Resist the Cult
Resist the Cult
When parents refuse to go along with the trans craze, it makes a difference.
Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, by Mary Margaret Olohan, Regnery, 288 pages.
By 2015, the LGBTQ movement needed a new cause. Its decades-long march to normalize homosexuality was nearing a triumphant end, accelerated by a strategic shift away from democratic persuasion and towards a coercive use of civil rights law. As it became apparent that that year’s Obergefell decision would effectively end the marriage fight, the LGBTQ movement moved to bring the T of their ever-expanding alphabet center stage.
President Barack Obama started the year by becoming the first president to mention “transgender” in a State of the Union address. TLC debuted a new reality show starring Jazz Jennings, a young boy on a futile quest to become a girl. Bruce Jenner decided he was actually Caitlyn and subjected the American people to a confusing Diane Sawyer interview and a nauseating Vanity Fair cover. Hollywood released The Danish Girl, a highly fictionalized account of the life of Einar Wegener, one of the earliest documented recipients of sex reassignment surgery. Wegener died from surgery complications in 1931. The Danish Girl received an Academy Award in 2015.
In response, conservatives relied on biological, psychological, and philosophical arguments to combat this latest deviancy. Most notable was Ryan Anderson’s tightly argued book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Today, nearly a decade after the transgender moment took off, there’s more than just theory to rebut it. The real life effects of this ideology are in, and they’re not pretty.
Enter Mary Margaret Olohan’s Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. As a reporter, Olohan has a knack for telling human interest stories. Her subject in Detrans is the growing number of young people, especially young girls, who fall into transgender ideology and take irreversible steps to alter their healthy bodies, only to regret it. The personal stories are just as important as the arguments from reason—and more powerful.
Detrans centers on four young women who are in the process of detransitioning, that is, embracing their sex after years of attempting to be men. Their stories bear similar traits. Prisha Mosley was diagnosed with a host of mental health issues around the time she entered puberty. Chloe Cole was diagnosed even earlier, first with disruptive behavior disorder at age eight and then ADHD at age eleven. Luka Hein was placed in a partial hospitalization program because of her struggles with mental health. Both Chloe and Prisha were victims of sexual assault. Helena Kerschner developed an eating disorder, as did Prisha.
The internet fed on these vulnerabilities. Every one of the girls Olohan profiles was heavily involved in social media. “Sad and lonely, also struggling with an eating disorder, Helena says she was delighted to find a platform like Tumblr, filled with friendly ‘social outcasts’ like herself,” Olohan writes. These platforms eagerly served up pro-LGBTQ content to these vulnerable social outcasts. Chloe “began exploring transgenderism online, and she quickly found a variety of LGBTQ groups and transgender influencers.”
Social media wasn’t these girls’ only online influence. “Pretty much every detransitioner I spoke with was exposed to pornography at an early age,” Olohan writes, “It wasn’t information they volunteered—in fact, they were surprised when I asked about it.” Most detransitioners recognize the role social media played in their transition. The fact that few also connect their pornography consumption to the life-altering procedures they undertook shows how ubiquitous smut has become and how harmful.
Olohan’s narrative progresses through these harms: After varying degrees of assistance from therapists and school counselors, often concealed from parents, the girls obtain prescriptions for hormones like testosterone and puberty blockers. Soon after, they experience severe mood swings, including intense anger and difficulty crying. “Helena reports that she would struggle against the anger by punching herself until she could cry from the pain,” Olohan writes. Many girls resorted to more severe self-harm.
Not all the harm they experienced was self-inflicted. For girls attempting to transition, the next step after hormones is the euphemistically named “gender affirmation surgery.” Prisha spent $7,100 to have her healthy breasts surgically removed when she was eighteen. She put half the cost on a credit card and struggled to pay it off, since she lost her job at Panera Bread when she had difficulty lifting her arms post-surgery. Luka underwent her double mastectomy at age sixteen. Chloe had hers amputated at fifteen.
Of the four detransitioners Olohan profiles, only Helena avoided this life-altering surgery. Interestingly, Helena’s background also stands out among the other girls’.
As we’ve seen, Helena experienced her share of emotional issues growing up. But she still “describes her family life as largely ‘stable’: her parents were married her whole childhood until after she had moved out, and they were always financially secure.” Neither of her parents was very religious, but the family did go to a Protestant church on Sundays when Helena was little. Later, she went to a Catholic school and “went through a phase of being super Catholic” in early adolescence.
By the time she was in high school, fueled by her hours on Tumblr, Helena began to perceive herself as transgender. She fully identified as a trans boy by senior year—but had yet to tell her parents. When she did, they didn’t embrace her delusion.
Olohan reports Helena’s mother’s reaction: “‘No,’ Helena’s mother finally responded. She added, staring straight at the road ahead of them, ‘No, I am not going to call you that. You are Helena and you are a girl.’”
This reaction delayed Helena’s medical transition. She didn’t begin taking cross-sex hormones until she was 18 and no longer needed parental permission. By the time she was 19, she realized her mistake, and began to detransition. She still lives with the effects of the testosterone, but she knows she’s fortunate. As she wrote in a 2022 Substack post, “There are others for whom the harm has been exponentially worse.”
Throughout Detrans, as Olohan describes the immense social and corporate power pushing vulnerable teens to transition, it’s easy to see the parents as victims as well. Pro-trans therapists are fond of asking skeptical parents, “Do you want a living son or a dead daughter?” It’s clearly an emotionally manipulative line, meant to serve an ideology rather than the wellbeing of young people. Many well-intentioned parents respond as expected and go along, however reluctantly, with the transgender program for their troubled children.
Clearly, Helena’s story does not indicate that families can always immunize themselves from the transgender contagion. But comparing her transgender experience to the others described in Detrans, it does suggest that parents have some agency in the face of the transgender onslaught. If parents understand what they’re up against, they can make a difference.
The subtitle of Detrans is helpful here: “Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.” This is no hyperbole on Olohan’s part. It comes directly from the experience of detransitioners.
“I now understood [the transgender community] exhibits information control dynamics similar to that of cults or extreme religious sects,” Helena told Olohan after her detransition, “I was angry that I had been affirmed every step of the way, and only questioned when I was starting to express regret.”
Luka came to a similar conclusion. She realized that her experiences only counted if they went along with the transgender ideology. “What mattered at that moment was I was pushing back against something that, at least according to [her doctor], could not be questioned,” she told Olohan, “At that point, I was like, OK, I’m in a cult, and I need to leave.”
It is incumbent upon parents to know this and to protect their kids accordingly. The stories in Detrans are heartbreaking and they are only becoming more prevalent—which is why the book is so necessary. Transgenderism is not the next frontier of civil rights; it is a demonic cult, one intent on destroying families and lives. And it has the full backing of far too many in our society, including public education.
So get your kids off social media. Remove them from schools that endorse transgenderism. Provide them with as stable, intact a home environment as possible. And by all means, protect them from the scourge of pornography.
If the philosophical arguments haven’t yet convinced you to take these steps, read Detrans. As Olohan movingly illustrates in her final chapter, your kids’ lives could very well depend on it.
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