YouTuber TheraminTrees

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This is going to seem irrelevant, but I'd be interested to see what, if anything, others think of it.

A few years ago, I watched quite a lot of videos by TheraminTrees, who's been producing content for a good while focusing on abuse and manipulation, especially in the context of controlling religious systems, from an ex-theist perspective. He's anonymous, but says he's an atheist who came from a creationist Christian family, with a narcissistic mother, and describes himself as a qualified therapist now. (I haven't come across anything in his videos that would suggest otherwise, but obviously the usual "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" would apply).

I know that lots of people on here have noticed parallels between some of the workings and characteristics of many religious groups, and those of the group that we don't seem to have a better term for than TRAs (though they're part of a larger loose coalition, I guess).

When I went back to TheraminTrees' videos recently, I saw them in kind of a new light. Many of them seemed to pick out and clarify — for me — mechanisms behind some of the tactics and underlying attitudes that could be seen as controlling, manipulative, or even abusive, that we've all been observing (though the videos don't ever mention TRAs, and there are parts that are more religion-specific and don't really apply).

For example, in this video on resisting emotional blackmail:

the parts on comfort, compassion vs. enabling, and coping with other people's coping mechanisms seemed to map quite well.

And this video:

on how adults can get indoctrinated into high-control groups has some interesting descriptions of, for example, how attempts to avoid cognitive dissonance might draw people further in, or how reasonable questioning or criticism can be recast as persecution, that, for me, felt quite familiar.

I'm obviously not trying to make out that trans rights activism is an organised centralised cult out to deliberately draw in adherents in order to cynically ruin their lives and soak them of all their money to send up the hierarchy, or that it's exactly the same as traditional religion, because it's obviously not.

But I did find that coming back to this YouTuber, who I used to watch for his perspective on how our thinking and our relationships can be warped by control and abuse (especially religious control and abuse), gave me a few of things to think about in relation to the movements we discuss here.

Is there anyone else here who's familiar with this YouTuber/his videos and has felt the same eerie feeling of recognition and familiarity? Or if anyone's watched either of the videos I linked (or any of his other videos), I'd be interested to know what you think.

(I can understand that the videos might sound quite offputting if you're not an atheist or agnostic, but for the most part his videos tend to criticise aspects of the more controlling and abusive variants of religion — some of the ones I haven't linked are more explicitly arguing for atheism, but I think the two I've linked should be mostly bearable for mainstream religious people, with the odd perhaps.)

The is, I’ll have a look. I think there is a link, there’s a Scottish MSP and her staffer who are both ex Mormon and Frances white from guilty feminist is ex JW. There may be an element of swapping one cult for another for some people and of replacing the structure of faith in a secular society for others. It’s a “belonging”, isn’t it? Who’d want to be a woman? We’ve been dismissed for thousands of years, here is a colourful, accepting and embracing group instead.

Cultish and cult like behaviour and behaviour patterns are incredibly common human behaviour. At base, it's just about reinforcing group identity. So that includes 'grooming', 'othering', and various other behaviours that are typical of cults. Obviously there are varying degrees of these behaviours, from mild and harmless, even beneficial, to very extreme and harmful.

You could look at pretty much any religion and see signs of cultish behaviour - and there are even people who make arguments that the only difference between a religion and a cult is the size of the group.

I'd go further and suggest that 'cult' is just a variant of group behaviour and can be seen in virtually any group with a dominating leader.

I wouldn't say genderism is a 'cult' itself. It lacks some of the essential features of a cult. But there are groups within the movement that display strongly cultish behaviour.

Derrick Jensen of the deep green alliance and a college professor has written extensively about Lundy Bancroft's descriptions of how men control and abuse and made analogies with both abuse of the planet and trans activist abuse of women.

This is him

Interesting. I recently saw similar behaviour in a thread on AIBU; one side was trying to have a rational, factual discussion. The other side was just using tactics such as shaming to convince everyone to stop asking questions, go along with it and trust the experts.It was a lesson in how an ideology can take over a group. It only needs to be pushed hard by a minority of key individuals.

Popping myself in to this thread so that I can come back to it and read all the comments so far as and when I get chance.

For me, the key to unpicking it all is being able to argue successfully in law, education and health that gender identity is a belief. At that point, it becomes a matter of a) whether someone believes or not and b) if they are a believer, what are the impacts on themselves (possibly the distress of gender dysphoria) and others (boundary encroachment e.g. telling a lesbian non-believer that your belief that you're a woman means that lesbians need to accept you as such).

Laws and policies should never force anyone to accept someone else's belief. Nor should they prioritise one belief (gender identity) over another (the immutability of sex). Sex and gender (identity) are separate. Clarity in the Equality Act will hopefully follow soon to remove any of the current space for misinterpretation.

Thanks for the video link Warrior, will have a watch of that. It seems useful to make links like this between controlling, abusive, and manipulative behaviour in different contexts and on different scales — religions, cults, political and social movements, interpersonal and intimate relationships — because sometimes it's easier to see/understand/believe a mechanism or a tactic that's happening in one context than in another, maybe because of our own biases. But then once you make the link, you can carry the understanding across to the new context.

This is Jensen's excerpt on Bancroft and how abusers work.

The deep green resistance support women's rights as a result.

derrickjensen.org/endgame/lundy-bancroft-abusers/

But then once you make the link, you can carry the understanding across to the new context.

Absolutely, I think it's about similar processes.

A lot of TRAs use statements that are opinions rather than facts but use them as facts. It's the way advertising or propaganda works. And is also how organised religion can work too.

But they also use a specific abuser type mechanisms such as DARVO and gaslighting.

To take a Pantene advert analogy;

There's a lot of sugar coated "here's the science bit" <hair flick, head tilt, shiny pout>

But the science is misleading, irrelevant or plain wrong.

But we are bedazzled by rainbows and "you're missing out here!"

Thanks for the link — an interesting example of cross-contextualisation, if that's a word?

And yes, we seem to be drowning in glittery boswellox.

It's an interesting one.

Sometimes cross contexts that are generalised can be useful but can be more misleading if specific - I think it's describing certain behaviour that's applicable. To understand processes and motivations perhaps?

There's a fine line though as it can backfire in some situations and can derail debates completely.

For example, direct comparisons or analogies linked to the holocaust and Nazi propaganda methods during a discussion, aren't useful in my opinion. It's so extremely emotive, the context is too different and it relies on individual knowledge, understanding and interpretation of how the analogy is being used.

The generalised and neutral idea of how propaganda works, which has links to advertising, the arts and the psychology of persuasion, and has been used by humans in many different contexts throughout history (and within organised religions), is easier to understand.