Helping Your Teen Leave the Gender Cult, Part 2

An email to an ROGD mom

Media suggestions for parents with children caught up in gender ideology (in three parts)

PART 1

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Dear S.,

I would like to continue writing about what I called Phase One, i.e. Preparing the Ground and Planting seeds. As I wrote in the previous email, my idea was to give my son a working vocabulary that could be used to describe gender ideology. I wanted him to first learn this vocabulary in other contexts, for example, while learning about cults or totalitarian regimes. I hoped that he would be able to make these connections himself, and eventually he did make them.

If you end up on the subject of the Holocaust, and even if not, the movie JoJo Rabbit is one of the best movies you can watch with a trans-identifying child. We watched it several times. My kids love it. It can be easily translated into being “about trans”, and I think it does affect their subconscious. JoJo is a little boy who wants to belong and he is a Nazi; his imaginary friend is Hitler himself… The ideology cripples him, literally, and yet he continues to believe, because it offers such an escape from the reality of war. All the while, his mother is in the Resistance Movement. “You are not a Nazi, JoJo, you are a little boy who likes to wear a uniform and wants to belong,” his mother says. What a perfect line!! When his mother is executed by the Nazis, JoJo has to figure this all on his own, including finding out that “The Devil” is just a Jewish teenage girl, living in his attic, and she is actually not the devil at all—the Nazi propaganda was all a lie, and the little boys’ uniform turns out to be made of paper. This is an absolutely brilliant movie and you will cry and laugh and there is so much to talk about.

Moving on to totalitarian regimes: Yuri Bezmenov’s interviews on YouTube are incredible. He was the Soviet KGB agent who defected and he too talks about how propaganda works. Gulag: Inside Stalin’s Deadly Prison Empire is a very good documentary but many are available on the topic. (Gulag: The History)

Moving on to the cults: We watched quite a number of documentaries, I don’t remember which ones, but you can find many and pick the most appropriate ones. The one that I remember was on FLDS, Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey. We watched several on Scientology (there are so many available!), as well as Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult. There are dozens of good and shocking ones, but some might not be appropriate for younger teens.

A book that we read on cults was Cultish by Amanda Montell. It is an easy read, but she is woke. So this is a great read for those who are woke and need a gentle introduction to the language of cults. By the last chapter my kids started noticing red flags, which was great. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism or anything by Robert Lifton is useful as he breaks down the process of brainwashing into steps and explains how it was done in China. Cults are such a useful topic which is so easy to integrate because everyone seems to be fascinated by cults.

Moving on to Medical Scandals: There are many documentaries right now on the opioid crisis. Netflix has Dopesick that many recommend. We watched The Crime of the Century, both parts. It was very revealing and impactful. We also watched the documentary about medical devices, The Bleeding Edge. They are unregulated and many are experimental. Obviously, anything about lobotomies, thalidomide scandal, Tuskegee Syphilis study etc.

A really great book that Sasha Ayad and Stella O’Malley recommended on their podcast and I read out loud to the kids was Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters. It was eye opening to me and made me rethink a lot of things that I was taught while studying psychology.

Of course, I make sure I always mention every instance where receiving new information changed my mind and how it is not always easy to adjust to new information, when you are so used to the things you took for granted before. Changing my mind and dealing with the shock and stress of my reality being shaken has been a recurrent theme throughout. “I used to think x, but now that I learned about y, I now think z,” was repeated at every opportunity.

In addition to medical scandals, there are social scandals as well. Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix is really good, and again, eye opening. Unbelievable to what extent policies are often made based on ZERO research! I also recently encountered a YouTube channel where academic plagiarism / Fake Data is discussed and it was also quite shocking:

Moving on to Plasticity of the Brain: The Brain that Changes Itself is a very inspiring and engaging book of personal stories. I think this was reassuring, as my son thought that he had the wrong kind of brain (female brain in the male body) and reading these very engaging stories was planting seeds that the brain is very adjustable and most things are fixable. There are also great documentaries on YouTube about brain plasticity.

We also explored the ideas of what it means to identify as trans-racial and trans-able. For example, we learned about Rachel Dolezal who “identified” as a black woman. The Rachel Divide is a great documentary.

Biology Warning: the famous Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolski, who has a great course on biology on YouTube, has completely sold out and believes biological sex is on the spectrum. Avoid. We started watching his course as I thought this would be great, and then I learned that he is a sell-out.

I hope this was at least somewhat helpful. As usual, feel free to reach out with any questions. More thoughts in the next email!

Love,

H.