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Notes -
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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