Is transgenderism a form of social brainwashing?

Picture this: you are fourteen, you feel different from everyone else, and you are not sure what that means. Years ago you might have heard "you're just sensitive." Today you get a different story. One that comes with words like gender dysphoria and non-binary. Words that barely existed before, and are now everywhere.

I am not disputing that trans identity exists. What concerns me is something else: what does that language do to people who are simply confused?

Start with the gay person who feels ashamed

Someone who has homosexual feelings but experiences them as something forbidden — through faith, upbringing or social pressure — becomes trapped in shame. That shame gnaws. It drives people toward self-loathing, sometimes further. We recognise this pattern. The solution we found is not to change the person, but to remove the stigma.

But consider this: a child who feels different — more sensitive, softer, not fitting the expected role — grows up surrounded by an environment that says: if you feel different, maybe you are in the wrong body. Is that liberation? Or is that a different kind of coercion?

Words create realities

Twenty years ago the contemporary meaning of "transgender" barely existed in everyday language. People with gender confusion sought other words, other paths. Some found peace. Others suffered — but from external rejection, not from the feelings themselves.

Today there is a ready-made framework. For many people that is a revelation. But for others the framework functions as a funnel. If the first answer to confusion always reads: then you are probably trans, all other explanations disappear from view. And with them, the other ways out.

Shame reversed

The implicit message in certain circles is: "If you feel this but don't acknowledge it, you are betraying yourself." That mechanism is structurally identical to what happened to homosexuals in the past. Only now the direction is reversed.

Before: you are gay but you are not allowed to be — shame — self-destruction.
Now, in some cases: you are confused but you must be trans — shame about doubt — hasty decisions with irreversible consequences.

That is not theory. From countries where treatment numbers have risen sharply, the stories are emerging of young people who, years later, regret a transition that moved too fast.

A mohawk you can reject. A man in women's clothing you cannot.

There is something else skewed in this debate that few people say out loud. You can mock someone with a mohawk. You can refuse to hire them. A man in women's clothing: you cannot — he is legally protected. Yet both are expressions of identity. Why does full social sanction apply to one and full legal protection to the other?

The answer lies in how the word conversion therapy has been stretched. Once it referred strictly to attempts to treat away homosexuality — rightly banned. Now the concept has been extended to gender identity. But not to musical identity. Not to religious identity. Only to gender. That choice is not neutral. It has far-reaching consequences for therapists, parents and practitioners who dare to accompany doubt without immediately steering toward transition.

What you are left with is a kind of protected-species cult: one identity category so heavily fenced in with law and taboo that even the most cautious critical question already counts as an attack. The conversion therapy act is the most recent example of this. Well-intentioned, but in practice a law that criminalises doubt and silences practitioners.

This is not an attack on trans people

People who conclude after lengthy deliberation that transition is the right path for them have every right to that choice. That is not in dispute here.

What I am raising is the system around that experience. The speed, the language, the pressure. The way doubt has been transformed from something that belongs to the process into something that needs to be corrected.

In the name of liberation, we are building a new cage. Those who doubt may not doubt. Those who wait are urged on. Those who counsel without steering risk their licence. That is not progress. That is simply a different form of coercion, with a friendlier face.