202: Steve Hassan and the Trans Cult Conspiracy Theory
“Cult expert” Steve Hassan has been publicly concerned with the complex sociology of trans youth since 2020. We track that interest back to his communications with gender critical activists in 2017, who reached out to him because they believed that his cult theory could shed light on what they believed were nefarious aspects of the trans awareness movement. In the spirit of helpfulness, but without any chops in the subject, he stepped up to the plate and started swinging.
Regardless of how earnest or paranoid his concern is, his access to this landscape has been bought with his intellectual legacy, and been filtered through networks that question trans identity altogether. His most inflammatory (but also silly) claim is that many young people are being hypnotized by online pornography and influenced by social media groups to the extent they inexorably choose medical transition. We investigate and analyze this unfortunate skid into the culture war mud.
Hassan has stated at length his opposition to the “cancel culture” he believes is directed at Rowling and himself. This episode is not that. It’s a sober evaluation of legacy, disciplinary overreach, and what better public intellectual engagement would look like.
Show Notes
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But this is the thing that Hassan is really worried about.
Some told me they watched hypno-porn.
I had no idea what they were talking about, and so I asked for some URLs.
He asked for some URLs.
Well, about those URLs, if you find his posts on Instagram where he repeats this claim, you'll see that dozens of mystified commenters are asking the same question, and he never answers.
So for four years, he's made this very strong claim about a genre of fetish porn, and no one but him knows what he's actually referring to.
So I asked him directly.
Hi everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today we can add to that tagline how sometimes we find theories in search of problems.
And it's clear that when the hammer of a paranoid analysis turns the whole world into a nail, Vulnerable people are made more vulnerable.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
Regarding gay folks and trans folks, my position is it's your life, it's your body, but please understand if you're a minor and you're on the internet, on social media, there is hypnoporn.
Which is pornography, programming people to think they're in the wrong body.
There's all kinds of contagion effects with people transitioning, doing videos and algorithms, ramping people up to become more and more extreme.
That was Steve Hassan on March 22nd in an Instagram Reel.
Conspiratuality 202, Steve Hassan and the Transcult Conspiracy Theory.
Steve Hasen has been publicly concerned with the complex sociology of trans youth since 2020 and today we're going to track that interest back to his communications with gender critical activists in 2017 who reached out to him because they believed that his cult theory could shed light on what they believed were nefarious aspects of the trans awareness movement.
In the spirit of helpfulness, but without any chops in the subject, Hassan stepped up to the plate and started swinging.
Now, it's not unreasonable for him or anyone to have big thoughts and feelings about gender care for young people.
This is a highly politicized field of developing psychological and medical practice.
Many educated people coming from diverse perspectives agree that the core questions are complicated, and that the risk-benefit analysis of interventions like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones needs more research, and that this process is confounded by culture war chaos.
Globally, medical best practices for trans youth are going through a convulsion of review and reassessment, with leading experts and institutions trying, with varying degrees of success, to disambiguate data from politics.
Currently, there's a lot of institutional and political pressure coming out of the more centralized medical systems of Europe, Most prominently from the UK's National Health Service to urge a more cautious approach when intervening with medicalized gender care, especially for young people.
Now in just one sign of how contested this space is, the recent NHS commissioned CAS report on trans youth medical care, in offering its view on selected research, finds that the evidence for medical interventions for youth having positive outcomes is inconclusive.
But trans-allied researchers have criticized the study leadership and design and point out that numerous studies showing positive outcomes associated with medical intervention were overlooked because they were not double-blind controlled, an evidentiary standard that they say is impossible and unethical for the subject population.
Now, the CAS report attempts to strike a conciliatory tone, but a lot of trans people and their advocates hear something else.
For instance, the writers at transactual.org in the UK argue, quote,
underpinning this report is the idea that being trans is an undesirable outcome rather than a
natural facet of human diversity. Yeah, it is so complex and so loaded and so
wading in unafraid to go where angels fear to tread is Steve Haas.
And I want to add that from from my looking into the topic, the government and medical institutions in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland and France are also part of this pause.
So something's going on along with the UK.
And in all of these countries, there's been actually a very progressive approach enacted over the last two to three decades of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors.
And they're all taking a step back based on re-evaluating their original data, as well as looking at what has happened since.
And this sounds like science doing what science does.
These governing bodies have expressed concerns about best practices with regard to psychological evaluations and Somewhat tangled overlaps between gender dysphoria and mental health diagnoses, as well as a disproportionate increase in teenage girls seeking medical transition.
They've each said that the data on positive outcomes is perhaps not strong enough, and some have also raised concerns about negative health outcomes from the drugs actually being more prevalent than what was initially thought to be the case.
So for now, it seems like more research is necessary.
Yeah, and in the interim, what we're going to see is a lot of opportunists use this issue and its complexity in various ways, dragging members of a vulnerable population into the culture war octagon.
And I think what we have learned a lot about on this podcast is that, as with any other complex public health issue, motivated interventions by non-experts seeking to market their own solutions just makes everything worse.
Unfortunately, that's what Steve Hassan's contribution has looked like so far.
Regardless of how earnest or paranoid his concern is, his access to this landscape has been bought with his intellectual legacy and been filtered through networks that question trans identity altogether.
His most inflammatory but also kind of silly claim is that many young people are being hypnotized by online pornography and influenced by social media groups to the extent that
they inexorably choose medical transition.
And he has not supported this strong claim.
So, Matthew, did you reach out to Steve as you were preparing for this episode?
Yes, several times over almost two weeks.
So I can say up front that this episode is not a blindside and I'll say more about those interactions in the
conclusion.
But then previously, we've interviewed Steve.
I interviewed Steve for this show early on, and he's interviewed me for his podcast.
I've cited his works for years.
There's even a section on his work in my 2019 book on a yoga cult.
I mean, we've never met, but we're definitely not strangers.
Okay, so Julian, today Steve Hassan goes by Cult Expert on Twitter and Instagram, which is an on-the-nose handle reflecting the fact that in the pre-digital world he became famous for his popular contributions to the anti-cult movement.
That began with his 1988 book, Combating Cult Mind Control, in which he offered two analytical tools that are now ubiquitous
in the discourse, the Byte Model and the Influence Continuum. So, Julian,
would you agree that those are highly influential? Yeah, and as you mentioned, we've had
him on the pod to talk about his Cult of Trump book, and he is one of that small group of
recognizable cult expert commentators in regular rotation for interviews and appearances in that growing
industry called the cult documentary.
The Byte model gets mentioned very frequently by people writing about and also doing social media posts about cults.
Yeah, it's everywhere.
And so, BITE, what is it?
It's an acronym for a checklist by which you can examine whether a group exerts all or a combination of behavioral, informational, thought, and emotional control over its members.
Now, the influence continuum, which sort of sits alongside the BITE model, describes the scale upon which the sociology of healthy persuasion can slide towards coercion.
Hassan posits that individuals, leaders, and organizations all enact relationships on a continuum between healthy and unhealthy influence.
Okay.
And at first glance, these two tools work together pretty elegantly, but then there's a catch that I'll get to in a bit.
I read Hassan's books as I got my own post-cult life back together, and it's really hard to overstate the initial impressiveness and usefulness of these models, but I want to underline initial usefulness because at the beginning of my recovery arc, it was very helpful to have super clear lists for identifying the contours of this thing that had had me in its grasp.
The bullet points are really clear.
For instance, the first 7 of 25 points of behavioral control are as follows.
1.
Regulate individual's physical reality.
2.
Dictate where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates or isolates.
3.
When, how, and with whom the member has sex.
4.
Control types of clothing and hairstyles. 5.
Regulate diet, food and drink, hunger and or fasting.
Number six, manipulation and deprivation of sleep.
And seven, financial exploitation, manipulation or dependence.
Yeah, there's 25 of those, they're super clear.
And I was able to use those lists, there's four of those lists, to determine that like one of the high demand groups I was in scored at about 60% full coercive influence and the other scored maybe at about 80%.
But I did over time get this feeling about the limits of these lists because in both of those groups, you know, the 60% and the 80%, these are rough measurements that were based on some sort of average I just drew up in my brain.
They worked, but also they were very generalized.
I knew that in one group, for instance, there were main personal attendants who waited on the leader hand and foot, 24-7, and they would have ticked every box for being coercively controlled.
But this was at the center, the small center, of a very large and diverse organization with many franchises.
And the farther away from the center you got, the relevance of those metrics fell off dramatically.
And so the early questions I had about cults as described by Hassan and others were, where does the problem actually begin and where does it end?
And how do we account for diverse orientations towards the leader and ideology?
And what we'll see is that those questions compound over time like cracks in the foundation, I think, if they remain unanswered.
And today they really confound Hassan's clarity as a political pundit.
So, where the Byte model leaves you hanging in that question of, like, where is the threshold?
Hassan's influence continuum takes up the slack.
If Byte doesn't sufficiently describe the diverse experiences of individuals within a group, then each of those individuals can be placed on the influence continuum in positions ranging from benign to toxic.
And so it is both a compelling adjunct to the bite model, but also a stopgap for when it just doesn't work.
Yeah, so the generous interpretation would be, look, this is complicated.
There's going to be lots of things going on at the same time.
It's not necessarily going to look as caricatured as, you know, you may see in stories in the media about scary cults.
And so here are some different ways to think about it.
The less generous interpretation would be, if you want to call this a cult, here's a set of criteria that it has to meet, and if it doesn't quite meet those criteria, don't worry, because we have this other tool which describes a continuum, and you can find where your cult critique sits on this continuum and just keep moving forward, right?
Yeah, now before I saw this moving goalposts sort of circularity problem, Byte and the Influence Continuum really did help me rebuild the basic boundaries of personal agency for myself, which had been eroded through merging with a leader or with prominent followers or through the rituals of disorganized attachment.
And there are a number of books in this entry-level category, and I think they perform an important function in a recovery story.
That part of seeing yourself in a whole new light, you know, it's shocking.
But sometimes you need someone with a crowbar to pry you out of a hole.
But then the problem is that once you're out, that crowbar might not tell you very much about yourself, and worse, it's easy to start beating other people up with it.
Yeah, that's a human tendency, I would imagine.
So, where does all of this come from, Matthew?
Well, with regard to Hassan's work, the starting point is his own experience with the classic pre-digital brick-and-mortar Unification Church of Reverend Moon, from which Hassan escaped in the late 1970s.
And it's in examining this old-school cult structure, unsurprisingly, that I believe Hassan's ideas are most compelling.
And this might be because they carry the charge of his own recovery.
And I would say that it's a tall order to take ideas that helped you recover from a very personal trauma and transform them into an evidence-based discipline.
Now, here's an important thing to know about these tools.
They are generalized to the extent that they speak very persuasively to people exiting or recovering from a dizzying array of groups, very much unlike those who followed Reverend Moon.
So, former members of breakaway evangelical sects, Mormon polygamist colonies, study groups based on A Course in Miracles, Lyndon LaRouche's political conspiracy theory cult, Synanon, and groups based on psychotherapy.
Hassan's readers hail from small groups and large, super intense groups to less intense groups, and this very broad audience is a sign of how accessible, maybe even memeable, Hassan's ideas are.
It has also meant that it has been easy for journalists covering group dynamic stories to understand them.
Hassan offers one-page PDF handouts on his website, making it easy for any TV producer to call on him as a talking head expert, gather resources quickly, and then have questions scripted and ready to hand to the on-air talent.
And all of these factors have allowed Hassan to carve out a permanent talking head presence in the anti-cult world, as you've mentioned Julian, And more recently, as cult has grown as a pop culture fascination, his presence has grown as well.
And some commentators have sounded alarms about this seeming opportunism.
The late cult researcher Kathleen Mann, for instance, in criticizing his third book, Freedom of Mind, Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs, writes, Hassan has greatly expanded his target audience due to what he says is cult activity increasing exponentially and the rise of the internet.
Since Hassan maintains a substantial internet presence through his website, it could be argued that he has increased public sensitivity to cults, thereby magnifying the importance of his solutions, as well as providing a forum where he can extensively promote his own theories and agenda.
So Mann goes on to note that Hassan never provides solid evidence for his claims of intensifying cult activity.
It's interesting because that title, Freedom of Mind, Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs,
there's quite a grab bag there and you're already hearing some of the stuff about like, you know, toxic relationships
and people who are gaslighting you.
And it's like, oh, yeah, all of that stuff is relevant, but does it does it fit into under the heading of cultic
influence?
Chapter two.
The Cult of Trump?
Really?
Is that helpful?
Okay, so you mentioned, Julian, that I interviewed Hassan in the spring of 2020.
This is soon after the publication of his 2019 book, The Cult of Trump.
I'd read the book.
But in the interview, I mainly focused on his previous body of work and how it might apply to the types of dynamics we were seeing in QAnon, or online groups run by conspirituality adherents.
I wondered about whether online groups could enforce behavioral control in the same ways that pre-digital cults did.
I wondered about how a leaderless group like QAnon fit the old model of the cult led by a single toxic leader like Reverend Moon.
And I didn't see any real answers in the book.
So, I just want to mention for anyone who may have forgotten, Reverend Moon, he was from Korea, correct?
He claimed to be God on Earth.
He may even have claimed to have been the second coming of Jesus, if I remember.
Yeah.
And he was famous for these mass weddings that he would hold, sometimes getting as big as being held in like football stadiums.
Because there was a whole lot of control over who you were allowed to have sex with, you had to be married to have sex, and there was also something about these marriages that was, you know, creating some kind of spiritual effect in the world for the good, and he's also famous for being intensely homophobic.
So that is Moon, who Hassan was devoted to and, like, followed around for a period of time.
Yeah, and against whom he developed his, you know, his recovery theories, right?
Exactly.
Now, during our interview, I held back on my skepticism about how he had expanded those original ideas for the cult of Trump.
For instance, the way he applies the bite model to Trumpism, which is a large-scale, extremely diverse, and often incoherent populist political movement.
There are no mass weddings at Mar-a-Lago, right?
Hassan's lens might make sense from the angle of charismatic leadership.
I mean, I have no problem with qualified armchair diagnoses of Trump as a malignant narcissist who is driven to control others to, you know, or else he's going to feel like he's dying.
Even Robert J. Lifton, Hassan's mentor, threw his hat into that ring in a collection of essays by 27 mental health practitioners released in 2017 called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
So, Hassan really is following his mentor's engagement with politics.
After all, Lifton developed his theories during the Cold War specifically in relation to Soviet political influence.
But in taking up this thread and expanding on it, Hassan has to argue that Trump holds totalizing behavioral control over his followers, which is the first criterion in BITE.
And that's a real stretch.
I mean, it's possible That this take is applicable to a small and influential section of Trump followers, maybe the J6 rioters.
But even then, the relationship is not interpersonal, but it's parasocial, and the behavioral activities were acute, ephemeral, and chaotic.
There were plenty of January 6th rioters who had never been to a rally before.
They came for all kinds of reasons, in different uniforms, and with a vast array of paraphernalia, from tactical gear to mock gallows to New Age bangles.
They had no plan, no rulebook, no real instructions to follow.
And QAnon had set up a situation for them in which Trump's statements were infinitely interpretable, so nobody could actually be correct.
He had no control over their physical realities, who they associated with or who they had sex with, when they slept, what they ate or how they dressed.
What you see with Robert J. Lifton is what does he do?
He goes and finds a whole panel of experts to feature in this book, writing specifically about what's What might be going on with the psychology of someone like this in terms of what we see about his behavior and his statements and the patterns over the course of his life and now since he's been president?
It's interesting because there's a way in which we often use the word cult that is more Casual, more metaphorical, more describing a tone than an actual technical phenomenon that would fit within this Byte model, for example, or that would fit within Robert J. Lifton's model.
And yet it feels like what Hasan has done in order to continue being relevant and continue his career of selling books and being a talking head is to actually slide closer and closer to that more Everyday colloquial use of the term.
Yeah.
While maintaining the perception that it's this very academic, you know, research-based kind of scientific definition.
If we think about how all of this applies to Trump's followers and to the J6ers in particular, of course they were responding to his influence very strongly.
The event was organized around a rally with an explicit Stop the Steal message, but they were also swept up in a massive performative event with many of them arrested and convicted on the basis of their selfie live streams posted to Parler.
So they may have been primed, but they certainly weren't trained.
They were activated and provoked, but they weren't controlled.
In fact, I would say their lack of discipline and coherence made them vulnerable.
So, those who weren't arrested melted back into the landscape, and many of them felt abandoned by their strongman.
So, to apply the bite model to Trump devotees seems just wrong to the point of stigmatization.
It's a sign that this theory has been watered down from its original form in combating cults and mind control.
And it's been stretched to serve this new presumed role as a geopolitical pundit.
And in 2019, he applied it to Trump followers, but by 2020, he was applying it to sectors of the trans awareness movement.
Now, to concretely show how Hassan has diluted his themes over time, we can compare the key sections on behavioral control from combating cults and mind control and the cult of Trump.
So first up, we have combating cult mind control, the behavior section, 1988. The need for behavior
control is the reason most cults prescribe a very rigid schedule for their members. Each day, a
significant amount of time is devoted to cult rituals and indoctrination activities.
Members are also typically assigned to accomplish specific goals and tasks, thus restricting their free time and their behavior.
In destructive cults, there's always something to do.
In some of the more restrictive groups, members have to ask permission from leaders to do almost anything.
In other groups, a person is made so financially dependent that their choices of behavior are narrowed automatically.
Every hour of the cult member's day has to be accounted for.
In these ways, the group can keep a tight rein on the member's behavior, and on their thoughts and feelings as well.
Behavior is often controlled by the requirement that everyone act as a group.
In many cults, people eat together, work together, have group meetings, and sometimes sleep together in the same dormitory.
Individualism is fiercely discouraged.
So, that's 1988.
Now, there's this passage from The Cult of Trump, 2019.
Trump demands loyalty and obedience, and often gets it, using a variety of tried-and-true cult tactics such as shunning and publicly insulting those who disagree with him.
He creates false enemies, Mexicans, Muslims, the media, to name just a few, to engender us versus them thinking, which renders people more fearful and obedient.
He rewards those who support him and punishes those who don't.
He holds mass rallies filled with people wearing Trump and Make America Great Again hats and t-shirts and chanting slogans which promote identification with him and the group in opposition to outsiders, though this is a common feature of many political rallies.
Okay, so, I mean, in 1988, Hassan is granular, but in 2019, he is so self-consciously vague and hand-waving, he offers that caveat at the end.
You know, of course, lots of political rallies feature Hassan slogans.
Yeah, like, I'm picturing any number of different candidates, including on the Democrat side.
I mean, the thing that I think is really hard about all of this is that, like, You can compare what has happened.
You can compare MAGA to other populist and authoritarian movements in the world today and in history very, very effectively.
And you can talk about the social psychology of all of that.
And you can talk about the political trends and, you know, what's going on within the culture in terms of recent history.
To try to overlap that with this very clear analysis of what was happening in cults in like the late 20th century, right?
Especially in America, where you had these groups where once you had crossed over, you were in and there was no way out and you were really being controlled and you had sold your car and your house and given all the money to the organization and the group was telling you who to sleep with and you had to get up really early in the morning to do your pujas and chant your mantras, etc.
To try to map those things onto each other is just really odd.
Well, that's why we have the Influence Continuum.
Got it.
So we have a watering down over time that renders the theory free to be picked up by everyone and anyone.
And whoever picks it up, the punters, they might be benign, as with those who develop an interest in group dynamics from a pop culture point of view.
There's the parade of doc makers and then a slew of cult podcasts.
But the ideas can also be weaponized by one's political enemies, with their explanatory power devolving into conspiracy theories.
And I'm afraid that's what's happened with this material parallel to Hassan with his
theory looking for a market leading him to throw kerosene on the culture war fire over
trans identity.
In July of 2020, Hassan posted a thread to Twitter.
And the rest of this episode will consist of us walking through it point by point with all the digressions necessary to figuring out where he's coming up with this stuff.
So Julian, you'll be playing the role of Twitter Steve.
I retweeted a J.K.
Rowling tweet and weighed in as a mental health professional who has written four books on cult mind control and how to help those who have been harmed and their families.
I've spent over four decades in the field of research and helping those who've been harmed by undue influence.
My website is freedomofmind.com.
And I've blogged for human rights, against conversion therapy, and for gay and trans rights.
Okay, so this is his positionality and credential statement.
Yeah, he's written the books, but whether they apply to issues of trans medicine is an open question.
And, you know, right up front, he's pitching his website.
But more importantly, I think he's making it sound here like he has a long track record of allyship.
So if you go to his site, there is a blog from 2017 that's 700 words and it's called Conversion Therapy is Dangerous and Abusive.
And there's another dedicated to how religious cults can be particularly toxic for queer people and a few other blogs that reference homophobia in religions like Mormonism.
Great!
And then Hassan can point to some interviews he has done with trans women, but only one specifically about trans issues.
So the first comes in 2013, years before the current culture war flared, with a woman named Denise Brennan, who's an ex-scientologist who had transitioned the year prior.
They mostly discussed Brennan's time as a Church of Scientology insider and her memories of L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige.
Her status as a trans woman was briefly referenced as part of her post-cult self-exploration.
She died in 2014.
Now the other post in the trans category is an interview Hassan conducted with Dr. Chrissy Stroop, an exvangelical trans woman who writes on right-wing extremism.
The interview discusses her work on editing a volume of essays called Empty the Pews, Stories of Leaving the Church, and then they discuss how the BITE model might be applied to evangelical community dynamics.
Hassan also asks her thoughts on trans politics and cancel culture, and whether J.K.
Rowling really has been engaging in anti-trans rhetoric.
Stroop asserts that, yes, Rowling is engaging in anti-trans rhetoric, and then she uses her own story to illustrate how transitioning can be a well-supported experience from a medical and psychological point of view.
And in part, she's responding to Hassan bringing up his interviews with detransitioners, which we'll hear about in a bit.
Now, to date, this exchange with Stroop is still up on Freedom of Mind as one of the two examples for the statement, I have blogged for trans rights, as if blogging would be a substantial form of activism.
But as far as I can tell, his claim boils down to his text summary of this conversation with Stroop, in which he says he knows he is not transphobic,
he's pretty sure that J.K. Rowling isn't either, despite what Stroop says,
and that it's evangelicals who hate the Harry Potter books who are trying to cancel her for her views on trans people.
Whoa.
This is an idea that he repeats several times.
He also says that J.K.
Rowling is well-researched in the topic and well-connected with trans people.
So, is Hassan padding his resume as a trans ally?
I don't find these resources compelling.
I think it would be like me saying that I was an anti-racist activist because of a few pieces I've done about white privilege while I'm remembering a conversation with a black guy I once talked to kind of awkwardly.
I don't know.
And then blogged about your conversation because you've blogged for anti-racist causes.
Right, yeah.
Chapter four, it all goes back to Jung.
So now the tweets go on to reveal the origin story of Hassan's concern.
A couple of years ago, I was approached by at Lisa Marciano, a therapist who wanted to know my opinion on the phenomenon of young people being drawn into a cult-like situation where all of a sudden they thought they were the opposite sex.
Who is Lisa Marciano?
Okay, so she is a 59-year-old Jungian therapist in Philadelphia who is at the heart of one of the central pseudoscience ideas of gender-critical politics.
Her basic claim that the rise of trans identity is a psychosocial contagion as opposed to a natural or inborn phenomenon is at the heart of what Hassan leans into in this discourse.
In 2017, Marciano published an article called Outbreak on Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics in the journal Psychological Perspectives.
She describes the emergence of transgender identity as a kind of distorted archetype in the Jungian collective unconscious that must be intercepted lest it cause mass psychosis.
She reiterated these themes in 2021 in an article called,
Transgender Children, The Making of a Modern Hysteria, in which she wrote that,
The rise in the number of children and teens self-diagnosing as transgender
can be compared with the explosion in the numbers of young women
exhibiting symptoms of hysteria at the end of the 19th century.
Okay, so Marciano has published one case study of a detrans client in which online interactions
influence them towards hormone treatment that they later stopped.
The patient came to believe, under Marciano's care, that their core issue was with their maternal relationship.
Marciano concludes this case study in true old-school Jungian fashion by disclosing that she believes that transgender identity is a kind of, quote, neurotic fantasy, unquote, that is telling us something about disease in the collective unconscious.
This is sounding to me like some real reefer madness style discourse here, along with appeals to some of the more speculative metaphysical concepts left to us by Carl Jung that maybe we should have left behind as well.
Yeah, they are metaphysical concepts, and there's going to be some kind of window into conspirituality, but we'll leave that to the side for now.
Here's where Marciano's 20th century meets the 21st century of gender-critical culture.
In her 2017 paper, A now familiar phrase appears for the first time in the academic literature.
Quoting from the abstract.
Rapid onset gender dysphoria is a new presentation of a condition that has not been well studied.
Reports online indicate that a young person's coming out as transgender is often preceded by
increased social media use and or having one or more peers also come out as transgender.
So what reports online you might ask?
Well, these would be answers from surveys that Marciana was actively involved in soliciting from parents of teens who were questioning their gender identities.
In her paper, she cites examples collected from a forum called fourthwavenow.com.
Now, to call fourthwavenow.com gender-critical is an understatement.
The rhetoric on the website is so inflammatory, it compares gender-affirming medical treatment to the practice of lobotomy.
A number of journalists have tracked the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria to the year prior, to 2016, when it first appeared in a post by Lisa Littman on that website, fourthwavenow.com, Littman posted a call-out for parents to submit stories about their children with gender dysphoria.
And this is the call-out that resulted in Littman's famous paper for PLOS One in 2018 that made the concept of ROGD a top talking point for people like Jordan Peterson and various hosts of The Daily Wire.
The paper's methodology was so flawed that the journal had Littman issue a correction that was almost as long as the original.
And the main problem was that the whole thing was based on the survey answers of upset parents who were trying to imagine why their kids were questioning their gender identities.
So it wasn't a survey of what the kids actually said had happened to them.
Littman turned triggered parents into reliable narrators of their children's experiences, experiences that they were clearly upset by.
And I would add here, Julian, that experiences they may not have had full access to, right?
They're reporting from the outside.
These are parents who were already alienated from and confused by their children.
So, Littman took these speculations to be accurate and definitional.
Now, the correction was published in 2019, but that didn't stop ROGD from becoming the backbone
of Abigail Schreier's popular book, Irreversible Damage, published in 2020.
And that book mainstreamed the theory.
And Lisa Marciano is quoted in Irreversible Damage seven times, and then at the end, she's thanked in the acknowledgements, along with anti-vax, anti-woke matriarch Heather Haying.
Marciano patiently improved my negligible understanding of genitosphoria, human psychology, anatomy, and endocrinology.
Professor Heather Haying provided key insight into today's campus culture.
Let's just pause, Julian, on the miracle of a journalist who has really no background in science writing thanking a Jungian therapist for teaching her all about anatomy and endocrinology.
Yeah, the thing that you fail to understand, Matthew, because of your lack of study in the true teachings of Carl Jung, is that if you can tap into the collective unconscious, all things become knowable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I suppose.
Yeah.
All right.
So, let's rewind a bit.
After Littman posted the parent call-out in 2016, this term started to circulate on three gender-critical websites of that era.
So, we've mentioned 4th Wave now, but then also transgendertrend.com and youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org.
There was a big email leak in 2023, and it came from former detransitioner Elisa Shoup.
I want you to put a pin in that name.
And the emails show that Marciano was the lead blogger at Youth Trans Critical Professionals, which collected and published stories from parents disturbed by their children's gender explorations, and then some interviews with detransitioners.
So in two of the three main gender-critical forms that spread Littman's nascent idea, Marciano was active on two of them.
And her centrality in the promulgation of the theory is enshrined in Littman's original paper.
Littman thanks Marciano for, quote, feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
So there's a plural there, versions.
This is an ongoing working relationship.
And then Littman discloses that Youth Transcritical Professionals was one of the recruitment sites, but does not disclose the conflict of interest that Marciano was the main blogger on that site.
So, just to loop back, it's all important because Steve Hasson's doorway into this discussion is through a key figure in the popularization of a theory that would sound great in a workshop on Jung at Esalen, Where you, you know, you do all kinds of other things as well, but then it turns out to be poorly evidenced to the point that the American Psychological Association and 61 healthcare organizations have denounced the concept of ROGD as poorly evidenced.
So, this is not a great start for Hassan's new fascination, especially seeing that he regularly appeals to his status as an evidence-based mental health professional.
Yeah, and this is all really so important to understand the genesis of these different ideas and their influence.
I think the thing that keeps coming to light for me here on this topic is how contested, how unresolved, how complicated all of this stuff is.
Seeing the bad methodology that you're describing here and the alliance in some cases of unqualified people and in other cases ideologically motivated figures within this narrative It's very telling.
At the same time, there is data from Sweden, Finland, and Holland, as well as the US and UK, showing that there has been a dramatic increase overall in teens seeking medical affirmation, with a significant majority in the last 10 years or so, 15 years, being girls.
Many of those also having not struggled with gender as young children, which used to be like a more typical flag, right?
Yeah, to the extent that the researchers know.
And that means that the question is still, are there suddenly more trans people out there for some reason, or suddenly more people becoming aware of their gender fluidity?
And so in the U.S., for example, you would expect those increases as trans youth become more visible, as they realize that they had options and there was more of an atmosphere of acceptance.
But European doctors interviewed by The Atlantic, and we'll include this in the show notes, point out that these countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc., are very progressive.
And the attitudes toward trans people there have long actually been very supportive.
So, for now, explanations for what's going on are still somewhat open-ended.
Yeah, and so we have a perfect entry point for conspiracy theory mindset.
There's an open question, incomplete evidence, there's an anxious feeling of something going terribly wrong, it might be, and it's worse because it involves kids.
So how are you going to explain it?
When you do explain it, will your explanation just happen to support what you already feel
about medicine, technology, or trans people?
Chapter 5.
Anti-Cult Recruiting I want to circle back to Elisa Shoup.
She's a military veteran who was the first American citizen to have a non-binary gender identity legally recognized in 2016.
This was part of a transition journey that began in 2013, but then medical complications and other doubts drew her towards detransitioning, and by 2017 she began to communicate with and speak out on behalf of gender-critical groups, who she describes as being extremely welcoming at first.
But by 2022, she had reversed her detrans process and rebuked her former allies in the anti-trans movement because she says she had been caught up in a toxic propaganda campaign driven by right-wing and faith-based groups intent on invalidating trans identity altogether.
And in a final public statement, she emphasized that her former colleagues were essentially offering conversion therapy, and they enlisted her help during a vulnerable time to become what she called a useful idiot, a pawn in their injurious war against the transgender population.
Now, as I mentioned, in March of 2023, Shoop leaked 2,600 pages of her emails related to this period in her life, and they're important because they show her communications with Marciano and Steve Hassan.
Shoop's first email to Hassan in April of 2017 opens like this.
Lisa provided me with your contact info to assist you in your project of understanding how transgenderism has cult-like tendencies and behaviors.
And in his response, Hassan tells Shoop what his interest in detrans people is, and of course, sends along his handy PDFs on Byte and the Influence Continuum.
I have precious little time, but I'm very interested from the angle of social influence.
I've worked with people in cults and religions which were homophobic and tried to brainwash them to think they were straight.
Not.
And some cults that tried to make straight people into hookers, pimps, gay people.
I've worked with people who thought they were aliens in a human body and some people castrated themselves.
But my interest is in hypnosis, NLP, mind control techniques, social influence and conformity, obedience to authority figures and other aspects of social psychology.
Do you like to read books?
If so, I would give you review copies of two of mine, Combating Cult Mind Control and Freedom of Mind.
If you'd like to read e-books, I can email to you.
Of course, they're on Amazon too.
If you don't like e-books, and you don't wish to purchase them in paperback, but would read them if I sent them to you, just give me a mailing address!
It's a lot.
He really wants to get the books out.
So I reached out to Elisa Shoup to ask her about this exchange and how far it went.
And the answer is that it didn't go very far.
Hassan never interviewed her.
They never collaborated on anything.
But Shoup did tell me via email that she found his pitch manipulative, going from, I have precious little time, directly to hawking his books.
She wrote the following.
And that gets at the heart of many of these folks.
I've come to view them as for-profit grifters who've jumped on the gender-critical bandwagon because it can bring instant fame.
Shoup also told me that she sensed that one strategy of the movement she once advocated for was to cast around for frameworks and rhetoric that would gain political traction and media attention.
It was effective, she felt, to the extent that they mobilized their credentials in mental health services and were able to heighten public fears over how trans medicine allegedly endangers girls and women.
But what about this issue of connecting with detrans people through the framework of the BITE model?
Will that influence the conversation?
In another Twitter thread from July of 2020, Hassan doesn't seem concerned about selection bias.
I've interviewed 12 detransitioners, male-female-male and female-male-female, who have read my work on cults and mind controls.
So this is not a neutral or representational sample.
Like, ironically, he's interviewing people already under his influence, and he must know that, right?
So I found 12 specific people who already have become detransitioners and realize that they've regretted their choice to transition in the first place, who also are familiar with my books and were ready to then be interviewed by me in a self-confirming way.
That's incredible.
I reached out to Lisa Marciano to ask about her communications with Hassan and the fallout from it.
And we met by Google Meet.
She gave me permission to record our conversation.
And she described reaching out to Hassan originally because she had seen him correlate being on the autism spectrum with a vulnerability to cult indoctrination.
Now that's another huge can of worms that I don't think he has the chops to really dig into.
We're not going to do it here.
So I'll just leave that there.
That's how they connected.
Something clicked for her.
She said she had clients expressing transition regret or contemplating detransitioning.
And she said she'd been disturbed by their stories about online influence, and she wondered whether there was a connection to neurodivergence.
She wanted me to know that she was talking about online contexts exclusively.
And she said that she had told Hassan about potential love-bombing, potential thought-stopping clichés, like the stark phrase, transition or die, which is stark.
It's a rally cry for trans health rights that you'll hear at political rallies, and it's definitely severe.
And in this case, the slogan emerges as the rhetorical outcome of boiling down the risk analysis of providing youth with gender care or not, according to the activists.
Now, some of Marciano's clients had read Hassan's book, Combating Cults and Mind Control, but they also said that they held the language of cult gently, knowing that it wasn't quite accurate.
And so when I asked her what she thought of him using the language of cultism, she replied, I don't go around repeating that.
I don't think it's helpful.
I think it's incendiary.
I think it's probably more helpful to use the term undue influence.
So Julian, I mean, the most charitable view of Marciano's concern, I think, is that, you know, some parents of teenagers will go into total panic if their kid starts wanting to transition.
And a therapist, predisposed to skepticism around gender fluidity, can make themselves available to those parents, and some of those parents might have legitimate concerns about the care their child is or isn't receiving.
But what's so destructive and unnecessary is the panic which plays right into the hands of the worst actors in this, which is the Christofascists who want to criminalize trans care altogether.
Yeah, it's really hard to have reasonable conversations about these very difficult and complex topics that reference the data, that talk about the different layers that have to do with psychological, social, historical aspects of all of this.
Because it's so intensely overheated.
And I think that one of the things that the Christofascists and the right-wing propagandists are really good at is finding the most lurid, the most intense, the most sensationalist, the most sort of disturbing examples they can of any aspect of this A discourse that might be scary or threatening, especially to parents, and amplifying it and acting as if this characterizes the whole movement.
And this characterizes anyone who is trying to create conditions within which trans people can be safe and supported within our society.
By now you might be sussing out an irony.
Marciano and others believe they have detected an online-based epidemic of trans identity.
So how do they uncover it?
How do they fight it?
Well, through their own online viral panic that gathers so much steam on such contestable evidence that it winds up on the timelines of major reactionary influencers like Jordan Peterson and then people invested in anti-trans discourse like J.K.
Rowling.
As Hassan's Twitter thread continues on from pinging this initial contact with Marciano and others in the gender-critical online space, we can see him mirror the rabbit-holing that he's so concerned about in the trans world, because he started to do his own research.
I was very skeptical, as I have close friends who are gay and a few friends who are trans.
But my philosophy is to be open-minded.
I started reading, watching documentaries, and asked to interview detransitioners to better understand their experience.
I became convinced that in these people's cases they were indeed socially influenced, much of it online, to believe they must transition.
So to this date, I have found no place in which Hassan has published his references for these statements or any case studies.
In 2017, he said in a leaked email that he'd interviewed 10 detrans people.
In 2020, the number was 12.
Again, no case studies.
But let's be clear that detrans people are absolutely out there.
We do not know how many.
The research is complicated, the parameters are contested, to the extent that detransitioning itself is defined in different ways in different studies.
Is it social, hormonal, surgical?
Some detrans people tell stories of online welcome and love morphing into online pressure.
They tell stories of intrusive counseling, medical neglect or malpractice, botched treatments and surgeries that leave them disabled or sterile, they describe regret, and even increases in suicidal ideation in some cases.
So should we be concerned about how this population is being cared for?
Yes.
Is it reasonable to question the incentives of super enthused counselors or the profit motives of plastic surgeons in a for-profit system?
Absolutely!
I mean, on the other hand, should we wonder about the financial incentives for rationing care in a socialized system like the NHS?
Maybe.
Should we all be honest about the fact that the medical best practices for trans youth are still contested?
Absolutely, we should.
But at the same time, I think we have to recognize that these complex uncertainties at the heart of emotionally impactful detrans stories are low-hanging fruit, as you're saying, Julian, for reactionaries and propagandists.
The detrans story as a genre is harrowing, isolated, traumatized, and as the account of Elisa Shoup shows, it is easy to pigeonhole the detrans person as the archetypal victim of a medical world gone mad, as opposed to someone on a vulnerable journey with multiple support needs who needs to be listened to and not recruited as a political pawn.
Yeah, and it's just as easy to characterize the detransitioner as someone who has fallen into the cult of right-wing reactionary anti-trans rhetoric, right?
Caught in the middle is this person who is going through an absolutely harrowing life path of trying to come to terms with their identity and how to live in the world.
Yeah, so can someone like that be understood and studied without further stigmatization or endangerment?
Well, yeah.
There are top-notch trans researchers out there doing work like that.
There's a guy named Kenan McKinnon at York U here in Toronto doing actual published research on this very delicate matter.
I'll link to one of his articles in the British Medical Journal.
It's called, Detransition Needs Further Understanding, Not Controversy.
And I'll also link to an in-depth piece from Reuters Investigations in which McKinnon is a featured expert.
It's called, Why Detransitioners Are Crucial to the Science of Gender Care.
Now, as you might pick up from the titles alone, there are clear and pressing questions being asked about how transition satisfaction is being researched, whether people in detrans situations are being well-served, And while McKinnon generally says that gender care is well-intentioned and well-regulated, he also finds issues to be worked on with regard to how gender care professionals are hearing, including, and serving those with regrets.
And the point is, Steve Hassan is not doing any of that work.
It's not his field, it's not his expertise, he's not showing that he's engaging with any of the actual literature.
So, charitably, this misguided saviorism might have some of this old momentum of cult studies behind it, which has a frontier-like vibe.
This is a discipline that runs on new and harrowing visions of social groups.
And that's in Hassan's wheelhouse.
And to be fair, it's not rare in the cult analysis world to take on a Cassandra-like orientation to problems, to be the oracle of bad things happening.
Chapter 6, Sissy Hypno.
Next up in the Twitter thread, he veers back towards the bite model, writing, I became convinced that in these people's cases, they were indeed socially influenced, much of it online, to believe they must transition.
So that's the ROGD tie-in, and right after that, Hassan continues with references to the BITE model.
They told me they were sleep-deprived.
Some described the praise and support they got for saying they were trans made them feel loved.
So, people are sleep-deprived from staying up too late?
Watching videos, I guess?
Yeah, who's forcing this up on them?
Yeah, I mean, is that in the bite model?
I mean, no, it's not.
Does the loving reception online qualify as love-bombing?
I mean, it might, but we're not talking about the ecstatic puppy pile in the ashram.
We're talking about online sociality.
But this is the thing that Hassan is really worried about.
Some told me they watched hypno-porn.
I had no idea what they were talking about, and so I asked for some URLs.
He asked for some URLs.
Well, about those URLs, if you find his posts on Instagram where he repeats this claim, you'll see that dozens of mystified commenters are asking the same question, and he never answers.
So for four years, he's made this very strong claim about a genre of fetish porn, and no one but him knows what he's actually referring to.
So I asked him directly.
I could not find the hypnoporn videos I cited, but did find the name of one of them.
In response to a follow-up email, he admitted that he was not an expert on porn and that...
I could not find the hypnoporn videos I cited, but did find the name of one of them.
It was Permanent Sisification.
I did go back on PornHub.com to search for it.
I did not locate it, but I did find many other videos on hypnoporn.
I also Google hypnoporn, and there are many websites and even YouTube videos.
Some of these videos even use brainwashing in the title!
Yeah, and that couldn't be anything but nefarious.
It couldn't be teasing.
It couldn't be ironic.
Yeah, none of it intersects with BDSM, right?
I mean, I think I can say that if you do follow the Hassan Do Your Own Research track, you will find those titles.
And if you view the videos, you're going to see fetish videos, but not so for Hassan.
What's fascinating about this is he starts off like early on, you know, with the first quote we gave of him, he's, or at the clip that we played, he's trying to talk about the power of the algorithm in like sucking you into this sissy porn hypnosis where your brain is going to be deranged into thinking that you're trans.
And then when he goes to find the videos, the algorithm doesn't serve them back up to him.
It's very weird.
Yeah.
Where are these videos?
Okay.
Yeah.
So what he says about this next is really incredible.
What I watched in hypnoporn, in my opinion, was weapons-grade mind control.
And if a person watches it, especially if they were at a low point in their life, confused, stoned, or friends with a bunch of trans folks, they could be profoundly influenced to, for example, believe they were a woman in a man's body.
Just another thing about the missing URLs.
I think if you found weapons-grade mind control as an expert in such things, you would bookmark it and alert the authorities, right?
So this idea is that there's a genre of porn that can hypnotize untold numbers of men into becoming trans.
This idea, it's not limited to Hassan.
It's been promoted by anti-trans activists like Rod Dreher and Graham Linehan.
And we should note that this contradicts a main premise of gender-critical concern with the sharp increase in female-to-male transitions that you've referenced, Julian.
You know, maybe ROGD is responsible for that, but then sissy porn mops up stragglers who are going the other way?
Because as far as I'm aware, there's no genre of weapons-grade, mind-control, butch-hypnoporn out there alleged to hypnotize young women into transitioning into men.
But thankfully, we don't have to answer the question of what this porn genre is in any more detail because the absolute rock stars of QAA, led by Liv Agar, did just that in their premium episode 224 called Sissy Hypno.
And I'm just going to summarize her findings here that in no way will detract from the full pleasure of listening to her layered research.
Agar tracks a lot of the discourse on sissy hypno back to misogynistic sources.
The NoFap forum and subreddits like rsissiology with hundreds of thousands of users all together.
And in these spaces, mainly cisgendered men with Jordan Peterson books on their bedside tables trade stories about their struggles with porn usage.
Now, the roots of the NoFap movement, we've covered them before, they're firmly planted in the far-right religious manosphere and fed by healthist and purity fetish ideals.
Now, these are men who believe that they're spiritually drained when they ejaculate.
They fear that porn is cucking the entire civilization by training men to be aroused by images of other men having sex with women they're not good enough to have sex with.
And they say that this is lowering testosterone rates and despoiling the flower of male youth.
But the NoFapper's hottest anxieties flare up around the arousals provoked by algorithmic journeys that take them into queer territory.
Post after post, plaintively confesses to same-sex attraction or attraction to trans women with penises.
The arousal is so foreign and reprehensible to them that it must have been deceptively implanted by the videos.
And yet, they keep posting about it.
They keep talking about it.
Long threads about their attractions, the ecstasy of their idea of submissiveness, their fantasies about anal sex, and their erotic worries about what it all means.
They share very transparently and tenderly with each other.
This is something you've found these threads yourself?
I've not seen this before.
Wow.
Yeah, well, and Liv Agar covers them in detail.
And this is where the conspiratorial whispers emerge.
Who is making this material?
What are they trying to do to the men of the great Western world?
As Agar points out, it's a short trip from unintegrated trans attraction to anti-trans bigotry.
Sissy hypnosex workers, from this point of view, are not producing their own content that is just interesting to them or that turns them on.
They're not working independently.
They're not scraping by on OnlyFans.
They are not meeting a free market need.
They are scheming to indoctrinate cis men into becoming sissies.
Maybe Russia is behind it.
Maybe it's Iran.
Here, fearing sissy hypno is a form of deeply internalized homophobia dragged to the surface by the nofapper's own hidden desires and then rationalized by geopolitical conspiracism.
Now, it would take a data forensics expert to track down how this discourse jumps from the NoFap Manosphere into the gender-critical territory of Marciano.
From my email exchange with Hassan, it's clear that he doesn't know anything about these connections.
Or about porn, really.
But we can say that the links between gender-critical influencers and right-wing agitators are clear.
These connections are most efficiently uncovered by a YouTuber who goes by the handle Sean, whose excellent sleuthing in a video called JK Rowling's New Friends gives the lie to Rowling's claims to purely feminist values.
Because as Sean points out, when it comes to opinions about trans women, she's perfectly happy to align herself with right-wing extremists like Posie Parker, who's like the David Icke of anti-trans bigotry, who regularly compares trans women to pedophiles and serial killers, campaigns against birth control and abortion access, and has said that cisgendered women who stand in her way will be annihilated.
Now, where the gender-critical and right-wing overlap focuses on sissy-hypno is in the content of activists like Genevieve Gluck, and Agar refers to her as well.
Here is Genevieve Gluck in April of 2023 speaking with Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, Just the month before, Knowles took the stage at CPAC to
declare that transgenderism must be eradicated.
And Genevieve can shed some light on this phenomenon that, frankly, as I've said on
the show, I don't even want to look into because I have been told and I've read on
different fora that talk about this phenomenon, that there is a kind of pornography that is
apparently a driver of the transgender identity that is so perverse that it constitutes a
kind of hypnosis where men will say, I was a normal guy, I lived to be 41, 42, and I
was basically normal, but then I fell into this kind of pornography and it essentially
I had a nervous breakdown.
Now I think that I'm a woman.
So rather than have to expose myself to that, And then, you know, I'll have to go to confession, potentially my brain gets melted.
I can just talk to Genevieve about it.
Genevieve, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Can you just give, not only the audience, but me, a rundown?
What is, among all of the types of pornography that lead to transgenderism, what is this hypnosis pornography?
Well, you touched on a good point there.
There are many types of pornography that are sort of involved with the transgender movement.
But hypnosis pornography is a little bit different in that it incorporates your lifestyle.
So typically when we think of pornography, we think of it as something that is passive, that you're sort of watching.
But this type, it asks you to sort of change your behavior, change the way you dress, even to start taking hormones.
And it's sometimes called Cissy Hypno, so that's short for Cissification, Hypnosis, Pornography.
And, you know, I myself, I have personally been somewhat mocked for the suggestion that this is having a powerful impact on men.
However, trans activists themselves will say things like it influenced them.
There's a famous academic who wrote a book in 2019.
His name is Andrea Long Chu, and the name of his book is Females.
And in that book, he explicitly states that sissy porn and hypnosis made him start identifying as transgender.
Now, you can't see this, but almost every time Knowles mentions sissy porn in the intro, the Daily Wire video editors are flashing clips of Dylan Mulvaney bopping around in Lindy Hop dresses like she's in a musical.
So it's silly.
But it's also extremely gross and also dangerous for someone like Mulvaney, who already gets swamped with death threats.
And the second thing you can't see, when Knowles throws to Gluck after that insane intro, she just rolls with it.
It's like 100% serious.
Now, you heard Gluck cite and misgender trans academic Andrea Longchew.
Longchew's writing about gendered sexual experience from an internally diverse point of view is extremely provocative.
It explores the politics and sensations of sexual receptivity and penetration in graphic ways.
And she has written the sentence, Sissy Porn Made Me Trans, and she's just left it hanging to be stripped of all context and irony.
You can quote that out of her book if you want.
And Gluck, however, makes it sound like Longchu is some kind of trans pope dispensing the truth of all trans experience instead of being a queer studies creative.
Now, I'll refer you again all to Liv Agar, who goes into more detail on Longchu, but for our purposes, here's an excerpt from an interview on Lit Hub where Longchu is asked about sissy porn and she answers just in plain English.
While I don't have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture and awareness.
Of course, it's in the long line of sexual practices like cross-dressing, in which cross-dresser identification becomes a key factor.
It's not that all of a sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people.
However, It is undoubted that the internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were.
Whether it's creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.
Yeah, reasonable.
So Genevieve Gluck, Lisa Marciano, Steve Hassan, the internet is real.
People use it to discover their desires through porn.
When a lesser known desire is made explicit, more people realize that it touches something within them.
What a conspiracy!
Who's behind it?
Who's behind it?
So, Hassan winds down his thread now by reaffirming his support of gay and trans rights, but also he cautions against blindly enthusiastic gender-affirming care.
Now, despite his omission of any solid data about the scope of the issue, this is Hassan's least troubling zone, because of course care and best practices need to be taken in such grave matters.
But he also writes that... Detransitioners have told me they've been harassed, treated as a traitor.
Exactly what cults do to defectors.
Yeah, totally plausible that this is happening, but I would suggest that it might be in part because this population is so embattled and so threatened by reactionary politics unleashing legislation against them every day that if you start implying that a population is actually a cult, what would you expect them to do when it comes to defending their membership and alliances?
Are they going to become more defensive or perhaps rigid?
Hassan's final advice is to... Take your time.
Please visit my website and learn about the Influence Continuum and Byte model.
I'm surprised he doesn't say, do you like to read?
Take your time.
Please visit my website and learn about the Influence Continuum and Byte model and become a better listener.
We all need to heal and come together, not be further polarized.
So I find it a little sad but also totally on point that he ends with an appeal for depolarization,
better listening, and a sales pitch pointing back to an old super polarizing theory.
Chapter 7, Fallout.
So I reached out to Hassan starting on April 4th to ask him for sources for his claims.
The first email response was highly defensive.
May I assume you've not read The Cult of Trump and listened to my five years of interviews since it was published?
Read my doctoral dissertation.
Know my over 40 years of expertise on hypnosis.
You know Lifton since 1976.
Read every one of his books.
Interviewed him many times.
How much do you know from my point of view?
By the way, my primary care physician is a trans woman.
She transitioned many years ago.
Don't worry, I'll be sharing much more going forward.
Please share your CV so I can catch up on your credentials.
My CV is on my site.
Yeah, so I wrote back to say basically, let's not play arguments from authority while you fail to answer basic questions about your sources.
And after that, I got a more moderate response and a promise to provide citations.
But they never came.
But he did send me random posts that were in the same territory, I guess.
Like, have you read Jonathan Haidt's new book on internet social media influence?
Have you seen this documentary on an evil fast fashion company?
It's on HBO now.
It's as if to say, look, bad things happen on the internet and cults are real, which I don't need to really know about.
I just want to know what his thoughts are on things like sissy hypno.
So, he also returned to playing the credential card, implying that I wasn't a legitimate journalist and saying that he would not answer any of my direct questions by email.
Now, the questions were like simple and direct things like, does he feel it's useful to imply a parallel between the Byte model and ROGD if ROGD is debunked?
Was it accurate to use the Byte model in relation to staying up late on Pornhub?
Was he going to publish his interviews with detrans people as case studies?
Did some or all of those referrals come through Lisa Marciano?
So, no written answers, but he did invite me to a Zoom call, asking to... Record it so there is an objective record and transcript so people will be able to decide for themselves.
Honestly, it seems you have an agenda which is other than contributing to the public good.
Then he wrote... If you decide to decline and publish anything, please make a note that I wish to answer your questions and have a respectful dialogue and you decline.
Yeah, so there you have it.
So he declined to answer and then he flipped it and he put that on me as if I had declined.
But I want to set the interpersonal sparks aside and, you know, finish on what are we to make of this.
In the most generous light, Hassan the public intellectual might simply want to have an informed public discussion about the legal and moral implications of trans youth medicine.
He may be earnestly concerned about young people navigating a confusing period in culture, technology, and parasocial influence.
He doesn't want anyone to make regrettable decisions.
And who does?
Now setting aside the question of why he wants to involve himself in this as opposed to something else, there are tons of issues or whether anyone besides a Jungian therapist asked for his opinion or how he would make sure he wasn't stretching his content for culture war clout.
How would he engage in a trans politics discussion in a productive way?
I would think it would not be by centering his own diluted theories from an unrelated field and decade.
Not by pulling a just asking questions routine about JK Rowling with a trans academic.
Not by uncritically spreading conspiracy theories about an obscure DIY porn genre.
Not by insinuating that trans rights activists and their allies are in a cult, and not by suggesting that a person questioning him about any of this needs some kind of special education.
Because if a person winds up doing these things, they might also wind up contributing to an increasingly chaotic and dangerous landscape.
And what I mean by that What is going on here?
In December of 2022, Chaya Reitschek of Libs of TikTok went on Tucker Carlson and said
this.
What is going on here?
Do you have any theories?
I think there's something so unique about the LGBTQ community has become this cult and
it's so captivating.
It pulls people in so strongly, unlike anything we've ever seen.
Thank you.
They brainwash people to join, and they convince them of all of these things.
And it's really, really hard to get out of it.
It's really difficult.
And there are studies on this.
There's been a lot of reporting on this about parents who are like, you know, my child is starting to say that they're non-binary or transgender or whatever, and what do I do?
How do I stop this?
And it's really, really difficult.
It's unlike anything we've ever seen, I think.
It's extremely poisonous.
I want us to remember that people make bomb threats based upon what Raycheck says.
Now, Steve Hasson is not responsible for Raycheck's speech, and she isn't quoting him directly.
But back when it happened, I wrote to him for his thoughts on the matter and he replied that he was, quote, horrified and repulsed by her usage of the terms.
But is he, really?
And will he come out and criticize people using this discourse in an inaccurate and inflammatory way that endangers a vulnerable population?
Because that's where we are.
Cult theory is now being weaponized against a vulnerable population.
I bet an expert could help reverse that.
Now the last best practice I'd offer Hassan is that he seek out a broad range of trans and trans ally voices, especially if he really wants to learn about the nuances of how a community is struggling to learn how to be accepted and supported in the world, how they are navigating their own ethical mysteries, and how they are central to answering their own questions.
So with that in mind, I'll give the last words to Chrissy Stroop, who Hassan interviewed way back when.
By email, she wrote this.
When Steve Hasen interviewed me about trans issues, I was taken aback by the many transphobic talking points he lobbed at me and apparently found compelling.
Since doing that interview, I've largely kept Steve at arm's length and tried to ignore him, but it doesn't surprise me to learn that he has only become more transphobic over time, stretching his bite model incredibly thin as he tries to paint trans rights advocates as a cult.
I can't completely escape Steve's work, of course.
The BITE model is understandably popular in ex-evangelical and similar spaces, and conversations around breaking away from a high-control religious group.
But I've not engaged directly with any new content he's put out since my last interview with him.
On the question of separating the art from the artist or the intellectual output from the intellectual who put it out, I am ambivalent.
We all have problematic faves.
I'll be the first to admit that I do.
But people who continue to engage directly with Steve Hasen and or his work should absolutely know that he's fallen down a transphobia rabbit hole.
I object in the strongest possible terms to him pointing to his interview with me to argue otherwise.
I hope Steve will eventually see the error of his ways and come around to a more accepting and also medically and ethically sound position on trans rights.
But in any case, we absolutely need to talk about Steve's transphobia whenever his work comes up.
Once his readers are aware, they can decide the extent to which they still want to engage with his work.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Including you, Steve.
I hope this was fair.
I hope it gives you some resources to take your time with.
And one request for you.
Please hang back from the knee-jerk response that this is an attempt to cancel you.
It's the opposite, really.
There wouldn't be any point in challenging your statements on trans politics if I didn't think you had a legacy to protect.
