The right’s latest conspiracy theory is queer fetuses

Right-wingers are now claiming that LGBTQ+ activists and members of the “Ivy League” are practicing “Neonatal Queer Theory,” a belief that doctors can “use sonograms to try and determine if a child is Queer in the womb.”

“This is some Ivy League bulls**t,” said James Lindsay, an anti-LGBTQ+ activist who has previously published hoax “research papers” seeking to discredit queer, gender, and critical race studies, while speaking on Calmversations, a right-wing broadcast hosted by Benjamin Boyce. A video clip of their chat was recently posted on the Mythinformer, a right-wing conspiracy theory account on X.

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“What they’re trying to do there is brainwash the parents to bring up the children in a queer accessible environment so that the scripting into sex category never properly occurs,” Lindsay claimed. Later, he said that activists are trying to pronounce unborn children as queer to “hijack” child development, using “receptive” teachers and uniformed and unprepared parents as ways to help propel “the whole cult dynamic” of queerness.

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In the video clip, Lindsay speaks with Boyce and Logan Lancing, author of The Woke Warpath and The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Health Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids.

“Neonatal Queer Theory,” as they put it, is non-existent. Searching for the term via the Google search engine only returns results for two re-posts of the aforementioned video on X. No biological tests can determine the sexual orientation of a person. Scientists believe that sexual orientations are determined by a combination of epigenetic and social factors.

It’s unsurprising that Lindsay would push such a conspiracy theory, as right-wingers have claimed for decades that LGBTQ+ people and their allies are “recruiting,” “indoctrinating,” and “grooming” children for sexual abuse and self-harm. This view has been cited as a reason to ban LGBTQ+ issues and policies in schools and to block minors from accessing gender-affirming care.

Lindsay himself is the second most prolific anti-LGBTQ+ tweeter in the United States. He helped popularize the anti-LGBTQ+ slur “groomer,” which insinuates that LGBTQ+ people and allies want to sexually abuse kids. He was suspended from Twitter for using the slur but was reinstated by the site’s new transphobic billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Lindsay has falsely suggested that the LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project is somehow associated with pedophilic grooming and has called a small federal government grant for educational drag performances “an act of political warfare.”

Notably, he hasn’t used his platform to speak out as ardently against widespread child sexual abuse in the Christian church nor has he partnered with any organizations that actually oppose such abuse or child sex trafficking.

Boyce has previously interviewed several “de-transitioners,” trans people who choose to resume living as the gender they were assigned at birth, calling them “damaged” and saying that they just needed to practice “self-acceptance” rather than transitioning.

While right-wingers often cite de-transitioners to delegitimize trans identity, de-transitioners represent a very small part of the trans adults, and they sometimes detransition because of the transphobic harassment and violence they face for living as out trans people.

Boyce has also interviewed Posie Parker, an anti-trans U.K. activist whose rallies are attended by neo-Nazis who call queer people “paedo freaks,” and Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a prominent transphobe who regularly equates trans people with misogynists, child sex predators, and mentally ill people who have succumbed to peer pressure. Shrier’s claim that young trans people have succumbed to “rapid onset gender dysphoria” has been debunked by recent studies.