I have a story to tell you.
I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. My mother, my father, my grandmother, my uncle, his wife and two of my three cousins are all JWs. For more than half of my life my entire social circle was witnesses. It's the entire reason I remained in the closet when I was a teenager, because I would lose everything if I came out. That's how cults work, they isolate you.
I do not believe in a personal god, not in the way Christian's define it, at least. I'm an agnostic, I don't know if there is a higher power or not. I had no faith growing up, but my mother demanded that I continued attending their services as long as I lived under her roof. It wasn't until I was 25 that I finally got a place of my own and was able to stop attending the JW services, but because I did not oppose their teachings, I retained all of my JW friends.
I defended the JW faith to anyone who spoke ill of it, because even tho I did not believe in god, I believed in the power of what they taught. I always scoffed at the way that many ex-JWs labeled them as a cult and spoke about how corrupt the organization was. I thought it was all just bitter spirits, people who had earned what bad treatment they received.
Then I came out as transgender. Overnight every single witness that I knew disappeared. Where once I would frequently see them around town, now I never saw anyone. They avoided me. My mother turned against me, my best friend abandoned me, and people who I had known since we moved here in the 90s turned their backs on me. I became the enemy, not because I said anything bad about them, but because I was not one of them.
My perspective completely changed about the faith in the wake of this. Things that I had always glossed over or excused now were painfully visible. The patriarchal and sexist setup of the church suddenly stood out like a sort thumb. The ways they indoctrinate people and love bomb visitors in order to make people feel welcome so that they're more receptive were painfully visible.
And then I realized that the reason my mother could not and would not ever accept me as a woman is because to do so would jeopardize her position in the church as well. If she respected me, if she listened to me, if she believed me, she would put her entire support network in jeopardy.
The JW organization is a cult, but when you're inside a cult, you have no idea that it's a cult, even when people from the outside tell you that it's a cult.
Cults that survive do so by structuring themselves to protect themselves from outside influence. Everything is build around keeping their members ignorant of how people on the outside see them. The members are told to disbelieve anything outsiders tell them. They're given completely plausible reasons for why these things are false, and when a member stops believing, they are removed from the congregation. The congregation is told that this person is a non-believer, and that they should not be trusted.
You don’t believe what your queer siblings are telling you, because you’ve been setup to ensure you won’t believe them.