Depends on you - can you deal with asking yourself tricky questions and finding good answers? Or does the challenge make you uncomfortable?

It’s good to be unsure. The worst people are the ones who think they know everything. The only universal absolutes should be respect and love for others. Other than that, keep thinking and enquiring and learning.

It’s important to question your beliefs when presented with evidence. My views on pacificism have loosened a lot, for example.

But the two view you mention are ones where the left is objectively correct. Homosexual behavior is a biological fact in almost all animals and non-binary gender systems exist across the breadth of human cultures.

Any belief system which serves as a permission structure for brutalizing others can safely be rejected as false.

It’s pretty normal. There’s a graph that plots confidence as you gain new skills or knowledge, and it sounds like you’re on the down-slope of Mt Stupid and coming into the Valley of Despair.

I have spent my life learning for fun and if I can be said to have learned anything about the process it’s that the more you learn the better you understand just how vastly complex everything is, how many ways you could be wrong, and how insufficient your earlier simple assumptions were. Like yeah, maybe trans people are just mentally ill because there have been a few cases where that seems to be the case. But does that make it okay to deny all of them the agency and dignity of being able to decide who they want to be? Even if we define gender-affirming care as ‘harm’, we seem fine as a society with people harming themselves with stuff like cigarettes, why are we not fine with people ‘harming themselves’ with gender-affirming care?

At the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is: would you rather never be made uncomfortable by this realization that things are more nuanced htan you thought, or would you rather have the most accurate information about the world that you can get? Because you can’t have both. Moral/intellectual certainty is a pipe dream, that way lies true evil, because no one cares less about others than someone who is absolutely convinced that they’re right/just.

I do this often and it can feel like the bottom of my existence fell out. But I always end up back where I started after using logic and my understanding of the world. It’s probably good to reality check yourself every so often

It’s a good thing to question your beliefs every once in a while. Sometimes people get things wrong, and sometimes ideas need re-evaluated.

The way I look at gay/trans/etc is to take MLK Jr’s advice: judge people by the content of their character.

Weird Al wrote a song about this

The mile markers along the road to truth are ideas we used to believe were true.

Further truth can only be obtained by holding currently accepted truth to the highest standards of scrutiny.

Great, go with that, what if?

What if trans people are just mentally ill? Well, if they’re mentally ill then that implies that there’s a cure, we don’t know what that cure is, therefore treating it like an illness is pointless. Instead we should treat it like a condition, i.e. something that the person has to live with. Other examples of conditions are ADHD or Autism, and how do we deal with those? Well, the first step is always for the person to accept that they have that condition and make arrangements so that they can live a “normal” life, these might include taking prescription drugs to normalize their brain chemistry but also behavioral and environmental changes to make their situation more comfortable, including asking people to have leniency on stuff like tardiness which is difficult for them to control. And how is that any different from a trans person taking hormones and asking people to use different pronouns? Why does it matter to me if the person wants to transition? It’s their body, I don’t care if someone does plastic surgery to change their nose, why should I care about their genitalia?. So what if being trans was a mental illness? Until a cure is found nothing changes, whenever a cure gets found then we can reopen the discussion, but unless a person is being a menace to others I oppose the idea of mandatory treatment, so it would be up to trans people whether they wanted to change their body or their minds, and I know what I would choose 100% (I’m a mind, I have a body, changing my body doesn’t change who I am, so that’s an easy choice for me).

What of gay people are just deviants? First you would have to define deviant, but in any sense of that word it honestly doesn’t matter, because what two consenting adults decide to do, deviant or not, is their own business. So why should you care?. The only “valid” answer here that I can think of involves religion, but we live in a secular society, where we recognize freedom of religion, therefore your religious ideas can’t be imposed onto others, so it’s not a valid argument in our society either.

So long story short, what if trans are mentally ill? Nothing changes, they should still be able to choose the sort of treatment they would prefer for their “illness”, and hormonal therapy, surgery and asking people to use different pronouns is a valid treatment. What if gays were deviant? Nothing changes, any group of people where all of them are consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to. So what if you’re wrong? You still should behave the way you already do, so nothing changes.

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I always look at it this way. So what?

What if I’m wrong and gay people are deviants? Well if I’m wrong, they get to live life like they want to. No problem there.

What if trans people are mentally ill? Well, we don’t stop boob jobs or tattoos, and if we’re claiming trans is ill then those are too. So no problem with that either.

Think of the consequences of your actions, and if those consequences are OK even if you’re wrong, then you can stop worrying.

If you feel crazy because you don’t fit in, it’s entirely possible you’re not the crazy one. It’s entirely possible a large portion of society is on another bender.

I found the book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay helpful.
It was first published in 1841, so it’s in the public domain and available online. I found my copy in a used bookstore for a $1.
Mackay documents many of the public manias that overtook society up to that point. He describes dozens of them and remember, his list stops in the mid-1800’s.
Being aware of this pattern helps me to realize that a large number of humans are highly illogical. It helps me to understand that yes, a large number of people can all go off the deep end. It’s not me, it’s them. Notably, I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is lie low and ride it out.

You should always Question everything, If someone tells you not to question it, question it Harder.

If it is the Truth then it doesn’t matter if you Question it or not, and nobody should care if you question it

If it’s a Lie, then You need to know why you’re being lied to, you need to know who benefits from it, you need to know if the Lie was worth suppression of the Truth.

If your life is truly better with the Lie it is always better to know and make that decision for yourself, never let others dictate what you believe because it is better for them, If you are going to follow a Lie make sure it is in your best interest. Because anyone will tell you a lie to help themselves but no one will willingly work against their own self interest.

No way, that’s just science, baby! (Edit: OK, and philosophy)

I think those questions need to be followed through with a chain of reasoning and questions, not denial. There’s usually lots of options.

So for that “gay people are deviants” question, a “no they aren’t” answer isn’t helpful, because it’s faith based, which leads to a shutdown of thinking and curiosity.

Another line might be: if they are, then does that mean that the tens or hundreds of other animal species with documented existence of homosexuality are also deviants? Can an animal be a deviant? Seems unlikely… Does that mean that maybe deviance is a dodgy concept? What does it actually mean? Does it mean a thing is fundamentally bad, or does it just mean that it doesn’t fit with a particular value system? If that’s the case, and I personally know a bunch of gay people who are really lovely people, is it possible that it’s the value system that’s the problem, not the gay people?

There’s usually plenty of other chains of thought that will get you to a place like this. Doing this kind of thought exploration also means that when you come up against someone making that argument in public, then you have a better idea where you stand, and you can potentially engage constructively with them, if they seem open to it.

Ok, let’s run that thought experiment, what if we’re wrong?

All too often, even if my premise is wrong, I’d get to the same results. Even if I agree with their premise, they are monsters. However you want to marginalize people for different preferences or presentation or not matching their body or skin color or gender, that’s no excuse for the abuse, taking away human rights, taking away normal accommodations for everyday life. Treat people like people.

Equally the thought experiment just proves the original point. Let’s assume there are people who believe the government is full of waste, fraud and abuse, and we need to fix that. They haven’t presented anything to convince us that’s true, their actions cutting people and agencies without investigation, due process, contractual requirements, or regard for constitutional checks and balances is quickly a much bigger problem. Then you have those same people acting above the law, a very suspicious correlation between cuts and personal enrichment of those involved, and you’re firmly in bizarro world territory where the asylum is run by the real lunatics. Even assuming the worst of people employed by the federal government, I can’t conceive of a way this isn’t far worse, proving my original belief