It's quite strange that someone clearly nuts like that pastor can be considered sane, wise, and morally authoritative. While in the same circles a trans person like Carlos is considered inherently deviant and somehow immensely threatening - even though all they have to offer is a life-long list of creative achievements, and absolutely no evidence of harm to anyone.
My conversations with my deeply religious grandmother left me with the impression that religion is a very dirty game: it inserts itself into your psyche in a way that it can become nearly impossible to distance yourself from it without massively breaking open what you consider to be your identity. This makes what the OP did all that much stronger, to be able to overcome that conditioning.
My grandmother never managed to, but, to her considerable credit, she did realize that some of her views were no longer supported by the evidence available, she was just too rooted in her ways to change.
I agree with your observation, but I don’t think religion is uniquely notable along those lines.
Ideology comes to mind as a pretty clean analog.
But looming in my mind is culture. Terminally, it seems indistinguishable from religion: it’s arbitrary, self-perpetuating, operates by getting deep psychological hooks into people and relies on (often blunt) communal enforcement.
And further, it seems “culture” has been elevated to the exalted, sacred status religion once commanded in society. In my view, this shift happened over the latter half of the 20th… cemented by 2010.
You are probably right, but because until very recently here religion was so strongly intertwined with culture that it is hard to see the difference and that the bulk of the people that stepped out of it haven't had time enough to establish a real culture of their own other than some common labels it is hard to make the distinction (for me, at least). This is probably yet another example of such conditioning. And in the meantime Islam has made an appearance and is gaining a lot of strength, to the point that it is only a matter of time before it will be the dominant religion, and given the cultural distance this is likely only going to cause even more issues.
That may be so, but religion seems to go out of its way to embed itself in the psyche of its subjects to the point that they experience severe identity crisis when trying to break free of it.
There are other groups that employ the same mechanisms.
Idk what maladaptive from an evolutionary basis means, dude. We’re not beholden to survival of the fittest anymore. We got glasses, bro. We do shit like microdosing, keto, and cryo therapy.
If someone wants to take estrogen and call themselves Jessica, why should I give a shit any more than when some gym rat (therefore on artificial testosterone) wants me to call him Jake instead of Jacob?
I don’t think there’s any religion in this, just good ol fashioned icky feelings about things that aren’t really a problem, they’re just icky feeling.
Idk what you’re talking about… I don’t look at depressed people like some evolutionary whatever whatever lol
If they want therapy I can pay for the therapy, if they want me to call them depresso mcfesso I can do that too idc. There’s no reason to be all high minded about stuff like this, man
Your understanding does not match the scientific evidence. One of the reasons being trans is not a mental illness is that cis people experience gender dysphoria all the time as well, like cis men when they're called girls, cis women with facial hair, or the revulsion many cis people experience when they even so much as think about the idea of taking hormones that don't align with their gender. To the extent that this is a "mental illness", the vast majority of people have it.
Rather than maladaptive, I’d characterize being trans and in the early stages of the journey to be painful emotionally and physically.
Merely having to look in the mirror and think constantly “this is not who I should be” is damaging. That’s why people deserve sympathy and aid from society.
When people say it’s maladaptive and characterize it as psychological disorder they are falling into the trap of believing that mental anguish must always have a mental solution. Thus they would prescribe therapy, drugs, and asylums.
On the converse, it is much easier in reality to change physical gender than it is to change one’s mind.
The times when we had to run and hide from tigers, when men were real men and women were left behind in the compound to rear the children is long behind us. And the simple fact is that even then there were gay and trans people, they just weren't recognized as such and ended up having problems to fit in.
