Netflix is Complicit in the Trans Medical Scandal
A detransitioned woman's thoughts on "Escaping Twin Flames"
Surprising no one, I love cult documentaries. I once did a six-hour interview with an ex-Mormon where we talked about high-control (“culty”) group dynamics and evaluated my experience in trans activism using an online tool he developed. Jonathan also did a massive amount of work tracking down video examples of the things I was speaking about in the interview—finding, e.g., TikToks exemplifying the behaviour I discussed and using interviews from other detransitioners sharing the same experiences.
It’s one of my favourite interviews, as it’s so different from any of the others I did, but gets the least amount of attention. So I’m going to plug it right now before I get into the meat of this post:
(Part 1: here; Part 2: here; and Part 3: here)
Back to cult documentaries.
When I heard that Netflix had just released a three-part docuseries investigating allegations around a particular cult-like community, and that gender and transition were somehow involved, I was curious to see how it was handled. (I’ve since been informed that Prime Video also has a three-part docuseries released in October on the same group.)
The Netflix show, “Escaping Twin Flames,” examines the community of the Twin Flames Universe (TFU), which, from the outside, seems like a matchmaking business gone horribly wrong. Many of the participants seem to have discovered it by searching online for “twin flames,” which is a New Age concept describing your “other half” or what we might more colloquially call a “soulmate.” In searching this term, people stumble upon TFU, which offers an online community and classes costing thousands of dollars.
Within these classes, members would talk about people who they have been interacting with in their personal lives. Jeff and Shaleia Divine, the founders of TFU, are able to confirm to members whether or not the person they are pursuing is, in fact, their true Twin Flame.
Twin Flames Ascension School guarantees that its members will end up with their Twin Flame. This is, of course, impossible. No one can guarantee that two people will sustain a healthy relationship forever. In order to stick by that promise, though, the organization’s leaders appear to encourage their members to pursue their Twin Flame at all costs, including stalking people who are already married or who have set clear boundaries.
Like other cults, TFU asks members to sink more and more costs into the group, creating a reliance on the community. They are told to cut off concerned family members, and many end up making their income from coaching other members. This makes it very hard to leave the group, as doing so would cost them everything they have worked towards.
You may be asking: where does gender come in? It starts in the second half of the second episode.
Jeff and Shaleia suggest that each partner in a Twin Flame union represents the yin and the yang, the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine. You’re one, and your Twin Flame is the other. Of course, this is a rather “heteronormative” approach, and they must have realized that their model would appeal to a wider audience if, for example, a man could embody the Divine Feminine and a woman could embody the Divine Masculine. This would allow their worldview to account for gay men and lesbians, as well as people who identify as transgender.
Where it all goes wrong is when it becomes clear that many in the community aren’t making progress with their Twin Flames. In order to deal with this problem, Jeff and Shaleia change the rules of the group. They claim that there can be false Twin Flames (even ones previously “confirmed” by Jeff and Shaleia themselves), and now, instead of someone’s Twin Flame being anyone in the world, it would be someone within the community. With straight women being overrepresented in their membership, they began to assign women together as couples, telling one of each of the pairs that she is actually a Divine Masculine. In one of the videotaped meetings shown in the series, Jeff appears to be pressuring a(n actual) lesbian woman to pick a male name and use male pronouns. The alleged claim is that her failing to fully embody the Divine Masculine would push away her Divine Feminine partner.
Anyone watching this show can see that what is happening is abusive. However, throughout the second and third episodes, the producers interweave comments from Dr. Cassius Adair, a woman who has medically altered her body to appear male and is described as a professor at The New School in NYC and the author of “The Transgender Internet” (which doesn’t appear to have been published yet).
Without these comments, I would have been fine with this docuseries (although obviously horrified about what happened within the cult). The inclusion of the comments is clearly meant to make a distinction between “real” transgender people and people who have been coerced into adopting an identity that doesn’t belong to them.
The problem, of course, is that every single person who has been told that it is possible that you aren’t the sex that you are—that male and female are not material realities—is being lied to. This is coercion. The trans community engages in this behaviour all the time. Daisy Strongin, who was featured in the PragerU documentary “DETRANS,” was recently dog piled on Twitter by people insisting that she is really a man—or at least she could be “genderfluid”—because she admitted she still has some dysphoria and sometimes thinks about being a man.
The outright lie that this is possible is coming from people at all levels of society: from medical professionals, from therapists, from religious leaders, from teachers, from journalists, from scientists, from politicians... it’s everywhere. A concept that would have been considered completely absurd 10 to 15 years ago is now embedded in nearly all aspects of the western world, and there is no empirical evidence supporting it.
Netflix is complicit in this coercion. They have been for years, but this is explicit. The idea of embodying the Divine Masculine or Divine Feminine is presented as a ridiculous concept while having an internal gender identity that differs from your sex is presented as perfectly reasonable. There is no difference. Both concepts are, as Amy Hamm put it nicely this week, “anti-scientific, metaphysical nonsense.”
In a series about a cult, they chose a member of a different cult to explain why one cult is invalid, but another cult is totally normal.
I’ll now dig deeper into specific moments throughout the show.
Close to the end of the second episode, a former TFU member, a trans-identified man, is shown briefly. Again, this is obviously damage control for the trans cult. They put a “successful” transitioner out in front before they start to dive into what happened within TFU. “I was 13 when I realized that I was meant to be a woman,” he says. “I was transitioning before I joined TFU.”
A couple minutes later, there is a shot of Adair watching Shaleia explain, “You can look androgynous, sport that look, but it doesn’t mean that it’s reflective of the truth of who we are, as either a masculine energy 100% or 100% a feminine energy.”
“There’s no evidence in biology, in psychology, in social theory, nobody who studies gender in a serious way believes that all human beings can be sorted into some sort of essential masculine and some sort of essential feminine. Gender is something that you can explore on your own and discover.”
I’m not sure how Adair is defining “gender” in this way, whether she is using it as a synonym for “sex” or not. However, human beings can, of course, be sorted into a binary. We have been doing so since the beginning of time. This is based on biological features, your phenotype, which either develops and is organized around producing small gametes (male) or around producing large gametes (female). (Whether or not your body actually produces said gametes is irrelevant.)
I’m frustrated that Adair is deferring to “evidence” and then claiming something lacking any credible evidence: that “gender” is something that you can “discover,” as if it was there, hidden, all along. This is never pushed back on. The emphasis is always that someone else assigning you a “gender” is bad (because power and control), but if you figure out your “gender” for yourself, that’s totally fine (because “autonomy”).
The trans-identified former TFU member later repeats the same thing: “It is not their fucking place to decide what gender somebody is or what they’re meant to align with [...] That is something people need to do on their own.”
As a thought experiment, replace the word “gender” there with the word “race.” It doesn’t matter if it’s an autonomous decision or not. One is more direct abuse, but in both cases, someone has been indoctrinated.
Near the beginning of the third episode, a woman named Victoria describes a conversation she had with her TFU coach, Keely, and Victoria’s assigned Twin Flame, a woman named Angie. (All three women have since left TFU.)
“[Keely] said, ‘Hi Victoria. Do you know why you’re here?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to tell me that Angie is my Twin Flame.’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘No.’ And I remember Keely looking shocked by that, and just, ‘What do you mean, no?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not a lesbian.’ And she said, ‘Well, no, you’re not. In spiritual truth, Angie’s a Divine Masculine.’ I didn’t have a way out of that. I just felt violated in that moment, thinking, ‘How much power have I given to these people?’”
I highlight this quote for one reason: this is exactly how people in the trans cult treat those who are not attracted to someone’s “gender identity.” Victoria is able to say she felt violated (without societal backlash) because she was forced to be with a woman, but if Angie were “genuinely” a transman, Victoria would be shamed and lambasted as a transphobe.
There is no difference.
Two mothers with daughters still involved with TFU speak about their daughters starting to identify as men after joining. One of the daughters has gone through with a double mastectomy. Throughout the episode, the mothers are understandably unable to bring themselves to say “my son”—they say “my child” instead—but both refer to their daughters as “he.” (I have to wonder whether each of them chose to do this or if the producers asked them to do so.)
In a particularly emotional moment, one of the mothers suddenly receives a text from her daughter while filming, and she breaks down over its content: “She appreciates my message... She appreciates the message... He appreciates the message... I can sleep tonight.”
It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch.
Again, let’s contrast this with other parents who have children suddenly identifying as transgender out of nowhere. The pain that they experience is just like the pain that these mothers on-screen are experiencing. Their children have often cut them out of their lives for not going along with their identity, just as these children have cut their families out of their lives for not supporting the cult behaviour. These parents are confused that their children, who have never given signs of ever being uncomfortable with their sex, are suddenly claiming to be something else. It’s clear that they have been influenced by someone.
But such parents cannot say anything without a backlash. They can’t speak frankly in the way that these on-screen mothers are doing. The on-screen mothers have someone specific that they can blame: Jeff and Shaleia. There are people who are responsible for other parents’ children identifying as transgender, but because the ideas are now so widespread, those people are able to escape blame.
“It’s not impossible that some of those people who start out in the group as straight cisgender women realize that they happen to be trans, but I don’t hear in the testimony of the people in Twin Flames Universe something like ‘I want to get closer to who I am.’ What I’m hearing them say is, ‘I want to get closer to who I’m supposed to be.’ That raises a red flag for me. That doesn’t feel right to me. We don’t want there to be a ‘supposed to be’ about gender. We want gender to be something that you are allowed to discern on your own.”
Translation: Our process of indoctrination looks more autonomous than theirs does.
Just after this, we listen to a woman explain that “I had been exploring being Divine Feminine for three years, and although I mastered it and the external, it never felt like a fit. Like, it never felt like it was completely authentic to me. I really felt like I had to work at it every day.”
Angie comments, “This is somebody who’s been in for a while, knows all the right things to say to keep people happy. And there’s not a word of truth to it.”
...but is what that woman said much different from what any trans-identified person says? “It never fit.” “I never felt authentic.” It’s someone who “knows all the right things” to say when it’s within the context of a very niche group, but it’s totally legitimate outside of that? How do you tell the difference?
Victoria: “It had become a form of conversion therapy.”
Presented without comment.
“What I think is very troubling about the Twin Flames Universe story is that people might hear about this group and say, ‘Oh, this is proof that transness is some kind of cult, that transness is something that is coerced.’ And nothing could be further from the truth. This is a group that is not in the mainstream of what trans people do and what trans people believe.”
“The mainstream of what trans people do and what trans people believe” has shifted dramatically over the past 15 years. This used to be a small group of people who were doing their own thing to alleviate distress over their gender. I can’t say I support their decisions, but at least they were trying to keep to themselves.
“Transness” today is, in fact, a full-blown cult that has managed to infiltrate society, and “Escaping Twin Flames” makes it so abundantly clear. It doesn’t matter that they’ve inserted somone in the middle to try to run interference.
(Here’s my colourful initial reaction to this particular bit. I’m a bit louder than the television is. Sorry for cursing!)
“I hope that people who are watching with horror, what Jeff and Shaleia are doing, come to realize that you have a lot in common with the trans community, because we, as trans people, want everyone to have ownership of their own body and be able to present ourselves and find love as who we are. And that’s what Jeff and Shaleia think is a threat to their business model.”
You’re wrong, though, Cassius.
This is the lie of transition. You are not claiming ownership over your body by permanently altering it. You are admitting you have no control over yourself. Like someone who cuts themself to feel something or someone who is starving themself to lose weight, the idea that you are exercising control is an illusion.
You are not becoming who you are. You are running from who you are.
And acknowledging that is a threat to the business model of the gender industry.
I really hope people don’t fall for this.
One of the ending screens just before the credits reads the following:
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
There aren’t any words to express how angry I am.
I like watching these documentaries so much because it really gets into the psychology of what it’s like to be convinced of something that just isn’t true, what it feels like to deal with the sunk costs, and how difficult it is to turn around and come back after years of involvement. I had that experience throughout transition.
I hope one day we’ll be looking back on this with amazement. How did we not see it?
I look forward to the day my experience—and the experience of so many others like me—is actually taken seriously.
I for one (as a parent of a trans-identified teen who has been researching this issue for 4.5 years now) take you, and other outspoken, articulate, detransitioners very seriously.
I find that mainstream media, along with every other facet of society, is caught up in the lie that is "your authentic self will be found by chemically and surgically altering your body in extreme, health-damaging ways." It disgusts me, and never ceases to cause outrage and sadness whenever I encounter it. Thanks for all you do.
I can't believe there's another one on Prime! I wonder if it takes the same apologetic tone.