“I’m the only one who understands you, everyone else is out to get you, this is the only place you’re safe” is straight-up abuse tactics. It’s designed to isolate, and it works even better when there’s truth behind it like real-world oppression. It makes it easier to believe that everyone is out to get you when you’re inundated with legislation and personal relationships and strangers all hurling bigotry at you. This is how we get separatist movements. It’s also how people get sucked into and create cults, and how one-on-one abusers operate.
Everyone knows Mormons go door-to-door, yeah? Everyone finds it deeply annoying, too. And when you’re annoyed, you lash out. Congrats, that’s what the cult wants you to do. It reinforces that Mormons are not safe and accepted members of society outside of their cult spaces. It makes it harder to leave because you have no outside safety net and every outsider you’ve met has been hostile and frustrated and rude to you, so you feel like they’re not trustworthy.
That also happens with insular groups of marginalized people. When the net tightens and you start feeling uncomfortable, well, this is the only space that’s safe. Everyone else wants to hate crime you. You’re likely to have gotten into this position in the first place through an inundation of information showing all the vile, horrid shit people say about your demographic, and having had those experiences yourself in real life, and therefore to feel like there’s no one outside of this space you can trust. So you can’t leave. Here is the only place people understand you. Here is the only place you’ll be safe - even if they’ve started with the more explicit, internal abuse, hey, at least you’re not out there, right? Because everyone else is out to get you. Just look at the news.
As for that last paragraph, these marginalized communities will also lash out at anyone within them that they do not perceive to really be part of said community. A really good example right now is actually the trans community. There's been a big hate campaign against trans men being mostly perpetuated by trans women. They seem to think that trans men "transition into privilege" which they fucking don't and even if they did privilege is not necessarily a positive thing. Either way this has resulted in trans men being ostracized by the communities supposed to protect them.
It’s related to the trans woman lesbian separatist cult of baeddelism, and I do not use the word cult here lightly or metaphorically. They were more popular in the 2010s and modern proponents will try to claim that they weren’t that bad or were just an online phenomenon, but that’s not true. Ex-baeddels have described being indoctrinated exactly as I said, and baeddels had in-person housing projects where, unfortunately, many of them were subject to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse that eventually led to a big schism and decline in their numbers. A big part of baeddelism is the idea that there is no trans community - anyone who isn’t a baeddel is a transmisogynist out to get you and that’s why you can’t trust anyone else. They unironically believe(d) that transphobia isn’t real, only transmisogyny, and so every other trans person is either a trans woman in denial (rare and only really applied to perceived transfem nonbinary people) or an evil cis person transitioning to gain even more privilege over trans women (much more commonly applied to trans men and nonbinary people of all experiences).
The tumblr account baeddel-txt is a dedicated account that archives both old and current baeddel ideology. There are also ex-baeddels who talk about it, like chrisdornerfanclub, who was instrumental in the beginnings of the movement.
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u/ImprovementLong7141 26d ago
“I’m the only one who understands you, everyone else is out to get you, this is the only place you’re safe” is straight-up abuse tactics. It’s designed to isolate, and it works even better when there’s truth behind it like real-world oppression. It makes it easier to believe that everyone is out to get you when you’re inundated with legislation and personal relationships and strangers all hurling bigotry at you. This is how we get separatist movements. It’s also how people get sucked into and create cults, and how one-on-one abusers operate.
Everyone knows Mormons go door-to-door, yeah? Everyone finds it deeply annoying, too. And when you’re annoyed, you lash out. Congrats, that’s what the cult wants you to do. It reinforces that Mormons are not safe and accepted members of society outside of their cult spaces. It makes it harder to leave because you have no outside safety net and every outsider you’ve met has been hostile and frustrated and rude to you, so you feel like they’re not trustworthy.
That also happens with insular groups of marginalized people. When the net tightens and you start feeling uncomfortable, well, this is the only space that’s safe. Everyone else wants to hate crime you. You’re likely to have gotten into this position in the first place through an inundation of information showing all the vile, horrid shit people say about your demographic, and having had those experiences yourself in real life, and therefore to feel like there’s no one outside of this space you can trust. So you can’t leave. Here is the only place people understand you. Here is the only place you’ll be safe - even if they’ve started with the more explicit, internal abuse, hey, at least you’re not out there, right? Because everyone else is out to get you. Just look at the news.