Gender as a Body-Modification Youth Sub(cult)ure

Eliza Mondegreen's talk at the Bigger Picture Conference in Lisbon.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time buried in the literature on cults and coercive persuasion. So today I wanted to reflect on how many of these dynamics show up in online trans subcultures. In particular, I want to focus on three key concepts from the literature on cults and coercive persuasion: don’t-know seekership, radical departures, and bounded choice. 

Young people who fall into destructive movements and cults are often seekers, and—as Eileen Barker points out—seekership comes in many different guises. Some people are looking for self-enlightenment, revolutionary political change, or spiritual consummation. But there are also people who know something is missing, but they’re not sure what. Barker wanted to find out what distinguished people who joined the Moonies from those who kept their distance or merely drifted in and out of the cult. She surveyed young people about their values and goals and how they went about pursuing those values. She wanted to find out what they were looking for. On a hunch, she added an option that said: Something, but I didn’t know what. “To my amazement, I found that this was the ‘ideal’ which, more than any other, discriminated between the Moonies, the non-joiners and the control…” She lost count of the number of Moonies who “added enthusiastic comments such as “Yes!!” or the number of confused members of the control group who wrote “What?”, “don’t understand,’ or “bloody silly question” in the margin.” 

The kids who ultimately find gender initially set out looking for all kinds of things, mixing healthy and adaptive needs with unhealthy and maladaptive ones. They’re looking for meaning, explanation for why they feel the way they do, a sense of belonging, a purpose, a cause, direction, distinction, a way to individuate, recognition for the changes we all undergo as we grow and change, a way forward when healthier pathways are blocked, the authorization to speak and seek care from others. They’re also looking for permission, an excuse or a scapegoat for why things aren’t working, a way to act out, and—saddest of all—a way to reject themselves and their bodies, a way out of the self. Many trans-identified individuals seem afraid to grow up, as though they worry about their ability to enter the world of adult responsibility. For these people, ‘trans’ is a cul-de-sac or a cocoon, a substitute for meaningful growth and change. Taken together, this mix of motivations puts many of these kids firmly in the category of  “I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what.” 

These young people are ripe for what Saul Levine called a ‘radical departure’ — a sharp, sudden break with the life they once lived. When it comes to radical departures, gender is a particularly attractive offering: a supportive community, a chance to rebel, an opportunity to be on the right side of history, to join a vanguard. Or, as Bret Alderman put it: “Current gender ideology is such a disastrous vehicle for adolescent angst. It allows for the ultimate reproach: I have been given the wrong body! It allows for the ultimate rebellion: I will exchange this body and get a new one!” 

As young people explore gender they are indoctrinated into a new way of ‘seeing’ gender that radically alters their beliefs about themselves, their attitudes toward their bodies (and toward extreme body modifications), and their relationships with family and the offline world.  

Recruitment takes many forms. Some young people are groomed into a trans identity by predatory adults. Some learn about trans identities in schools that upend their basic, commonsensical understanding of sex in the name of inclusivity. Others respond to peer influence. Many self-indoctrinate online, where they’re told that if you question your gender, you’re questioning for a reason: you’re trans. 

A trans epiphany is most accurately described as an existential crisis, a revelation that cuts one’s life in half. Transition is thus conceptualized as a process of unlearning and relearning everything: everything you ever thought you knew about who you are, everything you thought you knew about humanity, everything you thought you knew about your family (caring and concerned or repressive and transphobic?)—not to mention learning how to stand and walk in a convincingly masculine or feminine way, figuring out which gestures will give you away and which will uphold the illusion you’re attempting to create. 

There is a sense in which you are ‘born again’ when you come out as trans. Not coincidentally, infantilization is rampant in these communities. Men in their forties revel in their “girlhood.” Plush toys, anime, and cartoons abound. Every kind of misbehavior can be blamed on going through “second puberty,” which is, of course, not a thing. This infantilization facilitates the process of resocialization into radical new beliefs and ways of relating to the world.

We often talk about children as sponges, soaking up the world for the first time. Anyone who has spent any time hanging out with a small child knows how children can suffuse ordinary events with wonder, and how open they are to the world around them. There’s nothing quite like it.

But to be so open and unformed is also to be profoundly vulnerable to manipulation and distortion. Cults and high-control movements often try to induce this childlike malleability in new members. Initiates—by definition—know nothing. Cults often pair newcomers up with seasoned members (often referred to as older siblings), who provide a mix of instruction and surveillance. Cult recruitment activities can facilitate this kind of regression, too, like the Moonies did during recruitment weekends packed with juvenile skits and sing-alongs.

Transition is packaged as a symbolic form of death and rebirth, complete with deadnames and rebirthdays. But it’s better understood as a comprehensive program of self-rejection that proceeds from one 'disowning' to the next. Your name, your past, your self-understandings, parts of your body, any loved ones who resist, any inner voice that questions. Embracing a new identity and a new set of beliefs about gender provides opportunities for learning, growth, belonging, and mastery of new concepts—all of which can be exciting for young people. But tearing down your old identity and beliefs and attachments is painful and profoundly destabilizing. Young people going through this process describe coming to identify as trans and deciding to transition in those terms. They describe themselves as having been “more functional, productive, and ‘happy’” before they realized they were trans. They describe racing hearts and obsessive thoughts. The trans community reassures them that it’s normal to fall apart. 

Upon realizing that you’re trans, many young people find themselves paralyzed by obsessive doubts and fears. This is where the famously—or infamously—supportive trans community steps in, ready to celebrate every step, no matter how insignificant; to validate every feeling, no matter how out of touch with reality—and, honestly, the more out of touch with reality the better. 

One effect of this love-bombing is that real-world interactions start to chafe. Maybe nobody notices the changes you’ve made. Maybe nobody cares. Maybe they think it’s a phase, or a manifestation of mental illness. Their reactions—or non-reactions—make your internal transformation feel unreal. It’s tempting to retreat further into online spaces. There are no hard questions there. 

This actually has a funny way of popping up in the research literature on trans-identified kids and their use of online spaces. Look around and you’ll find lots of researchers saying, wow, it’s weird but somehow problematic Internet use is bad for every other kid but it’s protective—even life-saving—for ‘trans’ kids. I think these researchers are missing an obvious explanation: maybe it’s soothing to inhabit a fantasy world online and distressing to exit one. Online, young people can live inside immersive fictions like the ones Kathleen Stock writes about in Material Girls. Offline, life is messier. 

At the same time, trans communities set impossible expectations for how your real-world friends, family, and peers—even perfect strangers—ought to react to your gender revelations. The expectation is that everyone should be able to make the adjustment seamlessly, if they really care about you. No expressions of concern are acceptable. 

Meanwhile, recruits are sensitized to new sources of distress and threat. I think this is why so many young people pop up asking if it’s normal that they feel so much worse after coming out as trans. They’re constantly exposed to new ways to feel bad about the bodies they have. More sinisterly, they’re encouraged to believe that they are under serious threat. Steve Hassan referred to this as phobia indoctrination, the process of instilling members of high-control groups with irrational fears that limit their engagement with the outside world and make it hard to question or leave the group. In online trans communities, phobia indoctrination takes many forms. These include: 

• Telling community members that anyone who questions their identity or the advisability of transition (even if they’re coming from a place of genuine care and concern) doesn’t accept them for ‘who they really are’ or 'denies their existence.’ This pushes community members—especially naïve young people—to cut themselves off from friends and loved ones who may question or contradict the trans community, or may simply fail to follow the elaborate and often bizarre protocols that trans communities lead members to expect.

• Creating the false impression of a trans murder epidemic—even a trans genocide—and telling young people that the implementation of the Cass Report is “social murder,” which binds members to the community and instills an irrational fear of the outside world—and of mild-mannered British pediatricians.

• These communities also inflate suicide risk and present transition as the only alternative to suicide when it comes to dealing with gender dysphoria. This increases desperation that young people feel to transition, suppresses questions or doubts a young person may have, and pushes patients to conceal comorbidities and other complicating factors from the therapists and medical providers.

• Telling young people that if they don’t come out as trans and transition, they’re in denial and they will be living a lie—that they will inevitably realize their mistake and regret putting off transition. 

• Vilifying and attacking detransitioners as traitors and existential threats to the trans community, thus demonstrating to current members of the trans community exactly what will happen to them if they step out of line or—god forbid—leave. 

• Teaching community members to bury their own questions and doubts by labeling uncertainty about gender identity and transition, or discomfort with community dynamics as manifestations of "internalized transphobia" that cause harm not just to you but to all trans people. That’s right: your private thoughts about whether you’re really trans or whether transition is right for you hurt other trans people. We’ll come back to this one in a few minutes. 

The result is that community members are gripped by irrational fears (including the fear of freely following their own thoughts). They’re alienated from the outside world by bizarre protocols and unreasonable expectations. And they’re constantly self-policing to avoid running afoul of doctrine. The experience (or perception) of persecution and rejection solidifies attachment to the cult and members’ sense of the outside world as hostile. 

This may sound perverse but there’s a flip side to phobia indoctrination that comes with substantial consolations. One detransitioned woman observed that she “miss[es] the constant affirmations, the validation. The sense of community, the feeling that you have to stick together because the ‘other side’ wants you ‘dead.’ I feel like part of me getting so deep into those communities as a teenager was a need for rebellion and purpose. As a trans person, you are told that your entire existence is a fight against oppressive systems, and that feels insanely alluring for a teen girl without a place in the world.” 

All along the way, trans activism sets young people up to be rejected by equipping them with impossible demands and unreasonable expectations. 

Some young people end up distancing or estranging themselves from their families. Online trans communities are incredibly casual about estrangement. Often, young people will disclose that a loved one is hesitant about their decision to transition but that this family member is loving, just ill-informed, or that they just need more time to come to terms with this new information. In almost every case, community members will urge the young person to cut off anyone who is not in lockstep support of their transition. 

I want to be really clear about this: No healthy, open, supportive community seeks to terrify and control and isolate its members like this. These are the marks of a manipulative group exercising destructive influence over its most vulnerable members. And it doesn’t stop there. 

A common piece of advice offered to newcomers of wavering faith is to “imagine there are no obstacles to doing what you want.” This can take the form of bizarre thought experiments: if you could push a button and turn into a woman overnight and nobody would notice the change, would you do it? Of course, nothing remotely like this is on offer. No matter how you answer this question, it tells you nothing about whether you’re “really trans” or whether transition—with its limited offerings, medical complications, and social frictions—makes sense. 

These spaces also promote extremely casual and dismissive attitudes toward extreme body modifications. Members talk about wanting their bodies to run on “E,” not “T.” They urge each other on: “You can just go on hormones! It’s OK to do what you want with your body. Change happens no matter what.” Since your body will naturally change as you age anyway, why not initiate unnatural changes yourself by taking steroids or undergoing a double mastectomy? As one user put it: “I don’t really think there is anything wrong with being a ‘lifelong medical patient’ at all (besides bs stigma based on nothing). Nature fucks up.” 

When in doubt, just take the next step. Trust the process. Surrender to the process. To avoid regret, follow your ‘embodiment goals’: if you don’t want breasts and you get them removed, how could you ever regret that, even if you decide down the road that you’re not really transmasculine after all? 

Doubts are met with a mixture of pity, reeducation, silence, and hostility. Fellow members will confide that they have shared the same doubts and overcome them—or that they share the same doubts and battle them everyday. These reassurances reinforce membership in the group and make it awkward to persist in expressing unacceptable attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about trans identity and transition. Transition is presented as the only way out. When young people bring their doubts to online trans communities, their interlocutors often have a way of exacerbating their distress, sealing young people in a chamber with only one exit. If a young person rejects his “true self” by rejecting his trans identity, he is told that the torment he’s currently experiencing will never abate. 

At every stage, you will find your doubts turned against you, mobilized as evidence that you’re self-hating or inadequately enlightened, that you have a long way to go to overcome your internalized and deeply problematic biases, which harm you and other trans people, even if these are just thoughts you entertain in the privacy of your own mind without ever expressing them out loud. 

Over time, the surveillance and censorship moves from the outside to the inside. If it's threatening to think about something—if thinking something through will cause dissonant thoughts to clash—you won't. You learn to shut down challenging thoughts with ritualized responses like “That’s my internalized transphobia talking” or “That’s my imposter syndrome flaring up again.” Internalized transphobia in particular is regarded as a form of self harm, even as an illness of sorts. Sufferers are encouraged to police their thoughts for symptoms of a resurgence of illness. 

Trans communities actively discourage the consumption of outside information, particularly when it comes to the touchy subject of detransition. “A lot of [detransition content] is fake propaganda put there to specifically gaslight real trans people into detransitioning. They’re saying things specifically formulated to make you doubt yourself.” If in doubt, consume more trans content. Spend more time with trans people. 

I think much of what it is referred to as gender dysphoria is just cognitive dissonance: the painful gap between fantasy and reality. That’s why it gets worse with every step a young person takes toward transition. 

Along the way, the broken promises of transition become opportunities to reassert and strengthen your faith even as it is being tested. Each step of transition that fails to deliver the longed-for result provides a dose of disconfirmation, which the community encourages you to overcome by taking the next step. It’s a leap of faith. Recruitment matters because if you can convince newcomers to take up the same belief system, you can tell yourself there must be something there to believe in. 

The contradictory nonsense of the ideology is simultaneously a problem and a trap. What you don’t understand, you can’t question. 

Trying to make the nonsensical make sense traps people in ideology. I see so many young people keep trying to “‘solve’ the ideology.” Because they can’t make it add up, because they couldn’t disprove the possibility that had been planted in their minds, they can’t move on. I suspect this is one of the reasons ‘trans’ ensnares so many book-smart kids, who set out to master a new set of ideas and find themselves up to their necks in quicksand. 

Young people at this stage often feel disillusioned—but trapped. They often recognize the way the idea of being trans has poisoned their lives, like the young man who wrote that “all it has done is make me hate myself more than I already did.” But they feel like they’ve gone too far to turn back. 

Young people at every stage of recruitment, investment, and disillusionment are stuck in a situation that Janja Lalich refers to as bounded choice. Eileen Barker described more or less the same process as being “coerced at the level of meaning.” Trans communities remove the capacity to choose by removing options and information. For instance, by telling members there’s never a legitimate reason to detransition: either you were never trans or you chickened out. Either you were unsupported or you’re just in denial. Not: you changed your mind or you decided you didn’t want to live that way. These thoughts are incredibly hard to break up with. As one young person questioning the decision to transition reflected, when you’re told that “‘avoiding trans people and communities is just denying yourself from finding out your real self,’ … when I think about stopping, I feel like it’s denial.” 

But many young people do get unstuck and find their way out. They realize what they hoped for can never be achieved. They decide to make peace with their bodies, rather than continue to wage a war that can never be won. 

As one detransitioner put it, he came to realize that “deep introspection tells you nothing. You can spend weeks diving into your subconscious, turning things over and over in your head trying to figure out 'what did that mean?', 'what did I really feel?' but you're chasing a shadow. There's nothing there! It's like staring into the darkness so long that you start to hallucinate, it's scary but that doesn't mean it's real.”

I can’t think of a better analogy for what people in thrall to gender are experiencing: “staring into the darkness so long that you start to hallucinate.” This set of beliefs about the self is inherently distressing. Take this belief system on board and you can never disprove it. You can’t wrack your brains and find a definitive answer: yes or no. You can’t come to a clean resolution. Because it’s nonsense. Because there is no there-there, only hallucinations in the dark. The only thing you can do with nonsense is reject it and—if you cannot reject it—you will run into all kinds of trouble. 

I’ve often been asked if I think the trans community is a cult. I’ve spent years tinkering with theories about how cult-like dynamics may be emergent properties of online spaces, how—on the Internet—ideology can take the place of a leader, replicating a leader’s arbitrary twists and turns that keep followers in line. But you don’t have to agree with me to recognize that a healthy, open, supportive trans community would not look or sound like the trans community we’ve got. 

It would be honest about the risks trans people face, rather than wildly inflating those risks to instill fear. It would foster resilience and self-sufficiency in gender-questioning youth, rather than telling kids that anyone who disagrees with their worldview hates them or that exposure to ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ can lead to suicide. A healthy, open trans community would accept that transition doesn't work for everybody and that there are legitimate reasons to detransition and exit the community. A healthy, open, supportive trans community wouldn't seek to drive a wedge between gender-questioning youth and their family members or friends who sincerely want the best for them but question whether transition is the right answer. A healthy, open, supportive trans community would invite ethical research into transition outcomes and alternatives—rather than trying to shut down inquiry—because trans-identifying people deserve high-quality care, not just ideologically-compliant ‘care.’ And a healthy, open, supportive trans community would encourage young people to explore their questions and doubts openly—recognizing transition as a serious undertaking—without fear of censure or expulsion from the group.

So maybe it doesn’t matter what we call it, as long as we can see this movement for what it is. 

That said, I want to end on a positive note. In the 1960s and ‘70s, droves of young people disappeared into cults—ranging from destructive to merely bizarre. Many took on new identities, embraced rigid beliefs, and cut contact with loved ones. But—for most—these new beliefs and practices didn’t stick. As he followed these young people over time, Levine saw that they found ways to reconnect with the questions and doubts that they had previously “cast out and disavowed. That members can now allow the battle to move indoors, so to speak, indicates that the structure to contain conflict has been fortified.”

Ultimately, Levine concluded, most young people are “able to use their radical departures in the service of growing up.” While we wish that young people wrapped up in gender had found a safer, saner way to get unstuck in life—and while we have a responsibility to push back against a medical system that colludes with a destructive movement, rather than challenging it—let us hope that these young people too will be able to leave these rigid beliefs behind, think freely, reconnect with their bodies and their families, and move forward.

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