Christ and His Culture Is the Only Cure for Cults
A Review of DeTrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult by Mary Margaret Olohan
Detrans by Mary Margaret Olohan is not a pleasant reading experience. It is bracing, horrifying, gripping, and most importantly true and necessary. It is particularly necessary for Christians who care about the truth and care about the welfare of children, but who may have their head in the sand on this important issue. The gift Olohan gives us is the gift of faithful reporting. She says little by way of personal opinion, meticulously documenting the lives of several young people, and in doing so she makes a powerful case that gender ideology is indeed a cult that holds many youth captive during a vulnerable period of their life.
As Do No Harm, an organization of medical professionals whose mission is to “highlight and counteract divisive trends in medicine, such as ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ and youth-focused gender ideology,” has recently launched its Stop the Harm database, Detrans puts flesh on the numbers, helping us understand what the harm looks like from an insider perspective. Stop the Harm reports that “Between 2019 and 2023, hospitals submitted more than $100 million in claims for these experimental treatments on children. During this time, 13,994 children were given irreversible and damaging gender treatments at U.S. based medical facilities, including children’s hospitals, non-children’s hospitals, and affiliated institutions. By all accounts, this is a conservative estimate.” Of the top offending hospitals, Children’s Minnesota was 3rd on the list—this is the same hospital where my son has received life-saving treatment in their state of the art PICU. It’s disconcerting to realize that in one room a child is being saved, while in another, a child is being irrevocably harmed. But this is the stark reality we must grapple with—the medical industry, full of brilliant kind doctors, is also full of darkness and complicity.
Olohan opens her book with the stories of four young women: Prisha, Luka, Chloe, and Helena. The first seven chapters follow these four women from their early childhood to their first encounters with gender ideology to their transition and subsequent detransition. Each story is unique, but with common themes emerging: varying degrees of familial problems or neglect, social media or online forums filling the family gap and pushing so-called trans identity, self-reported mental health struggles, early exposure to online pornography, and access to adults ready to affirm and facilitate transition.
The first seven chapter titles represent the story arc each girl underwent:
Chapter 1, The Slippery Slope, describes early childhood experiences, mental health problems, and particularly shows how social media and online forums planted the quickly sprouting seeds of the gender ideology cult.
Chapter 2, Encouragement, outlines how the girls decide that they are, in fact, trans, and the subsequent encouragement they get from the online community, public school counselors, and doctors.
Chapter 3, Getting the Hormones, shows just how easy it was for the girls to be prescribed chemical hormones, such as testosterone, and just how lucrative it is for the clinics, pharmacies, and insurance companies.
Chapter 4, The Hormones Set In, is a nightmarish and graphic telling of the changes that testosterone caused in these young women, both internally and externally. One girl, Chloe, began testosterone at age 13, another, Luka, was put on birth control at 13 to prevent her period, then later right onto testosterone. Nevertheless, most of the girls describe a period of euphoria after beginning testosterone.
Chapter 5, Surgery, depicts three young women’s double mastectomies. Of the four women represented, only one avoided this permanent damage.
Chapter 6, Realization, is about gut-wrenching moments when each young woman comes to grasp the magnitude of what their transition had cost them and the horrible choice they’d made.
Chapter 7, Detransition, while a relief of sanity, still plays at the edges of despair, describing the difficulty of detransition, (for some, with drug use), and the roadblocks these women faced to get help. Helena tells how she let her pro-LGBTQ therapist know that she thought transition was a mistake. She describes her therapist’s response as something akin to, “you’re trying to talk yourself out of being trans because transphobia is making you hate yourself.”
As Olohan moves from one story to another, it can be difficult to keep track of who is who, primarily because of the amount of overlap in the girls’ experiences. The reader begins to see that the pathway to each girls’ transition is eerily similar—neatly orchestrated, scripted, and rushed along by the vulture like trans activists whose manipulative mantra is “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
The stories of the four young women pause at chapter 8, He. Ritchie Herron’s “living nightmare” is told in his own words. He goes into vivid detail about the dysfunction, pain, and ongoing wounds from having his male anatomy removed, and a fake vagina made, plus the damage from years on hormones. Ritchie’s story is followed by Walt, then Abel. It’s notable that the men’s stories do not follow the same script and arc as the young women’s. What is similar is the preying trans activists, who cajole toward particular outcomes and refuse to help when the patient no longer wants to transition. Abel, who transitioned hormonally and had surgical breast implants, describes his detransition moment like this:
“If you want to take a religious point of view, God speaking to me, or my own conscience or my own voice…it had all built up from right before I went to therapy, and it just came crashing in all at once. I woke up, went to the bathroom and looked at myself, realizing I was just destroying my body. No matter what I would have done, if I would have continued getting my face done, my genitals removed, even if the world recognized me as a woman, and I was able to present well enough that I was able to lie to the world, that deep down inside of me, I was always going to be a man. At best, I would have been a caricature of what I believed a woman was, because no matter what, in the end, I would never know what it is to be a woman. I would only have an idea what it is just from my own stereotypical idea of a woman, my own caricatures, the idea of a woman. Even if I was to replicate a decent amount of it in the end, being a woman is more than what the caricature of my mind had.”
When Abel shared his doubts about transition with his therapist, “his therapist suggested he was not having doubts about being transgender but was just experiencing childhood traumas coming back up.”
The final chapter sounds a dire note. It is the story of Yaeli Mozzelle Galdamez, a young woman from California who was removed from her mother’s custody because her mother wouldn’t allow her to transition, then transitioned with the help of the state, and later took her life by stepping in front of a train.
How Should Christians Respond to These Stories?
Olohan reports, “Pretty much every detransitioner I spoke with was exposed to pornography at a very early age. It wasn’t information they volunteered––in fact, they were surprised when I asked about it.” One young woman describes being exposed to porn around age 4 or 5 years old. She says, “It f—– me up.” But it didn’t end there. “As she continued to watch pornography throughout her formative years, Prisha saw women repeatedly, horribly mistreated.” Olohan reports, “A 2020 study found that 45 percent of Pornhub scenes included at least one act of physical aggression, that women were the target of that aggression in almost every single case…” Olohan then forces us to put that harrowing fact in the dark light of these stats: “93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls are exposed to pornography during their youth,” almost half of college age men first encounter porn before they are teenagers, and viewing porn at a young age leads to an increased likelihood of seeking out hardcore porn such as animal and child porn.
Helena, another detransitioner, says “As a young woman who both identified as transgender as a teen and grew up in a very online, pornography-influenced environment, I believe there is a profound connection between this new way of exploring sexuality and the identity confusion that we are seeing in so many young people today.”
If you’re looking for an illuminating experience, read Detrans alongside these three other books: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy, and the ever relevant and supremely true B-I-B-L-E. Haidt claims that the smartphone has rewired the brains of a generation and stolen their childhoods. Shrier asserts that an insidious therapeutic culture is making kids miserable. I think they’re both right and both absolutely worth reading, but neither of them is right enough.
There is no doubt a link between early smartphone/social media use, early porn exposure, and the ubiquitous culture of therapeutic gobbledygook to the transing of the kids. But does it follow that merely delaying smartphone/social media use, delaying porn exposure, and limiting the amount of bad therapy we ingest in favor of an anti-fragile approach to child-rearing is the best we can do for a solution? Haidt and Shrier focus on these practical means, but I can’t help but notice the glaring deficit: forgiveness.
As a mother of two college students, two high school students, and one preteen, I read the detransitioner’s stories with a tender heart. I wanted to have them over for one of our college student dinners, have them sing a hymn with us, participate in our lively conversations and debates, and get a taste of what the air is like when people are forgiven and free in Christ. I desperately want them to know there is a path forward for them—one paved by Christ.
But my concern is that, even as Christians, we will not afford them this needed grace—not because we are transphobic, but because we will see no need for a victim to receive forgiveness. This is a truth that our society cannot stomach—for all its hatred of the binary, it loves this one: you can be only victim or only villain. But the Scripture tells us a more complicated story about mankind. We can be both. There are gradations of culpability—a doctor who pushes a harmful surgery that will irreversibly damage a young person and does so for profit is culpable to the highest degree, a parent who is threatened and manipulated to acquiesce to someone harming their child is a lower degree of culpable, a teenager who insists on getting the harmful surgery is still a lesser degree. But to deny any culpability for the victims is also to deny the possibility of much-needed forgiveness.
In full disclosure, my childhood and teenage years seem miles apart from the stories told in Detrans, but upon further inspection, the childhoods of Gen Xers and Millennials (I border the two generations) were just precursors to the difficult ones described in this book. I may not have known girls who transitioned to be boys with hormones and surgery, but I did know a girl in Spanish class who got an abortion, and I certainly knew girls whose parents or school counselor got them on chemical hormones for any number of reasons. I may not relate to the way modern parents give their kids over to their smartphones and the degeneracy there, but I did know plenty of latchkey kids whose unsupervised teenage years morphed into alcoholism and addiction. Broken and lost young people are not a new phenomenon, nor are neglectful and unhappy parents—and the sins of past generations are not small potatoes compared to the new forms of dreadfulness.
But my parents did something a little radical for 1996—they took me out of the public high school to homeschool me with Christian curriculum. I was the only homeschool student in my church and my whole town (until the next year when another joined the ranks)! My parents could see how bad things were even then, and they did something about it. My life was profoundly shaped by taking away the bad influences from public school at a critical point of life and supplying life-giving influences in my education.
One of the strengths of Olohan’s Detrans is that she lets the stories speak for themselves. She refrains from solving the problems with her opinions and only comments with relevant information to better fill in the broader story of the growth and consequences of gender ideology. So, in the absence of her providing us a society-wide solution, I venture this for Christians: it is well past time to make radical counter-cultural decisions for ourselves and our children. We will have no healthy homes and life-giving tables to welcome the detransitioners to if we don’t start building every aspect of our lives—education, work, home, recreation, church, community––on the rock of Christ and his radical forgiveness of sinners by his shed blood.
It’s on this foundation of forgiveness that we can build growing pockets of counter-culture where it’s normal to not have a smartphone until you’re older, it’s normal to be a teenager and not care about Social Media, it’s normal to hate porn, it’s normal to obey your parents and love your siblings, it’s normal for dad to love mom and mom to respect dad, it’s normal to receive the Word and worship on the Lord’s day, it’s normal to do good work, it’s normal to desire marriage and kids, it’s normal forsake sin and turn to Jesus. It isn’t enough for Christians to offer detransitioners the consolation of sympathy for what’s happened to them. We can give them a real life-giving culture founded on Christ in place of the cult of gender ideology.
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