u/GroolGobblin0

[supprimé]

I don't actually have any worldbuilding I'm working on, this is just an idea I came up with, so feel free to steal it.

It wasn't for the usual reasons. My entire life I saw and knew about the harm Christians have caused, but I was verbally and vitriolically condemning it in church at every opportunity; the reason that wasn't what drove me away was simply because I understood The Bible to be Fact, and facts are facts regardless of how the people promoting them are otherwise behaving; if not, then we'd all be obliged to insist that cigarettes are actually good for you, purely because Hitler said they weren't.

The main reasons I left Christianity are:

A) Watching MAGA spend over a decade twisting their brains into knots to defend the insane antics of Trump made me realize that you can justify literally any nonsense whatever to reality with clever enough mental gymnastics, so I started questioning the defenses my preacher dad had been passing onto me my whole life of all the awful things you find in the Old Testament (it also helped me realize that the whole "dying for the world's sins" concept may in fact have just been the mental gymnastics the early Christians invented to explain why the man they'd been hyping up as a God couldn't perform a miracle literally to save his life).

B) A dejected ex-christian Bible scholar informed me over in r/HistoryMemes that the Book of Daniel wasn't penned until CENTURIES after the events it describes would have happened. In an instant, I watched my entire lifelong identity get invalidated by reality itself. As many problems as the Gospels have, at least they were written when Jesus was still within living memory! I genuinely felt more empty inside than I did when my mom died, and I LOVED my mom!

Imagine that you finally find that special someone, and they completely light up your life. Their mere presence next to you somehow makes any moment or task more enjoyable. The lovemaking makes you feel like you're orgasming with your soul. Then years later you have a baby, and your entire world shifts. They're the most precious thing you've ever seen, and every little thing they do makes your heart melt. You're the happiest person in the world.

...Then one day you take anti-psychotic meds for the first time and both of them vanish before your very eyes; in their places lay a sex-stained mannequin and a formula-smeared ragdoll.

THAT'S what it was like for me. The only reason I didn't retreat back into the comfortable lie is because I took psychology as an elective in both highschool and college, and after noticing just how many different disorders, complexes, or other problems can arise purely from the patient lying to themselves about something or other, I swore an Oath to God, myself, and whatever other powers might happen to be in the world that I would ALWAYS confront the reality of a given situation, NO MATTER how painful it was to do so.

...but here's the thing. Even though my entire lifelong identity had been bashed to pieces right in front of me, at no point did I accuse that friendly, honest scholar of TRYING to invalidate me as a person, nor of being bigoted against me, nor of wanting to commit hatecrimes against me. So why on Earth do trans people behave that way? How the heck do you think it would have looked to him if I had done that?!

I'm told there's a scene in Zootopia where the Fox character says something along the lines of:

>If everyone's going to assume that I'm a sneaky, untrustworthy scoundrel, then that's exactly what I'm going to be!

Well how the heck do you think that man would respond to constantly being compared to THE WORST PEOPLE IN HISTORY just for STATING THE OBVIOUS? I mean what is that even supposed to accomplish other than alienate would-be allies against the actual bigots calling y'all mutants and whatnot? Between this and the aforementioned Crisis of Faith, it genuinely makes me want to kill myself at times (yes I've already been reported to that reddit suicide hotline; as funny as it was seeing that message pop up for it's actual intended function for once, it did not help, as I already knew that the people who wrote it would not have taken my side), and I say that as someone who takes prescription antidepressants, precisely because of a prior suicidal episode. (The short version is that I was diagnosed with Autism at a very young age and at a time when most people had never even heard of the condition, so my parents' expectations were only ever going to be based on how a normal child would behave. As a result, I HATE when people try to assert that autism is a valid brainstate rather than a disorder, as to me these people are essentially claiming that my lifelong struggles never actually happened.)

Oh but what is "the obvious," I hear you ask? Well let's say that an alien lands in your backyard and asks if we have any "Fleazels" on this planet. When asked for clarification, the alien says "A fleazel is anyone who self-identifies as a fleazel." Surely you can see the problem there, right? This is a specific fallacy that logicians refer to as a Tautology, meaning it's akin to saying you own as many cars as you do cars, or defining a square as any square-shaped object. Furthermore, when you define "man" as "anyone who self-identifies as a man" and "woman" the same, and write the two definitions out, you'll notice that the two definitions don't even exclude eachother anymore, and could just as easily have been synonyms as antonyms.

There's a trans youtuber called Contrapoints who was actually brave enough to admit that these definitions don't work (I think it was in their "pronouns" video), but unfortunately the replacement definition they gave --that a woman is anyone who "lives their life" as a woman-- is even worse. By that logic, gluing twigs to my skin and standing in a hole in the ground makes me a tree.

Worse still, under that definition a femboy would qualify as a woman even if he doesn't identify as one! So essentially Contrapoints accidentally circled right back to telling certain people their gender identities are invalid, having succeeded only in rearranging things such that THEIR OWN identity was valid. Any set of definitions of men and women other than "whoever identifies as one" will inevitably have this problem regarding some demographic, even if only a hypothetical one, but even then we've already shown above how those definitions fail in their own way.

When you folks speak of religion you say "It doesn't matter that these ideas make you happy, they don't reflect reality. You need to change your identity." But when you speak of yourselves you say "It doesn't matter whether these ideas reflect reality, they make me happy. Asking me to change my identity is bigoted." Do you seriously not see the double standard at play there?

Well I DID change my identity, and it was EVERY BIT as painful as you folks always said it would be; but I did it anyway, because I made a decision to be the change I wanted to see in the world.

>but my identity doesn't hurt anyone.

Just because an idea isn't harmful doesn't make it factual, otherwise the earth would be flat, The Sun would be a pentagon, Trump's hair would be green, my dick would be huge, the horizon would be vertical, etc. It doesn't exactly hurt anyone when a flat earther asserts that moonlight cools down surfaces it touches (yes they actually say that, they're that crazy), but that hardly makes it factual.

For an example of an idea that's both factual AND harmful, consider how people who commit suicide when their identities are invalidated prove by their actions that they were at the very least too honest to simply slip back into the comfortable lie, which is something I think about every single day.

I won't pretend there's a clear right or wrong answer as to whether an idea's truthfulness or harmfulness should be prioritized, as both options have demonstrable problems, but I will say this: If I was willing to value happiness over truth, then I would still be a Christian.

>Well then I suppose the words men and women can mean whatever you want them to mean.

I would strongly advise against that line of thinking. When republicans decide that words like "commie" or "woke" mean whatever they want them to mean, we usually point to that very "destruction of meaning" as one of the hallmarks of Fascism. For us to turn around and do the exact same thing with our favorite words would be extremely hypocritical. The purpose of language is to describe reality, so a word without a real definition (like "fuckboy") is useless and should therefore be discarded.

Did anyone else watch the show Teacher's Pet as a kid? It was about a dog named Spot who really really wished he'd been human, and as such spoke, walked on two legs, wore clothes, and attended school. I think this show models exactly how we as a society should approach gender dysphoria, because A) not one character ever gave Spot crap for behaving that way, ...but B )neither did anyone ever entertain the idea that Spot behaving this way made him actually count as human.

So let's imagine for a moment that he did. Let's imagine that you're a student at that school and one day Spot asserts that species lay in the mind rather than the body (initially it's purely "because I said so," but eventually he switches to pulling out some scans which show that his behavior is actually rooted in wiring problems in his very brain, as it turns out), invents two new identity-based definitions of human and dog, and then forces them on the rest of society on pain of labeling anyone who so much as momentarily hesitates to accept them bigots. Would any of that make sense to you? No?

Well congratulations, you've just been banned from reddit, fired from your job, disowned by your friends and family, Spot refuses to believe that you don't want to commit hatecrimes against him no matter what you say, and the only social group willing to accept you are these weirdos who really really hate Spot, vastly out of proportion to his new strange ideas to boot (the cherry on top is that at one point after all that, Spot asks you "Why does this issue matter to you so much?"). What would you do in that situation? What do you suppose that an emotional teen with an irrational need to feel a sense of belonging would do?

Because that was the very first impression that the trans movement ever made on me as a teen joining Deviantart as his first ever form of social media in the 2010s. I will admit to my great shame that my hormonal and emotional teen mind did slide into the Reactive Fox mindset above once or twice (and these were doubtlessly some of my worst ever moments), but I always climbed back out again when I calmed down later.

That said, I have NEVER fully thrown myself in with the Angry Weirdos, as I simply couldn't ignore all the other glaring problems on display there. I would genuinely rather feel like the loneliest person in the world than convince myself of any of the obvious lies they tell on most other issues. I consider myself a centirst/independant, not a republican (anyone who tells you I want to "compromise on genocide" or other such nonsense is feeding you a fucking strawman; if you don't believe in forcing the gender binary on enbies then you shouldn't try to force a political binary on centrists, and the fact you never see the self-proclaimed Party of Diversity point that one out should tell you all you need to know about their true priorities; if we took the logic you folks use regarding gender and applied it to politics, then the fact that even one person in the country has beliefs that don't neatly line up with either party's platform means we ought to forcibly disband both parties entirely!).

>Okay, but what am I supposed to do, then? My distress at having to live like this is demonstrably real.

This is where the issue finally becomes a genuine conundrum, as I'll fully acknowledge that medical science doesn't have an alternative.... yet. However, This video, starting at the 3:42 mark, envisions a future organic technology in the form of domesticated and gene-modded microbes capable of performing pre-programmed instructions while interacting with the human neural network on the level of individual neurons; granted, in that video it's done to map out the human brain for the purposes of emulating it in AI, but I don't see why it wouldn't also be able to unplug and rearrange a few neurons afterwards.

But as is, in the political climate you folks have created, any research firm willing to look into a means of making your brain line up with your body rather than the other way around would get yelled at and accused of Eugenics and/or Reparative Therapy. Normally science hopes to be unafraid to challenge the dogmatic assumptions of the general public, but in practice every firm's funding is at the mercy of the local politicians, whose employment in turn is at the mercy of their loudest, angriest voters. So if things keep going as they currently are, you folks may find in a few decades that in your prioritization of feeling validated over your actual wellbeing, you ended up robbing yourself of the neurotherapy you actually needed, the same way the fearful and ignorant hippies of the 60s robbed us of the Nuclear Age, thereby warming up the planet even more than it otherwise would have.

>But that WOULD be reparative therapy!

The only reason that argument makes sense to you is because our society decided for whatever reason to classify gender dysphoria with the sexual orientations of all things, seemingly for no other reason than because they both tangentially relate to the genitals, which in my opinion is like trying to classify pancreatinc cancer with diabetes rather than other forms of cancer, purely because they both relate to the pancreas.

In fact, pretty much everything under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella that isn't an orientation could easily and safely be reclassified elsewhere. Gender Dysphoria? Group it with Body Integrity Dysphoria. Intersex? Group it with the other birth abnormalities like club foot or polydactyly. Queer? Well I was told that was a straight up SLUR, so why was it even in there in the first place?

Oh wait, I should probably explain what Body Integrity Dysphoria even is. Sufferers of BID, or the "transabled" as they prefer to be called, essentially feel the exact same distress over having a complete set of fully functioning bodyparts as a transgender person does over having the genitals they do, to the point of going out of their way to walk around with blind person canes or crutches or whatnot even when they don't need them in the least, and that's only if they can't get a doctor to amputate the allegedly offensive bodypart, which I should note is something most sane people would recognize as self harm. They also insist that their condition should be awarded the same social validation that was given to gender dysphoria, and for the exact same reasons too.

Of the handful of trans people I've spoken with who'd even heard of BID before, none could agree on what to think about it. One immediately accepted it as a valid brainstate, another did not, but gave age of onset of all things as the reason for differentiating between the two, another differentiated and cited the fact that BID's wiring problems have been found to all reside in a single specific brain region while Gender dysphoria's have not (btw you could say the same thing about Schizophrenia or my own autism, but we still consider both of those disorders), and the last chose to differentiate, but utterly refused to even give an excuse as to why.

I imagine one of the first things people will bring up in the comments here are the Hijras of Hindu culture, so I'd like to go on a brief tangent to talk about an entire D&D character concept I have that's loosely based on those (just hear me out):

See, in D&D canon there's this swamp-dwelling player Species called the Lizardfolk who generally have technology comparable to that of Uncontacted Tribes like the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island. Interestingly, even though they themselves have separate male and female sexes like humans (in biology this arrangement is referred to as Gonochorism, btw), their god, Semuanya, is Hermaphroditic. As such in the rare event where a Lizardfolk hatches intersex they're declared blessed by Semuanya and automatically raised as a cleric. My planned character would be one such cleric, who lets you refer to him/her using whatever pronouns you find most convenient, since I added my own worldbuilding detail to their backstory that Lizardfolk clerics are all referred to using the same separate, dedicated set of pronouns regardless of what's in their genital sheath, which of course would never translate into other languages at all.

Another detail I had was that this character insists that Semuanya be referred to as a hermaphrodite, not as intersex "for 'intersex' is the term you use for creatures like myself that aren't meant to be that way, and Glorious Semuanya of course could never have been anything other than the transcendent perfection they are, which I could never even hope to approach. Yes, my own arrangement technically isn't meant to look like this, but I'm also technically not supposed to be able to heal wounds or purify swamp water with a touch, now am I?"

Does that sound AT ALL like a character that a transphobe would write up?!

Yes, what you're feeling right now is precisely what it feels like to be a republican in today's America, it's precisely what it feels like to be a MAGA looking at all the insane things Trump's done, and it's precisely what it feels like to be a Christian looking into the archaeology and scholarship around the Bible. So now's your chance to be the change you want to see in the world, show them that the valley of despair has a far wall you can use to climb out of it again; if I can do it then so can you.

I'm truly at my wit's end here. I've gotten so, so many bans trying to open up to someone, ANYONE on Reddit who isn't MAGA about this (I originally planned on making this post to r/lgbt for example, but found that I was already banned for having posted the above Teacher's Pet analogy there before, which the mods accused of "comparing trans people to dogs." I tried to point out that they were committing the Extended Analogy fallacy there, but they've yet to respond). I keep trying to extend an olive branch, and have been punched in the face for it every single time. I swear on the graves of my dog, my mother, and all three of my dead grandparents that I hold zero malice towards any of you. If this post gets removed too then I don't know WHAT I'll do.