On Mermaids having to listen to Cass: “ This is so blatant and evil I have no idea why decent human beings let this happen.”

[Zahariel]

Cross posting is poor form.

but.

the responses to Mermaids having to listen to Cass on trans Reddit is just staggering and I think an important window into the minds of the people furthest in on this delusion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1gb26kv/charity_commission_is_instructing_mermaids_and/

“Cass and her supporters need to feck right off already. I'm sick of it being peddled around to try to legitimise crap, especially when it's been widely debunked by the rest of the world and professionals within the UK too. They keep LYING and pretending like it's "soo scientific" when it simply isn't and i'm sick of the lies and i'm sick of the British public slurping those lies up off the boots of the red tories.”

Do you think the commenters REALLy believe in death camps for trans people?

Reddit is a forum for American teenaged boys.

They* remove the "gender critical" Sub Reddit, removed the "PCOS" Sub Reddit, removed the "Female lesbians" Sub Reddit, removed the "Detransitioners" Sub Reddit.... And many more predominantly female Sub Reddits.

• "They" being Aimee Chanellor as this all happened when they joined Reddit HQ. But obviously AC didn't action all of that alone.

The mods are extremists and it's sickening. Just don't give it any clicks.

^ that formatting came out weird.

One problem is that the reason why science is an important tool for acquiring knowledge is not taught at school. This is especially true in the US, where objective reality is seen as having secondary value to personal beliefs. The US is a deeply religious country and even atheist progressives over there take their belief structures from Christianity. TRA ideology comes right out of the (unscientific) cartesian mind-body dualism needed by Christians to allow a non-physical human soul to exist and influence our brains behaviour.

US (and to a lesser extent) UK society has reached an impasse. The science around how human brains / minds work contradicts the libertarian ideals of both then right-wingers and the progressives. It is NOT possible for a Trans woman to be a woman in the objective sense, only in the subjective sense. Rather than accept that basic fact, the TRAs rail against the science that describes reality as reality actually is. This science denialism spills over into every other area of the TRA debate, leaving many TRA activists (and allies) in the same place as climate change deniers or creationists.

Over the centuries, Western thinking has had to adapt to several existential crises brought about by scientific advances. First, we removed the Earth from the centre of the Universe. Next, we removed God from the centre of our origin story. Now, we are removing the concept of a singularly defined soul / essential self from the reality of what it is to be a human, and many people are really not happy about that at all. The idea that the human self is a messy, poorly-defined thing that is subject to social contagion and is dependent on physical wiring of the brain is beyond TRAs. All they see is the true-self of a trans person, they cannot see, let alone examine, the many processes that define the mind of the trans (or non-trans) person.

@BigBadaBoom
I have a thought experiment.
Say x% of the population identifies as trans - although I suspect x would vary by country. I doubt people struggling to subsist in less developed countries have the spare time and energy to engage in luxury oppressions, they have too much of the real stuff to cope with.

Anyway x% of a population identifies as trans.
If you had an infinite amount of islands with shelter, food, and everything a human needs for life, and you put a baby on each island with a non humanoid robot to look after them and keep them safe. How many would come over time to identify as trans? What would x% be among these people raised in isolation?

My belief is the answer would be none, zero. Without even knowing there was two sexes how could they want to try to change to the opposite sex? Without knowing about gender, how could they want to swap gender? They would just be themselves.

If gender is a social construct then transgenderism is also a social construct. It is not innate.

I don't know. Its an interesting question. I don't think they always distinguish between what's true and what isn't. Like religion, it's about faith not evidence.
I was at school with one of the more prominent online trans activists and in the same close friend circle then, although we didn't stay in touch after school.
They commented on twitter about a major incident in our school when making a case about something else, except I was there. It didn't happen.
(This was a pretty massive claim btw, not the kind of thing anyone could have brushed under the carpet).
I know it was made up, but I'm not sure that is relevant to this person.
There's an interesting philosophical difference between 'lies' and 'bullshit' with the main difference is that bullshitters tend to believe their own bullshit.
I think this is the case for a lot of this.

There seems to be a genuine belief on reddit that anybody who has the slightest concern about children medically transitioning is doing it out of pure hatred, and that we want children to come to serious harm or even end their own lives because we despise them. Its not even possible in their eyes that certain people have different views on what is the best way to protect children, that the "TERFS" they hate so much might actually be doing what they think is right out of love and a desire to do well by the next generation.

They removed a PCOS thread? Why?! I'm gc and have PCOS so interested to know more on this please

You're right, I think, to see (Cartesian) dualism in the kind of religious nonsense of one kind of trans ideology. Separable souls etc.

Do beware of oversimplifying, though. Two things:

--1. Not every religious ideology requires separable souls. Not even every Christian ideology. For example Thomist (as in Thomas-Aquinas-style) Christianity, is based more on Aristotle than the (neo-)Platonists (and Cartesians).
These latter see a separable soul as required for eternal life, whereas the Aristotelian soul, as the form (roughly-speaking, structure) of the body, is inseparable therefrom. (Hence, for example, 'The Resurrection of The Body' as an article of the (Thomist) Christian creed, necessary for eternal life if the soul is Aristotelian rather than Platonist/Cartesian.)

--2. Not every present-day trans ideology has the clarity of belief in (gender identities or) separable souls. The Judith Butler queer theory crowd are not Cartesians or dualists at all. They're not really anything in that line other than purveyors of nonsense. (And, yes, take it from me, it is nonsense ... not even, as they try to make out (JB herself a prime exemplar), clever nonsense: it's just plain ordinary stupid nonsense.)
(If you want a diagnosis, here's a start. To take the lack of transcendental signified as destroying signification and hence meaning is to mistake what should be a modus tollens for a foolish (and clearly invalid in its self-stultification) modus ponens. As should be obvious, it's not possible to make sense of denying sense in that way, any more than it could be true that nothing is true.)
It's interesting the two wings of trans ideology - gender-identity Cartesianism vs post-structuralist relativism - are so wholly inconsistent one with another. (Of course the ideologues of both stripes try to keep that quiet - sometimes consciously, we cannot but think.)

Either way, it's just plain wrong to allow such ideologies to interfere with childhood, whatever grownups get up to. We should, indeed, have learned that lesson from history, as you rightly say, @BigBadaBoom.

Whatever the theological or philosophical arguments are (and in reality they all boil down to “because I think so”), there seem to be generally two sorts of people in the world - those who are inclined to belief, and those that aren’t. Lots of people seem to go along with belief for societal, emotional or practical reasons, without really subscribing to it. Others are consumed by it.
When a nun told me, aged 14, that because I had rejected my faith, I would burn in hell for all eternity, and I realised she meant it, I became aware of the profoundly morally damaging potential of religious belief.
It’s unsurprising that we see echos of what that nun said in some of the Twitter accounts of trans activists.

4w.pub/reddit-is-banning-womens-health-support-groups/

The sub still exists but it had its moderators replaced I believe. The rules in the current sub are now that it must be LGBTQ2A+ friendly.

This is it. If you tried to help the damaged people on that reddit they would see it as hate. They'd attack you and you'd be banned. I stay off Reddit. I can't do any good and reading their nonsense would hurt me.

these people are desperately sad and crying out for help and I truly want to help them

This is my crutch. I know, for my own need to prioritize other issues (abortion rights in my country for example), I should wipe my hands of these people because they don't want help. While I laugh at the Japanese soldier analogy (and think it works to explain a lot), one big difference is no one told those island isolated soldiers the war was over. These people have been told.

I want to be able to write them off and try to see them in a survival of the fittest Darwinian way...some people have such strong delusions they're unreachable and their genes will literally die off. But then I'm face to face with a friend's child or meet a confused trans identifying young woman and my mother heart gets pulled back in again because I want to save her from this madness. Is everyone susceptible to social contagion? I believe so. But some stick with it even after the tipping point.

Religion is a very apt metaphor. Even down to IW posing as JC himself. Not sure why though 😕

I think Lisa Littman summed up this attitude really well, she said

“It’s as if their loyalty is to the transition interventions and not to the long-term health and well-being of transgender-identified young people.”

https://nypost.com/2024/10/19/us-news/pain-confusion-compassion-how-the-us-has-reached-a-trans-tipping-point/

https://archive.is/3Bdvh

From memory, the sub is still there but there were a number of mod posts instructing users to only use gender neutral language. I believe some posts got removed for taking about pcos as a 'woman's issue'. It got quite a bit of backlash.

When did that happen? I thought moderation had become less insistent on the acceptance of TRA dictated language over the last year?

I am mildly amused at seeing genderism classified as an offshoot of the Manichean heresy.

Only mildly because the thing is causing so much self-inflicted harm to its victims and to those who care about them.

They really love their boot-slurping imagery. Given all we know about how they project, I imagine it's another of their fantasies.

Mimmymum is definitely in the Japanese soldier category.
Back when I was first peaking many years ago (under my other account name)
her vitriol and attack mode was exhausting
but came firmly into "protest too much" territory

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

GK Chesterton

I think about this quote a lot. Ferocious belief in irrational ideas seems to be something we're hard wired for.

But I totally agree with Helen Joyce's point, there are people who have done terrible things in the name of this ideology and they are never going to be able to admit that.

I don't remember his name, but the guy who pioneered lobotomies spent his entire life trying to prove that they were a good thing. There are truths that are too hard to face up to.

I don't remember his name, but the guy who pioneered lobotomies spent his entire life trying to prove that they were a good thing. There are truths that are too hard to face up to.

This is a great article about it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/14/walter-freeman-lobotomy-regret/

I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of these TRAs got religion when all this nonsense unravels. JW , Hare Krishna , Islam whatever. They might be happier?

"When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."

Nonsense. An atheist who has chosen the difficult path of going against the dominant, "normal", commonly-held belief of a Creator is LESS likely to believe in other baseless hypotheses.