Exorcism Made Me Realise the Insanity of Gender Ideology

The Parallels are Astonishing - Here's What Parents Can Do

Andrew Gold ringing the bells during the exorcism of a woman named Natalia

Sprightly following a gruelling one-hour exorcism, Candela kissed a large, wooden holy relic.

“She wouldn’t be able to kiss it if she still had a demon,” explained the exorcist.

“Is that right? Are you feeling better, Candela?” I asked.

“Yes! Much better!”

I’d been following an exorcist named Padre Manuel in the impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires when I noticed that all his patients were young and female. Desperate, they came to the Padre with complaints of urges, “pushes”, obsessions and intrusive thoughts.

Candela, 17, had anorexia and bulimia. Self-harm scars checkered her wrists.

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There was something wrong with her body, she felt. If something weren’t done soon to assuage Candela’s symptoms, she would kill herself. She assured her parents of this. Her teachers had already discovered her trying to do so in the school bathroom. Many of her friends had been getting exorcisms, and it was all the rage among her friends.

Does any of this sound familiar?

When the trans epidemic initially hit, boys and men were significantly more likely than girls and women to try to transition to the other sex (something that is, of course, not possible). Now, “those assigned female at birth” (as Orwell Reuters helpfully explains) are 7.5x more likely to “initiate transgender care”.

The experience of adolescence is an absolute shit show.

This is particularly true for girls, who have to deal not only with the hormone changes that the boys also endure but menstruation, the growth of breasts and the stigma of body hair growth. This is not to mention the sudden and unexpected attention from boys and creepy men.

Candela Looks Happy Immediately After Her Exorcism

Many of the detransitioning women I’ve interviewed on Heretics have come to realise that they weren’t really seeking to become boys but rather to halt the scary transition into adulthood. Linking puberty and their changes in their mind to this unwanted attention, they feel there is something wrong with their bodies.

Candela, too, felt that something wasn’t right with her body.

The Social Contagion of The Exorcist

Since she grew up not in the West but in an impoverished and religious suburb of Buenos Aires, she believed she was infected not by a “gendered soul” but by a demon. The funny thing about exorcism (which - when practised on young and vulnerable girls - isn’t funny at all) is that it had all but fallen out of existence.

What brought it back?

The film The Exorcist in 1973 instigated an explosion in its eponymous practice worldwide.

Padre Manuel adorned the walls of his nave and corridors with posters from the movie, with his face superimposed over that of the priest. He played the theme music, Tubular Bells, to start his mass. Make no mistake: much like trans, this is a social contagion sparked by a Hollywood movie.

A similar phenomenon took place in Hong Kong after a girl was found to have died from not eating. After research of American culture found that something called anorexia was the likely killer, the illness itself spread like wildfire through Hong Kong. (Helen Joyce told me about this, and when I tried to repeat it in front of an audience at Genspect in Lisbon last weekend, she had to interject when I kept saying Japan instead of Hong Kong!).

Talking with Stella O’Malley at Genspect

PLACEBO NOT ENOUGH FOR TRANS

The human mind is quite something. Placebo pills have altered the brain states of people with Parkinson’s. What’s incredible is that the placebo even works when patients know they’re taking a placebo.

This begs the question: given that it seems to quell the symptoms of the “possessed”, is exorcism necessarily bad? The notion of demons is bunk, but - much like euphoric girls straight after transitioning - the girls and women that I helped to exorcise reported feeling better immediately after their exorcisms. This lasted for around one year after the practice.

When I returned to see her a couple of years later, Candela no longer believed in exorcism. But she was nearly 20 and had passed through the worst and most confusing stage of her adolescent turbulence. For all the wrong reasons, perhaps exorcism helped her.

Gender care, however, cannot fill that role because its interventions are so invasive and permanent. Boys who take puberty blockers often end up with micro penises. I’ve met many women who took cross-sex hormones as teenagers and now have an irreversibly deep voice and facial hair.

Andrew Meets the Exorcist for the First Time

I’m relieved that Candela didn’t go through either of those steps, let alone some of the most horrific surgeries imaginable. She would have been a prime applicant for gender woo-woo if she lived in the West.

Delusion marks exorcism and transgender “care”. They are both consequences of the Symptom Pool (thanks, Mia Hughes!), which explains how one’s diagnosis depends entirely on time and place. Just 100 years ago, doctors labelled these symptoms in young women as hysteria, which comes from the Ancient Greek idea that the womb wanders around the body.

Get thee to a nunnery!

Or, at least, to the countryside for the treatment of fresh air (see: Virginia Woolf). Suppose you’re in the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires. They’ll tell you it’s exorcism that ails you. Just a few miles closer to the city centre, they’ll diagnose depression and OCD (unless you’re unfortunate enough to encounter an ideologically captured progressive: out of the frying pan and into the fire).

What grates me most is that the Vice-loving woke hipsters who would laugh viscously at the exorcist and his worshippers sits right now in a Jew-hating Greta Thunberg-inspired café insisting that his purple-haired sister will feel better if she has doctors cut off half her forearm before threading it through her thigh and out of her vagina.

He’ll tell her that all of her underlying issues will dissolve in a puff of smoke because she’ll then be a man (albeit one with floppy wrist skin hanging from her genitals).

After my Genspect talk, countless mothers with transitioning children stopped me to say how grateful they were to have a real-world current example - exorcism - with which to equate the level of delusion in trans.

They asked me what took these young women away from the cult of exorcism. And how they might extricate their own children from the cultish ideology of trans.

Here’s what I said:

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