This Diabolical MomentBy Rod Dreher
March 11, 2022
If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast interview that Kale Zelden and I did with “Helena,” a 23 year old woman who has detransitioned from transgender to biological female. I cannot urge you strongly enough to do it. You might think you have a good handle on this phenomenon, but I guarantee that most of you do not. I did not, though I read about this stuff all the time:
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Helena is not a religious believer (I asked, at the end), but Kale and I are, and we both believe in the reality of the demonic. After we finished the interview, we both talked offline about how gobsmacked we were about the spiritual warfare aspect of what Helena had told us.
In explaining how she fell into believing that she was really male, she talked about the role of Tumblr culture — the online website that has been influential in convincing young women to transition. To sum up, she said that it’s an extremely intense but cultlike culture that draws in vulnerable young women who are unsure of themselves, and desperate for community and approval. She said that within that culture, everything that normie culture considers to be good — Christianity, sex with love and tenderness, etc — is considered evil. She explains that she was taught by that culture that extreme, painful, pornographic sex was good, and that if she wasn’t prepared to submit to it, no man would ever love her. The culture overwhelmed her, and all those in it, with information, a maelstrom that confused them and caused them to submit to ideas and practices that enslaved them to their disordered passions. (This is not quite how she described it — I mean, using that language — but that’s what she talked about.) In other words, this culture shattered the inner lives of the teenage girls who participate in it by telling them that they are worthless, and can only be made worthy if they remake themselves according to its rules.
As Helena talks about the process of surrendering to this, chills ran up and down my spine, literally. She is not a religious person, and couldn’t have understood what she was saying in a religious context. But if you know anything about the literature of demonic possession, the narrative she told is very close to what happens in a case of possession. At one point she talks about how she gave herself over to these thoughts, and before she knew what was happening, they were controlling her.
Yep.
At one point, she says, after she had begun her transition, she would be sitting in her apartment for hours, fighting the urge to stab the needle from the syringe full of testosterone into her thigh. Everything in her was screaming, “Don’t do it!” she said, but she also had this overwhelming urge to do it, an urge that told her only by submitting to these hormones that were reorienting everything in her mind and body would she be free.
I’m telling you, this is incredibly powerful stuff, Helena’s story. I wish every parent who reads this blog would watch it. I wish every pastor and religious leader, especially those who are tempted to affirm transgenderism, or those who think that it is just a passing fad, will listen to what Helena has to say. Again, she did not convert to Christianity, nor is she a conservative (though she did say this experience caused her to become extremely critical, in a healthy way, of all ideologies; social justice ideology, she explained, is at the heart of Tumblr culture). She’s just a brave and extremely articulate young woman who talks about what happened to her. It’s also shocking and depressing to hear her talk about how in her school, the adults in her life — guidance counselors especially — pushed her to embrace this identity, thinking they were helping her.
Anyway, Helena’s story makes it clear that we are living in an acutely demonic moment in our culture. I mean that in a literal sense, but even if you don’t believe in the reality of malevolent discarnate beings who seek our destruction, you can and should still interpret this cultural moment as demonic in the sense Dostoevsky meant in his great novel, Demons, also called in English The Possessed. According to the Wikipedia entry for the book, “For Dostoevsky, ‘ideas’ are living cultural forces that have the capacity to seduce and subordinate the individual consciousness, and the individual who has become alienated from his own concrete national traditions is particularly susceptible.”
This is us. This is who we are today. The family is being dissolved. Male and female are being dissolved. The individual human personality is being dissolved.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/this-diabolical-moment-cbdc-transgender/
