Internalized transphobia, part 1

One of the most interesting aspects of cults and coercive influence is how the process of indoctrination installs an unsleeping, internal watchman to oversee one’s full-scale personal transformation.

This personal transformation is, first and foremost, a teardown operation: members of coercive groups embark on a righteous quest to condemn and destroy the old self—its gestures, speech (now problematic), patterns of thought, attachment relationships (goodbye to everyone who doesn’t get with the new program), name and self-presentation—and embark on an endless process of self-renunciation/self-transformation.

There will always be something else you must do to purge the wrongness of the old self: thoughts you must not entertain anymore, gestures that ought to pass from performance to instinct, perceptions that reveal the biases of the old and erring eye in the new and perfect skull.

Questions and doubts become ‘internalized X’ [insert worldliness, sinfulness, unbelief, -isms and -phobias], rather than the natural responses of a thinking self confronting new and often contradictory belief systems or considering a life-altering program of personal change. Your inner voice gets labeled as a betrayal of one’s newfound cause or faith, disabling your ability to question and evaluate the group, its beliefs, and the consequences of your involvement on your own life. Your doubts are not evidence that you should dig deeper but evidence of your personal inadequacies, your attachment to old and problematic points of view that you have a responsibility—not just to yourself but to the group as a whole—to suppress.