How to deprogram a ROGD teen: Part 1

A mother tells her story

I am writing this guide in the hope that it will help parents of ROGD teenagers. I see many instances where they are getting very poor advice but mostly, they are getting no advice at all. My belief is that gender ideology goes beyond social contagion and is a cult. My teenager daughter identified as trans for three years but once I realised that gender was a cult, I used deprogramming techniques to successfully rescue her. I will explain why I think that gender is a cult and how I went about deprogramming her. I am an ordinary mother, there is nothing exceptional about me and any parent can do what I did. I rescued my daughter without having to move house or home-school and I did it despite the threatening presence of the hostile professionals out there who encourage and celebrate trans identities against all reason, critical thinking, or good judgement.

There are two main approaches to a child who comes out as trans. Affirmation and watchful waiting. Affirmation is what the professionals would have you believe is the only treatment. It means agreeing with the self-diagnosis of a child without question, ignoring any explanatory factors such as autism and it involves fast tracking ROGD teenagers onto the path of hormones and surgery. For more reading on this check out the Interim Cass report. Watchful waiting is what responsible therapists advocate but this entails remaining neutral on the question of whether your child is “really” trans. I think that watchful waiting is fine if your child is only flirting with the idea of being trans and if this phase is not destroying their lives and the lives of their families. My daughter was being destroyed in front of my eyes and her life had fallen apart. The impact on our family was devastating and we were only coping by isolating ourselves from the angry, miserable and hateful personality that had come to reside in our daughter’s body. She was planning on running away I found out later and the pressure from outside factors made it imperative that I acted decisively in order to save her. I will take you back to how it began but the story will be familiar to many of you.

Sinead has severe attention deficit disorder and attends the local CAMHs for a prescription for Ritalin. She is also on the Autistic spectrum. When she was 11, she experienced a number of sexual assaults by a friend. Her best friend introduced her to the concept of gender and from the age of twelve all the girls in her circle were either non-binary or trans of one flavour or another. I believe that all these factors made her susceptible to the gender cult. She also happens to be a lesbian but, in her case, I don’t think that this was a major contributing factor. Not in the way that it was for her best friend who is a butch lesbian and is full of self-loathing, internalised homophobia and misogyny.

The first sign that there was something very wrong was when Sinead was 12 and she became unhappy, withdrawn and angry seemingly overnight. She came out as non-binary and then trans when she was thirteen and a half after first self-diagnosing with everything from BPD (borderline personality disorder) to DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). She was self-harming and had lost all interest in schoolwork or family life. Covid didn’t help and the lockdowns allowed her to spend hours on the internet when she was supposed to be doing online school. I found out later that influencers like Jammie Dodger and Noah Finnce were indoctrinating her into the trans cult and she was also talking to disturbed kids like herself on Discord. I had been turned into a jailor by Covid, checking on her to try and get her to do schoolwork and searching her room for blades to make sure she wasn’t cutting. She hated me because I would not agree with her that she was trans and she told me so many times. I hated her too by this point as I did not even recognise the person she had become.

When she did voluntarily talk to me it was to subject me to angry rants about how she had always been a boy and hated dresses etc. I was easily able to refute this invented back story and I never agreed with her that she was trans. However, because she really seemed to be going insane with stress all the family started to use her boy names when at home. I say names because she went through a few before settling on the final ridiculous one let’s call it Xavier. She called me transphobic and said that I didn’t know anything, and that last part was true. I was strangely reluctant to do any research and I think I only know why now. Firstly, I was afraid that researching it would make the nightmare real and I was full of horror at what was happening to our once happy family. Secondly, I was afraid that the research would tell me that she was indeed trans and there was nothing I could do about it.

Things came to a head after a series of meetings with CAMHs about her autism. Pressure was put on myself and my husband to affirm Sinead in her new identity and her medical records were changed to her new name without our permission. I also felt threatened that if I did not comply that I would be labelled as abusive. I felt that CAMHs were only waiting for an excuse to make life very difficult for our family if we did not affirm. But the psychologists pushed too hard and alarmed me into finally getting on the internet and doing some research.

One of the first things I came across was Lisa Littman’s research paper which documents the phenomenon of social contagion among teenage girls with trans identities, followed by the document prepared by the law firm Dentons which reads like a handbook for how to roll out this new religion across Europe. I then ordered Abigail Schrier’s book Irreversible Damage on Amazon. Within a few hours I realised that I was looking at a cult. Sinead pretty much ticked every box for risk factors. The sexual abuse I think was the biggest factor and I had just found out about this at the last meeting with CAMHs.

I’m not sure that I realised the reality about gender identity at that time, but I suppose that I never really believed the trans thing in the first place. I had some vague notion that trans peoples’ brains were different and of course I was slightly brainwashed by all the one-sided stories in the media. But on the other side I had been witnessing the carry-on of my daughter’s group of friends with all the talk of trans and demi-boys, agender, ace, non-binary and so on. It looked to me like a silly teenage phase, and I was hoping they would grow out of it. I was more concerned about the self-harm, the autism, the anxiety and Sinead’s obvious mental distress.

Gender Ideology is a Cult

So how did I realise so quickly that gender ideology was a cult? It just happened to be an area of interest for me, and I had an old paperback on my shelves about cults with a chapter on deprogramming which I had read with particular interest. Cults are funny things. They all hate and fear other cults and ideologies, but they all have certain traits in common. Sinead had been indoctrinated by the internet and to a lesser degree her peers. Gender ideology now pulled the strings. She was simply a puppet doing as she was told and nothing and no one was going to help her as had been made very clear to me by the appalling moronic behaviour of the CAMHs professionals (and later by my GP and the psychologists at the autism assessment).

Most people jump to the fact that there is no leader in gender ideology and no obvious money motive so how can it be a cult? But they are missing the point. The thing that makes a cult a cult is the level of control over a person. A properly brainwashed person has no free will. Take an ROGD kid. They are controlled by fear. Fear of the transphobic world where they are told trans people are killed and abused every day. Fear of themselves where they are told that they are at high risk of suicide and if they delay transition in any way, they are going to kill themselves. They also fear rejection from their peers if they say anything “transphobic”. They are taught to fear their parents who are transphobic, old fashioned and unsafe and they are discouraged from having any interaction with them. A trans kid is coached online and told what to say, what clothes to wear, how to behave and speak. A whole new language is used by insiders and language is distorted to fit the new meanings of the trans community.

Another thing about cults is how they control how a cult member thinks. Critical thinking is forbidden and thought-terminating cliches like “Transwomen are Women” are used to bring the thinking back on track. Any doubt or contradictions are strictly prohibited and labeled as “internalised transphobia”. The kids are told that if they are wondering if they are trans then of course they are trans because ‘cis’ people do not have these thoughts.

Kids are encouraged to ruminate endlessly about their gender identities and their dysphoria in much the same way that prayer or meditation acts in other cults to shut down critical thinking. They are forbidden from listening or watching anything “transphobic”. For example, they will be told that JK Rowling hates them and wants them dead, but they will never actually read what she wrote. Instead, they will rely on approved articles that explain why she is so transphobic. You can research this further yourself and I think that a very good analysis and comparison to Scientology is given by Arty Morty.

I am going to be recommending Arty Morty’s YouTubes many times because he is excellent at analysing and explaining gender ideology in a concise way. You can save a lot of time by watching his videos and taking notes which will come in handy later.

In Part 2: Step by step guide to helping your child escape the cult