I'm currently reading Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle (who is currently a tif that goes by Jude). It is a testament to internalized misogyny's effectiveness as a psychological weapon of war that Doyle could make the observations she does in the book and still hate being a woman and believe that men are inherently better (though to be fair, you could tell that the seeds of TRA brainwashing had begun to take root in her mind).

Anyways, the reason I'm making this post is that I got to the part where she's talking about the history of young girls being accused of demonic possession when they most likely just had some kind of mental illness, and it's lowkey kind of scary how she fails to make note of any of the similarities between it and 'gender affirming care'.

Here are some quotes:

In a culture where we’re trained to protect children and loathe women, the border zone between the two states is the subject of intense superstition and terror. Puberty marks not only a girl’s first steps toward adult sexuality, but the beginning of her reproductive capacity —the life-giving potency signaled by menstrual blood. Her blood is terrible because her power is threatening; her fertility is something patriarchy must demonize and control in order to secure its own existence.

Puberty marks the point where girls stop being people and start being women, where it becomes important to ensure their submission to male power. If that means training girls to hate themselves, or to see their own sexuality as the most horrifying thing imaginable, so be it. What could go wrong?

(flash forward to the present where the majority of teenage girls who wish to hack their breasts off and rake their vaginas shut are mostly dysphoric lesbians with internalized homophobia or autistics who can't cope with their developing bodies during puberty thanks to their sensory issues)

That Anneliese Michel believed herself to be possessed is not in question. She believed it the way she believed in God, with total, self-annihilating certainty. The problem was that her family agreed with her, and that they let her kill herself as a result. Anneliese, who was born in Bavaria in 1952, was raised in a version of Catholicism so severe it was nearly medieval. In one 1976 poll, 89 percent of Germans said “no” when asked if there was a Devil. Yet when Anneliese started experiencing blackouts and convulsions at age sixteen, “the Devil” struck her parents as a plausible explanation (...) It was the sort of thing their family took very seriously. And so, instead of looking for ways to convince their daughter she wasn’t possessed, the Michels started looking for signs that she was. Still, in the exorcism boom of the mid-1970s, and in a case as theatrical as Anneliese’s, it made a certain amount of sense for the priests to just roll with it. Which is why, when Anneliese announced that the Virgin Mary had told her to stop taking her medication so that she could die a martyr, everyone just rolled with that, too. She starved to death. Correction: Her parents let her starve herself to death, in her own home. So did her priests, who continued performing the exorcisms even as it became clear that Anneliese intended to die.

(Not unlike how certain ideologues encourage it's members to continue shooting up bathtub hormones that aren't approved by the FDA even when it's severely impacting their physical health to the point where they can barely move or speak, no?)

Just as we still look for supernatural evil instead of human abusers, we still insist on seeing demonic influence where there are only girls in pain. In 2016, Linda Chaniotis wrote for The Guardian that “I reportedly screamed from the age of three months to three years old,” and that she had refused to let anyone but her mother touch her. In response, “my parents decided that when I was about two, I had been cursed by a witch, and that I was demon possessed.” She was exorcised repeatedly and unsuccessfully; she learned to run and hide the moment she felt her “demon” starting to emerge, so that her parents wouldn’t be angry.** It wasn’t until she was thirty years old that her doctor told her she was epileptic, and that she had been hiding the seizures her whole life**

We would rather see girls stopped dead—stuck in a constant childhood that never decays—than let them grow into women who can pursue their desires.

Doyle must have some massive cognitive dissonance going on, if she could recognize all this, and still go on to support putting children on puberty blockers. Does she really think it's a coincidence that there's been such a massive explosion in recent years of young girls wanting to halt their puberty and mutilate themselves in a world where sexist societies have a tendency to pathologize their psychological distress with diagnoses that have no basis in modern science whatsoever, rather than acknowledge the root cause of their suffering?

To quote Reaux from the FDS podcast,

If you dont watch for these types of things in your own culture, men will find a way to make it happen, right? There's a big discussion right now about some of the medical practices being used to transition girls from female to male when it comes to transgender identity and there's been a huge controversy in the states because there's people who've been whistleblowing and saying these doctors have been pushing these girls to get masectomies, to try to get skin grafts, get fake penises, to go on hormones that'll destroy their ability to self regulate their hormones. Like they'll shrink their ovaries. Itll cause all sorts of long-term problems. And it's being given to them because they'll be like "I'm a woman who feels uncomfortable in my body" and then the medical industry will be like "you should transition to a man". So like, stuff like this keeps happening in different forms where women's bodies get highly politicized and instead of society making it better for women to exist, what they do is they try to create some external mechanism to justify why this person needs some kind of medical intervention and quite frankly mutilation of their bodies to exist in a world that's really built for men. So like, a lot of people here wouldn't see that as sexism. They wouldn't see that as sex-based oppression. They would look at that and be like "well, we should support people who are trans etcetera" and I'm not saying that we shouldn't, I'm just saying that there's clearly, for there to be such an explosion of girls who are suddenly deciding that they're actually men because they feel uncomfortable in their bodies, then perhaps it's not just a matter of gender dysphoria, that there's other cultural pressures there.