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So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
I assume you’re talking about the Netflix Escaping Twin Flames, rather than the slightly older Amazon Escaping Twin Flames Universe. Kind of weird that they were produced so closely; I doubt they have much difference in content or messaging.
With that out of the way.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World, and now I feel obligated to defend the motte’s favorite punching bag. First: I do not think child transition is a good thing. I do not support people or charities endorsing it, implementing it, or making it school policy. Same goes for drag queen story hour, which gives me the same uncomfortable feeling as most Americans. The broader umbrella of “gender-affirming care” is something that I think is oversold, even a fad, but I would not deny it to consenting adults. I understand that you think the whole edifice is literally fake and gay. That’s no excuse for the Worst Argument.
The best of your comparisons between transgender advocacy and Twin Flames is the final ritual/medical practice. I have some objections there, mostly due to selection bias, but let’s call it a good comparison. Sure, pushing someone to undertake surgery is an extremely suspect way to shore up one’s own power.
Everything else gets shakier. Where’s the equivalent to cult control of income? To struggle sessions? Hey, sometimes people get therapy, which is kind of like being convinced to be doing something, which is kind of like what a cult would do. Or worse—sometimes they imitate their friends. Clearly, that must be further evidence of cult behavior.
One of the signature features of cults, one you mention yourself, is control of information. I agree that kids in public schools are relatively controlled. The cult of George Washington has held power for too long, and our kids are indoctrinated that lying about cherry trees is bad. Yes, schools teach things to children. Your legitimate objections to what they’re teaching is not evidence of a cult.
It’s almost a moot point, given that the youngest generation has more access to information than any before. They can go on their smartphones and find traditional gender roles. Why don’t they? How did teachers suddenly gain mythical powers of narrative control for this one subject?
The common thread, here, is that there is more than one explanation for what you’re noticing. Kids do copy their friends and take adults at their word, just as they do for everything else. Adults in positions of power are using this to promote politics or aesthetics, just as they do for everything else. You might have seen such phenomena in a cult documentary, or you might have seen it in a chess club, on a BBS, in a small 1800s town. It’s not unique to cults.
But the key piece, the one most conspicuous in its absence, is the leader. Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader. It’s just the first thing people think about. The central example, as it were. Hence my accusations of Worst Argument.
You have one interesting piece of evidence: both this cult and these people pushed members towards invasive, extreme surgery. You have a smattering of weak evidence: trans advocates do a bunch of stuff which sort of, if you squint, looks like cult behavior instead of regular social dynamics. And you ignore any missing pieces because you’ve already made up your mind. Trans bad, cultists bad, therefore trans cultists.
And everyone clapped.
Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.
The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.
I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.
And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.
I don’t believe that most trans communities come close to the coordinated, authoritarian shunning practiced by the central examples of cults.
An athlete or prisoner exploiting gender categories is not the same as a leader exploiting his follower’s social dependencies. There is a difference in agency, in blame.
Labeling trans activism a cult is about eliding those differences. It’s about taking the same no-bad-wrong reaction we reflexively apply to Jim Jones, and applying it to anyone who’s sufficiently pro-trans. Sure, a doctor who gets invited to certain conferences has social and financial reasons to stay the course. Does that mean we can expect him to break out the Flavor-Aid?
In light of the fact that at least one study found that gender reassignment surgery dramatically increased the risk of suicide among trans people (compared to a control group of trans people who didn't undergo gender reassignment surgery), the analogy may be more apt than you strictly intended.
For what it's worth, I didn't interpret the OP's post as arguing "trans is a cult" (although maybe that's how they intended it, I dunno). I have a great deal of compassion for people dealing with gender dysphoria, fully support the rights of adults to do with their bodies as they wish (admittedly perhaps not on the taxpayer's dime), and think that medical transition is the right choice for some trans people.
All that being said, I believe that a lot of trans communities (subreddits and the like) are extremely creepy, and the similarities they exhibit with Jim Jones and co. are more than just unhappy accidents: strikingly similar patterns of indoctrination, isolation, encouraging hatred and distrust of heretics and apostates, explaining away of reasonable questions and cognitive dissonance. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticising this conduct, any more than we would when the Twin Flames people do it - if anything I think we have a social responsibility to do it (doubly so when so many people who get sucked into these communities are underage). The trans movement isn't reducible to these creepy subreddits (obviously, given that gender dysphoria predates the internet by decades). But I also don't think we're Chinese robbering the whole movement by pointing out a small handful of subreddits with subscribers in three digits. /r/egg_irl has 315k subscribers, which is an appreciable fraction of the entire trans population of the US. /r/FTM has 212k.
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David Miscavige does not inspire the same levels of personal loyalty and devotion as L. Ron Hubbard did, but he makes up for it by being every bit as dictatorially controlling.
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Scientology actually unquestionably has a leader, David Miscavige, who has also continued all the cult stuff that Hubbard did. He's not a charismatic leader, but he doesn't need to be: like in numerous cults and organizations, he can just always refer to the charismatic original founder's, who is still "at some level" regarded the leader, authority. Miscavige's identity is hardly secret either, it's among the first things one learns if one looks at Scientology at any level (and he featured in South Park's scientology episode etc.)
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No, you haven't. If someone claims that everyone should be let out of jail, and you say "that means we'd let even murderers and rapists out of jail", they can't respond "that's the Worst Argument in the World, most prisoners in jail are in there for nonviolent crimes". You judge how bad the standard is by looking at the worst case, not at the average case.
While most transgendered people are not in cults, the left has no principled standards about how to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else. You're just not supposed to gatekeep at all, and the policy of not gatekeeping deserves to be judged by the worst cases that it enables, not the cases they would like you to think about.
Who’s arguing to let everyone out of jail in this analogy?
That’s a lot more cautious, and more defensible, than what the OP was going for.
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This is tragically wrong, and wildly so. I'm not (that) old and in middle school buddies used to send me goatse, lemonparty, 2girls1cup, god only knows what else over the public school wifi without any thought of oversight or repercussion. I can't even come up with a joke for how much things have changed - it's so out of control and sad - clinical, sterile, and politically corrected.
Where are those promoted these days? Genuinely asking, because I'd like to be there
It wasn't magic, or a mystery. They openly refused to hire, fired, de-platformed, or otherwise silenced anyone who disagreed. Not just on 'this one subject' - but certainly on this one successfully. Vaccines also come to mind. Or masks. These people forced toddlers to wear masks, day after day, for a long time.
Anywhere but here it would seem extremely odd you were still shrugging like 'it's a moot point' and asserting they didn't 'suddenly gain mythical powers.' People have fought total wars for generations over whether or not the cracker was actually Christ. 'Men can be women, actually, even at 3'?
C'mon.
Middle schoolers still share weird shit with each other in private discord servers/dms. I'm not sure if the prevalence of that over the whole population has increased or decreased, but it's still there.
I had thought it was obvious that wasn't my point - my point was that once upon a time 'the youngest generation' genuinely did have more access to information than any before and that is not this 'youngest generation'. You used to be able to search for almost literally anything on youtube and watch full on independent documentaries about it. Now all the results are BBC or CNN or whatever.
It was the example you gave. I'm still not sure this is true though? I think it's directionally true - see how many subreddits are banned - but it's not that true. Even pre-elon, there were a lot of nazis on twitter. There were and are a lot of nazis on tiktok. Communists, too. Lots of weird fetish stuff too. Youtube is still mostly native creators, BBC and CNN are a very small fraction of the views.
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I didn't see it necessarily as trans ideology meeting every aspect of a cult just that there are obvious parallels.
The cult dynamics are most apparent perhaps in social media groups, where there is love-bombing, sanctioning and social games to influence vulnerable new members by the group and older figures, moderators acting as the cult leaders. These are places where teenage angst will be helpfully interpreted as a sign you're probably trans, and doubt about transitioning framed as internalised transphobia, or a need to stop listening to others or going to other places on the internet and just stay on 'trans-friendly sites'.
I think the current ideology has cult like manifestation but that it's better described as a culture-bound syndrome, or egregore, though that's a more nebulous concept.
There are several ways in which trans communities can resemble cults. These are also ways that other groups often resemble cults. Niche nerd hobbies are a good example.
Conversely, when I look at things that are very cult-specific, like the type of leadership, I find that trans spaces don’t have them. This may be oversight on my part—responses are certainly eager to give me anecdotes for the opposite!
The people I know who transitioned did dive into trans-friendly communities, divest from mainstream circles at the slightest hint of transphobia, and surround themselves with like-minded people. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t coercive at all. Instead, there was something missing or distressing in their lives, and the social apparatus of transgender spaces offered an alternative. I think this is a lot closer to your culture-bound label than it is to OP’s choice of cults.
I agree with your post here. I think the word cult is mostly just being used as a snarl word to advertise to everyone how much the speaker doesn't like transpeople. That's not to say that the trans community is flawless and does nothing wrong - I think there are serious issues with how they present themselves and act, but using cult to describe them is just incorrect.
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I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.
Agreed, the second part of what you talk about is what I am referring to by a culture bound syndrome, but there's also explicit manifestations that if not exactly characteristic of cults, are cult like. It's a modern social construction/transhuman cult perhaps. Religious belief is another relevant paradigm. I feel like we're arguing in the margins.
Have you read The Ballad of MsScribe?
Ah ha, yes perhaps my comment needs a few caveats, great link :) To be fair I was thinking real life woodworking clubs or walking groups, not internet fan-fiction clubs but on reflection I can see all sorts of human behaviour would be out there regardless.
I think cults are probably on a spectrum, where different degree ultimately separates into different kinds.
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Ummm....
Maybe the way the cult will get you fired from your job if you get too heretical, or alternatively get you some sweet DIE points to help with a better job if you are one of the stunning and brave ones?
(I mean I don't necessarily disagree with your thrust here, but I'm not sure the line between 'regular social dynamics' and 'cult behaviour' is as bright as I'd like for literally anything these days. See "You know what nobody hates each other about yet?")
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Have you seen the reaction to Contra points saying she doesn't like being asked about pronouns? Have you ever seen how they treat detransitioners?
Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.
If this is they key than the case falls flat on it's face. I straight up disagree a cult needs to have a leader.
Why is it bad to give people more information to make a decision? That seems like the opposite of controlling information!
I was referring to their profiles on critics of transgender medicine.
How did you miss the part where I said "tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up"? You quoted the text!
Well the way you phrased your comment made it sound like transgendermap or Shinigami Eyes were themselves the problem, rather than the way people use them.
They are themselves the problem. Shinigami Eyes is literally an app for marking social media accounts as TERFs so you can dismiss them (at best). Likewise the problem with the profiles written by transgendermap.com isn't the people who read them, it's the people who write them. Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.
This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.
This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can do their own evaluation.
At this point I have to ask you, how do you think cults do control of information?
...dismiss her, and all the groups she's involved in, without ever engaging with them directly.
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You're all for the app that marks social media accounts as Jewish then, presumably?
What do you imagine my objection to this app would be?
That's interesting - I'd personally find it distasteful at best but can't but into a short sentence why. Let me think on it
Are we talking about the jew finder or the TERF finder? For starters, being ethnically jewish isn't a choice.
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It breaks the gentlemen's agreement that a pseudonym you encounter for the first time online is a blank slate.
Outside of 4chan and a handful of other places, that gentleman's agreement disappeared 10+ years ago when mass adoption of smartphones enabled normies to use the internet easily.
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I can. It's coordinating meanness against people who don't deserve it. That's always a bad thing.
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I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.
I'm lost, who's doing "Gish gallop debunking"?
Im over generalising and it's not the right term probably. I mean picking at the margins, like the 'well that doesn't sound exactly like a cult to me', when the OP was making parallels. Or, pointing out how rare it is, when the argument is not about volume.
It's not arguing the substantive points but rather deflecting in a manner that can be defended as being a legitimate argument, this hiding the true motive.
I may be projecting however...
Oh, that's fair enough as a criticism, but yeah "gish gallop" usually refers to spamming with sources in hopes of their sheer volume leaving your opponent unable to respond.
Yes, it's not the right term, I agree.
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I agree that other groups count as cults, too.
OP’s choice of comparisons had clear examples of financial and informational control, emotional abuse, and personal gain/leadership. I felt it was appropriate to argue that trans activism lacks some of those.
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My mental model of a cult is just "religion, but less popular," so I probably have a lot to learn about how cults work, but this comment and the one to which you are responding made me think about how cults and religions have to adapt to new environments. With respect to the information environment, obviously the 21st century is vastly different from - and more liberal than - anything that came before, which means information control is very difficult and thus will have to look very different from cults in the past in order to achieve similar things. The stuff you point to seem like decent analogues to past censorious technologies; they can't outright control what you have access to, so they manipulate which sources that you actually choose to access.
And this connects to my own observation from about a decade ago when I began to recognize the social justice movement of which I had been a part as a modern incarnation of religion. In this modern world of science, the traditional notions of faith are much more difficult to keep popular, and so religions that rely on that suffer, and religions that find other ways to get people to believe things prosper. The beauty of social justice (aka Critical Race Theory, aka "wokeness," aka "it's just basic human decency," aka "empathy") is that it allows people to enjoy all the beliefs of faith while eschewing most of the leap that's usually required. You still have to leap, but now you have a whole structure built to reassure you that this leap is totally justified because of historical reasons and very smart scholars who have done the Work and published in their peer reviewed journals to prove that simply listening and believing (the Right People) is the correct way. So if you're (like me at the time - whether that has changed now is something I honestly couldn't answer) someone who thinks of himself as non-religious and, in fact, better than those deluded religious people who cling to their faith, this is the perfect religion to latch onto.
However, I've also heard people call social justice a cult, and I would agree with that to the extent that a cult is just a less popular religion. But I also recognize that a cult is often more than just that, because being less popular comes with it many of its own complications, such as the whole recruitment process that can require much more brainwashing and thus much more control than a typical religion. I wonder what other cult-specific patterns we will see 21st century versions of, which route around the additional difficulties of the new environment. Obviously cutting one off from one's friends and family is a big one, but that seems to be just following the standard playbook as best as I can tell.
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Naming your app after the ability to see people's names so you can murder them with your grim reaper notebook certainly isn't great optics, eh?
It's anime and the target userbase is autists that live online. It goes with the territory.
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