Gender Identity: The New Religion
When evidence-based decision-making is replaced with pseudo-religious purity politics, society begins to operate more like a cult than a democracy.
Every day in the centre of Sunderland in the late 1980s, The Church of Scientology set up a stall encouraging passers-by to take their Dianetics questionnaire – a personality test devised by the founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The test had two hundred questions, many of which alluded to mental health, habits, happiness and so on. If, by the end of the questionnaire, you found you scored poorly (which you invariably did, no matter how you answered the questions) you were invited to book an evaluation to discuss your results and consider joining the church. As a recruiting tool, it was effective at identifying the vulnerable and the lonely, despite rumours that the church isolated its followers from family and friends and took their money.
In 2010, the Church of Scientology was still setting out its stalls. Guardian journalist, Adam Boult, took the Dianetics questionnaire and booked himself an evaluation. After discussing his results (poor, obviously) he asked the evaluator what she would tell him to convince him to join the Church of Scientology. She claimed she would not try to convince him and instead, opting to quote L. Ron Hubbard said, “What is true is only what's true for you – it's your reality that counts… The thing that's stressed most strongly in Dianetics and Scientology is that you seek yourself.”
Fast forward to the present and try this for yourself if you like. Type the words “am I trans?” into a search engine. A quick search on Google turns up an eye-watering 17,510,000,000 results (this and other searches were accurate for me at the time of writing). In the search results you will also see the phrase, “am I trans quiz”, of which there were 25,800,000. The first result - thecaseyblake.com - offers a three-minute quiz, a far cry from the 200 questions posed by the Scientologists – but answering the questions honestly with no gender confusion, concluded with, “conflicting answers – are you being honest with yourself?” Just as the Dianetic test always suggested personal problems, it seems the “am I trans?” quizzes tend to lead toward the answer, “yes”.
In forums and groups all over the virtual world, via education settings, the media, advertising and more, people – especially children – are being invited to imagine the reason they experience any discomfort in their lives could be because they are ‘transgender’. The UK’s National Health Service website’s section on gender dysphoria states that someone experiencing dysphoria “may feel lonely or isolated from others... face pressure from friends, classmates or workmates, or family to behave in a certain way... or may face bullying and harassment for being different”1 (our emphasis). What teenager has not at some point felt she or he was different or misunderstood? Arguably, such feelings are characteristic of this milestone of human development, also known as puberty. In the developed world there are signs that growing up and becoming an adult is being pathologised, re-framed in terms of symptom and trauma and, of course, treatment.
The same forces which are pushing gender ideology to children, are also encouraging them to see parents who don’t affirm their chosen identities as the enemy – ‘invalidators’ and ‘gatekeepers’. One child took to TikTok this week to complain that her “transphobic mother” developed cancer and received “top surgery” (bilateral mastectomy) before she did. The Church of Scientology has been long rumoured to love-bomb its followers while alienating them from their friends and families. Gender ideologues or ‘trans rights activists’ operate in exactly the same way – pushing wedges between children and the people who understand them and love them best, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. The saccharine neologism ‘Glitter Family’ is used to describe the LGBTQ+ community people join because they believe their birth families do not accept their identities. Cyclist and academic, Rachael McKinnon (AKA Veronica Ivy), glamour model and ex-NSPCC ambassador Munroe Bergdorf and Tiktok personality Jeffrey Marsh are three grown men, who claim to be women and non-binary, have all encouraged children struggling with their identities to contact them directly and privately for ‘support’.
Along with alienating vulnerable people from their support networks, the gender ideologues have weaponised ‘transgender’ suicide statistics in order to bully and emotionally blackmail people into affirming their identities and acquiescing to their demands. These statistics often do not stand up to scrutiny but they are an effective tool to silence dissent. Threatening suicide is a common feature in abusive, coercive-controlling relationships. This week, Keir Starmer was reported by the Independent to have reaffirmed the Labour Party’s commitment to upholding single-sex exemptions as outlined in the Equality Act 2010 in regards to places like shelters and hospital wards. Straight off the bat, Shadow Secretary of State Lisa Nandy was Tweeting her unending support for the gender ideologues because, she claimed, “2 in 5 trans young people have attempted suicide”. This statistic comes from two studies, one too small to give any real idea of the scale of the problem (27 self-identified trans young people) and while the second was larger, the data was of poor quality. Both studies were commissioned by transgender lobbying groups, so hardly impartial.
If being alienated from your support network, brainwashed with love-bombing and emotionally blackmailed with suicide statistics (as well as dodgy murder statistics, see: Trans Day of Remembrance) is not enough to persuade you to accept the new gender orthodoxy, punishments are increasingly being meted out to gender heretics. In September 2017, 61-year-old Maria MacLachlan was at Speaker’s Corner in London while women outlined their objections to plans to change the Gender Recognition act to allow individuals to “self-identify” as their preferred ‘gender’ without the need for medical or psychological assessment. A male trans rights activist known as Tara Wolf hit MacLachlan and damaged her property. When giving evidence at the trial, MacLachlan was told she must refer to her attacker using female pronouns. Wolf was found guilty but walked free from the court with only a small fine despite the fact that he had posted on Facebook before the event that he wanted to “fuck up some TERFs”. At this time, increasing numbers of feminists were becoming concerned about the implications of self-ID. Groups such as Fair Play for Women, Women’s Place UK and We Need to Talk were arranging meetings around the country to discuss what needed to be done to safeguard single-sex spaces for women and girls. The location of the meetings had to be kept secret from all attendees until the very last-minute as activists would bombard the venues until they cancelled. This was the norm and many meetings had to take place in pubs and even on one occasion in a school when a suitable alternative could not be found. In June 2018, A Woman’s Place UK meeting was almost cancelled when a credible bomb-threat was made to the venue. Of the threat, a Sussex Police spokesperson said that it was “being taken seriously and [was] not… linked to any other event or offence." The Spectator was the only UK media outlet to run the story. The moral panic around support for ‘trans rights’ was beginning to reach fever pitch at the end of the 2010s and in March 2019, an employee of the thinktank Centre for Global Development called Maya Forstater, lost her job for Tweeting her belief that biological sex matters.2 The writer JK Rowling tweeted support for Forstater and was inundated with thousands of death and rape threats. Kate Scottow and Marion Millar, both mothers to autistic children, were arrested in December 2018 and April 2021 respectively and separated from their vulnerable children for the crime of not believing that a man becomes a woman on his say-so. Scottish Millar had faced up to two years in prison for her tweets. Imprisonment and separation from one’s children are increasingly common punishments for gender heretics. In November 2020 in Australia, a fifteen-year-old girl was removed from her family for not affirming her preferred male gender identity. Her parents wanted to seek help from an independent psychologist. The girl’s father told The Australian newspaper, "[the authorities say] we will not allow her to change gender, so it's dangerous for her to come back to our house because we will mentally abuse her - they want us to consent to testosterone treatment." In April this year, in Vancouver, Robert Hoogland was imprisoned for violating a court order barring him from publicly discussing his fifteen-year-old daughter’s ‘gender transition’. She had been referred by a doctor for testosterone injections at the age of thirteen. The court had ordered him to refrain from speaking out in public or to the media, deeming any effort to do so a “form of family violence.” In the UK, you don’t even have to commit a crime to be reported to the police, who can find you guilty of a “non-crime hate incident”. You could have one without even knowing but if you do, it could show up on an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check and could prevent you from working as a teacher, social worker or any other job with vulnerable people.
So-called trans rights activism demonstrably operates like a cult – they brainwash, isolate, emotionally blackmail and have full control of the narrative. But what happens when a cult becomes bigger than a cult? What happens when the cult controls the courts and the police and the schools? What happens when showing disdain for the cult’s religious beliefs gets you reported to the authorities and your children removed? Or you get put in prison?
When logic, reason and evidence-based decision-making have been replaced with purity, righteousness and doctrine as the bedrock of our society, and when we are all expected once more to believe in transubstantiation because lipstick actually turns a man into a woman, we are arguably living under a totalitarian religious regime. Every day this regime encroaches further on our lives and liberty. We must work now to overthrow it before it becomes too late.
This was accurate at the time of writing but has since been updated on the NHS website.
Since writing this, Forstater has since won her case claiming discrimination.