Anti-childhood-sexual-abuse spaces have a transphobia problem

It’s been two years since I set up Secrets Worth Sharing, a platform providing intersectional and approachable advice on how to talk about childhood sexual abuse. When I began following other accounts that focused on this topic, something weird started happening. My recommended videos started to become anti-trans. 

I was seeing increased messaging in my feed glorifying traditional gender stereotypes. I was half-watching reels, before realising they were advising the removal of trans women from survivor support services. I was exposed to voiceovers telling me that drag performances groomed children. 

Clearly, the algorithms were picking up on a trend: to be anti-child sex abuse is to be anti-trans. And to fight for a world where children are free from sexual abuse is to be exposed to harmful propaganda in the process.

I believe that it is possible to build an anti child-sex-abuse movement that supports trans people – in fact, it is the only way, as these intersections are so crucial to understanding experiences of abuse. Truly recognising them is the only way to ensure we are able to support all people who experience child sexual abuse.

Trans as identity, drag as performance  

As trans academic Harper Keenan and genderqueer drag performer Lil’ Miss Hot Mess write, “In both conservative and liberal discourses… ‘drag’ is sometimes erroneously conflated with ‘trans.’ We wish to be explicit: these terms are not synonymous.” They go on to say that there is of course overlap – not only is drag a celebration of playing with gender, there are also some drag artists who are trans. However, “drag generally refers to a kind of consciously artistic performance intended for an audience.” Transness does not exist as a performance.

To talk more about the difference between trans identity and drag, I interviewed Prince, a trans person, drag king, performance artist and organiser. 

Prince has been performing for almost a decade, and is the co-founder of Brighton King Night – the city’s biggest drag king night. “A lot of people misunderstand drag by holding a reductionist view that it is only a cisgender man in a dress. The way we describe it is taking gender and experimenting with it,” they explain.  

Prince has hosted drag performers who are hyper-feminine, others who are clowns who blend burlesque into their performance and some who dress like gremlins. “There is no one way to perform drag – it is whatever you want it to be. Some people love to go on stage and have a persona. Some people, like me, like to merge parts of myself with the person I take on stage,” they tell me. 

While Prince started doing drag to explore a “sexy, charismatic and chubby boy” persona, it was through performing that they started to explore their journey of transition. 

So for Prince, there is a link with their drag and their transness. However, they stress that these are still very distinct from each other. “I have autism and a lot of  people are surprised to hear that I can be awkward outside of performing,” they laugh. Where drag performances provide a space for them to bring some aspects of their identity to the stage, many other parts of their identity are also explored privately as a trans person navigating their daily life.

It is important to distinguish the false parallel drawn between transness and drag as this underlying assumption is used by “gender-critical activists” that I’ve had the misfortune of coming across online. Their flawed logic suggests that trans folks and drag performers alike are engaging in a hypersexual form of “dress up”, and this is inherently harmful for children to see.   

Using anti-trans rhetoric to frame drag performances as inappropriate for children entirely misses the freedom and safety that drag provides for so many, regardless of their gender expression. It also (maybe deliberately) does not take into account the fact that there are many drag performances which are totally appropriate for, and tailored to, children. 

Child-friendly drag performances

I speak with Ebony Rose Dark, a drag queen and cabaret dance performance artist. Like me, they have also been exposed to many arguments about how drag is unsuitable around children because it is sexual in nature. We chat about the Drag Queen Story Hour (storytime events for children hosted by drag queens) and how these events have been increasingly targeted by the far-right for these very reasons. We also talk about how some people would go as far as to claim that taking a child to a Pride march where there are drag performers is a form of sexual abuse. 

Like Prince, Ebony reminds me that there is no set formula for what drag is, which means people reach a conclusion for themselves. In this way, it can be harder for people who aren’t in the scene to to truly understand its value and they can draw damaging conclusions based on the sexualised performances that they see on TV or social media. 

Just as with any performance art, there are of course drag shows that are sexually explicit and not appropriate for children – but these are not the ones which drag performers would take into schools. “If I did go into schools, I’d be going with sophistication and class!” Ebony says. “I would go out of my way to play with how drag could be interesting for children, like the patterns on my dress.” These types of performances, often seen in the family-friendly sections of Pride marches, use clothing and colour to entertain children, but also to show young people that there is beauty in difference. 

In reality, it’s not drag itself that parents and the far-right are afraid of. Fear mongering through anti-drag sentiments is just an attempt at veiling their hatred for trans people themselves, which is reflected in political policies across the world.

Discrimination on a global scale

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in transphobia across the globe. In 2022 Florida passed the “don’t say gay” bill, which bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity at schools. Shortly after, a report by the Human Rights Campaign found a 406% increase in tweets using “groomer” or “pedophile” in relation to queer people since the state law was passed. Meanwhile, far-right politicians in America are still using drag queens as props of fear in the debate on sexual violence. 

And of course, there’s the very recent April 2025 ruling by the UK supreme court that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex, which has had disastrous effects on trans people being limited by what survivor support services they can access, and in many cases being excluded from purported ‘women’s only’ spaces. 

Prince is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Drag and transitioning has been such a powerful experience for them to come to terms with their own gender and sexuality. Yet the very medium that helped Prince to heal is being weaponised against them and people like them. 

It feels easier for us to point to ‘the other’ when we think about those who sexually abuse children. Often, trans people and drag performers are already othered in society, making it easy for them to become a target.

Many people forget that trans people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crimes, including sexual abuse. On top of this, when trans children are sexually abused, their transness is often weaponised. According to a report from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in 2022, some LGBTQ+ survivors of child sexual abuse were told their identity or orientation was result of the abuse they experienced. Even if this is ever the case, this framing can diminish the meaning of someone’s gender identity. 

“A lot of what we do in trans activism is advocating for and supporting the trans youth,” Prince says. This includes trusting children to know their own gender identity, as well as knowing when they are uncomfortable and encouraging them to trust their gut reaction to an abusive situation. The belief that all trans people are perpetrators, ignores the realities for trans kids. “We should be focusing on the survivors themselves. We need to trust children more in situations like this. They need to be believed a lot of the time.”

Is it possible to accept part of someone’s activism but not all of it?

It hurts me so much that the area of activism that I want to dedicate my life to is steeped in such anti-transness. If we are to build and believe in a future free from childhood sexual abuse, we must accept all identities, especially trans ones – a community that has a high percentage of survivors of sexual abuse. Anyone is subject to being a potential victim and childhood sexual abuse activism spaces should welcome these identities so that we are better equipped to support people from a diversity of sexual abuse experiences. It’s the only way we can prevent abuse.

The very existence of trans survivors and drag performers like Prince serve as living defiance against these harmful messages in childhood sexual abuse advocacy. “As a trans person, I’ve realised there are so many people who don’t want me to exist. It’s not okay, but I need to focus my energy in other places, to try and empower people like me. To think about if I was to become a parent, how I could recognise abuse and teach my children differently? Your concern is not us, it’s abusers.”