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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.
According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight. Where is the medical establishment there? What about the 8.4% of kids on psych meds, some of whom are on them involuntarily?
Also maybe it’s because I don’t live in America, but in my modern Western country, transitioning isn’t a matter of waltzing into a clinic and getting your breasts chopped. Just getting evaluated by the gender service takes upward of 5 years, and you need to be vetted by a series of psychologists. Getting any kind of surgery requires an official gender identity disorder diagnosis and a letter from 2 separate professionals (and good luck getting those). Sure, you can go private - have you got ten thousand pounds in cash? You have to be incredibly dedicated, child or adult, to go through this system.
And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill. You can get all sorts of crazy ridiculous procedures, even as a minor, if you have more money then sense. Is it not absolutely disproportionate to have so much air time occupied to whatever most likely very low % of those few hundred kids from privileged backgrounds that might regret it later?
I'm just going to assume your numbers are true. I agree, in the grand scheme of things, the kids being trans issue is not as important as compared to many issues you've identified in terms of scale and impact on our personal lives.
It's also not as small as you present it to be. First five sources I found had higher amounts. Here's one for example:
There are also estimates that 300,000 of youths aged 13-17 identify as trans (Data up to 2020, the number is probably higher today). It's an issue because the numbers are growing.
You also bring up school shootings, which according to your numbers is nearly as small as the trans issue. Anyone can get shot? Well anyone can have kids and their kids might go on puberty blockers, which there seems to more and more evidence that these things are not fully reversible and may have permanent effects.
The trans issue seems to be pushed more and more into my face these days, from both an anti and pro trans perspective. There are examples that the trans issue is impacting our daily lives. For example, does your company enforce or encourage people to put pronouns on their email/profile? Why do we need to do that? For 99.99% of people it should be obvious what your gender is. I work with a lot of different companies due to my industry and more and more companies are implementing pronouns into their HR systems.
We're also seeing trans ideas showing up in our culture through movies, books, video games, tv shows, etc. And I'll be honest, more of then than not, the experience is ruined by the inclusion of a trans person, because it's usually forced into for the sake of diversity and inclusion rather than for the sake of telling an interesting story. The Japanese seem to do better job of exploring these ideas. Inside Mari is a manga I read many years ago that explores the idea of a man waking up in a woman's body. It displays the experience of dysphoria quite well, so a story that explores trans issues can still be interesting. But so many modern entertainment just want to push it into my face now, and it's executed horribly.
Do you care about women's rights/issues? The common example is the trans in women's athletic competitions. I don't know how anyone who claims to support women's right can also support having trans people in women's athletic competitions. We're seeing trans athletes dominate the space, taking away opportunities for women. There's a reason we have a women's only league/competition in so many different sports.
It's also impacting language and the way we speak. I know it's a bit of a meme, but there are people who can't even define what is a woman anymore. I'm pretty sure the attempt to remove gender from gendered languages e.g. saying latinx instead of latino/latina is related to the trans movement. It's no longer pregnant women, it's pregnant people, because now a man can get pregnant. If trans people are such a small percentage of the population, why are so many people trying to reshape our language and the way we speak to be inclusive of such a small percentage of the population?
And if you ever engage in a discussion about trans issues and say anything that could be anti trans, so many people seem to get offended and will even make attempts to dox you, get you fired, yell at you, scream in your face, call you Nazi scum, or any other myriad of rude and toxic behavior. And many of these people are activist types that try to change culture and society. The reason Jordan Peterson got famous in 2017 is because trans activist types recorded themselves confronting him about his views on Canada's Bill C-16. This is over 6 years ago, has the trans issue gotten better or worse since then? I remember reddit was fawning over this man around that time, now he's actively hated and despised. More and more young people support the idea that misgendering should be a crime. It seems to me that the trans issues have only become more prevalent in our lives.
I used to not care about trans issues. But when the trans issues start popping up over so many different areas of life, and many of the loudest proponents for the trans issues seem to be angry, anti-intellectual activist types, well it makes me want to be on the opposing side. Given the impact the trans movement has had on our modern culture and society, I'm not sure I can agree trans issues are no longer irrelevant in our lives anymore. It certainly doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
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