To what extent are we allowed to discuss parallels between cults and gender ideology?

[WitchyWitcherson]

Although harrowing and upsetting, I find cult documentaries fascinating. There are a couple that stand out to me as having really strong parallels to gender ideological beliefs.

Notably (on Netflix if anyone else wants to watch them!):

• Docs on Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) such as Keep Sweet. The phrase and purpose of "Keep Sweet" as used by the Jeffs patriarchs has a lot of similarities with the "Be Kind" narrative that has been peddled to keep people from questioning things.
• The Programme: Cons, Cults and Kidnappings - Episode 2 in particular on vulnerability of desperate parents to looking for easy solutions, then subsequent denial/minimisation of the damages done to their children.
• Twin Flames: They coerce people into medical transition because of a belief in a male or female spirit.

Anyway, these parallels to me are stark, but over the years I've noticed post deletions where people describe gender ideology as cult-like (incidentally in the "The Programme" doc, there was an online forum for parents with kids in the 'school' that deleted all posts criticising the programme...! Talk about more parallels...). So I ask... to what extent are we allowed to discuss these parallels without posts being deleted?

To caveat: I understand not all trans-identified people have homogenous beliefs on sex and gender, and I'm not saying all trans-identified people are part of some cult conspiracy, just that there are aspects to gender ideology and some of the people who are proponents of said ideology adhering to similar behaviours to people who are within cults (shutting down discussion, holding onto beliefs in the face of clear facts and harms, claiming special/"other" status, offering a solution to people's suffering etc. etc.).

Brill, CRT now in the house, all we need is a Jew hating, terrorist lover and we'll have the Omnicause Trifecta.

I love MN 😍, it's the oyster the whole world is in.

Yes. They were discussing girls and single sex sports. The evil bastards.

The "Angry Young Women" cover story in this week's New Statesman is a quite a thing. There's a definite story worth telling about women in their 20s, who are a real outlier in polling terms and are driving a lot of the surge in Green support. But I can't quite decide whether the NS article is a clever spoof, because a lot of the "new feminism" they're touting seems to be young women who have intuited that the dating market is fucked and, because they're chronically online, are looking to politics to sort this out.

It makes me wish this cohort of young women had a kind of female Jordan Peterson (before he went off the rails) who could give them actionable life advice like, stop doomscrolling, stop being angry that Sydney Sweeney exists, and stop blaming the terrible state of the dating market on Israel and landlords.

I don't think Angela Nagle's model of online subcultures is completely correct, but she was definitely onto something.

Disclaimer, I haven't read the article so this is a more general musing....

What I've noticed in my lifetime is a move from socially enforced good behaviour to an expectation that good behaviour will be legally or structurally enforced, and a corresponding overreach by law and police to settle what should be personal or political arguments, and by schools, institutions, media and so forth to define what society should find acceptable r not.

Perhaps it is an unavoidable consequence of moving from a relatively monolithic culture where people felt confident in bullying anyone whose thinking, taste or lifestyle was outside the norm to a pluralistic one where there is no consensus on norm in the first place. When the behaviour of other encrouches on us, or crosses what we believe is a moral line, we don't feel able to confront it in person so we appeal to authority to enforce for us.

How ironic to use the word “appropriated” whist standing up for an ideology that has unashamedly appropriated anyone and anything that it can.

Well, that's exactly what the Equality Act did or tried to do. Formalised and legalised 'correct' behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, etc.

I personally think it worsens attitudes on the whole, because nobody likes to be sanctimoniously preached at. Plus it assumes bad faith as a basis, which is demeaning and antagonistic. Much of the effect ends up damaging social cohesion.

Yes. It's a hard one. Given where we are I think we do need the EA or some sort of protection for people who don't fit society's stereotypes of who is suited to what roles, who makes the best decisions or the best leaders, who is most to be trusted and so on, and ways to create opportunities for people who wouldn't get them because they don't start from the right place. But I also see the limitations and collateral damage.

@FlirtsWithRhinos There is a definite argument that ever since Thatcher - and with another peak during the Blair years - there has been far too much legislation, often responding in a slightly unthinking way to media/public-led concerns, and in parallel with governments trying to control the judiciary.

MissGendering
I personally think it worsens attitudes on the whole, because nobody likes to be sanctimoniously preached at. Plus it assumes bad faith as a basis, which is demeaning and antagonistic. Much of the effect ends up damaging social cohesion.

I was for a long time part of a large and semi-structured group of between a hundred and fifteen hundred people at any given event, who got along quite nicely on the whole and behaved what I would tend to classify as "decently"; for instance, if someone with a pushchair or a wheelchair wanted to use a lift, people who didn't have pushchairs or wheelchairs would tend to let them into the lift first. There may have been pushy, unpleasant exceptions to this decency, but I never personally encountered one.

Then along came a (thoroughly nasty in all sorts of contexts) individual who had someone in a wheelchair in tow. On the second day of the gathering, she had printed out a lot of notices and stuck them at the door of every lift, on every floor. They said "give way to wheelchair users".

And whereas until that day, none of us would have failed to let someone in a wheelchair into the lift first, and thought nothing of it, now a fairly large cohort felt inclined not to give way to this individual and her wheelchair-bound appendage but instead to barge in front of them at every opportunity. Being hectored made us resentful in a way that was quite startling when we examined it in her absence.

It didn't actually help that this happened to be the only person in a wheelchair at the gathering that weekend....

Litigating anti discrimination means people end up necessarily more concerned with the letter of the law than human interaction and society and the larger ideas that underpin it, like morality, fairness, etc.

It becomes another tool to beat people with, rather than an encouragement to consider others, and our responsibilities.

Look at single sex spaces. Rather than considering the needs of a CSA survivor or a woman having a flooding period and in need of privacy, and making a practical, compassionate solution, we've had an interminable court case that has retraumatised the women involved and is still unresolved. Litigation is an absolutely shit way to resolve societal issues. Imo.

What ideology?

But what else are we supposed to do?

Predatory men who want access to women's spaces have no interest whatsoever in respecting women's needs. No amount of encouragement to consider others would make a difference.

I learned that I didn't fully appreciate the film 'Brazil' until I moved to the UK.

In this situation, we haven't much of a choice.
We've been forced into it.

'False consciousness' was mentioned upthread. That concept has struck me for years as doing an absolute number on sensible discourse. You are either an Oppressor, and therefore Bad, or Oppressed and recognise it, and therefore Good, or Oppressed but arguing the toss about it, saying you were never oppressed, you had a decent crack at life, you got on with the powers-that-be and found them fair-minded and reasonable etc etc - and this makes you a victim of 'false consciousness'. Which is to say, you are being pushed firmly into the appropriate box, while being told that you had no idea what was going on. Which is really fucking patronising, when you stop and think about it.

That is not to say that people can't be duped, but when you have some academic dictating how things should have looked to a highly intelligent individual who happens to have left clear-eyed writing saying how things did look, to him or her, at the time and on reflection 30/40/50 years later, and saying s/he was a victim of false consciousness, it just feels wrong

Predatory men who transgress women's boundaries should be charged with harassment etc. Thats nothing to do with the EA's aim or intent?

Yes. I think I know what Engels was getting at with the idea, but as often happens with Engels, his philosophical dabbling turned out to be a bit of a liability in the long term.

False consciousness today means "You may say X, but I know you really believe Y and are arguing in bad faith. I have telepathic powers which I was awarded along with my degree in Cultural Studies."