Indoctrination can be achieved in many different ways. From the drip drip method that is barely even noticeable, to utter submersion.
When I was a child, I went to a religious primary school where the local vicar was a regular visitor. I was told that I was a Christian before I even knew what or who a Christian was. Religion was dripped into my forming mind with prayers three times a day and hymns at morning assembly.
At that age I just did what I was told, believing that that was just the way things were. I was not old enough to realise that I choose to have a religion or not. I could choose a different mindset, a different path.
Religion and I collided a few years later and we went our separate ways.
Religion can be many things for many people. A hub to the local community, an enrichment to people's lives, or simply just a comfort or safety net that some need or want. It can be part of who someone fundamentally is and can form the basis of their moral code, their bench mark for right and wrong.
But religion can also be escalated to cult level, making you condone things you never would before. Do things that you would never do. It is also the perfect excuse to control people and has been used in this way for centuries. Blind faith can be dangerous.
Religion has been a very useful tool for the subjugation of women. It is, to quote one example, what allowed, arranged and condoned thousands of young girls and women to be locked away in the Magadelene Laundries in Ireland for the crime of having a baby, for being presumed "promiscuous", or simply in some cases; being too pretty.
It is why women were told that their place was in the home and the man's place was head of the household, and her. "It is written in the bible Susan, don't you want to obey the word of God?"
"Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the
head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything
to their husbands” (Eph. 5:22–24)."
Blind faith is how monsters are not only made, but how they can flourish in plain sight.
So where and why does this fit into what I wanted to talk about today? Because blind faith is not just about religion. It can be about any movement, group, shared belief system.
When I began to become interested in politics and feminism, the left side of politics seemed like the perfect fit for me. The "morally right" The good. The just. There was a general assumption that the liberal position was the good and anything to the right was wrong. There was only one choice for me, clearly.
So too with feminism. I wanted rights and equality for women. As I learned about feminism I also educated myself about intersectional feminism, named to include woman of all races, ethnicities, class, culture, age etc. I wanted that.
So there I was, a left leaning intersectional feminist when one day, I saw a man winning a women's cycling competition. A man who identified as a woman but not only identified, said he was an actual, biological woman.
From there my fall down the rabbit hole was swift. Suddenly, a man with a beard who wore skirts and had decided he was a lesbian, was a real woman. One who went into schools for Stonewall teaching children they could be born in the wrong body. Listen to Magdelen Burns about that one.
Lesbians who didn't accept "lady dick" were transphobic.
Talking about being pregnant and giving birth was transphobic because it didn't include transwomen. Having a women only group on Facebook talking about menopause was transphobic. Men's mental health groups were disbanded because they would not include transmen. Women meeting to discuss women's rights were transphobic. Refuges should accept transwomen, or they would lose their funding (again this year too). I could go on and on and on and on.
Every FUCKING thing that did not place men identifying as women front and centre, became transphobic.
We were told that words were actual violence. That we were killing people by saying the immutable fact that you cannot change sex. A woman lost her job for saying this. Told that her views were "not worthy of respect in a democratic society".
Children as young as FOUR being referred to a gender clinic. Teenagers being prescribed puberty blockers like they were sweets. 4500% rise in referrals to Tavistock. Three quarters of those being girls.
The rabbit hole is so deep you could drown in it.
The world went mad before our eyes. Yet people, including myself, who questioned this idealogy, were called bigots. That anything other than the ultra left view was right wing. We were not worthy of being called feminists. We were TERFs. What the ACTUAL FUCK???
Where did the left go so wrong, so fast? Moreover, why the hell have so many fallen for the indoctrination? Why are doctors now scared to question if a child is transgender? Why have politicians fallen hook, line and sinker for this? Lisa Nandy saying that transwomen who rape women belong in women's prisons because they identify as women. This article goes a long way to explain that.
So where do liberal feminist women who have been thrown out of the left, thrown out of what is now called feminism do? We fight.
We organise. We educate. We agitate.
