#glinner

I'm only going to tag the ones I think I know.

In a sense I think you're right, but I think it's more accurate to say that transphobia is a very conspiratorial or paranoid mindset and those types of mindset tend to be self perpetuating. The conspiracist sees conspiracies everywhere, the paranoid will see everyone out to get them. They force people to isolate in echo chambers, or even withdraw more completely into themselves. It's like a memetic parasite that thrives on the feedback loop, until eventually the host is fully consumed by these thoughts. JK Rowling, Graham Linehan and any number of other TERFs or transphobes are constantly seeing a dissonance between Reality (objective) and reality (subjective), so they have to keep warping their perceptions more and more until they've become completely divorced from Reality. It's the exact same as anti-vaxxers who can't reconcile their beliefs with the facts, so they decide that the experts are being paid off, which means there's someone paying them off, which means there's something they don't want us to know. You keep making these micro adjustments in your vision of the world to justify a deeply held belief, but those adjustments add up and eventually your reality is utterly incompatible with actual reality. It's kinda sad but considering it's a parasite that incubates in hatred and bigotry, it's hard to feel sympathy for the kind of person who succumbs to it.

With Elon Musk doing a speed-run radicalisation rush to the far-right, I felt it was pretty relevant again so I've brought it out from behind the paywall again.

LOL