Transgender activist Olivia Hunt blamed legislation aimed at stopping child sex change procedures for violent crimes against gay and transgender individuals in a hearing Wednesday.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing Wednesday on “The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and Violence in the United States.” The hearing comes almost a month after a shooter entered a gay night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and killed five people and injured others.
Hunt, who is the policy director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said use of the term “groomer” is at fault for violence against transgender people. (RELATED: Pro-Censorship Activist Caught Flat Footed By Own Tweets At ‘Extremism’ Hearing)
“Anti-LGBTQ activists have appropriated this terminology, used by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and used it to slander LGBTQ people and our allies as predatory, harmful to our children,” Hunt said.
“This same rhetoric has been used as justification for anti-LGBTQ activism. Heavily armed protestors have made numerous attacks or attempts at intimidation against family-friendly pride events and drag performances around the country. Even hospitals have been targeted by bomb threats and intimidation tactics based on social media figures spreading baseless stories that the performers are, in their words, ‘mutilating children.'”
“There’s a straight line that can be drawn from the legislation trying to strip trans people of our human rights to the increasingly hostile and inflammatory rhetoric portraying us as a threat to society, to the acts of violence that have taken far too many lives,” Hunt continued.
Activists have increasingly used terms such as “stochastic terrorism” to argue that reporting on the dangers of sex change procedures for minors leads to violence. These activists tend to pressure social media platforms to censor this sort of content.
Activist groups such as Media Matters have succeeded in pressuring social media platforms to censor the word “groomer,” usually used by commentators to refer to adults who expose children to sexually suggestive content or encourage sex change procedures.
The steps predators take to groom children bear a striking resemblance to content put forward by teachers around America, according to a report by the Daily Caller.