The 2020s anti-LGBT movement in the United States is an ongoing political backlash from social conservatives against LGBT people. It has included legislative proposals of bathroom use restrictions, bans on gender-affirming care, anti-LGBT curriculum laws, laws against drag performances, book bans, boycotts, and conspiracy theories around grooming. Between 2018 and 2023, hundreds of anti-LGBT laws were considered, with more than one hundred passed into law.
The backlash has been widely considered a moral panic and part of a larger culture war in the United States. Scholars have cited rising anti-LGBT attitudes and policies as an example of democratic backsliding. The backlash has been connected to similar conservative backlashes in Hungary, Russia, and the Middle East.
Grooming conspiracy theory
Since the early 2020s, members of the far-right and a growing number of mainstream conservatives, mostly in the United States, have used the term "groomer" to falsely accuse LGBT people, as well as their allies and progressives in general, of systematically using LGBT sex education and campaigns for LGBT rights as a method of child grooming and enabling pedophilia.
In the United States, the popularization of the term has been linked to Christopher Rufo, who tweeted about "winning the language war", and James A. Lindsay in August 2021. Following the Wi Spa controversy in July 2021, Julia Serano noted a rise in false accusations of grooming directed towards transgender people, saying that it appeared as if there was a movement to "lay the foundation for just smearing all trans people as child sexual predators". Libs of TikTok (LoTT) also slurs LGBT people, supporters of LGBT youth, and those who teach about sexuality as "groomers." In 2021, LoTT made false claims that the Trevor Project was a "grooming organization" and that Chasten Buttigieg was "grooming kids". LoTT creator Chaya Raichik said on the Tucker Carlson Today show that LGBT people "Want to groom kids. They're recruiting."
The conspiracy theory then moved into the American conservative mainstream, with a number of high-profile cases of its use in Spring 2022, including its use by members of the Republican Party. On February 24, the right-wing The Heritage Foundation issued a tweet stating that the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act "protects young children from sexual grooming". During the debate over the act, Christina Pushaw, press secretary to the state's governor Ron DeSantis, tweeted that anyone who opposes the act was "probably a groomer". In April 2022, Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to the Democratic Party as "the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics". Also that month, a group of far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists held a demonstration at Disney World in which they accused Disney of grooming. Disney has been the focus of several other uses of the conspiracy – Jim Banks and 19 other members of the Republican Study Committee published a letter to Disney accusing the corporation of "purposefully influencing small children with its political and sexual agenda".
Since then, numerous right wing pundits have described the behavior of parents and teachers who support minors in their transgender identities as grooming, and the term "groomer" has widely been used by conservative media and politicians who want to denounce the LGBT community and its allies by implying that they are pedophiles or pedophile-enablers. Slate Magazine later described the word "grooming" as "the buzzword of the season". In March 2022, Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed that schools were becoming "grooming centers for gender identity radicals", dedicating an entire segment of her show to the topic a couple of weeks later. In April 2022, the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters published a study stating that within a three-week period spanning from March 17 to April 6, Fox News ran 170 segments on trans people, throughout which the network "repeatedly invoked the long-debunked myth that trans people pose a threat to minors and seek to groom them".
Education
Anti-LGBT curriculum laws
In July 2022, a wave of anti-LGBT curriculum resurgence saw ten such laws beginning to take effect in six different states. Some states enacting these new laws appear to have mirrored similar laws from other states.