JP Sears constantly refers to himself as a freethinker. His increasing religiosity is counter to critical thinking, however. Derek responds to two recent videos that detail his religious thinking and transphobia, showing how a specific strain of Christianity—and binary thinking—is not freethought, but propaganda.
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There's a big difference between supporting the child and indoctrinating a child.
If a child says, hey, I'm trans, they don't need to be bullied.
They need to be supported.
They might need mental help.
Notice he can't even say the word bullied.
He couldn't get it out.
I don't know, his background maybe hit a little too close to home for him.
Maybe there's some transference going on there.
Not going to psychoanalyze it, even though he feels fine psychoanalyzing an entire cohort of children by stating that if they think they're transgender, they might need mental help.
Personally, I don't believe God makes mistakes and is like, dude, you were meant to be a girl, but I put you in a boy's body.
Now we've moved into an even more fundamentalist version of Christianity.
We're talking creation theory here.
So God had created.
That doesn't mean he thinks that the earth is necessarily 6,000 years old.
He may.
I don't know that.
But the idea of creationism is apparent right there because By his estimation, there was some metaphysical force that molded humans specifically.
But this is also indicative of thought-terminating cliches.
The idea that if God intended this, then there's basically nothing you can say that would ever be debated.
It is what it is.
And that's, again, where the binary nature of this comes in.
Now, of course, research in biology shows and in psychology shows that there are no binaries here.
We're not this species that was created as Adam and Eve.
Nothing supports that on any level whatsoever.
But we have these very old operating systems of both culture and neurology that dictate certain parameters by which we live.
And so it's hard to have these sorts of conversations in general.
There will never be any headway made if this is the rules of the game.
But there are so many holes in the argument.
And here's one that is pretty close to home for me because he brings up something that I recently saw as well.
And it kind of boggles the imagination that he doesn't realize why this may be the case.
There was that Bill Maher quote you may have seen it was going down going around a month or two ago where he's looking at the trend of trans children saying like cool there's a lot in California barely any in Ohio so that means either California is creating them or Ohio is shaming them and I think there's absolutely an agenda not to like identify kids who are trans
I think there's an agenda to create them.
Yeah, you said it, but of course that doesn't jive with your belief system.
There is this anti-gay messaging I remember from a while ago of people saying, why weren't there any gay people 100 years ago?
There were.
There were reasons you didn't know about it because they couldn't talk about it.
Ohio has a number of anti-trans bills.
Besides that, if that's the mindset of the people who live there, do you really think the children are going to feel comfortable talking about these things?
Or if they do bring it up, what type of response are the parents going to give?
I don't know what it's like being a parent.
I'm not going to be one.
So I don't really feel the need to comment on parenting issues.
It's something that I leave to Matthew and Julian on the podcast.
But that said, I remember being a child.
And there's a lot of that that still influences me today.
That's all of us.
And so to put this idea that comes out of nowhere, This identity, your identity is bound with your environment.
We know this.
Where you live and the influences you have sometimes conflict with your psychology and your biology.
Sometimes it supports it.
He is going fully in the direction of conflict, not support, and saying that conflict is the right path ahead because supporting is some form of indoctrination or creation.
What This kind of conspiratorial thinking would create a nefarious agenda of parents wanting to create transgender children.
Now you might be able to argue that the support might be too much.
You could honestly argue, because we know that our prefrontal cortex isn't fully set until about age 25, that people go through phases.
These are things that can be debated.
I'm not taking a side on any of that, but we can talk about that.
But to open up by saying that someone who expresses it might need mental health help, and then not to realize that the environment you're in matters, so there's probably a reason why more people in California feel comfortable expressing to their parents what's going on than in Ohio, Really?
