AOC expertly shuts down ‘groomer’ panic, says ‘real threat’ to women is straight men

Politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has, once again, spoken up for the LGBTQ+ community, using her own experiences to prove that LGBTQ+ people are no threat to women.

The New York Democratic representative, known as AOC, told Instagram followers the majority of attacks on women "are from straight men" while at the same time dispelling claims that queer people are somehow a danger.

In her Instagram post, AOC explained she was harassed by a man for the first time when she was in her early teens.

"I still had braces in my teeth," she said.

"If you ask a lot of women about the first time that they had encountered something like that, they will often say 11, 12, 13, 14 years old."

She added that she could barely believe how many stories she and "almost every woman" have about being harassed by heterosexual men, and that anti-LGBTQ+ "groomer" rhetoric is a way to refrain from addressing the sheer volume of sexual assaults perpetrated by straight men.

"When you actually look at who is committing this abuse, it's majority straight men," she said.

"Many of these disgusting and insinuating attacks on trans and LGBT people are actually projections of what predatory cisgender, and often straight, men do when left in the presence of women."

Statistics from the Boston Area R*pe Crisis Center (BARCC), which AOC cited in her video, found that 82 per cent of those suspected of committing child sexual abuse were, or had been, in a heterosexual relationship.

Additionally, it found that the risk of a child being sexually assaulted by his or her parent's heterosexual partner was 100 times greater than by someone who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual (0.7 per cent of cases).

The not-for-profit organisation's research also revealed that, on average, 60 per cent of 103 transgender women surveyed in Massachusetts had been forced to have s*x against their will at some point, while more than a third (38 per cent) suffered sexual assault on numerous occasions.

"Instead of getting you to challenge the patriarchy, they're trying to get you to challenge the very gender expressiveness that challenges patriarchy," AOC said.

"Don't get it twisted, because a lot of people attacking drag are projecting."