Originally a comment by Artymorty on The belief is mandatory.

Fred Wallace is of course the man who sends unsolicited dick picks to women. He also sends unsolicited pics of himself in flagrante at men’s fetish dens. I still can’t wrap my head around people who insist this man is a woman even when they know that he knows he’s a fetishistic man, and that they know that he knows that they know he’s a fetishistic man — so much so that he blatantly publishes pornographic pictures of himself engaging in his fetish.

Everybody knows he’s a man, and everybody knows that everybody else knows he’s a man. And yet.

It’s that two-regions-of-the-brain thing: first-order belief (“I believe x is true/false”) lives in the frontal cortex. But the limbic system overrides it, because it prioritizes tribal attachment, which involves second- and third-order beliefs (“Other people in my tribe believe x is true/false”, or “Other people in my tribe believe that other people in my tribe believe x is true/false”). They’re not stating their personal beliefs, because they can’t even access that part of the brain. They’re stating the prevailing dogma of their tribe, as required to maintain their social standing within it.

And they’re not even conscious of the fact that they’re doing it. The switchover in their brain from rational driver to irrational driver is imperceptible to them.

But it’s not imperceptible to us, to the people around them. If you pay attention, you can actually tell that they’re doing it. You can tell that their safety mechanism has been activated if they’re confronted with anything that involves questioning beliefs about trans. You can tell that they’ve switched over to a heightened emotional state. You can tell that they’re subconsciously panicking, that their threat level has spiked, that they’re no longer calm and collected, when the word “trans” comes up. Sentences become fragmented and clipped. The voice raises. The body tenses up. It’s as if they’re in the jungle and they’ve just detected a lion. They flee as soon as they can. Or they do the modern equivalent: they abruptly hang up the phone on you.

That’s not first-order logic processing; that’s the emergency backup system taking over. It’s the limbic system hijacking the brain and cutting off the capacity for individual belief because it could endanger the person’s tribal standing. That there is the magic behind the curtain that keeps religions and cults going for millenia. It’s probably the single most perplexing feature of the human mind.

And the fact that that mechanism is activated by the word “trans” is proof positive that trans is a cult. It literally operates on the same brain mechanism as cults do.