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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Aeon article on cults

2 replies

Mermoose · 29/09/2019 10:37

I was reading this article about cults and brainwashing, and I was struck by similarities between what the writer describes and some tactics of transactivism. Here's the article
aeon.co/essays/how-cult-leaders-brainwash-followers-for-total-control

And an example of what I mean by similarity:
"If you try to get clarification, they say it’s not something you can understand … Anything you bring up from your own background is deconstructed. […] After a while, things that seemed preposterous seem normal"
When I first started trying to understand transgenderism I was constantly met with this - 'it's something you can't understand'. When people - Janice Turner; Gia Milinovich - explain their own discomfort with sex stereotypes, it's dismissed.

And this:
"The fiction starts slowly, of course, with mere propaganda intended for the public and the wider world. Scientology, for instance, hawks its ‘pathway to greater freedom’ and broadcasts its agenda for a drug-free world. The fabulous theology of Scientology – where alien beings hurled out of a volcano inhabit our bodies – was an inner ideology reserved for senior, well-indoctrinated members; it was released to the wider public only through a leak."
Strikes me as very similar to the way that transactivism is presented as being about kindness, and most people are completely unaware that it is about denying the existence of biological sex.

OP posts:
skql · 29/09/2019 10:41

"contact us
run away home."

Ereshkigal · 29/09/2019 14:39

That was a fascinating read. This part was pertinent too, about the importance cognitive dissonance in cults or cultlike situations:

The fictional, invented quality of the total ideology reinforces the confusion and eventual dissociation experienced by followers. Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea with her mother in 2007, recounts in her memoir In Order to Live (2015) how ‘North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks.’ She passed starving orphans every day but believed the propaganda slogan that ‘Children Are King’.

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