LAST week, I wrote about the worrying trend of women’s organisations in Scotland being maliciously targeted because of their support and inclusion of trans women.

It’s important to recognise this as part of a wider backlash from some quarters against progress towards a world where freedom of expression and equality for all are valued in place of traditional ideals of gender, sexuality and the patriarchal family unit.

Unfortunately, one doesn’t have to look far for evidence of this, and another glaring example emerged just days later. On Saturday, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) announced a last-minute cancellation of a Drag Queen Storytime event for children due to “hateful and intimidatory behaviour of a small number of people online, which led to the performer feeling unsafe”.

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For the uninitiated, a Drag Queen Storytime is when a person – often, but by no means always, a man – dressed as a drag queen (extravagant dresses, wigs and make-up) sits and reads children’s books. It shares a lot of similarities to the way children are engaged in theatre through pantomimes, which typically feature a man dressed as a woman in over-the-top costume. A key difference, perhaps, being that drag has its roots in LGBTQ culture – and therein lies the problem.

There are some who imply that LGBTQ people are inherently dangerous to children, and who frame any exposure of children to drag as a “safeguarding risk”. Many of the same people are similarly shocked and appalled by the prospect of LGBTQ groups in schools and warn of pupils being “indoctrinated” by inclusive education.

Their arguments are identical to those once made to justify banning schools from teaching about gay people. Today, this trojan horse sometimes appears under the guise of “protecting women”, alongside the “concerned parent”, but rest assured that no matter how it’s dressed up, the ideology underneath is just as regressive and damaging as ever.

To really understand that, we need to understand who is driving this. In this most recent incident, the groups orchestrating the pushback online were the Scottish Family Party and Us For Them (UFT) Scotland.

The former is known for being vocally opposed to abortion, same-sex marriage, adoption and IVF, and what they describe as “vulgar and corrupting sex education”.

They also warn of a “domestic violence racket”, suggesting that women’s organisations are exaggerating the scale of domestic abuse to gain funding.

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UFT emerged to oppose school closures, masking and social distancing in classrooms in response to Covid-19 – a campaign which saw the EIS having to report “inappropriate posts” from some of the group’s members to the police. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the group has since branched out to complaining about “selfish” teacher strikes and about the corruption of young minds by … seeing someone read a story in a costume.

The group has celebrated having this and a similar event in Stirling cancelled, after members sent emails to the venue, council and elected representatives. A quick perusal of the comments reveal transphobia and accusations of paedophilia, while members proudly shared a photo of a small, in-person protest where they held a sign saying “Hey perverts! Leave those kids alone!”

Yet UFT claims its members have been “raising issues politely”. Of course it is in the interests of these groups to present themselves as reasonable, concerned citizens, but you only need to scratch the surface to see this is far from the truth.

Another group which has been among the most vocal in its opposition to drag performances aimed at children is For Women Scotland (FWS), who recently complained about a Glasgow drag event advertised as open to those aged 14+.

Last month, FWS (which describes itself as representing “gender critical” feminists) sponsored and spoke at an event as part of the “Battle of Ideas Festival” alongside the Scottish Family Party, the Christian Institute and Stuart Waiton amongst others – all of whom think that smacking children is a wonderful idea but that letting them know LGBTQ people exist is harmful.

The strange logic in that is that it all stems from a view that parents have an absolute right over their children, their bodies and their minds. And for some, this also clearly extends to the view that men should have an absolute right over their wives, their bodies and their minds. None of this is very feminist, nor does it have anything to do with children’s rights, but the biggest con of recent years is that large parts of the media are willing to entertain the idea that it does.

In fact, the arguments being made by these groups are the mirror image of those being made by the Christian Right in the US, where a queer club was targeted just last month by a shooter the night before it was due to host a drag event for children. No clever branding or justification is going to change the fact that these people are campaigning to strip back LGBTQ people’s hard-won rights, nor can it obscure that women are put at risk by these very same ideologies.

At least the Scottish Family Party are willing to say the quiet part out loud. In a post about the Dundee event, the group said “the last thing children need is to be presented with the message that changing and bending gender is great fun”.

They got one part right – drag is about subverting gender norms and stereotypes. And this is the crux of the matter: it’s not really queer people they are afraid of, it’s the ideas we represent. It’s the systems that our existence threatens to crumble.

The National: Trans rights campaigners

Narrow ideals of femininity and masculinity – of how men and women are supposed to act, dress, be – are still pervasive in our society. This limits all of our lives in different ways, and it has been the driving force behind misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.

That’s exactly why feminists in Scotland and many parts of the world are working so closely with LGBTQ activists – these oppressions are rooted in the very same belief systems. Right-wing, reactionary voices are terrified of seeing those systems uprooted, and they are banking on being able to divide us so that they never will be.