Mercury in Retrograde

Gender Critical Sex Realist, Adult Human Female; peaked February 2021. #IStandWithJKRowling

[Mercury in Retrograde @retrogatorade21]

“Schools are not simply accommodating a few children. They are teaching a highly contested theory of sex and identity as fact to all children at the exact developmental stage when concepts of embodiment, category permanence, boundaries, and truth telling are being formed.“

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

Rebuttal 11: “You’re overreacting. Trans children are only a tiny proportion of children”

Even if only a small number of children socially transition, the impact is not confined to those children. In a school setting in particular, social transition functions as a public developmental script that all children are required to learn, interpret, and accommodate.

Child development theory explains why this matters.
1. Schools don’t just “support” a child — they teach a framework to everyone
Vygotsky and Bandura show that children learn identity concepts through social mediation, modelling, and reinforcement. In a school environment, a socially transitioned child is not simply an individual case. It becomes a lesson about what sex is, what identity is, and how to interpret discomfort.

Children treat adults and institutions as epistemic authorities. If the school treats “gender identity” as a fact, children absorb it as a fact.

2. Young children think concretely, not abstractly
Piaget’s work shows that primary aged children are still largely concrete thinkers. They struggle with abstract distinctions such as “sex is biological but gender is internal.”

When schools introduce identity claims that contradict bodily reality, children do not process this as a nuanced philosophical position. They process it as:
- confusion
- contradiction
- a new rule they must obey to avoid punishment

This does not create understanding. It creates compliance.

3. It disrupts Kohlberg’s sex constancy development
Kohlberg’s sex constancy model describes how children gradually learn that sex is stable across time. This is a normal cognitive milestone.

School policies that require children to treat sex categories as negotiable, or to treat pronouns as overriding biology, interfere with that developmental process. This affects not only the transitioned child, but the entire peer group’s developing understanding of sexed embodiment.

4. Social transition is not a neutral accommodation
The Cass Review notes that social transition should be viewed as an active intervention, not a harmless change.

In children, identity development is time sensitive and path dependent. Once a child is socially transitioned in front of peers, the psychological and social cost of reversal rises sharply. This creates a ratchet effect: persistence increases, not necessarily because the identity is innate, but because reversal becomes humiliating, destabilising, and socially costly.

5. Adolescents are vulnerable to imitation and social reward
Erikson and Marcia locate identity formation in adolescence, when belonging, status, and peer approval are paramount.

In this stage, identity categories can spread socially because they offer:
- a ready-made explanation for distress
- a protected status
- a peer community
- a narrative of meaning

This is not a moral claim. It is a developmental one.

6. It forces all children into “doublethink” about sex
Children are not just witnessing a transition. They are being required to participate in a new paradigm: that sex can be overridden by declaration.

For many children, this produces:
- anxiety about saying the wrong thing
- fear of punishment
- the lesson that reality is negotiable if authority insists

That is not inclusion. It is training in contradiction.

7. It reframes boundaries as prejudice
Safeguarding depends on children learning:
- bodily privacy
- sex-based boundaries
- that discomfort matters

If children are told they must accept opposite sex peers into intimate spaces, they learn that their instincts are morally suspect and that boundaries are “unkind.”

This is a safeguarding issue, not an ideological one.

8. It pressures children into speech they don’t understand
Compelling children to use language that contradicts what they can see teaches:
- words matter more than reality
- honesty is punishable
- social harmony requires self-censorship

That is not healthy moral development. It is institutionalised coercion.

9. It reshapes peer dynamics, especially for girls
In practice, these policies often shift the burden of adaptation onto other children, particularly girls. Girls learn that discomfort must be suppressed for social peace, while boys learn that sex boundaries can be bypassed through identity claims.

Again: this is not neutral.

Conclusion
The “tiny proportion” argument misunderstands childhood development. Schools are not simply accommodating a few children. They are teaching a highly contested theory of sex and identity as fact to all children at the exact developmental stage when concepts of embodiment, category permanence, boundaries, and truth telling are being formed.

In that context, small numbers are anything but trivial.

[Genevieve Gluck @WomenReadWomen]

Former Australian PM Julia Gillard's administration added "gender identity" to the Sex Discrimination Act, thereby stripping women and girls of their rights.

Now, she is rowing back, and admits that the law was changed without public consent.

[Róisín Murphy @roisinmurphy]

My heart breaks for lesbians. There were never large numbers of exclusively same-sex attracted women. Now they are being dismantled. Young girls are transitioning before they get the chance to explore their sexuality, and men are demanding access to every space, intimate or otherwise. A fragile culture built by one of the most marginalised and misunderstood groups is dying, and very few care.

And before anyone comes here to tell me “lesbians won’t save your career,” again, I know.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

You mean men, men who claim to be women. You are a national broadcaster that consistently obfuscates facts around sex because you’ve taken an ideological position the public overwhelmingly rejects. This isn’t news, it’s propaganda.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

A man (Samantha Tempest, here abbreviated to ST) is arguing in court that he belongs in a group for menopausal women. It is pointed out to him that menopause is the cessation of ovulation and that, being a man who never started, let alone ceased, ovulating he does not belong in such a group. He disagrees. He says he's had 'menopausal symptoms' like hot flushes and brain fog. This is like me claiming to have been in the army because I once shot an air rifle and quite like khaki.

[Stephanie Winn, LMFT | ROGD Repair @sometherapist]

Greeting the Hostile Intruder: Who Am I Talking to Right Now?

When your "trans" child seems almost possessed

There is a moment I have heard described so many times now, in so many variations, that I have come to recognize it as a distinct phenomenon. A mother is sitting with her adult daughter at a nice hotel for afternoon tea. They have been having a lovely visit; laughter, catching up, ease. Then something shifts. The daughter's face changes, her voice flattens, and she turns to her mother and demands, in a low growl without a touch of whimsy, "what is my name?"

The mother is stunned. This is not the child she raised, and it is not even the same person who was laughing with her ten minutes ago; something has come in and taken the wheel. Having no script for what has just walked into the room, the mother defaults to the tools she has always trusted: warmth, softness, reassurance. She reaches for the daughter she knows, and she tells her, in some way or another, how much she is loved.

I want to explain why, in that moment, love is often the wrong tool. Your love is real, and no one is asking you to stop loving your child. The issue is with what is sitting across from you in that moment, which is not entirely her, and with the fact that declarations of love meant for her tend to land somewhere else entirely. If your daughter has been captured by an ideology, and if it has taken over enough of her mental real estate to produce this kind of sudden state shift, the part of her that is currently speaking cannot receive your love the way you intend. It can only devalue it. When you say "I love you" to something that considers you the enemy, or considers your love conditional on your compliance, that love gets metabolized as evidence that you do not understand her, or worse, that your love is a manipulation. The tool you reached for, out of every fiber of your being as a mother, is the exact tool least equipped for that moment.

The move I want to offer you is different, and it takes some getting used to because it runs against every instinct you have. When the state shift happens, when the aggression comes at you, you do not match it with anger and you do not respond with love. You name what has just come into the room. You take a breath and you drop your voice low, not into your throat but into your belly, and you say something like, "whoa. That is a lot of anger coming at me." Not as a scolding, not as an accusation, not with any heat in it; just as a plain observation of what you are noticing. What you are doing is marking the moment and refusing to pretend that nothing has changed.

The reason this works, when it works, is that it interrupts a pattern the ideology depends on. The pattern is: I come at you hard; you respond with softness; I collect that softness as evidence that you are weak and that I am right to escalate. Neurologically and relationally, that cycle only fuels the entitlement and resentment I have described elsewhere. Naming the aggression breaks the pattern in the very first turn. You are neither soft nor returning the aggression, so there is nowhere obvious for the script to go next. She has to actually notice what she has done. Some part of her, however buried, is now present in the room again, because you have refused to keep the exchange running on autopilot.

If you have room for a second sentence, and often you do, it can sound something like this: The person I raised was loving and kind. I am not sure who I am talking to right now. Say this without cruelty; there is no need for edge in it. Say it slowly. What you are doing with this sentence is refusing, out loud, to conflate the being coming at you with the person you raised. This is the move at the heart of what I want to teach in this piece. You are declining to hand over the whole of your child to whatever has decided, today, to speak for her; you are holding the line that there is a difference between them, and you are keeping a seat at the table for the daughter you know, even when she is not currently in the chair.

Some parents find it useful to think about this with the language of spiritual possession. I do not require anyone to take it in a literal sense; it works well as a metaphor. If it helps you to think of your daughter as your daughter, and to think of the identity that has taken up residence in her as a separate entity with its own agenda, its own script, its own hostility toward you, then use that mental frame. Some mothers find it clarifying to give the intruder a nickname; the new name the child has demanded works well for this purpose, because that is often the name under which the hostility is delivered. Oliver is demanding and self-centered where Olivia was considerate. The distinction, once you make it in your own mind, changes what you owe to whom.

Your obligations to your daughter are enormous and permanent. Your obligations to whatever is currently animating her when she comes at you in cruelty are essentially none. You do not owe warmth to a hostile stranger who has walked up to you at a gas station and started something. You do not owe reassurance to a voice that is threatening the child you love. Your job in those moments is not to soothe the intruder; your job is to stay standing, differentiated; to name what you see, and to hold open the door for your actual child to walk back through when she is ready. That door stays open. That door has always been open. You just do not fling love at whoever happens to be at the threshold.

There is a related image that helps some parents hold this posture. It draws from the folklore of Ireland and Scotland, where fairies are not the cute, whimsical creatures of American children's books. In those older traditions, fairies are tricksters at best and dangerous at worst; you do not court their attention, and you do not assume their goodwill. If it helps you to picture what has taken up residence in your daughter as a fairy of that older sort, mischievous, seductive, and hostile to the mother in particular, then hold that image. This is not a benevolent presence. It has convinced your daughter that it is her true self. It has not earned your affection, and it may even use any affection you give it against the child you are trying to protect.

What happens next? Very often, some sort of confrontation. You have opened a door and named the intruder; you have acknowledged the alter ego as its own presence, which is what your child has been demanding of you all along, and this can leave her feeling briefly powerful, even vindicated. At the same time, your framing has communicated something she was not expecting, which is that you view this new presence as a separate person from the one you raised. Both things can leave her rattled, and rattled is not necessarily a bad thing. Shock focuses the attention; when the ground shifts under our feet, we start looking around at what else might not be where we last saw it. Your child should be paying attention in these moments, because a great deal is at stake, more than she can yet see.

Once you have said "I am not sure who I am talking to right now," she will often name the intruder for you. It's Oliver. I'm Oliver, Mom. You know who I am. This is your opening for the second move, and it is a move I want you to have ready before the moment comes, because you will not have time to compose it on the spot. What you say next, quietly and without heat, is something like: If this is Oliver, I'm not sure how I feel about him. One sentence, and that is the whole of it.

Notice what this single sentence accomplishes. It grants the alter ego what he has been demanding, which is to be recognized on his own terms; in a certain sense, you have finally given him the acknowledgment he has been agitating for. And in the same breath, the sentence strips him of something he was expecting to come along with recognition, which is the automatic warmth, the unconditional welcome, the maternal love that was never in question when it was directed at your daughter. Your daughter has that love, and she always will; Oliver, whoever he turns out to be, is a stranger. Strangers have to earn their place at the table, and so far, based on how he has been behaving, Oliver is not making a promising first impression.

You are treating this new entity at face value. If it is behaving as a hostile stranger, that is how it will be greeted. If Eliot demands the right to dismiss all your precious memories of Eleanor and insists that her name never be spoken again, then Eliot is also declining the fondness you feel for Eleanor, because that fondness was never his to inherit. Eliot is telling you, in no uncertain terms, that Eleanor, who picked you dandelion bouquets and fed monkeys at the zoo, is not here right now. And going by first impressions, the person who is here right now seems, frankly, kind of a jerk. It may be appropriate to proceed accordingly.

Underneath this posture is a moral proposition worth naming aloud, at least in your own mind. Your child is entitled to your unconditional love because she is your child; that love is hers by birthright and does not need to be earned. The hostile stranger who has walked in wearing her face is not entitled to that love, because that love was never his; it belongs to her, and he has spent a great deal of energy insisting that she is not present. He can have your civility. He can have your attention, at least for now. What he cannot have, not automatically and not on demand, is the fondness and warmth that belong to your daughter. If he wants any part of that inheritance, he will have to show that he deserves it, and by the evidence he himself is offering, he has some considerable ground to make up.

Everything I have described leaves you with a much clearer sense of where to put your love. You save it. You do not spend it on the moments when the intruder is speaking; you save it for the moments when your daughter herself is present. When she calls you from the roadside with a flat tire, when she leans in for a real hug at the end of a visit, when she asks whether you could bake something together, when her guard drops and the child you know comes to the surface for a moment — that is where love belongs. And because you have not been scattering it indiscriminately at every hostile encounter, the love you offer in these real moments carries its full weight. It is the thing itself, arriving where it was meant to arrive.

I want to close with a word about what this posture actually is. Sometimes parents worry, hearing this approach for the first time, that they are being asked to become cold, or to disown their child, or to write her off as somebody else. That worry is understandable, but it misreads the move. What I am describing is a refusal to give up on her, expressed as a refusal to keep addressing your love to the wrong recipient. The daughter you raised is still in there. She may be quiet for now; she may only surface in flickers. But she is more likely to come back to you if she can trust that when she does, you will know it is her, and that you have been holding her seat at the table all along.

This is an ROGD Repair bonus article. Where it appears in the course, it comes with “homework” questions to help you personalize the tools. If you’re a parent in this, join ROGD Repair today for an emotionally intelligent approach to raising gender-questioning teens and twenty-somethings. With over 120 lessons on the psychology concepts and communication tools most relevant to your situation, you’ll learn to work smarter, not harder, to help your child grow in a healthier direction. Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month at https://t.co/cfuJjBqXUZ.

[Venice Allan @roseveniceallan]

These gender goblins can barely say that “trans women are women” anymore because they know how ridiculous it sounds

[CaliRN619 🚑🩺🚑 @CaliRN619]

PRIDE 🏳️‍🌈 used to be about non-discrimination and a way to showcase how the LGB humans were no different than the straight humans.

Now it’s all about degeneracy and and flaunting their sexuality 🍆.

I don’t know what’s worse, the men gleefully exposing their penises to children or the parents who allowed grown men to wag their penises at the children 🍆👧👦.

They should all be in jail 🚓🚔🚨

[Sarah Phillimore @SVPhillimore]

An 11 year old apparently refusing to leave his room, a grown man now considering giving up …. Because you cannot stop other people seeing what they see. You cannot arrest every single person for ‘hate’. You cannot force people to believe.

This whole thing is insane. If ‘passing’ is the only goal for this apparently ‘true and authentic’ identity then yes the only solution is to take little boys and freeze them in prepubescence with drugs.

And many parents will continue to revolt. Is this Government going to lock them all up?

[ThisIsntWorkingPodcast @IsntWorkingPod]

Are cross-dressers peaking their colleagues at work? Were DEI activists really bullied at school - or are *they* the bullies? Loved this conversation with @sometherapist Stephanie Winn - thank you! Link ⬇️

[Meghan Murphy @MeghanEMurphy]

It’s because females who attempt to “transition” realize their lives aren’t better, but worse, post-transition. That “transition” didn’t resolve their problems but instead destroyed their bodies and health. Men’s sexual fetish remains post-transition, and since your fetish was your primary motivation for “transitioning,” there is no incentive to “detransition.” Indeed, your “transition” allows you to flaunt your fetish in public, unchallenged

[Cynthia Breheny @PTElephant]

Predatory men have

• Built entire dungeons in their homes where they trapped their own daughters for years without their wives knowing (Josef Fritzl)
• used places of worship, schools, politics, causes, celebrity to gain access to victims
• trapped women in marriages to gain access to their children and harm their wives

And yet, I see comments all the time about how men would never pretend to be women to prey on them

Amazing

[Laura Becker🐦‍🔥 @LauraBeckerReal]

When you're suicidal, you don't think of tomorrow's consequences. Yet, transgender-identifying dysphoric patients' suicidal ideation is often seen as evidence they NEED the transition, instead of a glaring red flag that they cannot consent to permanent medical mutilation.

[The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦 @Rob_ThaBuilder]

These lunatics in Academia have gone absolutely mental, denigrating female breast feeding as "rooted in cisnormative maternity" frameworks (indeed, the only framework with which it CAN be rooted, as men dont have mammary glands capable of producing milk).

The way they discuss breastfeeding here highlights perfectly the dysgenic, anti-human mindset that these freaks approach every topic: nothing matters except shattering norms, destroying anything helpful, and uplifting everything harmful.

The problem with the "cisnormative maternity framework" they say, is it "limits how feeding is discussed, documented and supported", as if that shiuld matter one iota.

Breastfeeding has one and only one purpose: nourishing a child. Thats the only thing that matters. These baby-haters will throw out Breastfeeding that nourishes a child if it "limits how it is discussed and documented".

They also complain about how "traditional breastfeeding" success is measured by obsolete things like "latch, growth, bonding" when it SHOULD be measured - according to them - by "parentel well-being, reduced dysphoria, and affirming parentel identity".

This is the pure narcissistic, grotesque mindset at the heart of all trans activism: the only thing that matters is making men comfortable in their belief of their own womanhood. Nothing else matters, not the morher-child bond, not the health of the baby, not the developmental milestones.

Not once is the babies welfare mentioned here, and in fact it denigrates and undermines prioritizing the babies health in favor of a man's ability to pretend hes a woman by allowing him to feed a human baby the pus-filled secretions from his drug-engorged nipples.

These ppl are among the most disgusting in the world.

[Independent Women @IWF]

BREAKING: The Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Independent Women ambassador & detransitioner @SorenAldaco, allowing her medical malpractice case against her former therapist & Three Oaks Counseling Group to proceed.
🧵

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

This gentleman believes that women who don’t feel comfortable sharing single-sex spaces with men should simply remove themselves.

And if your MP isn’t already arguing for that position, perhaps it’s time to ask them why not.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

As the world wakes up from the pink-and-blue fever dream of the last decade, there are going to be a lot of people saying that we should forgive and forget, that demanding accountability will only do more harm, and that we should focus on the future instead of bringing up a past we can do nothing to change

Anytime you hear someone say that, I want you to remember this video. I want you to remember the pain in their voices. The regret. This didn’t happen by accident.

These kids were deliberately pushed along this path because the people doing the steering had ulterior motives of their own that had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to “protect trans kids.” They were lied to, they were manipulated,
they were groomed - yes, groomed - and there has to be some accountability. There have to be consequences for this.

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

One of the most thought provoking speeches I've seen in a while.

@Miss_Snuffy on how raising a generation to see the world through oppressors and the oppressed is changing the West.

If you don't have time, bookmark it. It's worth every second.

WATCH:

[Genevieve Gluck @WomenReadWomen]

US liberalism is a sadistic cult that worships suffering. They don't want to be happy, because happiness is sinful.

The more one has even the appearance of suffering, the more authority they have. They are crabs in a barrel.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

There’s a man named Tremaine Carroll. He’s a third-strike lifer in CA who has multiple convictions for kidnapping and sexual assault. He doesn’t take estrogen, or use a woman’s name, but he says he’s a woman, and in spite of the fact that a prison psychologist says Carroll is a predator who’s gaming the system, the state of CA agrees.

They transfer the 6’2, 250 lb Carroll to Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, and they put a woman in the cell with him. A few months go by, and she turns up pregnant. No one’s sure whether or not it was actually consensual, but legally prisoners can’t consent, so they transfer her to another prison and move another woman in.

This one, he rapes.

When she reports it, the prison authorities punish her. They don’t take her to the hospital; instead, they strip search her and lock her in isolation. She’s left there for days, with no medical or psychological intervention, and while she’s locked up, Carroll counter-accuses; files a complaint against her under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

He’s not put in segregation, much less strip searched, and the victim is on track to spend years being punished for it, but Carroll gets greedy. The very day that he accuses the first victim of rape, he rapes his new cellmate too. Even the California prison system couldn’t overlook that one, and he was finally placed in segregation before eventually being transferred back to a men’s facility.

The story doesn’t end there. The California Bureau of Prisons has completely failed to punish any of the guards involved, and the judge who is overseeing the rape charges has decided that the prosecution must refer to the defendant by she/her pronouns, stating that otherwise his trial will not be fair. Mr. Carroll has also chosen to represent himself, which is a deliberate tactic meant to both delay the trial and torment his victims.

See, when a maximum security prisoner defends themselves, everything takes much longer, but he’s in prison for the rest of his life so it really doesn’t matter to him. In fact, he probably finds all of this highly entertaining.

The victims, on the other hand, are all serving shorter sentences, which means that they risk constantly having to have this dragged back up even after they return to normal life. It’s also extremely traumatic for victims to have these proceedings delayed. Every delay causes fresh trauma, and I know this because I have watched defendants do this to victims’ families for the last eight years, and to victims themselves before that.

This man is being allowed to use the system to punish the victims he used the system to rape, decades after he should no longer have been a threat to any woman. Given that I have spent my entire adult life trying to make the system work for victims, you’re goddamn right I’m happy to lend them some fvcking hammers — every last one I can get my hands on.