an overwhelmingly cis-hetero adult establishment to believe that they are weird and broken and abnormal and that they have no say whatsoever on how their bodies are defined or who gets to define them. But this is even bigger than Queer kids too. Our entire compulsory school system is a device designed with the intent to groom all wild children into domesticated citizens.

The American compulsory school system was an invention of the Protestant Reformation of the mid-19th century. Using the Prussian model of martial schooling, a bunch of racist bible thumpers built our supposedly liberal public-school apparatus for the express purpose of force-feeding immigrants and Indians the King James Bible until they choked. The classroom was modeled after a church with desks lined up like pews and a pompous instructor standing above them and lecturing fire and brimstone like a preacher. Over the years this system dropped God from the act and turned its attention to preparing children for the assembly line with bells triggered on the hour like a factory but the product being manufactured remained unchanged and America’s schools, both public and private, continue to churn out that product to this day.

The product I’m talking about is obedient subservient children who are socialized to believe that they have no rights, only privileges granted to them by benevolent adult authority figures in exchange for staying in line and following the rules. There is a word for this, another terrible slur, and it’s called ‘victim.’ Children in this country and in most other modern nation states around the world aren’t easy marks for abuse because they’re stupid or innocent. They are fodder for pedophiles because they have been coached by petty authoritarians into believing that their own bodies don’t even belong to them, and the sickest thing is that they’re right.

Children have all the rights and dignity of farm animals in modern western society. They can’t vote. They can’t work. They can’t leave the house unattended. They can’t even empty their bladder without a stamped document from an adult and these Jesus creeps have the nerve to bitch about “parent’s rights?” In a country bereft of youth rights, parent’s rights amount to little more than property rights and I’m sick of tiptoeing around the subject matter of abolition just because I’m a faggot. I’m an abolitionist because I’m a fucking faggot and the only thing that I’m grooming your kids to do is fight back.

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