Inoculation Against Insanity

If you believe in nothing, you'll believe anything

I wrote an article on the porn industry the other week that I didn’t send out via email because I figured people might not want that sort of thing in their inboxes. You can read it here if you want.

Michael Shellenberger recently exposed a massive op to promote weird transsexualism to children:

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1764799914918490287

I’ll point to one special part of the tweet:

American Medical Association, The Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH. It is considered the leading global authority on gender medicine.

This sounds scandalous, if not totally surprising. Most alert people have known the medical establishment has been ideologically compromised since at least 2020, but this little detail displays many of the network effects of different medical associations and how they in effect create a reliance on appeals to personal authority.

Medical recommendations are based on the opinions of people placed in various authority positions. The former belief was that recommendations were proposed by experts based on evidence and practice. Those experts are, it is plain in 2024, experts according to self-fiat. WPATH simply declared itself the authority. Moreover, all one needs to assert authority is for other expert organizations to defer to it on some special piece of information. Thus, ideology (religious belief, really, but I’ll get to that) becomes medical practice, which is currently also associated with “science” in the minds of the typical westerner. Keep in mind that the American Academy of Pediatrics began (borderline) recommending circumcision, an originally religious amputation of the male skin on the genitals, in the 2010s, ostensibly because it reduces the transmission of HIV, a virus primarily spread through receptive anal sex and intravenous drug use. A rational person would not respond by circumcising his son but by ceasing to consider the AAP an authority.

There is no better example than “gender medicine” to reveal that the point of this deferral to authority is to remove personal judgment in matters of medicine. This is the path by which children are removed from the care (and judgment) of their parents and placed with “caregivers” who give them access to exogenous sex hormones and mutilating surgeries.

Laying aside the government’s intrusion for the moment, there is a very strong inoculation on the individual level against the madness of gender, and that is the Christian religion, not just with faith but also with the teachings of our forebears. Once upon a time I thought I had made up the saying, “If you believe in nothing, you’ll believe anything.” It turns out I wasn’t that original, but the sentiment holds. If you have a firm place to put your feet, metaphorically, it is much harder to be blown over by the shifting winds.

An understanding of Christian Theology doesn’t just give one pause when it comes to accepting any old thing; it has specific answers that negate even considering transgenderism valid at all, and that is the theology of the body and the soul:

This reveals transgenderism to be not a medical paradigm but an expression of religious belief, specifically the gnostic belief in the denial of the body. If that sounds like a leap, stay with me.

You can’t be “born in the wrong body” if you are your body. If the soul is the form of the body, altering the body cannot reveal some other hidden form.

More than that, consider that Christ had a body. If you are a ghost inhabiting a flesh puppet, what was Jesus Christ? How could he be fully human if the human is not the body? Why did he die? Did he die at all? Why did his body rise if he was not his body? There are deep theological consequences from rejecting the idea that your body is really you.

How do people know they are trans (or gay, for that matter)? It is not outwardly discernable. There is no objective evidence that a person can gather to determine whether a person is trans or not. It is state entirely reliant on internal, personal, subjective knowledge, or gnosis. You are trans because you feel you are, and others only know because you say you are. “Being” transgender is a gnostic, solipsistic state that cannot be confirmed or denied, since it isn’t an action or expression. We also know that altering a form externally doesn’t change its essence. Carving a rock into the shape of a tree doesn’t make it a tree; it makes it a statue of tree. To what effect trans “treatments” work is likewise an internal and unverifiable effect. It doesn’t externalize the internal, because expressions of our mind or internal self are actions, not shapes.

The core of trans ideology is religious and we ought to treat it as such. Theological arguments immediately and permanently disable the gnostic mysticism that underlies the entire paradigm of “treating” trans patients with hormones and surgeries.

So, when properly inoculated against these religious ideas, one ought not take anything a supposed medical board based around a religious idea says seriously. You might as well be shocked if there was a medical board of Hindu gurus that proposed some esoteric form of Eastern healing for relieving invisible humors or chakras, and it turned out to be proposing procedures without evidence and suppressing the real consequences of what they do. We call the Death Cult by that name because it is a cult.

Religion is a major blind spot in the modern secularist, both in themselves and in the greater culture. Coming from a generally Christian and post-protestant culture, there is an assumption that all religions and religious ideas will fit the Christian mold. The idea that there could be new cults that come into existence that have no Christian teaching to spring out of like a weed is not seriously considered by most secular individuals. Historically, however, new cults are the norm, not the exception. Christian dominance in the past produced cults that were primarily Christian in their origins, like the Adventist movements and the Mormons in the USA or the Cathars in the middle ages. We are now seeing that “secularism” as a religious area is capable of producing its own cults with their own beliefs, practices, and cosmologies.

I believe this limitation will be a major obstacle to righting society. Most Christians will have difficulty identifying emergent cults for the same reason as the fully secularized. When the cults perpetuate themselves inside of government, using the government’s monopoly on force, it will take longer to recognize and react to them, allowing them to do more damage before being countered. Plus, the court system is not prepared to entertain religious that do not resemble Christianity or the more familiar forms of folk religion and declare themselves to be something else entirely, such as “science.” Be prepared for religious sentiment to be tied to an increasing number of odd things in the coming decades.

Thus far, most debate around trans issues focus on the idea of consent as a razor for who should be able to transition, rather than attacking the idea itself.

Consent is important. The main reason children are so targeted is precisely because there is general social agreement that children can’t consent. We understand they can’t consent primarily because their faculties of judgment are impaired compared to adults. Their ability to be inoculated against insanity is limited and therefore they are deserving of special care and special protection. We can have compassion in disagreement with adults that choose to alter their body as per our legal framework of rights, but the movement was not going to stop there. The new cult came for kids because they are still forming their beliefs, thought processes, and ideas about themselves – their spiritual, intellectual, and psychological immune system.

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