The new religion

To add to the commentary about the UK, I think the problems in the new gender ideology became more noticed in the UK earlier because of the concrete plans to change the GRA, and that was discussed and written about.

My hope is that UK is just ahead in terms of time and that some needed resistance to the most extreme demands will be created elsewhere, too. In a way the wizard had to come out from behind the curtain in the UK while he is still managing things from the back of the stage in other countries.

In other words general knowledge about what the rights are the trans activists demand (including the right to alter language without any democratic consultations) is really scarce in other countries, and most people think that transgender means only someone who has struggled for decades, has had extensive surgery, suffers greatly from gender dysphoria, and that being kind towards that group exacts no costs elsewhere and threatens no rights of others.

They have no idea how wide the tent now is or what the bundle of trans rights demands actually contains. But as long as men are not at all threatened by being turned into ejaculators and penis-havers we are not going to see the kind of resistance that would be needed. That's probably exactly why men have been left undisturbed.

I am beginning to wonder if what has left British women particularly impervious to the siren call of this new religion has been our lack of religiosity as a country

I have wondered the same thing. I've also thought that there is something different about the UK (especially from the US) in terms of our irreverence to political ideologies as a whole. We're not a country that draws big political rallies and marches. We don't glorify our politicians. For the most part we're pretty cynical and apathetic to it all, especially when it involves being told "what to think".

The reality is that most normal people in the UK will not subscribe to gender wang (as demonstrated by a cursory look at the comments under any related Daily Mail article). It really is a subset of people who are actively preaching this.

Similarities to a cult (as pointed out): "no debate," persecuting blasphemers, anger against women, science erased by magical thinking. Actually it goes even further: any inconvenient material reality is erased and unspeakable.

Seems pretty clear. If it looks and walks and quacks like a cult, it's a cult. Which leaves the question of how to tackle a mass delusion which came riding to the rescue of patriarchy just when it seemed all was lost.

No idea. You can't use reason, as OP says. They wouldn't recognize reason if it bit them. We don't have power. What else is there?

I suppose one could try to start a countervailing story, one that dreams the world where we could all live our lives in peace. (Technical problem: I don't know any messiahs. Do you?) But it seems to me that people aren't really interested in beautiful dreams right now anyway. They'd rather have something that feeds their fears.

What I have seen on Twitter is that trans activists don't allow any debate at all, but even if they did it seems that most are not actually terribly well educated about the theories underlying their own activism. Mostly I see mantras (trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary are nonbinary, #nodebate) and references to the high rates of suffering among transgender women, including incorrect statistical data and so on.

I agree that faith-based views are difficult to change. The only cases I know of resulted from major catastrophic events in the lives of believers, combined with lack of help from their religious organizations.

It would certainly be interesting to see how far adherence to organised religion maps directly to organised gender identitarianism aka transactivism.

That’s a really interesting idea. Initially I thought that doesn’t really hold for Scandinavia, but on closer inspection I think it actually does.
Within Scandinavia Norway has traditionally had stronger religious ties. (I think something to do with more smaller communities living in harshish conditions along the fiords, compared with Denmark and Sweden, but don’t quote me on that.)

Norway has just introduced totalitarian hate-speech laws, effectively banning feminism (of the old fashioned womancentred variety). Sweden has put the brakes on transitioning of children, and Denmark is floundering about a bit behind everyone else. Danish feminists are looking to the UK for inspiration, and like the UK, Denmark doesn’t have a very strong tradition of religiosity.