He began to believe it was true
But it’s definitely not a social contagion at all, definitely not.
Ollie Davies was 26 years old and at the lowest ebb of his life when he made a decision to come out as a trans woman.
Estranged from his family, he was suffering depression, anxiety and behavioural problems as well as a crisis of self-identity. He existed in what felt like a dissociative state. “I felt as if I had no free will,” Mr Davies says. “I was completely nihilistic and lonely and self-hating and had no self-esteem. I was experiencing a total loss of identity and lack of sense of self.”
Mr Davies, who was openly bisexual, had never questioned his gender identity as a child or young adult. But when people within his group of queer activist friends repeatedly suggested to him that he was trans, he began to believe it was true.
“Ultimately it came from suggestions from others, people just started suggesting that I question my gender,” Mr Davies said.
That’s not possible. It never happens. People never suggest. It all comes from Within. It’s a condition of The Soul.
When Mr Davies announced his decision to transition, the affirmation was immediate and intoxicating.
“Everyone I knew put trans people on a pedestal,” Mr Davies says. “It was fashionable. I knew it would be celebrated and promoted. At first it was euphoric. I felt like coming out as trans was my coming home and the key to everything that was wrong in my life.”
On a pedestal? Fashionable? Celebrated and promoted? But how can that be when we’re told it’s the most vulnerable, the most despised, the most persecuted?
Trans health doctors under AusPath insist a mental health assessment is not required in order to facilitate a person to transition because “being trans is not a pathology”.
That seems like a remarkably irrelevant “because.” The issue is whether doctors should be messing around with people’s bodies in very drastic ways simply on the strength of assertions of being the opposite sex.
Mr Davies believes that if doctors probe the motivations of many young people who present with gender confusion, they would discover external factors were sometimes heavily at play.
“I think there is a massive population of people who actually don’t have gender dysphoria who are now either being pushed toward or themselves being drawn toward this gender affirmative care pathway,” he says.
“It has infiltrated the culture, it comes from doctors, it comes from the school curriculum, it comes from the media, it comes from social media, it comes from the peak LGBTQIA+ organisations and the marketing that they put out, it’s everywhere, telling you if you don’t feel like you fit the stereotype, you might be trans. For me, it felt like I’d pretty much been involved in a cult.”
Telling you if you don’t feel like you fit the stereotype, you might be trans and if you are you will be praised and flattered and all but deified. Why would you not take the bait?
For people suffering from depression and anxiety, having everyone tell them they are beautiful, they are special…that can be pretty heady. When it seems like no one understands you, having someone who seems to is almost certain to be a feel-good thing. When the world seems hostile, the trans world online welcomes them with open arms and warm words…and it feels good.
Nope, no co-morbidities here.
Some Souls are fixed and solid. Some souls are Fluid (Hi Pippa!). My own thought is they’re all vapour.
Yes, the love-bombing.
Bingo.
This cult is different, though, in that so many who aren’t a part of it (in terms of being trans-identied themselves) shill for it and defend it to the point of violence. Self-righteous defense of a “marginalized, oppressed minority” only goes so far, given how many trans-activist, heterosexual beardy-bros would likely refuse to include TiMs in their dating pool. The ability to unleash their misogyny in the cause of the “right side of history” might exlain some of it, but not the degree of institutional capture. How many non-Catholics, non-Muslims, non-Scientologists, etc. actively promote, recruit for, and defend these other cults? How much media coverage of these other belief systems steps as far away from journalistic neutrality in the degree of distortion and obfuscation in their stories on them, as it does in the case for gender ideology?
…until they detransition. Then you’re an evil apostate who was never “really trans” in the first place.
“Being trans is not a pathology” and “Trans people require gender-affirming medical treatment” is a flat-out contradiction. Medical treatment is only necessary when there is some dysfunction that needs repair or accommodation. This is like the inverse of homeopathic medicine’s claims to have no side-effects (while still having a desired effect).
I bet if these doctors were confronted by a patient demanding the amputation of a perfectly healthy arm or leg because it was “alien” and “didn’t belong to them”, their first response would not be to say “You’re absolutely right! Let’s get you prepped for surgery!” They would arrange for counselling to get them to understand that the limb was actually theirs; they would try to talk them out of such a drastic, irrevocable step, one that would needlessly cripple them for life. Why is it with “gender affirming care,”
mutilationsurgery is so high on the list of options, when it should be a last resort?Panicked trans pushers realize they need to make “conversion therapy” illegal around the world before everyone wakes up.
Well, I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.
Cults prey on lonely people, especially those with developmental disorders (such as autism in my case), mental illnesses, and those with LGB sexualities. The genuinely marginalised. The cult recognises the fact that marginalised people are desperate to belong anywhere where they are accepted; and so, along with the love bombing, uses mantras and other methods to persuade the marks that they were and are marginalised because they are trans, thus making the cult even more attractive. Coupled with the very powerful suggestion in speeches and publicity materials that anyone questioning an acolyte’s declared ‘trans’ status is, ipso facto, hostile to the person themselves and wishes them dead, and it becomes almost impossible to question the process. All religions and cults have some kind of initiation, after which it becomes even harder to leave (because of sunk costs). I was very fortunate that I’ve always had a reluctance to take any medications which aren’t absolutely vitally necessary, so I didn’t get onto the cross-sex hormones train, and that I was already a regular visitor to this place with a whole bunch of rational, sane, and kind people who were willing and able to question and explain how ‘trans’ is never the answer, however attractively it might package itself.
What if, stay with me here, gender dysphoria is precisely what you experienced? What if, and this is a radical idea, there’s no fundamental truth of being associated with dysphoria but instead only the fears and insecurities that we experience because of our sexed bodies, gendered cultures, and personal imperfections? What if gender dysphoria, wait for it, is bullshit used to infantalize the confused, justify paraphilias, supply narcissists, and validate the insecure?
What if it’s all a lie?
YNNB
Building upon “born this way”, the TRAs have done a great job of selling the idea that science has established that all other treatments are doomed to failure. One of the first things that really helped peak me was a podcast interview with a doctor who talked about the David Reimer case as proving the immutability of “gender”. The upshot of his spiel was basically that all your objections have already been debunked. By science. Everything out of the guy’s mouth was such obviously bad science and even worse logic that I could hardly believe I was hearing it. Most people, even most educated people of above average intelligence, would’ve been unlikely to recognize the errors of method and reasoning. They would have come away believing that science is completely on the TRAs’ side.
Nullius: your comment made me think of, oddly enough, of being an audiophile; a hobby rife with woo. I was a young but impecunious audiophile back in the 70’s and the engineering centric Stereo Review mag my bible. Fast forward to the early 2000nds and I wanted to put a good system together. Stereo Review was gone and the hobbyist press was full of stuff about being able to hear the difference in interconnect cables and speaker wire and electrical components like capacitors and resistors. Well, I thought, maybe there has been a new understanding of human hearing ability. Surely there is scientific backing for this. Everyone said so.
Of course, as with gender ideology, there wasn’t. Even a liberal arts guy like me could see it. Stereo Review was right all those years ago.
I put a damn fine system together for a reasonable price with plain old wire and no magic capacitors. Being handy with a soldering iron helped. And though I don’t check all the boxes for stereotypical masculinity, I’m still an adult human male: a man.