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Trans TikToker Says Politicians & Pastors Are The Real Child Groomers
TikToker Kristen Bowde's research found that pastors and politicians are the ones who are overwhelmingly abusing children — not queer people.
Kristen Bowde has made a name for herself on TikTok debunking one the most harmful myths the right is currently lodging against the LGBTQ+ community — that all queer people are grooming children.
Bowde, an attorney and former correspondent for CBS News, creates weekly videos for her more than 380,000 followers where she presents local media reports of children being targeted by sexual predators.
“TikTok is supposed to be this app where teenagers do dance moves, but it turns out it's an incredibly effective political organizing tool,” she told Them in a recent interview. “I am delighted that people are finding this useful information and are sharing it.”
@newgirlny_fl Your #pastor, your #priest and your own #family members and #neighbors turn out yo be yhe teal offenders in week 22 of Who’s Making News for SA of #children. #Trans #transgender #thisiswhattranslookslike #mtf #lgbtq #lgbt #🏳️⚧️ #rainbowmafia #dragqueen #dragqueens ♬ original sound - Kristen B
While combing through countless news reports since joining TikTok six months ago, Bowde began to notice a trend. Conservatives love to vilify the LGBTQ+ community and blame drag queens and trans people for taking advantage of children, but the attorney has discovered that the majority of these crimes are committed by religious leaders and Republican politicians. That’s right, the very same people who have been shouting from the rooftop that queer people are abusing children are, in fact, child abusers themselves.
“They’re the ones who are committing the crimes,” she told the outlet. “They’re the ones who are doing this.”
Bowde, a 73-year-old trans woman, recently relocated from New York to Miami, Florida in an effort to combat the sweeping homophobic and anti-trans laws Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently put into effect. “For a year and a half, the drumbeat has been louder from the right wing, and the anti-trans rhetoric has been extreme,” she said.
The TikToker — whose account brings in around $1000 per month which she donates to groups like Equality Florida — says she was shocked by what she found once she started digging.
“The people who were — time after time after time — going to jail for this were pastors, Catholic priests, people who were senior officials of churches, and Mormon bishops,” she said. “What it wasn’t was anybody who was a drag queen, and what it wasn’t — for the most part — was anybody transgender.”
Bowde is on week 22 of this research project that she plans to continue for a full year. During this time she says she has found 1,216 cases of children being sexually abused. “Out of those 1,216 cases, we have 104 who are pastors,” she said. “We have 37 priests. We have 21 politicians — of whom 17 are Republicans, three are Democrats, and one was non-partisan. We have no drag queens, not one. Three of those 1,216 cases have been transgender people. Three out of 1,216 is about one quarter of 1 percent.”
She continued saying that pastors “are committing crimes disproportionately to their number in society.” According to the social media maven, if you want to protect children you should stop worry about the LGBTQ+ community and instead keep them out of churches.
“So who’s the risk here? Well, it’s not the drag queens,” she said in the interview. “They haven’t committed a single one of these crimes. It’s not the transgender people. They're committing them at a rate dramatically below their incidence in the population. It’s the pastors. Their crime rate is so astronomical that it’s a real risk factor to take your kids to their churches.”
Bowde feels it’s important to combat the misinformation and hate right-wing politicians and conservative pastors have spent years spewing. “Everybody from the extreme right wing to these pastors are pushing this in an attempt to divide us, and it’s been successful,” she said. “This is inflaming passions and has divided the nation. That’s really unfortunate, especially when you factor in that this division is based on a lie. It’s based on a huge lie.”
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
