7/3/2021 0 Comments My Horrid Views From My PastI am not a good person. If I’m being honest, much of what I do (mostly on my podcast, which is be an advocate for trans liberation mostly, but also for other oppressed minority groups) is to try to make up for the horrible views I had in the past and advocated for. As you may know by now, I grew up in a fundamentalist church and family. We were super conservative in every way. Politics was everywhere around me as a kid, politics was important to my mom and grandparents on my mom’s side, who we saw quite often. I grew up watching Fox News, especially Bill O’Reilly, reading Christian conservative news magazines and evangelical talk radio such as “Cross Talk,” a right-wing extremist program that regularly pushed some of the most insane conspiracy theories ever and extremely racist looking back at it. I still remember it’s election night coverage and the things they said about black people. It genuinely was indistinguishable from rhetoric I hear from alt-right figures. This is what I grew up with. As I got older and got more access to the internet and became more interested in politics I started listening to Glenn Beck. I listened to the first hour live, then did school (I was homeschooled, so I could get away with it), and listened to the rest of the show via podcast. I don’t think I missed a single episode for several years. I was addicted to Glenn Beck. I can honestly say that no one influenced my political beliefs more than Glenn Beck from 2013-2019. Then, I started getting into some of the even more hardcore stuff. I got into Erick Erickson, Steve Deace, Michael Berry, and eventually, Alex Jones. I loved Alex Jones. I couldn’t wait for the day I made money to buy his stuff. That’s how lost I was. I genuinely took Alex Jones completely seriously (minus the Illuminati stuff, I never believed in the Illuminati). I only stopped listening to him when he started getting friendly with Trump because I was a Never Trump conservative (in 2016 I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate). I started reading websites such as The Daily Caller, Townhall, The American Thinker, Red State, Right Scoop, The Gateway Pundit, Brietbart, Liberty Treehouse, TheBlaze, InfoWars, and some other websites that I genuinely don’t remember the names of at this point. I also read a lot of TruNews, and watched Newsmax TV and OAN. I remember going to OAN’s website the day it launched I was so excited for it. So, yes, I was quite well acquainted with both networks before the rest of the world took notice of them last year. Oh, I also just remembered: I was a huge fan of Caiden Cowger and was a supporter of the Constitutional Freedom Party (a conservative party trying to keep the spirit of the Tea Party alive after seeing the rise of Trump and it’s founders and members being terrified of it). I grew up believing that government needed to be extremely small, but the military needed to be big. In fact, the military was practically worshiped. Being a soldier was the highest calling there was in my family, that and being a cop, and we worshiped cops almost as much as we did military members. I remember being taught that any black person who didn’t act white (though those words were never used) or dressed white or talked white were a bunch of thugs and welfare queens. Black people were often the cause of the nation’s problems I was taught, especially because the black fatherless myth was instilled in my brain from an early age. I was taught that Obama was a Muslim from Kenya. I genuinely believed that. Just about everyone around me believed it, and pushed it regularly, along with the notion that Obama was a communist. I also grew up a “pro-life” (let’s call it what it really is though, pro-forced birth) and quite an extremist at that. I believed, and so did everyone around me (and most people I know are still in this position) that abortion should be illegal under ALL circumstances. The woman got raped? Too bad, that fetus in her stomach is more important. It’s a high school girl who got pregnant? Well, shouldn’t have been sleeping around the boys. I mean, that’s why you’re supposed to wait ‘til marriage. She asked for it. Terrible, sure, but this is the consequence of sin. Is the mother going to die if the baby isn’t aborted? Well, then the mom must die. Nothing is nobler than a mother dying for her baby. No, I’m not exaggerating or joking about any of those stances. These are the beliefs I was raised with. I was told that these are the only reasonable positions on abortion. Otherwise, you were worshiping Moloch. I was raised believing in the war on Christmas. I was raised to believe that gay and trans people were subhuman scum who chose to be queer for attention and to usher in acceptance of pedophilia. Heck, the reason 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Boston marathon bombings, school shootings, all happened because we lets gays out of the closet. Once I realized that I was trans, it terrified me. I believed I was a hell-bound monster. So, what did I decide to? Become even more hard-line against LGBT people in hopes if I became more hard-line against LGBT people, then maybe I would stop being trans. I remember posting on The Daily Caller that gay people should be stoned. It only got worse once my parents found out I’m trans and sent me to conversion therapy. I made myself genuinely hate the LGBT community with every fiber of my being. I became obsessed with LGBT people and bashing them. I was so desperate to not be trans, to convince myself that being trans was bad and I needed to just choose to not be trans. The first scale to fall from my eyes was immigration. My dad got involved with a local ministry that worked with refugees and immigrants. I was a hard-line anti-immigration person. Well, over time, hearing about how broken the immigration system was and meeting refugees I became a pro immigration person in about the span of a year. This was probably in about 2015, I’m guessing. Then the next scale to fall from my eyes was to realize that racism was still alive and well in America. I didn’t believe in systemic racism until the Black Lives Matter marches of last year, but I realized racism was still a thing in America and the drug war was inherently racist in about 2018. Listening to rappers such as Propaganda, Derek Minor and Lecrae helped me understand that. Then in 2019 I couldn’t pretend to myself that I wasn’t trans anymore. My gender dysphoria got too severe. I started coming out to people. So, because of that, I stopped trying to force myself to be anti-LGBT and started trying to find community. The first thing I did was start this blog. Then, I started a Tumblr blog and became a part of the transmedicalist community. Then I got onto Discord and joined several trans Christian Discord servers. Blaire White and Kalvin Garrah were the trans figures I listened to the most as a transmedicalist. Eventually, on Tumblr I started finding people who weren’t transmeds and on YouTube I discovered the channel “Jammidodger” and Sam Collins. Due to these influences on Tumblr and YouTube I started moving away from trans medicalism. This was the turning point to becoming a pro-LGBT activist. Around 2017 I went from being conservative to libertarian. Figures such as Austin Petersen and Jason Stapleton were instrumental to becoming a libertarian, that and the radio show Free Talk Live. Even as a libertarian I still remained a loyal Glenn Beck listener. Stopped listening regularly to him in late 2019 and stopped listening completely early 2020. Eventually I started reading Reason Magazine and watching their YouTube channel. Then I got into John Stossel. Then it was Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, Dave Smith, and Michael Malice. It was a fascinating ideology to get into. Libertarianism was exciting, it was basically conservatism, but more open-minded. It was pro-immigration, something I already was, which was good for me, because I was tired of being the lone conservative fighting for immigration on conservative forums. Libertarianism seemed a lot more logically consistent than conservatism. It seemed like the only true response to the looming threat of communism in America. I was genuinely convinced that we were diving straight into communism and would soon look just like Venezuela or the Soviet Union, and libertarianism was the best weapon against it. Over time, I got even more extreme in libertarian beliefs. I ended up a Minarchist, borderline full-on Anarcho-Capitalist. For a brief amount of time I flirted with Objectivism due to Yaron Brook and being influenced by books written by Ayn Rand such as “Socialism.” Most of the libertarian intellectuals I was influenced by were Ludwig von Mises and Tom Woods though. I still own my libertarian books by Rand, Mises and Rothbard. I don’t really remember much about my exact beliefs during this time to be honest, outside of the growing misogyny I was feeling. I was getting more and more desperate to not be trans, so I decided I needed to “man up.” So, I started looking around the internet to figure out how to be manly. I eventually stumbled onto the MGTOW community (MGTOW is short for “Men Going Their Own Way”). Basically, it’s a hate group. They hate women, because according to MGTOW, feminism has ruined everything and it’s in women’s basic nature to be gold-digging whores, to be liars and psycopaths. Women need to be put into their place, according to this ideology, by being treated as sub-human. According to MGTOW beliefs, women are nothing more than sex dolls for men, who exist merely to suck dick and make babies. They exist for no other purpose and are overall, pretty useless. In fact, it is beyond generous that men would even put up with such useless creatures. This is the hate group I fell into because it seemed to me to be the manliest there was because I was so desperate to not be a trans woman. In the end though, there were two talking points I could not accept which allowed me to get out of MGTOW, and those were: that mothers hate their children, and I genuinely cannot remember the other one. My favorite fringe belief of MGTOW: the trans people exist because of feminism. According to MGTOW, trans women exist because they have been taught by feminism to hate being men, and trans men exist to water down what it means to be a man. It’s basically TERF beliefs, just in reverse. In 2019 I got introduced to 5G conspiracies. My dad bought into them completely and made the whole family watch a bunch of videos talking about why 5G is dangerous. Eventually, I bought into it completely. Heck, I was even pushing the conspiracy that 5G caused COVID on Twitter early in 2020. Not joking. You can still find those tweets. I don’t think I ever deleted those tweets. I genuinely believed it. I’m extraordinarily embarrassed about it now, but it’s what I believed. So, what helped push me away from such fringe hateful beliefs for good? It was finding a YouTube channel called “Philosophy Tube” late in 2019. I grew up not knowing a single person on the left who talked about their beliefs. So, I just assumed that it was impossible to be intelligent and be on the left. Abigail Thorne completely destroyed those assumptions. I was amazed at how well-spoken and well-thought-out she was. An intelligent leftist. I had just found a unicorn. I binged her videos and subscribed to watch future ones. Her channel opened my eyes so much. Single-handedly she made me an enlightened centrist. Before I saw her channel, I was on the verge of going full-on Anarcho-Capitalist. Now, I was a centrist because of one leftist. Eventually, I found other YouTube channels such as Thought Slime, Vaush, Xanderhal, David Pakman, Secular Talk, Actual Jake, and Majority Report. They pushed me over the edge to put me firmly on the left (to be more specific, while I call myself a socialist, I push more for anarcho-communism, but communism is still such a dirty word I just call myself a socialist). After finding more channels such as The Serfs, Contrapoints, The Young Turks, The Damage Report and Ring of Fire. I started watching Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. I became aware of hate groups and beliefs, and how they were started and how to figure out what hate groups are. So, with more awareness of hateful beliefs, I genuinely hope my days of bouncing around to different hate groups is over, but now I’m left with nothing but shame and disgust for my days of having such hateful beliefs. It’s something that brings genuine shame to me. It’s something I would love to just hide and pretend I never had such beliefs. That said, I know I can never truly move on until I shine a bright light upon the things I once believed.
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AuthorHi! I'm Anna, a currently transitioning transgender woman! I started my blog "Ramblings of a Trans Woman" as therapy for gender and identity issues and abuse from my parents and church. Hopefully, someone else out there can get something from this. If you want to talk, just get in contact with me, there's plenty of ways how and we'll discuss the best way to talk! Archives
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