I transitioned into a man - then changed my mind. Now the trans 'cult' that groomed me into changing sex has hounded me out of TWO cities

This.

I don't think the WAH WAH WAH she's a racist WAH WAH types realise how much they're pushing normal people to vote on the right, and the extent to which they're making Reform look like a more attractive option.

Because honestly, EVERYTHING is fucking racist including not wanting young children to be raped on an industrial scale according to these dimwits. To the point that the word 'racist' has lost its meaning.

I just feel tired as soon as I see such a kneejerk reaction. So what if she's now politically right wing - that doesn't make her detransitioner story any less awful. It sounds as if TRAs tried hard to completely destroy her life. I don't understand how not allowing her to work in a studio due to her beliefs and detransition is not discrimination, either. It must be.

Its interesting how the 'GC movement' (where my membership card??) are supposed to purge their ranks of wrong thinkers, lest any far righties be there.

But, the trans community never condemns awful treatment meted out by their brethren, either to detransistioners, or GC people.

On one hand, we are baddies because we don't condemn other people's, who share some of our views, thoughts.

On the other hand, real concrete actions by members of the trans community are shrugged off because, dear reader, she was asking for it.

Men's rights activism writ large.

Yes, it seems to be a case of "It didn't happen, and if it did it wasn't that bad, and if it was it's because she's a right wing bigot so she deserved it".

Conveniently forgetting that attending the march came after 4 years of being shunned, harassed and threatened by the cult.

So you agree with most people here about trans people.

Now will you condemn the treatment of former trans people (detransitioners) by TRAs?

The thinking seems to be 'she's a wrong un and she deserved it'

Which is nice. 🙄

Do you also think it's morally right to persecute someone for leaving a cult?

Do you actually have anything to say about that?

All this ridiculous 'bad company argument' and victim blaming.

"She's far right therefore she deserves everything she gets"

Er...no, not really.

She's still been treated really badly, whatever her political views. And if she's supporting a legal political party/ figure then so what? You might not approve. But her expectation to not be treated like shit shouldn't be contingent on her political views.

The whole 'yeah but she's far right' is just a distraction - 'look, squirrel'.

Are we really saying the only people who deserve to not be treated badly are people we agree with?

Because that sounds childish and cult like, and conveniently removes the focus from the people in the trans community who have treated her appallingly.

Its ironic really.

Sorry can't concur on there being any harassment of detransitioners from me. (I don't speak for anyone else)

This whole thread is about harassment of detransitioners. Do you have anything to say about this (apart from "it wasn't me")? All your posts seem to be suggesting that it didn't happen.

If the actions of your "community" are pushing reasonable people towards the far right, perhaps it's time to think about why that might be.

And just for clarity - I would be a 'fellow traveller' here : trans people should be respected as people and their human rights must be respected. Reasonable people can differ on the affordances society is able to make at any given time to accommodate trans people, of course bearing in mind the conflicting rights of others. This is not at all the same as licensing transphobia.

I’ve heard someone my age (46) say “when I was a teenager, if this stuff had been around, and someone told me boys could become girls and vice versa, I would totally have believed it”, and might have had surgery.

It is appalling that children are being “persuaded” about this before they are old enough to decide objectively.

I will say what I think here - the GC movement should cut off and disassociate those who want to ally with far-right groups and individuals

That would probably actually benefit the GC cause politically against the people you call 'TRAs' and others who you no doubt think of as fellow travellers.

But I'm saying this because in the bigger picture it's the morally right thing to do

Sorry can't concur on there being any harassment of detransitioners from me. (I don't speak for anyone else)

You might want to bear in mind people were appalled by, and campaigned against 'Tommy Robinson' during his EDL years long before issues like trans had anything like their present political salience.

There are reasons for that - people are directly affected by racism against themselves, their families and their communities in the UK already, without it being further stimulated. That's why criticism has to extend to those who would encourage or ally with his campaigning.

You are side-stepping the point I made. This was very clearly about the contrast between incontrovertible evidence of the cult-like behaviour of two authoritarian, minority groups in the UK vs the absence of such behaviour from the majority of the population, ie. gender critical / sex realists.

My post was in response to, and quoted, this post about detransitioner Philippa:

"On X, she recently retweeted Keen-Minshull’s statement, ‘Islam is incompatible with women’s rights’, and caused a stir while being photographed for this piece, when she announced she would be attending Tommy Robinson’s Unite The Kingdom rally in London.
So she joined another cult then"

Your pivot to a deep dive into the cause of the rise of fundamentalist Islam since the 1970s is a deliberate distraction from the point being made.

Your patronising dismissal of both the death-dealing Fatwas against Salman Rushdie and Lubna Zaidi and the appalling harassment of detransitioners as mere "anecdotes" demonstrates that you would do anything rather than confront actual evidence.

There has been no "trading of anecdotes" because there is no anecdotal evidence of similar cult-like behaviour by gender critical / sex realists.

Where I think the PP who I quoted is wrong is in conflating "charismatic leader" with "cult leader". The two are not synonymous.

It is also obvious that there does not need to be a "cult leader" for "cult-like behaviour" to be in evidence.

This article is a good explainer:

Cults Without Leaders: How Belief Systems Replace Thinking Under Identity Pressure, and Why Parts of the Modern Left Exhibit Cult Dynamics
Identity Pressure, Moral Absolutism, and the Erosion of Independent Judgment

One of the most effective defenses modern belief systems deploy is a misconception about what cults actually are.

When people hear the word cult, they picture a charismatic leader: a Jim Jones, a David Koresh, a guru standing on a stage issuing commands to followers who surrender their autonomy. So when accusations of cultish behavior arise in modern political or cultural movements, the response is immediate:

“Where’s the leader?”“Who’s the cult figure?”“That can’t be a cult — no one is in charge.”

This objection sounds reasonable. It is also outdated.

Modern cults rarely look like the caricatures people expect. In fact, the absence of a single charismatic leader is not evidence against cultish behavior — it is often evidence of its evolution.

To understand why, we need to stop defining cults by personalities and start defining them by function.

What a Cult Is — Functionally

At its core, a cult is not defined by robes, compounds, or leaders. It is defined by how belief operates inside a group.

Functionally, a cult exists when:

• Identity replaces evidence
• Belief becomes a moral obligation
• Doubt is treated as betrayal
• Repetition substitutes for verification
• Group belonging outweighs factual coherence

Once belief becomes an identity signal rather than a truth-seeking process, cult dynamics are already present — regardless of leadership structure.

The Charismatic Leader Fallacy

The fixation on charismatic leaders is a relic of earlier eras. Traditional cults required a central authority because information flowed slowly and communication was limited. Control depended on physical proximity and hierarchical enforcement.

Modern belief systems operate differently.

Today, authority is distributed, not centralized. Media ecosystems, social platforms, and peer reinforcement replace the need for a single leader. Narratives propagate horizontally through repetition rather than vertically through command.

No one has to say, “Believe this.”Everyone simply repeats it.

The group itself becomes the authority.

This is why the question “Where is the leader?” misses the point. In modern cults, leadership is replaced by consensus pressure. The belief persists not because someone orders it to, but because rejecting it threatens social belonging.

Full article:
lucianseraphis.substack.com/p/cults-without-leaders-how-belief-6ca

The rally is only mentioned once right at the end of a long article which talks about her transition and detransition and the abuse she received for detransitioning.

What brought her to that point? Read the article and think about all the treatment she received from people she thought were her friends and allies and why she ended up where she did.

You've made several posts on this thread, but you haven't engaged at all with the main subject of the thread, which is the abuse inflicted on detransitioners by trans cultists.

You've tried to derail from the subject by posting AI drivel about Islam and suggesting that we shouldn't have any sympathy for this woman because she's attended the Tommy Robinson rally.

You don't have to be a Tommy Robinson supporter to recognise that many aspects of Islam as practised in many countries are profoundly anti-woman.

Just more chiding and tutting.

But factions of Islam are incompatible with women’s rights. We have schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram and forced into marriage and raped. We have women in Afghanistan who now have no rights. Iranian women now have to cover their hair in public or be beaten. How are these compatible with women’s rights? How is talking about this Islamophobia?

@AntiRacistFella There are genuine challenges that exist in the UK - they're not going to be helped by divisive rhetoric and deepening mistrust between communities.

This is what drives me mad about so many political commentators. Lots of chin-stroking and 'well, I wouldn't do it this way' type comments and buzzwords like Divisive and Mistrust. Where are the bloody solutions?

The conversation doesn't have to link to things brought in as distraction from the main thread. It can, if it helps throw light on the main topic, but it doesn't have to.

I certainly don't have an issue with detransitioners and they're entitled to hold their views about what happened. But the conversation has to connect with other views shared (not obviously related to trans/detrans - but for some reason linked in).

Personally, but for the 'Tommy Robinson' connection - I wouldn't felt any reason to engage with this post. It was the young woman herself who choose to promote his rally, and the Mail that felt there was enough editorial justification to mention it.

I was fired as a patient for not wanting to medicalize. In a delicate and uncomfortable mental health situation that I knew HRT wouldn't help, and starting to question things. When I expressed this, I was told, explicitly, that I would kill myself and the clinic made me sign papers stating that I wouldn't, despite never expressing suicidality.

At last. We found it. A genuine example of conversion therapy.

What does this have to do with detransitioners?

And if her previous "community" had supported her instead of threatening her and trying to ruin her life, none of this would have happened.

So by shunning apostates and expelling them from the community, TRAs are driving detransitioners towards people that they find unacceptable, and then blaming their victims for finding another community which accepts them.

What do you expect detransitioners to do when they're treated in this way?

Okay..

The point is that the conservative form of Islam is not the only one, but it's been spread deliberately and artificially by the wealthy oil rich Gulf states since around the 1970s. That's key to understand why the fundamentalist wing within Islam has more visibility compared to the similar fringes of other religions. We can't conflate "Islam" with just its fundamentalist currents and certainly not with Islamism - a political ideology.

There are genuine challenges that exist in the UK - they're not going to be helped by divisive rhetoric and deepening mistrust between communities.

You can't just post a wodge of AI generated text and expect the rest of us to figure out what point you are trying to make.
Have another go.

True - and the specific question I asked was this "Connection between middle east oil and the islamic revival starting in the 1970s" (it's the conclusion of the answer)

So not likely a "trick" to oppose the points raised, but relevant significant context.