It's a cult

Butterflies. mermaids, and wrong bodies

Kathleen Stock, in her book Material Girls (2021), argues that many who repeat the slogan ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’ don’t necessarily believe this to be literally true. Instead, she suggests, they are immersing themselves in a fiction, just as we all do when we watch a film and immerse ourselves in its fictional world while we are in the cinema. Immersion in a fiction, she writes, “allows mental alleviation from whatever current mundane or stressful reality faces you.” Yet, she later explains, “immersion in a fiction about sex change is being coercively required of people.” Which sounds more like a cult, a world from which it is hard to escape -  a far cry from the cinema experience, where no-one stops us from returning to the real world after the film has ended, or compels us to keep repeating slogans to signal our support for it.

The cult-like aspect of the ‘trans’ phenomenon is illustrated by two very different films - Butterfly, a 3-part drama that was shown on ITV in 2018,  and Wrong Bodies,  a feature length documentary that was released this month on X (twitter).

Butterfly

We are, nowadays,  bombarded by films that portray ‘trans lives’ in a way that encourages us to accept a fiction that ‘being born in the wrong body’ is real.  Butterfly is one such film. It persuades us, the viewers, to immerse ourselves in the world of a boy who thinks he’s a girl. But the boy in the drama does seem to really believe he is a girl, and his parents are told, fairly forcefully, that they should believe it too, and buy into a suicide narrative that his life depends on it. We, the viewers, are left in no doubt as to how we should react when faced with someone who claims they have changed sex.

Butterfly (summarised by Transgender Trend here), unwittingly presents the ‘trans journey’ as an exercise in denying reality. 5 minutes into the first episode, Max, a manipulative and mentally disturbed 11-year-old boy, is on an outing to an aquarium, where he hallucinates that a mermaid is swimming toward him. Max is persuaded on social media that he’s really a girl, and every few minutes he vehemently denies that he may be gay (a presumably unintended reference to the internalised homophobia that is often at the root of the ‘trans’ phenomenon).

At the start of the second episode, Max’s parents seek help from Mermaids (the real life charity that is under investigation for disregarding basic safeguarding standards in its treatment of vulnerable children). They are greeted by James (played by actor Jake Graf, a Mermaids patron who is famous for having her eggs frozen before taking cross-sex hormones and later using a surrogate mother to provide her with children). James  takes them to meet Alice (based on Susie Green, then the real life CEO of Mermaids, who took her own son to Thailand to be castrated as a 16th birthday present, and is credited as the series consultant). Alice uses a classic mind control phrase to tell the parents, before they have had a chance to speak, “I know exactly how you’re feeling”. 

Following advice from Alice, Maxine (as Max, now 12, insists on being called) is taken out of the country by Vicky, his mother, to be assessed for puberty blockers. At a Boston hospital, creepy Doctor Farrow asks Maxine if he is “a caterpillar who wants to turn into a butterfly.” He’s delighted by Maxine’s response - “I’ve always been a butterfly’”, and explains that he’s “someone who helps children give birth to themselves. It’s so rewarding.” By the end, an NHS gender clinic has agreed to give Maxine the medical intervention he is convinced will make him happy. A conversation between Maxine and his mother reveals that Vicky is now even more in denial of reality than he is:

Maxine: “What sort of girl will I be? How real will I be? Will I be as real as you and Lily (his sister)?’

Vicky: “I think you already are.”

Maxine: “Not undressed, I’m not.”

Vicky: “That will come. We’ve got a long way to go. It’ll come, It’ll come. You’re beautiful.”

The final scene shows Maxine being injected with puberty blockers, surrounded by his smiling family. The whole family has become part of a body mutilating cult, and we are encouraged to join in with it, too. 

Mainstream media and cult normalisation

“The explosion of all things ‘trans’ has certainly not happened organically, as the radical activists would have you believe. Instead, it has been fed into the consciousness of the people, using the usual methods of propaganda, not least of which has been television.”

(ITV’s Butterfly - a masterclass in Trans propaganda, Critically Thinking, 2024)

Butterfly is far from unique. There have been numerous programmes on mainstream TV intended to normalise a belief that one can be ‘born in the wrong body’  and that children who believe this must be indulged, rather than helped to accept their healthy bodies. A children’s programme on BBC in 2014, and repeated in 2015 and 2016 (summarised on Transgender Trend  here), was aimed at 6-12 year olds. Called I am Leo, It was about a girl, Lily, who decided at age 6 that she was a boy. In 2017 BBC3  updated Leo’s story, in Becoming a Trans man : Leo. This was followed in 2021, again on BBC3, by Transitioning Teens (summarised by StillTish here).  

A more subtle normalisation comes from inserting ‘trans’ characters into soap operas such as Coronation Street (as far back as 1998), EastEnders (2017), Emmerdale (2018), and Hollyoaks (2024). And into sci fi popular with children - Doctor Who now has a ‘trans’ character who questions The Doctor about pronouns (2023).

The predominant narrative in these programmes normalises the violation of sex boundaries and the mutilation of children’s bodies. Critical perspectives are hardly ever shown. Indeed, we know that the BBC has explicit editorial policies, dictated by a ‘trans’ lobby group, to ensure that they don’t appear. Similar policies are in place elsewhere in the British media. These policies ensure that viewers are drip fed  a consistent story that appears to show us that some people are born in the wrong body or that they can change sex, and that we will harm them if we don’t collude. Constant repetition ensures that immersion in this distorted perception of reality is almost total.

Wrong Bodies

If anyone is in any doubt that ‘trans’ is a cult, watching Wrong Bodies should dispel it. It’s a feature length film made by Skirt Go Spinny, and is a worthy successor to What is a Woman: Wrong Answers Only, her horrifying but brilliant exposé of autogynephilia, men’s eroticised colonisation and hatred of women. Unlike  the director of Butterfly, who wanted to immerse us into the ‘trans’ cult (without acknowledging it is a cult), Skirt Go Spinny invites us to look into the cult from outside, and observe the full, shocking enormity of it.

The opening sequence of Wrong Bodies, showing footage of the 1970s Peoples Temple (Jonestown) mass murder suicide cult, might seem over the top. But an hour and a half later we have seen how the ‘trans’ cult operates, and when we return to Jonestown at the end of the film we can be in no doubt that transgender is also a cult, and that the parallels between it and the Jonestown cult are striking.

Wrong Bodies samples the sort of online material that glamourises the ‘trans’ cult, which is used to recruit new members into it and ensure that they don’t leave it. TikTok videoclips created by predatory influencers play on children’s insecurities, and employ typical cult tactics to suggest that only adopting a ‘trans identity’ and joining ‘the trans community’ will resolve them. Troubled children are manipulated into cutting off from their families. They become dependent on new ‘families’ who initially tell them what they want to hear, but soon enforce strict conformity to cult-determined ‘gender identities’. Parents are emotionally blackmailed by an insidious suicide narrative into allowing, and often encouraging, their children to undergo unnecessary and harmful medical procedures.

These videoclips are interspersed with commentary that provides helpful context, by experts who have researched the cult. Tech billionaire Martine Rothblatt comes closest to being the cult leader. But, as journalist Jennifer Bilek explains, the difference is that he leads via a religion that is based on technology - “he believes that technology will become God.”  Rothblatt  already thinks that he, a man, has become a woman, and he is motivated by a belief that before long technology, which “really has the spirit of God”, will enable humans to live for ever.

Bilek shows Rothblatt’s key role in the transition from transsexualism to transgenderism, and then on to transhumanism. Rothblatt was instrumental in creating a legal framework which enabled a male sexual fetish to be rebranded as transgenderism, and which allows the body mutilations that ‘affirm’ it. He made sure that his underlying belief, that the human limits of sex can be transcended, was incorporated into an industry that is developing means of achieving it. It’s an industry with which he intends to create a transhumanist future, where reproductive sex is replaced by artificial reproduction, and the human condition is transcended completely.

Wrong Bodies shows us how ‘trans’ influencers’ like Dylan Mulvaney use social media to recruit young people into the cult. Jeffrey Marsh is particularly influential, and particularly sinister. K Yang, a former ‘trans educator’ who now helps parents and children to escape from cult indoctrination, exposes the manipulation in the techniques he employs. She points out that influencers like Marsh deliberately target children at an age when their brains are beginning to develop critical thinking skills, via social media access that is largely unsupervised by parents. “New vocabulary is introduced, new language is adopted, which is internalised by the recruit and assists in reconstructing their entire understanding of themselves and who they are in relation to others … Once the biological family is out of the way, dependency on the group can be established.”

One of the strengths of the film is that it illuminates the links between the ‘trans’ cult and similar cults that have appeared throughout history. Filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar shows how the Hijra, an Indian castration cult that dates back 900 years, are believed to have divine powers, but have been abducted as young boys and forced into prostitution. Journalist Genevieve Gluck describes how the more recent Russian Skoptsy cult also depended on taking children away from their families. The cult was  based on a conviction that undergoing bodily mutilation brought you closer to heaven, and promised you everlasting life. Heaven’s Gate is a more recent cult which promised transition to a higher state of evolution via body mutilation and mass suicide. Gluck is convinced that, with its glorification of body mutilation and its suicide and genocide narratives, contemporary transgenderism “is like history repeating itself again.”

These quasi-religious undertones were disguised in Butterfly, where it was a doctor who asked if Maxine is a caterpillar who wants to be a butterfly, and who claimed that he helps children give birth to themselves.  Wrong Bodies reveals the underlying belief that ‘transition is sacred’. Cult members are indoctrinated into a novel reinterpretation of transubstantiation - that God makes wheat but not bread and grapes but not wine, so that ‘trans people’ can experience their ‘own divine act of creation’. Belief that extreme dissociation from the human body is the path to salvation is one of the key elements linking the ‘trans’ cult with the Hijra, the Skoptsy, Heaven’s Gate, and Jonestown.

Media reach

Mainstream TV still has the capacity to influence politics, as ITV’s recent drama Mr Bates vs. the Post Office demonstrated. There’s no way, though, that a mainstream TV channel would show a programme like Wrong Bodies - they’re too invested in the promotion of gender ideology for this to be a realistic possibility. Maybe that’s not as important as it used to be, as in our fragmenting media landscape more and more people read news articles curated by Big Tech rather than newspapers, and watch online videos rather than TV. Yet these platforms are also captured by gender ideology. Wrong Bodies was premiered on X, a platform that, like YouTube, has censored Skirt Go Spinny’s material in the past, for being deemed to be in breach of community guidelines.

For anyone seeking to use social media to resist the attack on sexed reality, there is a huge mountain to climb, not least because of platform guidelines and algorithms that censor content that is critical of the cult. Jeffrey Marsh has more than 680,000 followers on TikTok, Dylan Mulvaney 9.7 million. In contrast, Skirt Goes Spinny has 11,000 followers on X, and 4,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Confronting the corporate agenda 

Corporations have discovered that there are huge profit opportunities from the splitting of our sexed bodies into separate body parts, and melding them with tech. Having seen this future, the medical industrial complex is not going to let go of it, and when it loses a battle it will change tack and focus on winning the war. So, in the UK, if NHS policy changes to permanently restrict the supply of puberty blockers in its clinics (as today’s news suggests), it will work through private sector clinics instead, if necessary in other countries. And if it is unable to allay concerns about the effect of cross sex hormones on fertility,  it will use this as an opportunity to promote gamete freezing, surrogacy, and artificial reproduction. 

Medicine, even in the UK, is a capitalist enterprise, motivated more by profits than by wellbeing. The medical industrial complex has identified a market opportunity in promising human improvement through body modification, and it is ultimately seeking to create bodies that transcend our biology. It is supported by media and ads that groom us with  what Bilek describes as “a constant drumbeat selling us dissociation from our sexed humanity as something that’s real.” The consumer need that this meets is one that is artificially constructed by corporate marketing, and is continually reinforced by cult mind control.

Wrong Bodies will help anyone affected by the erosion of sex boundaries to understand what is going on. It will also help those of us who already say no, but don’t have much access to material put out by ‘trans’ activists on social media. A lot of what we are up against is unhinged, and we need to be reminded of this from time to time. Most of all, though, Wrong Bodies emphasises the big picture,  exposing the corporate interests and political goals behind ‘gender identity’ and the ‘born in the wrong body’ delusion. 

Wrong Bodies deserves to be widely viewed, shared, and acted on. At present it is only available, for free, on X, by following the link here.