Here’s how I generally react to “Nihilism”.
Across history, the Slave-castes have had very shitty lives. They have little-if-any Choice. They generally starve to death. They generally fight and die on the frontline of war zones. Their lives are generally short, brutal, painful, and miserable.
Thus these are the ones most needy and desperate for an “Afterlife”, a better-life, a Utopia. So when early Semiotic Cults came online, concentrated in what is now “Jews/Judaism”, they began to congregate and concentrate more and more to Mass Religion, which appeared as Abrahamism. This gives Hope to the Hopeless. The “Nihilism” then is the generally miserable, hopeless, choiceless, desperate outlook of the Slave-caste. Nietzsche rightly referred to this as “Slave Morality” of the Master-Slave Dialectic (Semiotics). The Nihilism then is that there are many layers of Lies. The first lie, mainline, is an “Afterlife”. This later evolves into a “Blank Slate Theory”, Tabula Rasa. This also evolved into what is now Cultural Marxism, that babies are born “Gender Fluid”. These Modern-Post-Modern occurrences of this ancient phenomenon.
However, the slave-caste of this MPM Era, is different than before, more sophisticated and nuanced. So the ‘Nihilistic’ tendencies are very much the same as ever before, but it does not apply to any & everything.
Nor does it apply to the specific way-in-which the cultural “Elite” pass down their failed choices and disastrous consequences onto the lower classes, the MPM Plebians.
For example, consider a “Modern Male” who is “Transexual” and persuaded to cut off his genitals. That is a payment of consequence, a failure. The Lie has an effect. MPM people can be bullied, harrassed, threatened, and coerced into these paradigms of “Righteousness”, for some “greater purpose”.
Shame and guilt are part of these functions.
The old Morality has upgraded and evolved into new forms, a “Post-Christian” era where the same underlying mechanisms are at play, but Semiotics changed and upgraded.
A last point for now, when I think of “Nihilism”, I think of suicidal tendencies. People who are Nihilistic have essentially “given up on life”. This is prelude to the Abrahamic theism, ideology, and so then something like Transexuality and self-castration would indeed be Nihilistic behaviors.