So Your Child Wants To Be Our Next Sacrifice To The Gender Gods

A review of 'She/Him/Us: A Psychiatrist's Search for Her Daughter in the Transgender Sea' by Lisa Bellot

Lisa Bellot, pseudonymous author of She/Him/Us: A Psychiatrist's Search for Her Daughter in the Transgender Sea, notes that “people in zombie apocalypse movies aren’t particularly good at making obvious, commonsense decisions. They cock their heads, listen to the sound of snarling coming from the old, abandoned warehouse, and say, ‘I wonder what that could be. I think I will go investigate.’”

Like so many cases of sudden transgender identification in teenagers, especially girls, Bellot’s daughter Jordan — another pseudonym — wandered into the abandoned warehouse online at the age of eleven. When Jordan was confronted about her cutting behaviors, which continued throughout her ‘transition’, she announced that she was definitely trans, and in “words that sounded like a well-rehearsed speech rather than a conversation.” Rather than responsive thought, “she had well-prepared answers” she had learned from the internet.

“We were progressive people,” Bellot writes of herself and Zack, the child’s father. “We recognized the existence and struggles of transgender individuals, but I also knew my daughter, and on some fundamental level I felt that her transgender proclamation was not an accurate reflection of what she was going through.”

“Very little, if anything, about my daughter’s story fit a typical transgender narrative. To discern this, you will first need to familiarize yourself with the prototype of an authentic transgender narrative,” Bellot writes, entering the house of horrors herself. As a psychiatrist, Bellot has ‘helped’ a Janet turn into a Jack. She believes in the existence of “authentic gender dysphoria,” that a person can be “authentically transgender” or “genuinely transgender” as long as they fit the diagnosis.

Therapeutic professions have a lot to answer for in the rush to ‘transition’ as many young people as possible. Counselors, therapists, doctors, nurses, and administrators have all been trained to roll out a red carpet at the approach of a self-declared ‘trans child’.

Supposed experts on the magical, mystical gender journey asked: “Would you rather have a healthy son or a dead daughter?” This was extortion, a crime. While her daughter has desisted and seemingly escaped the house of horrors, Bellot seemingly remains trapped within it, unable to discern that ‘born in the wrong body’ is a patent statement of faith.

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Confessions Of A Truthful Therapist

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I mean no disrespect to Ms. Bellot, who is a talented author. Rather, the horror of reading She/Him/Us only occurs to a reader who has experienced disenchantment with ‘experts’ and ‘diagnosis’. If you are among the ‘gender criticals’ who hold the view that no transgender identity should ever be medicalized, then Bellot’s participation in the system, however professional, makes her part of the horror-show.

She is however a consummate professional. In at least two cases, Bellot writes, she did recognize that requests for transgender medicalization from her patients were inappropriate. “Neither seemed particularly interested in relieving their symptoms, but were instead committed to what they assumed would be the lifelong melancholic plight of a transgender individual.”

Gnostics, in other words, because as we have long since established here, ‘gender identity’ is first and foremost a gnostic faith movement. ‘Born in the wrong body’ is a patent gnostic metaphor, a reality that can only be revealed by the unique self-knowledge of one’s invisible, ineffable genderbeing (gnosis). Bellot even recognizes a key characteristic of gnostic religiosity in her daughter, who chose the new name ‘Ash’.

The immature defense mechanism of splitting is commonly referred to as “all-or-nothing thinking.” Ambivalent (i.e., mixed or contradictory) feelings are not tolerated by an individual, who abandons critical thought and adapts a mentality in which he or she perceives ideas and people as “all good” or “all bad.” Ash’s trans-identification was constructed around an “us vs. them” mentality.

Bellot notes “the cult mentality” in gleeful advocates of Jordan’s transition, the “projective identification” of herself and Zack as evil transphobes, sees the parallel of cult deprogramming. “It was as if we had broken into her room one night and pulled her from the clutches of a cult, and she lashed out at us because of it,” Bellot writes. She uses the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control (link here) to analyze the dynamics of the ‘transgender community’.

She notes how the past is reinvented by the believer. “All ties to the past are severed. There is no ‘before.’ There is only the ‘after’,” a cult conversion. “These women universally speak of the ‘coaching’ they received,” Bellot writes of detransitioners. They learned “what to memorize to tell doctors and therapists to convince them to prescribe the desired medications.” They learned to tell the right story to get the magic gender medicine.

And yet Ms. Bellot cannot bring herself to admit the whole thing might be a false belief, that ‘the right narrative’ may simply be a catechism her profession has approved to sacralize disembodiment. “I am not convinced that the transgender movement is a cult, but there are similarities in the strategies that it uses, particularly when it involves indoctrination of children,” she writes.

So it walks like a cult, talks like a cult, has everyone involved acting like a cult, but we cannot simply call it a cult, because reasons: Jordan is no longer on fire, but mom remains stuck on Summerisle. I am not making light of Ms. Bellot. On the contrary, she ought to write a movie script, because this book perfectly describes the predicament of her entire profession, right now.

“If I believed or even suspected that my child was a boy trapped in a girl’s body, I would’ve embraced it,” Bellot writes. “If Jordan identified as a transgender man and I thought he was leading an authentic life in doing so, Ash would have my full support.” All that Jordan had to do was bring the right story, and Bellot would have readily endorsed the cult.

In this book, the Wicker Man community is Dante’s Watch, a pseudonymous Left Coast city with all the progressive diversity and inclusion worship that one would expect. Bellot’s divorce, a new school, and the disruption of Jordan’s social connections all played a role in her transgender declaration.

But it was social media that did the harm. “One silver lining from our session with the gender specialist was that I was able to hear Jordan tell her story to a professional using expressions and terminology she had clearly gleaned from outside sources,” Bellot writes. “She’d discussed her gender identity with the confidence and vocabulary of someone who had spent countless hours on the internet” learning a catechism.

Bellot began to look at the YouTube influencers that played such a large role in her daughter’s life. “The number of medically and psychiatrically false statements made by these individuals was voluminous, but the information was presented as if it was an absolute truth,” she writes. The ‘science’ they presented was sorcery.

Bellot intuitively understood that something was wrong. “I’m not aware of an adolescent girl who loves her body, enjoys how she looks in girls’ clothing, likes the way she appears in pictures, and looks forward to her period every month,” she writes. “If you find one, let me know. It might be our first contact with an extraterrestrial life form.” Growing up is hard to do and that pain is the very essence of becoming an adult human.

As the identification progressed, things began to bother Bellot. “One appointment in which we were all present was solely dedicated to the therapist providing moral support so that Ash would feel comfortable asking us for a different kind of binder. The concept of the therapist needing to be present for moral support for such a request seemed completely unnecessary,” she writes.

Worse were the efforts to circumvent her authority altogether. “Parents do not appreciate being kept in the dark. They do not like other adults colluding with their children in secret.” Indeed, the word for that is ‘grooming’ and until the advent of genderwoo, it was universally understood to be dangerous for children.

Despite the fact that Jordan’s story made no sense as a classic gender dysphoria diagnosis, every clinician encouraged the identification. They were all eager to medicalize and so was Jordan. “Could they not see it? Were they afraid to articulate what was right in front of their noses?” Bellot wonders.

“Let’s discuss the various forms of testosterone so we can get you started,” was the primary focus, and anything outside the realm of medical transition was swept aside to make way for important topics like the surgical options already available. Nobody seemed to recognize (or at least admit) that being a trans-identified youth was becoming a fad.

Plot twist: from Christine Jorgensen to the present, ‘transgender’ has always been a fad. Bellot notes that “schools do not require, and in California they are not allowed to request, medical evidence of a diagnosis to support these social allowances and interventions.” The child gets whatever they want just because they ask for it.

Attention comes with identity. Jordan gained “options and advantages” at school and in the community through her transgender declaration. “He wanted as much as the school was willing to give, as much as we were willing to give. All his answers were conversation enders. All his responses sounded like they were coming from somebody else’s script.”

‘Ash’ was clearly not getting better, still self-harming, and yet every therapeutic session seemed too brief and entirely centered on the needs of the gender identity. “His mood had deteriorated significantly since he’d come out to us and his peers,” Bellot writes. “Rather than the anticipated social and emotional relief that experts touted, our ‘healthy son’ was more moody, more angry, more sullen, and more withdrawn in the wake of his outing.”

The affirmation project continued, “not because she had boy tendencies or demonstrated a long history of stereotypical male preferences in activities or interests, but because she had decided to call herself that and we were too afraid of the potential consequences to contradict her.” The suicide threat. Bellot writes that this extortion paralyzed her and Zack.

But they did eventually shake off the inertia, for “a parent’s job is not to agree with their child in all things,” Zack declares. “A parent’s job is to teach and protect their child as best they can, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”

“I wish ... I had said no from the beginning,” Bellot writes. “Consider saying no to your child’s professed trans identity.” Make parenting great again. Like the most tragic horror movie characters of all, she failed by second-guessing her instincts. Confronting horror brings on the happy ending (?) in which Ms. Bellot accompanies Jordan to school in order to oversee her complete detransition back to her ‘deadname’ and female pronouns.

Pitchstone Publishing has made a brave choice to publish works critiquing ‘gender’ and this is one of them. Bellot is a primary source for understanding the experience of parents during the time of genderwoo’s absolute ascendance over the culture. Her experience is perhaps not typical, but her daughter’s is.

Desisters and detransitioners all have different stories from one another. The only thing all their stories hold in common is that they believed a lie that people can be born in the wrong bodies, and that they themselves were born in the wrong bodies. No child is ever born in the wrong body, therefore no adult is in the wrong body, either.

Lisa Bellot has not escaped the island where children are sacrificed to false gods, at least not yet. If Pitchstone continues to publish her works, perhaps her view will evolve. In any case, I hope to read a sequel one day.