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Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.
The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.
I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.
And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.
I don’t believe that most trans communities come close to the coordinated, authoritarian shunning practiced by the central examples of cults.
An athlete or prisoner exploiting gender categories is not the same as a leader exploiting his follower’s social dependencies. There is a difference in agency, in blame.
Labeling trans activism a cult is about eliding those differences. It’s about taking the same no-bad-wrong reaction we reflexively apply to Jim Jones, and applying it to anyone who’s sufficiently pro-trans. Sure, a doctor who gets invited to certain conferences has social and financial reasons to stay the course. Does that mean we can expect him to break out the Flavor-Aid?
In light of the fact that at least one study found that gender reassignment surgery dramatically increased the risk of suicide among trans people (compared to a control group of trans people who didn't undergo gender reassignment surgery), the analogy may be more apt than you strictly intended.
For what it's worth, I didn't interpret the OP's post as arguing "trans is a cult" (although maybe that's how they intended it, I dunno). I have a great deal of compassion for people dealing with gender dysphoria, fully support the rights of adults to do with their bodies as they wish (admittedly perhaps not on the taxpayer's dime), and think that medical transition is the right choice for some trans people.
All that being said, I believe that a lot of trans communities (subreddits and the like) are extremely creepy, and the similarities they exhibit with Jim Jones and co. are more than just unhappy accidents: strikingly similar patterns of indoctrination, isolation, encouraging hatred and distrust of heretics and apostates, explaining away of reasonable questions and cognitive dissonance. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticising this conduct, any more than we would when the Twin Flames people do it - if anything I think we have a social responsibility to do it (doubly so when so many people who get sucked into these communities are underage). The trans movement isn't reducible to these creepy subreddits (obviously, given that gender dysphoria predates the internet by decades). But I also don't think we're Chinese robbering the whole movement by pointing out a small handful of subreddits with subscribers in three digits. /r/egg_irl has 315k subscribers, which is an appreciable fraction of the entire trans population of the US. /r/FTM has 212k.
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David Miscavige does not inspire the same levels of personal loyalty and devotion as L. Ron Hubbard did, but he makes up for it by being every bit as dictatorially controlling.
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Scientology actually unquestionably has a leader, David Miscavige, who has also continued all the cult stuff that Hubbard did. He's not a charismatic leader, but he doesn't need to be: like in numerous cults and organizations, he can just always refer to the charismatic original founder's, who is still "at some level" regarded the leader, authority. Miscavige's identity is hardly secret either, it's among the first things one learns if one looks at Scientology at any level (and he featured in South Park's scientology episode etc.)
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