This is a masterful piece Eliza. Thank you for being there at the conference and doing the work you are doing. From a parent who has been cut off from her adult daughter roughly since the launch of TikTok, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
A brilliant piece. Thank you. My desisted son readily recognizes that he was in a cult. He is still seeking. I wonder if we as parents should have brought him up with religion or limited and rigid choices. Both of us were brought up atheists, in dysfunctional and sad families. What motivated both of us through puberty and adulthood was to not become like our parents and our sad families. Now we watch as our son struggles to find a purpose. He feels convinced that the rest of humanity and his peers know what to do and how to move forward. He is 20 and moved back home after being unsuccessful in college. But he does work, takes some community college classes, plays the guitar, and goes out with friends. Nevertheless he becomes gripped by insecurity, decision paralysis, and depression. My husband and I fought similar demons. We tell him this is the pain of growing up- for some of us it’s much more difficult and an intellectual as well as spiritual path. Sometimes the choices given to young people in the Western world are too vast, and then we search for meaning and can easily grasp falsehoods. I wonder if our son would do better in a small tribal collective- working for food and shelter. I wonder about all of us in the age of consumption and individual “choice”.
I obviously know nothing about your son but I would be wary of "small tribal collectives", especially for someone who is probably susceptible to cults, as our trans-identified and desisted kids seem to be. Such collectives seem to be very high risk of becoming cultish. Just my intuition, not based on any facts.
I am thinking more about how our ancestors lived, not the modern religious cults and communes that we have many of. I’m both fascinated by and put off by religious cults. One of the things I did with my son when he identified as a “girl” was to watch cult documentaries, like Nexium. He would watch some episodes with me and it would provoke good conversations between us. It was a way to help him see what was happening to him on line without me telling him directly that he was in a cult. I did a lot of sideways psychology, very carefully picking out moments to drop an interesting or related article, meme, or narrative. In the end he worked his way out of it, but it was a slow and devastatingly painful process.
Congratulations: exposing your gender-conflicted son to material on OTHER cults sounds like just the right material to have engaged his own doubts, without directly addressing the nonsense of gender ideology itself. Which would also strengthen his confidence in his own powers of discrimination: to help him untangle himself. But given his persisting vulnerability, would it really be wise to entrust him to any kind of cult-like outfit?
Perhaps some form of body-centred practice, that reinforces his being at home in his body, might help. I'm thinking of things like Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais, which cultivate interoception and "presence": a kind of body-centred mindfulness. You don't have to have physical problems (as I did) to take AT lessons: its increased self-awareness is particularly helpful for actors and musicians.
I'm very glad your son desisted! And seeking itself is an excellent and necessary part of healthy growth: "The unexamined life is not worth living," as Socrates reportedly said. He has an insightful and supportive mother. I dropped out of a university degree at 21 (42 years ago), went back to live at home, and also played guitar, but didn't go out with friends or take community college classes. I struggled with anxiety and depression, too. I don't regret any of it. We, the sensitive ones, who often don't fit in, just have to learn to love ourselves as we are, and our lives often turn out deeper and more wonderful than those who feel compelled to run on the rails civilization puts in front of us. All the best. I enjoyed reading your Substack today.
Thank you Eliza for this clear and perceptive analysis. It’s so helpful. And I think it may apply to other forms of activism around at the moment, as well as trans activism. The modern world can feel so bewildering, and can make us feel so impotent, that this type of cultism can be a welcome escape from a perception of our own helplessness.
The last paragraph brought tears to my eyes...Honestly your writing has helped me in so many ways to make sense of what my daughter is going through/has gone through. You are a true gift and I am thankful you chose to study this!
In the 1960s my father abandoned our family and joined a hedonistic cult led by an Indian guru. Lots of damage to families, drug addiction, but it petered out eventually. My father, who styled himself an apostle to the guru’s “father,” has never stopped believing. Recently on FB I saw he organized a reunion of the “Family.” He has never questioned or regretted his own decisions. After years of expecting some kind of awareness from him, I’ve given up. He’s in his 80s, and any regret would undermine the purpose of his life.
I wonder, as I see more people detransition (eg Tiger Reed, Jamie Reed’s spouse), if the medicalization itself sometimes is what ends the delusion. The ongoing health problems become too much, and as people seek a way out of that, their attachment to the delusion weakens. Whereas someone like my father, who renounced family and career for a fantasy about a new world governed by his guru, has held on even as the group disbanded.
This is such an important piece with so much insight. It needs to be well sent read and taken seriously. Thank you for writing this.
"I think much of what it is referred to as gender dysphoria is just cognitive dissonance: the painful gap between fantasy and reality." This is spot on. I don't think people appreciate just how much deep pain a teenage girl can find herself in as she faces all the physical, emotional, social, psychological, and hormonal changes of puberty, just how deeply and intensely she may feel this pain, how much she can believe the pain is intolerable and will never end and how desperate she can become to escape it. Of course some girls will see the idea of transitioning as both a literal and metaphorical lifesaver. Of course they would cling to it with a death grip and fight anyone trying to take from them what they believe is their only hope. But oh god, the adults exacerbating and enabling them in their self-destructive desperation and pain rather than loving and guiding them through it...
One component of the situation that I do not see in this fine essay is the teen rebellion component. The trans insanity is today's nuclear bomb of teen rebellion. "If you do not agree to medicalize my delusion, I will kill myself". The rebellion aspect is really important, and one reason why parents are paralyzed with confusion.
That idea - which I guess wasn't explicit in this approximate transcript of Eliza's talk - chimes with something else that struck me, when she talked of the spike in cult membership in the '60s and '70s. That time involved youth rebellion, and, like today, significant validation of it in academia. It was the counter-culture of self-expression, "self-actualization" and freedom (particularly sexual freedom) challenging the old stuffy traditions. I recently saw the current phenomenon celebrated as, "the new sexual revolution."
A wonderful analysis, Eliza; you marshal your thoughts with clarity & warmth & perceptively explain the ‘no escape’ nature of the trans cult. I agree that it doesn’t much matter what name we give to this phenomenon. I hope your piece will reach a wide audience. Thank you.
This is probably one of my grimmest observations, but isn't it weird how the trans movement weaponises suicide threats but asisted suicide is also a progressive cause? If assisted suicide is virtuous why shouldn't regular old suicide also be considered virtuous?
What happens when those two aspects of 2020s Progressivism meet? Threatening suicide as a means of emotional blackmail relies on the blackmailee not thinking that suicide is a legitimate response to personal suffering. I guess we'll have to keep our eyes on Canada to see how it plays out...
I'm not sure I follow. The assisted-suicide cause is in favour of allowing assisted suicide in cases of unbearable suffering; it doesn't advocate suicide (assisted or not) as a good in itself, just as the less worse option. Hence, the threat of suicide used as blackmail is akin to the accusation of abuse on the scale of deliberately giving someone an unbearable form of suffering. The two issues don't seem to clash, to me. But you raise a question I'd not thought about before, about how common it might become for those damaged by transgender ideology to seek assisted suicide. Not only is this a terrible end to any "gender journey," presumably some clinic will once again charge for the assistance. Grim thoughts indeed.
The weirdness for me was less about the Trans part and more about the use of suicide threats by progressives in support of their causes when those same progressives increasingly support very permissive rules on assisted suicide. Canada seems to have moved well beyond the use of assisted suicide for the treatment of great suffering near the end of life to treating to more as an empowering lifestyle choice that is a valid treatment for things like being homeless, or disabled, or sad. Eliza has wrote about the trend and linked to articles about it here before, it might've also come up in some of the interviews she has done in the recent past.
Also, I'm pretty sure there has already been one case of a TIF with multiple post surgical complications being oked for euthanasia in either Canada or Europe somewhere. There was also a story months ago, maybe last year, of a Canadian First Nations TIM who regretted his transition and applying for MAID, but I don't know what came of it. Eva Kurilova did an interview with him I believe. It'll be interesting to see if a link between undergoing Gender Affirming Care and choosing to be euthanised a few years later develops a strong correlation in years to come and Canada will probably be one of the best places to keep an eye on due to it being all in on both those causes.
Unfortunately there is a parallel to be drawn, however grim -- but also significant differences. Assisted suicide for the very old and / or terminally ill is the humane alternative where medical practice "shall not strive / to keep officiously alive": ie accepting one's own death graciously instead of fighting it to the bitter end, especially if putting up with appalling physical pain.
But the cult-serving myth of inevitable suicide by trans-identified youth if denied recognition, serves two purposes. It stands to boost suicide rates by social contagion -- why even talking about it is risky, because it reinforces expectation and copycat behaviour. (Why publicising suicides is strongly counter-advised by outfits like The Samaritans.)
And suicidal inclinations are also reinforced by "phobia indoctrination", with constant reference by transactivists to "genocide" of trans-identified people by "haters" and "transphobes" by "hate crimes" like "mis-gendering" -- ie correctly referring to someone's sex.
Because "mis-gendering" stands in for wholesale refusal to accept the "trans" premise -- so is equivalent (in trans mythology) to mass slaughter.
It's all incredibly self-indulgent: but obviously a recipe for misery if someone's happiness is entirely dependent on external recognition, AND not getting it requires you to kill yourself.
So the suicide threats themselves are as much the product of cult blackmail of the "trans" person -- instructions to behave as expected, or face rejection and expulsion by the cult -- as they are blackmailing others outside the cult, to affirm their "gender identity" OR ELSE. Where the "else" is too often, also, outwardly directed violence.
It's maddening, but hard to blame entirely anyone caught up in this death cult for going through the prescribed motions of its mental conditioning.
Brilliantly put. Definitely a cult, though in the age of the internet, a distributed network cult, rather than the single leader version of the broadcast age. Each closed discord/reddit enacts its own mini-cult as you have so artfully shown.
The thing is a big chunk of us seem to be susceptible to cults, even after the facts around the inevitable abuse that occurs are aired publically.
The Amish, who have aided and abetted numerous cases of known child abuse (let alone the unknown abuse), are to some people wonderful examples of how we could learn to live with nature and build amazing barns.
Osho, who oversaw a commune that neglected children such that they were targets of predatory sexual abuse and that became so deranged they attempted to poison the local population in a bizarre plot to rig a political election in their favour, is to this day venerated by many as someone who could do no wrong.
I wonder if it is a weird desire for infantilism, a perfect womb like state of contentment you can attain if you give up your critical faculties.
There's a larger group, I call the mob or hand-maidens who aren't part of the cult proper but enable it by perpetuating myths. Many on the left are in this position, they seem unwilling to accept reality and keep perpetuating the trans myths without engaging on relevant details.
Is it because their personality requires society to be 'progressing', otherwise they fall into a pit o nihilism, or is it just they hate the political Right so much they will sacrifice children to maintain the ego position of 'being right' and the Right being wrong
This is a fantastic article, as usual. A lot of insights into how indoctrination works and the tactics and thought processes behind them.
One other idea I’ve seen in the area of phobia indoctrination - the idea that if you ever desist, it means you were just “faking it for attention”. I know this was what my daughter was told and I think wanting to prove this isn’t the case is one of the things keeping her psychologically trapped.
What is so unfortunate is this "following" culture - basically social media created 1984 Results by having everyone carry Big Brother in their pockets. The Cell phone controls weak minds - and we all have weak minds at some or another in our lives or days. Children who have not developed inner authority should not be spending so much or any time on the phone. They are too vulnerable to social influences. If I had a kid, I would raise them in an internet desert - where it would only be accessed for school and work - and the kid culture was not raised by social media.
A really brilliant analysis and, as an ex-cult member who read Steven Hassan's "Combating Cult Mind Control" when I left, a hopeful path forward. Deeply understanding the trap we or loved ones may have stepped in is an important part of escaping it. I've forwarded it to a parent struggling to understand what's really going on with her kid.
So grateful you are thing in the words from Steve Hassan (former Moonie) and Janja Lalich, who has her own story of abuse in the Democratic Worker’s Party cult. Lalich’s book on bounded choice - exploring the severe rules in the Heaven’s Gate cult and her own story in the DWP, really helps me understand how some people in my life were attracted to and now stuck the gender cult.
Thank you so much Eliza. As a parent of a child who has disappeared into this ideology, your piece says so much to me.
This is a masterful piece Eliza. Thank you for being there at the conference and doing the work you are doing. From a parent who has been cut off from her adult daughter roughly since the launch of TikTok, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
A brilliant piece. Thank you. My desisted son readily recognizes that he was in a cult. He is still seeking. I wonder if we as parents should have brought him up with religion or limited and rigid choices. Both of us were brought up atheists, in dysfunctional and sad families. What motivated both of us through puberty and adulthood was to not become like our parents and our sad families. Now we watch as our son struggles to find a purpose. He feels convinced that the rest of humanity and his peers know what to do and how to move forward. He is 20 and moved back home after being unsuccessful in college. But he does work, takes some community college classes, plays the guitar, and goes out with friends. Nevertheless he becomes gripped by insecurity, decision paralysis, and depression. My husband and I fought similar demons. We tell him this is the pain of growing up- for some of us it’s much more difficult and an intellectual as well as spiritual path. Sometimes the choices given to young people in the Western world are too vast, and then we search for meaning and can easily grasp falsehoods. I wonder if our son would do better in a small tribal collective- working for food and shelter. I wonder about all of us in the age of consumption and individual “choice”.
You may wish to recommend Stoic thinking to him. It is a way to bring order to a chaotic world. It emphasizes personal growth and self-control.
I obviously know nothing about your son but I would be wary of "small tribal collectives", especially for someone who is probably susceptible to cults, as our trans-identified and desisted kids seem to be. Such collectives seem to be very high risk of becoming cultish. Just my intuition, not based on any facts.
I am thinking more about how our ancestors lived, not the modern religious cults and communes that we have many of. I’m both fascinated by and put off by religious cults. One of the things I did with my son when he identified as a “girl” was to watch cult documentaries, like Nexium. He would watch some episodes with me and it would provoke good conversations between us. It was a way to help him see what was happening to him on line without me telling him directly that he was in a cult. I did a lot of sideways psychology, very carefully picking out moments to drop an interesting or related article, meme, or narrative. In the end he worked his way out of it, but it was a slow and devastatingly painful process.
Congratulations: exposing your gender-conflicted son to material on OTHER cults sounds like just the right material to have engaged his own doubts, without directly addressing the nonsense of gender ideology itself. Which would also strengthen his confidence in his own powers of discrimination: to help him untangle himself. But given his persisting vulnerability, would it really be wise to entrust him to any kind of cult-like outfit?
Perhaps some form of body-centred practice, that reinforces his being at home in his body, might help. I'm thinking of things like Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais, which cultivate interoception and "presence": a kind of body-centred mindfulness. You don't have to have physical problems (as I did) to take AT lessons: its increased self-awareness is particularly helpful for actors and musicians.
I'm very glad your son desisted! And seeking itself is an excellent and necessary part of healthy growth: "The unexamined life is not worth living," as Socrates reportedly said. He has an insightful and supportive mother. I dropped out of a university degree at 21 (42 years ago), went back to live at home, and also played guitar, but didn't go out with friends or take community college classes. I struggled with anxiety and depression, too. I don't regret any of it. We, the sensitive ones, who often don't fit in, just have to learn to love ourselves as we are, and our lives often turn out deeper and more wonderful than those who feel compelled to run on the rails civilization puts in front of us. All the best. I enjoyed reading your Substack today.
Thank you! I write and speak out a lot, more and more under my real name even. But I still use my pseudonym when I speak about my son.
This is so useful, and so full of genuine curiosity and care - amazing. Thank you.
Thank you Eliza for this clear and perceptive analysis. It’s so helpful. And I think it may apply to other forms of activism around at the moment, as well as trans activism. The modern world can feel so bewildering, and can make us feel so impotent, that this type of cultism can be a welcome escape from a perception of our own helplessness.
The last paragraph brought tears to my eyes...Honestly your writing has helped me in so many ways to make sense of what my daughter is going through/has gone through. You are a true gift and I am thankful you chose to study this!
Brilliant insights and analysis, as always!
In the 1960s my father abandoned our family and joined a hedonistic cult led by an Indian guru. Lots of damage to families, drug addiction, but it petered out eventually. My father, who styled himself an apostle to the guru’s “father,” has never stopped believing. Recently on FB I saw he organized a reunion of the “Family.” He has never questioned or regretted his own decisions. After years of expecting some kind of awareness from him, I’ve given up. He’s in his 80s, and any regret would undermine the purpose of his life.
I wonder, as I see more people detransition (eg Tiger Reed, Jamie Reed’s spouse), if the medicalization itself sometimes is what ends the delusion. The ongoing health problems become too much, and as people seek a way out of that, their attachment to the delusion weakens. Whereas someone like my father, who renounced family and career for a fantasy about a new world governed by his guru, has held on even as the group disbanded.
This is such an important piece with so much insight. It needs to be well sent read and taken seriously. Thank you for writing this.
"I think much of what it is referred to as gender dysphoria is just cognitive dissonance: the painful gap between fantasy and reality." This is spot on. I don't think people appreciate just how much deep pain a teenage girl can find herself in as she faces all the physical, emotional, social, psychological, and hormonal changes of puberty, just how deeply and intensely she may feel this pain, how much she can believe the pain is intolerable and will never end and how desperate she can become to escape it. Of course some girls will see the idea of transitioning as both a literal and metaphorical lifesaver. Of course they would cling to it with a death grip and fight anyone trying to take from them what they believe is their only hope. But oh god, the adults exacerbating and enabling them in their self-destructive desperation and pain rather than loving and guiding them through it...
A characteristically intelligent analysis, beautifully put. And as ever, kind. I hope it was received as such. Thanks!
One component of the situation that I do not see in this fine essay is the teen rebellion component. The trans insanity is today's nuclear bomb of teen rebellion. "If you do not agree to medicalize my delusion, I will kill myself". The rebellion aspect is really important, and one reason why parents are paralyzed with confusion.
That idea - which I guess wasn't explicit in this approximate transcript of Eliza's talk - chimes with something else that struck me, when she talked of the spike in cult membership in the '60s and '70s. That time involved youth rebellion, and, like today, significant validation of it in academia. It was the counter-culture of self-expression, "self-actualization" and freedom (particularly sexual freedom) challenging the old stuffy traditions. I recently saw the current phenomenon celebrated as, "the new sexual revolution."
A wonderful analysis, Eliza; you marshal your thoughts with clarity & warmth & perceptively explain the ‘no escape’ nature of the trans cult. I agree that it doesn’t much matter what name we give to this phenomenon. I hope your piece will reach a wide audience. Thank you.
This is probably one of my grimmest observations, but isn't it weird how the trans movement weaponises suicide threats but asisted suicide is also a progressive cause? If assisted suicide is virtuous why shouldn't regular old suicide also be considered virtuous?
What happens when those two aspects of 2020s Progressivism meet? Threatening suicide as a means of emotional blackmail relies on the blackmailee not thinking that suicide is a legitimate response to personal suffering. I guess we'll have to keep our eyes on Canada to see how it plays out...
I'm not sure I follow. The assisted-suicide cause is in favour of allowing assisted suicide in cases of unbearable suffering; it doesn't advocate suicide (assisted or not) as a good in itself, just as the less worse option. Hence, the threat of suicide used as blackmail is akin to the accusation of abuse on the scale of deliberately giving someone an unbearable form of suffering. The two issues don't seem to clash, to me. But you raise a question I'd not thought about before, about how common it might become for those damaged by transgender ideology to seek assisted suicide. Not only is this a terrible end to any "gender journey," presumably some clinic will once again charge for the assistance. Grim thoughts indeed.
The weirdness for me was less about the Trans part and more about the use of suicide threats by progressives in support of their causes when those same progressives increasingly support very permissive rules on assisted suicide. Canada seems to have moved well beyond the use of assisted suicide for the treatment of great suffering near the end of life to treating to more as an empowering lifestyle choice that is a valid treatment for things like being homeless, or disabled, or sad. Eliza has wrote about the trend and linked to articles about it here before, it might've also come up in some of the interviews she has done in the recent past.
Also, I'm pretty sure there has already been one case of a TIF with multiple post surgical complications being oked for euthanasia in either Canada or Europe somewhere. There was also a story months ago, maybe last year, of a Canadian First Nations TIM who regretted his transition and applying for MAID, but I don't know what came of it. Eva Kurilova did an interview with him I believe. It'll be interesting to see if a link between undergoing Gender Affirming Care and choosing to be euthanised a few years later develops a strong correlation in years to come and Canada will probably be one of the best places to keep an eye on due to it being all in on both those causes.
Unfortunately there is a parallel to be drawn, however grim -- but also significant differences. Assisted suicide for the very old and / or terminally ill is the humane alternative where medical practice "shall not strive / to keep officiously alive": ie accepting one's own death graciously instead of fighting it to the bitter end, especially if putting up with appalling physical pain.
But the cult-serving myth of inevitable suicide by trans-identified youth if denied recognition, serves two purposes. It stands to boost suicide rates by social contagion -- why even talking about it is risky, because it reinforces expectation and copycat behaviour. (Why publicising suicides is strongly counter-advised by outfits like The Samaritans.)
And suicidal inclinations are also reinforced by "phobia indoctrination", with constant reference by transactivists to "genocide" of trans-identified people by "haters" and "transphobes" by "hate crimes" like "mis-gendering" -- ie correctly referring to someone's sex.
Because "mis-gendering" stands in for wholesale refusal to accept the "trans" premise -- so is equivalent (in trans mythology) to mass slaughter.
It's all incredibly self-indulgent: but obviously a recipe for misery if someone's happiness is entirely dependent on external recognition, AND not getting it requires you to kill yourself.
So the suicide threats themselves are as much the product of cult blackmail of the "trans" person -- instructions to behave as expected, or face rejection and expulsion by the cult -- as they are blackmailing others outside the cult, to affirm their "gender identity" OR ELSE. Where the "else" is too often, also, outwardly directed violence.
It's maddening, but hard to blame entirely anyone caught up in this death cult for going through the prescribed motions of its mental conditioning.
Brilliantly put. Definitely a cult, though in the age of the internet, a distributed network cult, rather than the single leader version of the broadcast age. Each closed discord/reddit enacts its own mini-cult as you have so artfully shown.
The thing is a big chunk of us seem to be susceptible to cults, even after the facts around the inevitable abuse that occurs are aired publically.
The Amish, who have aided and abetted numerous cases of known child abuse (let alone the unknown abuse), are to some people wonderful examples of how we could learn to live with nature and build amazing barns.
Osho, who oversaw a commune that neglected children such that they were targets of predatory sexual abuse and that became so deranged they attempted to poison the local population in a bizarre plot to rig a political election in their favour, is to this day venerated by many as someone who could do no wrong.
I wonder if it is a weird desire for infantilism, a perfect womb like state of contentment you can attain if you give up your critical faculties.
There's a larger group, I call the mob or hand-maidens who aren't part of the cult proper but enable it by perpetuating myths. Many on the left are in this position, they seem unwilling to accept reality and keep perpetuating the trans myths without engaging on relevant details.
Is it because their personality requires society to be 'progressing', otherwise they fall into a pit o nihilism, or is it just they hate the political Right so much they will sacrifice children to maintain the ego position of 'being right' and the Right being wrong
This is a fantastic article, as usual. A lot of insights into how indoctrination works and the tactics and thought processes behind them.
One other idea I’ve seen in the area of phobia indoctrination - the idea that if you ever desist, it means you were just “faking it for attention”. I know this was what my daughter was told and I think wanting to prove this isn’t the case is one of the things keeping her psychologically trapped.
What is so unfortunate is this "following" culture - basically social media created 1984 Results by having everyone carry Big Brother in their pockets. The Cell phone controls weak minds - and we all have weak minds at some or another in our lives or days. Children who have not developed inner authority should not be spending so much or any time on the phone. They are too vulnerable to social influences. If I had a kid, I would raise them in an internet desert - where it would only be accessed for school and work - and the kid culture was not raised by social media.
A really brilliant analysis and, as an ex-cult member who read Steven Hassan's "Combating Cult Mind Control" when I left, a hopeful path forward. Deeply understanding the trap we or loved ones may have stepped in is an important part of escaping it. I've forwarded it to a parent struggling to understand what's really going on with her kid.
So grateful you are thing in the words from Steve Hassan (former Moonie) and Janja Lalich, who has her own story of abuse in the Democratic Worker’s Party cult. Lalich’s book on bounded choice - exploring the severe rules in the Heaven’s Gate cult and her own story in the DWP, really helps me understand how some people in my life were attracted to and now stuck the gender cult.