Child Molesting Female Impersonators Are a Myth. Child Molesting Religious Males Are Not

“Perverts” are not coming for your children, disguised as transgendered persons, in your local department store bathroom.Far more likely- by orders of magnitude in fact- they’re coming for them in your church.That’s an arguably coarse statement, provocative and doubtlessly offensive to many. It’s also utterly correct. I know because I have prosecuted and/or consulted on cases involving the sexual abuse of children for almost 20 years.Opponents of Target’s new policy often insist that the issue isn’t hatred or intolerance against transgender persons. They’ll acknowledge, as they must, that no virtually no complaints of transgender persons- or even predatory persons in disguise as one- attacking a child or anyone else in a bathroom have been reported anywhere. No matter. The issue, they insist, is preventative. Allowing people who identify as transgendered into bathrooms other than their assigned gender, the argument goes, will create a floodgate of eager male pedophiles disguising themselves as women in order to gain access to little girls.Folks, that’s nonsense. It simply isn’t done that way. Child molesters almost always groom, not only children but the families and institutions to which they belong. They enter their victim’s lives as invited guests almost all of the time. They rarely prey on strangers, despite myths to the contrary, and when they do, it’s not through the use of feminine disguise. In fact, most child molesters identify as straight males. Most will not admit to abusing male victims (carrying a stigma of homosexuality or femininity) until threatened with a polygraph. Most identify as masculine, and would not deign to “put on a dress” in order to invade a restroom in search of a little girl. That’s just not what they do. And there’s no reason to do it; they get dozens of victims far more easily and with far less risk in their communities, usually as trusted figures.Obviously, no one can state with certainty that a child molester (only a subset of whom are pedophiles, by the way), would never seek access to children by exploiting these new policies. Without a doubt, some anecdotal example- however stretched in terms of its actual relevance- will be claimed somewhere in a nation of 300 million.But the idea that the nation’s male child predators have been waiting with coiled excitement, wigs and lipstick in hand, to invade female restrooms in search of little girls, and that policies like Target’s are going to create a public health crisis of newly endured child abuse, is baseless, plain and simple. It’s frankly silly.But stoking the fears of parents with this baselessness is not silly. It’s dangerously misleading. The cold fact is that fear- in order to push back against policies like Target’s- is being sold by quite a few people who, to put it bluntly, do have a real problem with the idea of not only transgender people using bathrooms of their identified gender, but also with transgenders themselves. They see them as mentally-ill fetishists and largely immoral creatures. They assume that a rejection of gender norms goes hand-in-hand with sexual crime and abuse. Never mind that transgendered people are largely passive, reliably victimized and abused themselves, and far less likely to hurt anyone than, say, a straight, cisgendered, and religious male, which is how most child molesters describe themselves.And yes, I said “religious.” That’s because most child molesters- 93% in one study- claim they are religious. My former boss and lifetime mentor, Victor Vieth, probably the most prominent legal child protection professional in the U.S. and beyond, speaks often on this topic as a devout man of faith himself. What he points out, while doing crucial work with other decent people of faith in order to make religious communities safer, is that most child molesters identify or claim to be religious, and then purposely exploit religious environments and the usually decent, trusting and forgiving people within them.I remain a practicing Roman Catholic and am in no way anti-religion in a general sense. I also understand that a parent can be wary of their own church, mosque or synagogue and still fear for their children in other circumstances. But an uproar about disguised child molesters seeking out little girls in public bathrooms is utterly misplaced, and in many cases disingenuous and cynical. It’s also dangerously misleading, especially by religious people when their own environments are far more dangerous than any department store bathroom.