Originally a comment by Artymorty on If the rationally indefensible is the point.
I think the rationally indefensible behaviour is seen more among the activists who defend “trans” than by trans-identifying people themselves.
The trans population itself is small and mostly a hodgepodge of people in various states of mental disarray, disorder, and distress. (Well, plus a lot of horny chancers and charlatans.)
The progressives who back the movement are much more numerous than the trans-identifiers themselves, and this group, a great, rabid cheerleading squad, seems to be caught up in a spiral of tribalist-identitarian loyalism, and this spiral seems to be fueled in large part by the fact that the tenets at the heart of trans are plainly unbelievable.
Belief in extraordinarily unbelievable things is a remarkably consistent feature across cults and extreme religions. That’s probably got something to do with how it pits the rational part of the brain — the one that can detect bullshit if it actually applies itself to analyzing the thing — against the tribal part of the brain — the one that says anything that might threaten your tribe or separate you from it is a threat that must be shut off. Ergo: if your tribe believes something crazy, you must shut off your critical thinking function or you could be ousted from the group.
The internal conflict between the two impulses of the mind is like a Chinese finger trap: the harder your critical thinking mind tries to pull out, the more your tribal-loyalty mind tightens its grip.