Marjorie Taylor Greene calls trans teacher who received death threats a “groomer”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had a short reply to a video of a transgender teacher and camp counselor explaining the training they had to go through to work at a queer summer camp: “G-R-O-O-M-E-R-S.”

The teacher, who just goes by “Flint” on social media, had been the target of several segments on Fox News last year because they posted a video of their LGBTQ+-inclusive books that were available for juniors and seniors involved in their schools’ queer student alliance. The right-wing attention led to death threats – one specifically mentioned “multiple pipe bombs in [Flint’s] classroom” and throughout their school – and accusations of “child abuse” for making the books available to older teens.

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Flint’s latest video is not sexual in nature and describes how hard it is to become a counselor at the summer camp they work at.

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“I swear it was harder to get hired here than it was to get into grad school,” they said in the video. They described some of the workshops they are presenting this summer and said that they had attended “anti-racism and anti-bias training and mental health screenings, neurodiversity training, way more than I’ve ever done for public education. Because we take the health, safety, and growth of these kids very seriously. I’m surrounded by some of the most capable people I’ve ever met.”

The extreme anti-LGBTQ+ activist Chaya Raichik – who goes by “LibsofTikTok” on Twitter – accused Flint of giving workshops on “trans masculinity and anti-racism” while dressed in drag (Flint actually says they received anti-racism training, not that they’re giving a workshop on that topic).

And Greene called Flint a groomer, a term used to describe child sex abusers.

G-R-O-O-M-E-R-S https://t.co/Kk2x1Vyh8d

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) July 21, 2023

Flint’s TikTok and Instagram accounts are currently set to private.

In another tweet, Greene said that summer camp should have kids “outside getting dirt under their fingernails, learning to hunt and fish, building bonfires, enjoying God’s creation.”

“Is Queer camp going to dress kids in drag as grooming adults throw dollar bills at them?” she asked, even though there is no indication that any of that would be happening from Flint’s video. Raichik replied with the suggestion that they’d “be teaching kids to cross dress and shake their bodies provocatively while barely clothed as adults clap along and throw cash at them like prostitutes.”

While Flint didn’t say what summer camp they work at, queer summer camps are about creating a safe space for generally older LGBTQ+ teens to learn about leadership and get the tools they need to advocate for themselves in the outside world while building self-esteem.

Raichik and Greene saw the idea of safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth as an opportunity to make demeaning sexual comments about the minors, queer young people often concerned with fighting bullying and discrimination while establishing and expressing their identities.

Kids should be outside getting dirt under their fingernails, learning to hunt and fish, building bonfires, enjoying God’s creation.

Is Queer camp going to dress kids in drag as grooming adults throw dollar bills at them?

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) July 21, 2023

In September 2022, Flint was outed and deadnamed in a Fox News article for posting a TikTok video featuring their personally curated “queer library” of roughly 200 LGBTQ+-inclusive books. The collection wasn’t used in daily classroom instruction but was made accessible over the past five years to juniors and seniors involved in an extracurricular queer student alliance.

Fox News wrote that one of the collection’s books, Juliet Takes a Breath, “contains extremely graphic imagery of sex between women.” Another book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Being Trans… “discusses BDSM, fetishes and a kink social media networking site [FetLife],” Fox News wrote. Yet another book, This Book is Gay, mentions sex toys, anal sex, bathhouses, orgies, and other sexual topics, Fox News mentioned.

Flint admitted that they hadn’t personally read every page of every book in their collection. The Fox News story compelled Flint’s school district to review books in all district libraries and to remove four books from Flint’s collection by September 2022. Fox News never mentioned the books’ removal in any of its follow-up articles.

The day after Fox News published its first article, someone called Flint’s school threatened to burn it down while the kids were still inside. That same day, Flint also received messages from four different email addresses calling them a “groomer” and calling their library “nothing short of child abuse.”

Fox News subsequently published four follow-up articles, all written by Hannah Grossman that largely recounted the aforementioned books’ sexual content while offering barely any new information. The most recent article was published on March 18, 2023.

After Fox News published its subsequent articles, a person identifying themself as “Zamina Tamaro” emailed a bomb threat to the school. Tamaro accused school administrators of being “child abusers” and tolerating “sexually deviant and degenerate behavior from its staff.”

“We won’t tolerate this, we won’t stand idly which is why we placed multiple pipe bombs in [Flint’s] classroom, as well as in other locations in the high school,” the threat said. Tamaro said that they had also planted bombs at the district superintendent’s home, its education center, and Flint’s home. The bombs had “been rigged with explosives [that] will detonate shortly after receiving this email,” the email claimed.

“The school district is equally as bad for ENCOURAGING this degeneracy,” Tamaro’s threat continued. “F**k you all, we’ll see you burn in hell.”

An investigation found no explosive devices. The FBI and Orange County School District Cyber Crime Detail are continuing to investigate the threat, The Capistrano Dispatch reported at the time.

“It was hugely traumatic,” Flint said of the threats. “I’d never been the focus of any kind of national attention, especially national attention that was homophobic. [The Fox News coverage] characterizes me as a predator, as someone who is intentionally and maliciously grooming and indoctrinating children for an agenda, which is bonkers.”