The Traffic in Children
Max Fox
How do you diagnose a panic? Perhaps you know it when you see it. Canonical approaches describe panics as scapegoats for a more fundamental conflict that cannot be addressed on its own terms. Exciting but never touching the displaced topic, a panic gathers momentum, spiraling outward, lurching toward its furtive objects and away from the liberal commitment to reason, even threatening to overturn reason’s vaunted place in public discourse. You cannot reason with panic-stricken people, we tell ourselves, but perhaps the serene are no more amenable to it. In the irrational mode of the panic, something finds expression that otherwise cannot be spoken.
The current panic over trans people presents itself as a concern over the proper relation between adults and children. The phobic objects of the panic, as is often the case, appear somewhat threadbare under the apocalyptic light in which they’re cast: children’s books with queer or trans characters, drag queens hosting library readings, schools issuing guidance to call children by their self-affirmed names. These are supposed to represent elements of a widespread plot to either coercively transition children to some unnatural gender or inure them to sexual predation—“grooming.” Reading to children, speaking to children, even speaking about children have all been brandished as evidence of this predation. Because grooming is understood as a kind of sexual interest that hides in objects remote from any sexual act, this panic can seize on any relation to children or transness as its sign.
The ground for this fantasy was well prepared by the popular delusion known as QAnon, a paranoid quest to narrate the international movement of capital as a conspiracy to traffic and harvest children for forbidden sexual pleasure. This tendency gained its considerable community of adherents via posts on the imageboard 8chan (now 8kun), notorious for its commitment to hosting child pornography and mass shooters’ manifestos. Ron Watkins, an administrator of the site and one of the purported authors of Q’s “drops,” described QAnon as a way to make “intelligence training” available to “normies,” giving a mass base the very tools of social manipulation that have buoyed their persecutory belief. An audience ready to respond to such stories of abuse has been groomed, if you like, for just this moment.
An audience ready to respond to such stories of abuse has been groomed, if you like, for just this moment.
The primal scene of the current panic involves a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact. The panic this inspires is not necessarily over not having an answer—right or wrong, and irrespective of the person whose gender is in question—but over the child asking the question at all. The concept of gender here is apparently so fissile that when exposed to the curiosity of a child this scene doesn’t ever need to actually take place for the entire structure of parental authority to threaten melting down.
As the resistance to an imagined answer to an imagined question, this panic, in fact, conveys a number of presumed certainties that run together: that talking about sex is sexual activity, that gender nonconformity is sexual perversion, that children have a fixed gender but no sexuality, that to recognize someone’s gender is to be implicated in it, and that trans people cannot be children. The panic is not about ignorance or uncertainty, then, but about the demand, in the panic-stricken adult’s mind, to give the answer to a question they believe should go without saying.
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Speech, reason, children, adults, sexuality, imagination, prohibition—here we already have the classic objects of psychoanalysis before us. But we also have, as Jacqueline Rose argues in her first book, the materials of children’s literature. The certainty that some books are not for children—books about queer or trans people, for example—has turned them into lightning rods for the current panic and the targets of a wave of recent bans. In her 1984 The Case of Peter Pan, Rose argues that the modern myth, the play, the book, and its adaptations all represent the problem the genre of children’s fiction treats in its form: the “impossible relation between adult and child.” Peter Pan has never, “in any easy way, been a book for children” but in fact poses the more serious question of “whether there can be any such thing” at all.
Rose investigates the genre as the form this impossible relation takes. In children’s literature, the intergenerational relation is both blocked and cultivated: the adult comes before the book (as author or buyer) and the child comes after (as recipient or reader), but “neither of them enter the space in between.” Provocatively, she argues that children’s fiction is “something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction,” but not for an “act which is sought after or which must actually take place.” Instead, it is a form of investment which “fixes the child” in one spot so that the child can be made to “represent the whole problem of what sexuality is, or can be, and to hold that problem at bay.” The child’s image is generated through the stories we tell on their behalf in order to stave off adults’ neuroses. Instead of children’s literature being where adults imagine stories to delight or soothe children, Rose holds that these stories are where we imagine children to delight or soothe adults.
As much as we would like it to, our desire never enjoys a wholly rational career, and the language we use to manage this always betrays us. The image of the child “can be used to hold off a panic,” Rose observes, but the “sexual disavowal is, therefore, a political disavowal” of the differences that might confront us if we were to consider the real child in front of us and not its fantasized image. Rose’s aim, by demystifying the image of the child, is to demonstrate that behind that image lies adult desire and real children. To which child are we speaking, Rose asks, and what is our investment in them? For a participant in the current panic, the image of the child allegedly groomed by teachers when asked for their pronouns is an affront not to trans children, certainly, nor to cis children, who seem generally quite eager to refer to people the way they request, but to that adult’s desire for all children to be cis.
Rose undertakes her study to demonstrate the utility of Freud’s concept of the unconscious. Freud found that there is never a single, self-evident meaning of an event that an analyst might uncover, because, in Rose’s gloss, there is “no childhood which is simply over and done with.” The project of deciphering dream images as symbols of events from childhood runs aground on the fact that the child and the adult are not fully separate figures and so the symbols cannot have static referents. Our self-understanding as adults demands that we be done with childhood, but childhood persists in the unconscious. So, too, in the social uses of children’s literature: the child is recruited as an image to satisfy the adult’s need for a “pure origin”—that is, something simply and strictly in the past.
This image of the externalized child is a projection of ourselves as children—in fact, Rose suggests, the image of the unconscious itself—and our persisting memory is what “we endlessly rework” to “build an image of our own history.” The rational adult mind is helplessly interrupted by the recurrence of scenes, images, and events from our childhood. It is the relationship between this child and adult that Rose says is impossible, which indicates the enormity of the task that children’s literature is summoned to resolve. In this sense, Rose describes innocence, disturbingly, “not as a property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire.” The adult needs an image of the child as innocent for supremely adult ends: to manage their relationship to their own desire.
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Freud’s decisive early insight was that children are “bisexual” (or perhaps “bigender” in current terms) and “polymorphously perverse.” In the passage from this stage to adulthood, later investments, consolidations, and orientations take form, but infantile sexuality lives on in the unconscious, constantly threatening to undo the certainty adults need that they are one gender or another, or that their desires do not violate the prohibition of law. Children have a sexuality, but it takes a different form than that of adults. The difference between children’s and adults’ sexuality, in fact, makes it incumbent upon the adult to not impose their desires and sense of sexuality on the child. Conversely, the trans or gender-nonconforming child can be seen as a compact figure of what the adult struggles to repress in the sexuality and gender of its unconscious. But when trans children themselves are met with violent suppression, it is cruelty of a related and more concrete order—the coercive imposition of the desire for innocence becomes a violation of its own.
In the quest to understand desire’s social origin and potentially fatal destiny, reason alone doesn’t have enough to say.
That Freud described the complex passage from infantile to adult sexuality with recourse to myth gives some sense of the weight accorded, for him and for Rose, to fiction. In the quest to understand desire’s social origin and potentially fatal destiny, reason alone doesn’t have enough to say. This may be why partners in the incumbent coalition that petitioned for LGBT acceptance have fallen somewhat silent in the face of the current panic. In the past decade or so, many liberals were won over to this cause by the argument that sexual prejudice was a form of unenlightened irrationality. No doubt, the reactionaries have preserved their durable slurs against queer people as sinister pederasts and emancipated women as castrators. These fictions still circulate globally, notably mobilizing “illiberal” or religious conservatives. But by aligning itself with the public status of reason to the exclusion of psychic reality—with its mix of fact and fiction—the liberal movement had to leave a number of live questions smoldering: how to relate sexual norms and criminal law, how to acknowledge the sexuality of children, and what sexuality has to do with gender. Because of the movement’s too-easy affirmation of the sex offender as a moral-criminal category, child sexuality as taboo, and gender and sexuality as something like discrete organs, the fantasized figure of the groomer could ignite these political embers and spread like wildfire.
If not for the real efficacy of a fictional transgressor, why are those drawn in by the panic moved to act by what are clearly hypothetical events, why do they see the content of picture books as so socially catastrophic, and why are they so eager to subscribe to laughably intricate delusions that continually disprove themselves? It would then be wrong to take these stories as simply incidental targets of this panic. It is as if children’s literature is the speakable face of an unspeakable relation in which the panic is unmistakably invested. The idea of perversion in schools, pornography in libraries, pedophiles in state: in all of these lurid, Kleig-lit images jostling the child in peril, the desire for children to conform to an adult fantasy of innocence circulates in a frenzy, drawing adults together.
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What in this desire might the presence of a trans child disrupt? And why might their presence only seem to register now? One obstacle to deciphering this question is that many of the professional hawkers of panic are naked opportunists. Christopher F. Rufo, a Manhattan Institute propagandist most responsible for pushing the groomer slur, comes to the campaign after having transformed a scholarly term of art, Critical Race Theory, into a klaxon for the race war that in certain minds was convoked by the 2020 summer George Floyd uprising. Flush with success at mobilizing cadres of parents to storm school board meetings—already sites of intense conflict over how to manage the competing demands of workplace safety and child supervision during the COVID pandemic—Rufo claimed the 2021 victory of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin was proof that the right can run and win on “culture war” issues, a front on which they felt they had lost strategic ground.
Rufo candidly broadcasts his strategy to wrest images and concepts from circulation and disfigure them to repulse bystanders, bludgeon his enemies, and galvanize his audience of Christian fundamentalists and white supremacist revanchists. Like Matt Walsh, his brother-in-arms and star of the recent transphobic film What is a Woman?, he covets and resents the enemy territory of the mainstream media. Rufo is so confident in his disdain that he can be seen telling credulous liberal journalists precisely how he has manipulated them into carrying out his campaign. But the panic is not restricted to the media.
Grooming was once a term that circulated within specialized discourses drawing from the feminist movement against sexual violence.
In Texas earlier this year, the governor told the Family Protective Services department to investigate and threaten with child abuse prosecution any parents who sought gender-affirming care for their children. In Florida, a law passed in March prohibiting public school employees from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation with students under a certain age, compelling districts to notify parents if their child accesses counseling or medical care, giving parents the right to halt any requested services and to sue the district for violating the law. Here, the state intervenes on behalf of the parent to secure their child’s gender against its determination from outside the family. Self-deputized citizens are taking up enforcement, too: in California, gay parents reported their children being accosted by a stranger on a train who followed one child to the bathroom and trailed them back to their family, shrieking “Remember what I told you. They stole you. They’re pedophiles.” One of the fathers acidly punctuated his Twitter thread narrating the terrifying encounter, “Yet *we’re* the groomers.”
Grooming was once a term that circulated within specialized discourses drawing from the feminist movement against sexual violence. Naming a unique experience of abuse, “grooming” described when an adult preys on a child by compelling them to enter into a sexual relationship they are too vulnerable to refuse. These cases needed a distinct name because the abuse in question came not from monstrous strangers or bursts of violence, but from adults recognized precisely by their relations with children: teachers, coaches, priests, uncles, stepmothers, fathers. It was around the passage of the Florida law that the “groomer” ascended the lexicon of the panic. By posing grooming as something which happens outside the home, and positioning themselves as defenders of both child and unwitting parents against society, given form in the figure of “woke elites,” the right found in the groomer an antagonist volatile enough to propel its conflict onto new terrain.
The plot advanced when the Disney corporation, itself a conservative pillar of childhood formation, belatedly moved to oppose the Florida bill. In 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Christian denomination in the United States after the Catholic Church (and which is also undergoing an internal crisis over the coverup of decades of sexual abuse by its clergy), had voted to boycott Disney over its extension of health benefits to same-sex partners of employees. But today’s right took things further. The Disney corporation was pilloried in conservative media and eventually stripped of its self-governing status under which it operates Disney World as retaliation for opposing the bill. Given its historic role in the subsumption of children’s literature into the most advanced sectors of capitalist development, Disney could plausibly be appreciated as a national threat to a cherished image of childhood.
Tucker Carlson invited Rufo on his nightly show to explain how the media conglomerate has tried to “inject queerness” into its programming, after Carlson intoned in reddened astonishment that the company’s “main goal” is now to teach children they can change their genders. He implied the Disney corporation itself was acting like a “sex offender,” warning that the company has a “fixation on the sexuality of children.” “What exactly can’t they consent to?” Carlson asked. “Disney didn’t say.” (A wag commenting under this video offered that “the head of Disney Films said Peter Pan is now named Peter Pansexual...”) While Rufo and his ilk have cynically confected the dire terms of this threat, an admission seems to lurk behind it: the force that ultimately shapes children is not the family, but lies somewhere else in society.
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Historically, there is a recurrent pattern of confounding misdirection that attempts to conflate any departure from normative sexual and gender regimes with sexual violence and abuse. Charges of systematic molestation accompanied multiple bids for gay and lesbian political equality, dogging the campaigns for antidiscrimination ordinances in the 1970s and for the right to marry and form families in the 1990s and 2000s. Changes in the gender composition of sectors of the waged labor force in the 80s were greeted with child molestation panics, this time located in daycare centers. Earlier in the twentieth century, the discovery of child molestation on a mass scale in newly populated cities had contributed to the drive to establish professional vice squads in police departments. These squads then pursued female sex workers or men seeking sex with men, even though most of the victims of molestation were girls. After the inquiries of the 1970s women’s movement discovered the high rate of assaults taking place within the family, efforts to prevent violence against children took the form of a public education campaign against “stranger danger” instead. In recent years, the slow-motion exposure of systematic child molestation within institutions famously committed to gender normativity like the Boy Scouts of America, churches, and organized sports prompted little equivalent in panics or public response. Instead, concern percolates over the risk from queer or, more recently, trans people participating in these hazardous organizations.
Seeing this century of panics as a history of misdirection doesn’t mean that hideous sexual violations never take place, but clarifies why, in order to address real molestation, feminists and others advocating for children had to learn to see through the adults who used the image of their barred relation to children precisely to violate it. To protect children, it became necessary to grasp the adult’s desire for the child’s innocence as potentially sexual. This duality elicits, in Rose’s words, “this strange focus on a child always innocent and yet sexualized by that very focusing of attention.” In the context of Peter Pan’s late Victorian composition, this took political form “as the campaign for the sexual protection of children.”
In the 1880s, England had been scandalized by the apparent discovery of widespread child prostitution via a series of tabloid articles. Rose argues that the campaign was a political attempt to stifle “more difficult questions about [the] social inequality and poverty” that put children into positions where sex work was an outcome. The object of this supposed protection, the child, was simultaneously “totally sexualized and totally innocent,” Rose writes. Like the stage production of Peter Pan, which served to give adults “the right to look at the child,” the moral uproar over child prostitution in the Victorian era offered a “highly sexualised form of attention to childhood [that] takes onto itself the meaning, and the objective, of innocence.”
The resemblance of today’s panic to this historical voyeurism couldn’t be more plain. In Ohio, the right to look at the child has recently been drafted as a law: any girl “accused” or “suspected” of being trans who wishes to play on a sports team must undergo extensive medical examination of her genitalia and genetic makeup. The panic over trans children achieves a terrible apotheosis: not only does it enshrine the idea of their presence as a sign of sexual violation, it also legislates real sexual violation of any child under its jurisdiction. What they imagine this protects is cis children’s innocence, but adult sexual integrity is at stake here as well. In their desire for children’s innocence, adults affirm that their own infantile sexuality has been left behind—a condition of entrance into community with other adults. By draping themselves in praise for defending the innocence of the child, the right perversely dictates that direct attention be paid to the child’s sex. At its worst, this furnishes the pretext for the adult’s enjoyment of a child’s sexuality, under cover of law, while bellowing that it does not exist.
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What should we make of the regularity with which the panicked charge of molestation and seduction of children appears on the scene? Or which more difficult questions does it occlude? Those committed to reason assure us panics only obliquely bear historical meaning: to begin with, they aren’t significantly true. As panics are illogical, the argument goes, they should not determine reality. They are characterized as a flight from knowledge rather than as revealing a logic or secret, constituting an unaccountable break from our drive to know. This has led to a robust literature in sociology and sexuality studies that, with a cool bedside manner, treats panics like freak weather events, to be avoided and deplored but not afforded the causal weight to overturn any of the deep structures of the world.
This is the advice drawn on, for example, by James Kirchick in a recent article for New York Magazine, which narrates the current panic as one in a long line of such episodes. He says the grooming panic is an “increasingly desperate” attempt to both explain and turn back the liberal settlement that had been won by gays and lesbians, as well as the “increased visibility” of trans people. In the past, anti-gay moral panics harmonized with the repressive struts of the anticommunist security state to become “fatally effective;” now, because of widespread acceptance and anticommunism’s retirement from the national vocation, this latest panic, he argues, should represent nothing so much to fear.
But the pattern this type of panic exhibits might be better accounted for as the inverted apprehension of a real social event or disruption. Given the role that the image of the child plays in securing psychic integrity for adult subjects, whose human capacities and attributes are constantly being stretched, inflated, stripped away, and sold back in parts to meet the demands of the endless expansion of production, when this image of the child comes into crisis it may be a sign that the relations that make and remake capitalist society are in crisis, too.
From the other direction, the threat posed to the family by children’s gender self-determination may be that it reveals the image of the child to be a social object parents cannot alone control. Any real, living child’s ultimate gender is a mystery which unites its material body and social existence, synthesizing uncountable contingent encounters and their traces into something that coheres and persists. It is the image of the child, not their real, particular one, that these parents fear to lose. The more the panicked wail about the threat to children’s innocence, the greater their investment in the image of a child that is not theirs, and the more inconsolable their sense of loss.
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For the image of the child to circulate between adults and bind the private life of families to a society that determines them, it must correspond to the shared condition of domination of actual children by their parents in the family. The abstraction of the image then confronts both the parents and real children as a concept beyond their control. This inversion, which Rose describes as the misrecognition of the chimeric child for the unconscious self, also conforms to the illogic which Marx finds in the fetishistic misrecognition of commodities that is the hallmark of capitalist society. This inversion could be described as the misrecognition that commodities can form social relations between themselves as things, obscuring the social relationships between people that actually constitute value.
The misrecognition in fetishism is not of one object for another, but of how commodities come to carry value at all. To Marx, they appear as the bearers of value through an inversion proper to the capitalist production process, where private producers of commodities bring their concrete activities into relation with each other only through the equation of their common element, human labor in the abstract. The worker expends their private, concrete labor in the production of a commodity, which can only be valued and exchanged as the bearer of a unit of this shared, indifferent element. Fetishism is the name for the misapprehension that follows from this inverted process, in which each commodity appears as the guarantor of its own inherent value. For the fetishized commodity to appear valuable, it must block the perception of the social process which constitutes it. Instead of seeing the commodity as a shard wearing the handprints of the total human world, the fetishized view of commodities imagines it gazes at objects which have animate social existence on their own. This comes closer to grasping the movement of the image of the child.
In the crisis of children’s gender self-determination, the family is stripped of its pretension to cohere the totality of social meaning. Dizzy, destabilized, its partisans grope for a concept which promises fixity. Ready to hand is the idea that the social meaning of gender is given by natural law. This psychic investment in a biological substrate of gender is a component of what Jeanne Neton and Maya Gonzalez in the journal Endnotes call the “gender fetish,” which locates the distribution of sexually differentiated roles in the creation of value in some natural attribute rather than the social arrangement which compels it. For them, gender is bound up in the division of labor: women are those workers who are compelled to perform the unproductive work of reproducing labor-power under private domination, both at the daily level for their wage-earning partners in the family and at the generational level by replacing the cohorts exiting the labor market with fresh sellers of labor-power, their children.
Since it is the role of those assigned to the gendered sphere of nonvalue to reproduce capitalist relations as if following natural laws, crisis appears in the form of the non-natural operation of gender. In a crisis, capitalist order appears threatened by the treacherous sabotage of reproduction by those entrusted with it—or the perverse operation of denaturalized gender. Those committed to a fetishized understanding of capitalist relations will fail to recognize any image of this as the function of abstract social processes. So they will seek the cause in fictional agents they take as real.
The image of the child in peril is an expression of the unspeakable threat posed to familial reproduction by capitalist crisis and vice versa. Faced with this crisis, reactionaries root around for proof of the permanence of capitalist relations of production, whose reproduction relies on the family. Fortunately or unfortunately for the forces of reaction, these relations will always be undergoing transformation. Capitalist production is constantly in flux as competition undermines and re-establishes the conditions necessary for profitability, but this unreliability at least offers the consolation of a reliable threat. For the committed losers of the right, devoted to their own persecution, this can supply organizationally useful excitement. The permanent revolution in relations of production faithfully strokes their wound, the chasm in their most intimate belief: that their private life is private, that interiority is self-generating, that society is merely a fetter on the individual, that the family orders the nation, which orders the world.
This is the fetishist’s view of capitalist society, but this time from the perspective of circulation, which cannot see its dependence on production. So it sees the family, the site of production and reproduction of capitalism’s single crucial commodity, labor-power, as standing apart from other social relations. This misrecognition of the role of the family in the production of labor-power allows for the fantasy of a fixed social order, one where social domination flows from personal qualities of birth and development can be kept within supposedly natural limits. This fantasy is evident in the conviction of the possibility for fixed symbolic meaning, which requires a petrified social field. The QAnon-style enthusiasm for decrypting secret messages is one expression of this fantasy. So, too, is the fixed, fetishistic image of the child.