A lawyer is going viral with TikToks countering claims that trans people are a danger to kids. The real hotbed of sex abuse, she said, is church.

• Kristen Browde makes viral TikTok posts listing people accused of sex crimes against children.

• Her point is to push back on the narrative that trans people or drag queens often abuse kids.

• Instead, per Browde and other sources of data, many cases are linked to churches.

When attorney Kristen Browde first downloaded TikTok, the app assumed she, a 70-year-old white woman, "must be a Trump supporter."

"All I saw was Trump flotillas and Trump trucks," Browde told Insider. "It pretty quickly figured out that that really wasn't going to work with me."

Browde, a divorce/family lawyer now has over 300,000 followers on TikTok. Lately her popularity has been fueled by her series where she shares weekly lists of people charged with and convicted of sex crimes against children.

(While Browde's posts list convictions and charges together, those who are charged have yet to be put on trial and may ultimately be found not guilty.)

The argument put forward by Browde is that her lists are not overwhelmingly LGBTQ people, despite warnings from elected leaders that trans people may prey on kids. Instead, they are often connected to churches.

Browde said her posts are responding to the nationwide panic over LGBTQ people being around children, perpetuated by right-wing figures including Fox News' Tucker Carlson and Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the divisive Twitter account LibsofTikTok.

In the past four weeks of her series, Browde noted that the majority of people in her lists have been pastors, not drag queens or trans people.

She has so far listed 38 religious figures, four school officials, two police officers, and three politicians.

"The series has shown that with politicians and tabloids screeching about transgender people and drag queens, they're looking in the wrong direction," Browde told Insider. "Because those are not the people who are abusing children. Not in the slightest."

Browde told Insider she got the idea to start listing these cases when she returned to Florida to take on her vice president role, and the outgoing president had made a speech in which he read a list of names.

"He said, you don't know these names, but let me tell you who they are," Browde said, paraphrasing the man. "These are priests and pastors who've been arrested in the past week" on allegations of sexually abusing children.

The former president pointed Browde to the blog Joe My God, which aggregates news stories about child sexual abuse in the US. "I was like, OK, this might be a great TikTok," Browde said, using this information as well as her own research to start finding cases of child sexual abuse that made the news.

There are no official statistics documenting the characteristics of child sex abusers — but high-profile cases have been linked to churchgoing.

A recent review by the UK government into child sexual abuse found that religious settings were the second most common institutions for child abuse to occur, after schools.

"In the past week there have been 17 arrests or convictions of adults accused of having sex with children," Browde said in her first TikTok, which has been viewed 1.4 million times. "Of those 17, 14 were pastors or youth pastors at Christian churches. One was the husband of a youth pastor. One a police officer. None were drag queens."

Browde said this was "unsurprising" because the majority of perpetrators of sex crimes have "power and access to children." There have been cases of drag queens committing these kinds of crimes in the past, and there will be again, she added. "But they're so disproportionately below the occurrence in general society," she argued.

Browde's list is not an exhaustive one, but she is confident that she's catching the majority by monitoring news reports.

A question she gets asked a lot is how she knows the perpetrators of these crimes don't participate in drag in their free time. In response, she said she doubted this was true — claiming that if it were the case, news media and prosecutors "would never stop shouting about it."

Browde said the attention on the LGBTQ community was misdirected, especially in light of well-documented cases of child abuse in churches, particularly Catholic ones.

In 2002, The Boston Globe reported an explosive series of stories which uncovered a culture of concealing sexual abuse towards children by priests in the Catholic Church, leading to a global reckoning for the clergy and the Vatican. Similar cover-ups were reported internationally, including in the UK, Canada, Australia, and many European countries, leading to thousands of accusations.

Similar allegations continue to the present day — like a series of lawsuits, reported by the Guardian, against the LA-based International Churches of Christ.

Browde said she has no intention of telling people not to take their children to church. "But don't take your kid to church and say they're safe there when they're not," she said.

She also doesn't believe she's going to change the minds of extremists who hate trans people like her. Rather, she's hoping to reach the open-minded parents and persuade them that being trans is "simply not a factor" in whether someone is likely to be a criminal.

"Being transgender is no more an indicator of whether you're a good person or whether you're a bad person, than whether you're right or left-handed," Browde said. "If you were a good person before you were out, you're probably still a good person afterwards. Just a hell of a lot happier, and probably better dressed."

Overall, she hopes her community will stop being targeted unfairly.

"I think that that movement will implode and we just have to help it," she said. "I hope these TikToks in some small measure contribute to that."

Read the original article on Insider