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One of the most ideologically appealing forms of pseudoscience started with the idea of vaccines causing autism. A parent's guilt that they don't really love their child can be intense. Telling them that their child isn't really autistic, that their real child is hiding in there somewhere waiting to be cured and that the autism was something done to them by external factors, is quite appealing.

Yes, it shouldn't matter if it's due to external causes but this is the appeal of the idea.

𝚝𝚓𝚠

And this is the cursed vein that "social contagion" comes from. You don't really hate your trans child. You love your child who only caught the trans from the environment. There is no moral obligation on your part to love your child as they really are as you're seeing surface manifestation of peer-pressure and anxiety. The real child, your fantasy of what they were supposed to be, is hiding in there somewhere.

And as I've noted before, in this way the bigoted parents are also victims of a scam.