Helping Your Teen Leave the Gender Cult, Part 1

An email to an ROGD mom

Annotated Resources for Homeschoolers of Children Aged 13-18 and anyone struggling with gender ideology (in three parts)

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Dear S.,

I’m glad you reached out. I’m not sure if this would be of any help, but I’ll share all my thoughts and experiences without reservation, in case anything in this email will end up being useful, even if just as a starting point.

When I look back and how we approached the process of deprogramming our son, I’m now able to see it as more of a pattern and a strategy. Back then, though, it was all trial and error, intuition and luck. I will try to describe the process. As with every strategy, it has to fit each particular family, so you would be tweaking and changing things, but I hope that my description of what we did will provide some help and guidance.

This is what we had as a baseline, which simplified things significantly.

1. We have always homeschooled, so we were very used to sitting together for breakfast to watch a video and for me to read out loud to the kids, even if they were already teens.

2. Our son has always been easy-going. He didn’t have autism or ADHD.

3. While he was more depressed than usual in the beginning, he was no way near qualifying for a diagnosis of depression.

4. Neither he nor his younger sister had cell phones. They did have laptops in their rooms (which in retrospect I should have never allowed.)

Aside from making sure we continued having a good relationship, as this was the most essential foundation, my goal was to give him vocabulary to critically discuss gender ideology.

More specifically I wanted to convey the following ideas to my children:

1. people are easily manipulated; psychology of persuasion is a thing

2. brainwashing is real, it works, and it destroys you

3. social media and media in general are tools for brainwashing

4. cults destroy you and your sense of reality

5. the brain is plastic

6. medical malpractice / medical scandals have always existed

7. family is very important

8. biology can’t be dismissed

Human biology was the last step and it was the hardest. My hope was that if he could talk about all of the above and understand what was happening, he would be able to see all the red flags of the gender ideology.

I told him early on that discussing gender was between him and his life coach, but we did have “explosions” when we tried to talk about gender. For most of the time, though, especially for the first year, we didn’t touch the subject of gender and gender ideology.

I outlined two phases below, but in practical terms, at some point these phases are used intermittently, depending on what is going on. The whole approach is of applying pressure, then releasing pressure; making them uncomfortable then drawing them in, as well as tweaking parenting strategies. This builds resilience and helps them to be able to discuss emotionally challenging subjects.

Another issue is that many say that their kids won’t watch a documentary or a podcast for an hour. My response is that you can really build up to it. We were able to build it up, so it is entirely possible. Several months before he shared that he thought he was trans, he was already easily distracted and moody. We would watch about 20 minutes of a documentary of his choice and he would ask to leave. I would encourage him to rest or go for a walk, but I would basically let him quit because I thought that he needed to rest. But when I realised what was going on, I started replying with, “I’m sorry you are not feeling well, but we will still continue until we are done.” He would stay, even though he was visibly uncomfortable. However, overtime we built up to three to four hours of homeschooling a day—watching documentaries, reading together, discussing, playing board games. I slowly built up the length of time we spent around the table together.

Phase One: Preparing the Ground and Planting the Seeds

To prepare the ground, I wanted to first make him understand that the woke ideology was psychologically unhealthy and was making teens sicker. The Coddling of the American Mind, a book by Lukianoff and Haidt is absolutely excellent. It is written in non-academic, accessible, conversational language with summaries at the end of each chapter, and it mentions gender only for a couple of paragraphs in one of the chapters. Since I was reading this book out loud to both kids, I skipped that part. The authors give examples of psychologically damaging strategies and policies both from the left and from the right, while saying that the left engages in them much more. Most of the examples are “from the left.” The premise of the book is that every element of the woke culture is the opposite of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and thus creates victimhood, rather than robust psychological health.

If your son is open to reading Thomas Sowell, his books are excellent as well. Both of my younger kids love Sowell. They watched many videos on YouTube and loved The Social Justice Fallacies and The Conflict of Visions. But if he sees Sowell as the enemy, he might not be open to him, at least not yet.

At the same time, I wanted to introduce my son to Jordan Peterson, without bias. I used to be biased against him, so I was careful how I introduced him to Peterson. We started with his Personality Course—the one that you pay for on his website (I believe it is offered now via Peterson Academy). I studied psychology in university and we typically talk about psychology with the kids, so incorporating personality psychology was a very natural progression. One of the lectures in this course IS on gender / sex differences, and at that time I was very anxious about showing it to my son, but we did it. After that, we started listening to Peterson’s old university lectures on YouTube—they were like a review of the condensed Personality Course. Peterson of his university years is quite different from Peterson today. He is an engaging speaker, his students love him, and my children enjoyed it. It also helped telling them that it was a second-year university course.

Concurrently we started listening to some of his podcasts as well.

To understand social media influences we watched The Social Dilemma (documentary). I thought that it was “too kiddy” but both kids, 16 and 14 at the time, really liked it. They agreed with all of what was said, and after we watched it, I told the kids that their internet will be turned off at 10:30 pm every night, as well as other restrictions. We said that this would be a trial period of 30 days. They were not thrilled, but it made sense to them and they didn’t protest. Later my son came to me with good arguments of why he should continue having unlimited internet…The arguments were truly good. The Old Me would have agreed, and I was very, very close to agreeing. However, I said that I was very firm on my resolve and that we would continue with the experiment beyond the 30 days. He did have to admit that it WAS helping him schedule himself better. There were times when he would get really upset about not being able to be online when he wanted, but we persevered. In retrospect, this was one of the most difficult and best parenting decisions.

Following the interest in psychology, we watched several documentaries on Freud’s nephew, The Century of The Self, on YouTube. Again—psychological basis for the manipulation of the public. This goes hand in hand with The Social Dilemma.

The Push on Netflix also goes hand in hand—a documentary / mockumentary about manipulation of those who are susceptible. Unlike The Century of The Self, this is modern, fast paced, and more of an entertainment.

Naturally, The Milgram Obedience experiments, Solomon Asch Experiments and The Stanford Jail experiment (though this last one seems to have some kind of issues and fudged data, so be careful with that one) and various obedience and conformity studies—many have documentaries made about them and we watched several. We also recently watched a great documentary called Radical Evil on YouTube. It is about the Holocaust and mentions many of the conformity experiments in a very impactful visual way. I highly recommend this one—very difficult to watch, very impactful and has all the right messages and a lot to discuss.

I will continue in the next email. Let me know if you have any questions.

Lots of love,

H.