Doesn’t the very rise and fall of trans youth identification contradict your claim? Being queer was novel and cool, and now (for many) it’s cringe. People adopt what is novel and cool and reject what is cringe, particularly as naive children.
Or, and this is gonna sound crazy, I know, it's not because it used to be novel and cool but because young people feel less safe to come out now that the trans panic has done its thing and the current administration has spent an inconceivable amount of money, time and attention painting this marginalised community in a bad light at every perceivable opportunity to do so?
Now do anorexia, bulimia, or any number of social contagions. The difference between being allowed to be who you are vs. being encouraged into a lifestyle is not easy to distinguish.
If another kid tells you that they're going to beat the daylights out of you to gain the acceptance of their peers, other kids get the message pretty fast and that message is to conform and to isolate the kid that is going to be the subject of the beating. It has nothing to do with adopting what's cool and rejecting what's cringe, unless you consider the current shift against human rights to be cool and supporting human rights to be cringe.
I can say that the data you're sharing suggests it's just as likely that the drop in numbers that your site claims started sometime between 2023 and 2024 are due to people becoming more afraid to identify as such due to Republican attempts to restrict LGBT rights and make life miserable for anyone who doesn't identify as straight
OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
If you're going to broaden the definition of grooming so absurdly to include normal things in culture you just don't like then it seems like you should allow people to conclude your intent is to diminish the seriousness of things that actually are grooming.
> OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
Irrespective of the upthread discussion, MAGA is absolutely both being racist and quite actively grooming people, particularly children, to be racist. That's fairly overt.
No, normalizing taboo behavior especially towards specific audiences has always been grooming. Grooming does not require active persuasion, but simply creating a context conducive to some intended outcome.
You are broadening this out to the point that is absurd and would excuse cracking down on almost any liberalisation, in a way that is kind of prurient.
Honestly it's rather creepy and I hope you one day consider what you are saying.
You've been misled by the recent narrowing of the term to mean specifically attempts at sexual exploitation. The term has always had a wider meaning. Google "grooming definition" if you don't believe me. I would link it but I don't see a way to.
And your pathetic attempt at shaming for daring to disagree with you is utterly transparent. Using the moral high ground as a weapon is poison to discourse.
Grooming of a person in a non-abuse setting involves deliberately changing the environment around an individual who does not yet feel they could be someone's successor or confidently exhibit the qualities or experience needed.
Again: it is an active, targeted process aimed at someone who does not necessarily know they are being changed.
Grooming has never been as broad a concept as you are talking about such that it just means changes in the moral or social landscape that some find undesirable.
It has always meant a form of targeted attention (even in the literal sense of care and attention to a specific animal). Social liberalisation you do not care for is not grooming.
Yes, an active targeted process. No, it doesn't have to be aimed at "someone". It can be aimed at creating an environment conducive to one's interested in some class of people.
Yes, intentionally targeting kids with an ideology is grooming. It is preparing them to be amenable to your ideology to increase acceptance of it in the broader culture. At least that's the most innocuous reading of it.
This isn't how being queer works!