Accusation in a Mirror

The Cult Projection

In late 2024, a revealing conversation took place on X/Twitter between some of Aotearoa’s 'gender-critical' figures. They were discussing an upcoming two-day "De-Cult" conference in Christchurch, and their frustration was palpable.

"A two-day ‘De-Cult’ conference is on," one wrote, "without a whisper of the neo-rainbow cult in the programme."

It's crucial to understand that when many in the gender-critical movement use the word “cult” like this, it's not just a pejorative insult. It's not the casual slur people often use for any group they happen to disagree with. For them, it is a literal diagnosis and a deeply held belief that frames their entire world-view.

But what if this claimed diagnosis of others is, in fact, an unconscious self-portrait? This is where we encounter psychological projection: a defence mechanism where a person or group takes their own unwanted traits, anxieties, and behaviours and attributes them to someone else. It's a way of offloading uncomfortable truths by seeing them not in yourself, but in a designated enemy.

Sometimes, however, projection is not just a private defence. It can be cultivated into a deliberate propaganda tactic. In the field of propaganda analysis, this is called accusation in a mirror. Coined in the 1970s based on studies of organised hate campaigns, it involves accusing your target of the very wrongs you are committing yourself. The aim is to reframe hostility as self-defence and to make escalation seem justified. In the context of gender-critical activism, it becomes a rhetorical tactic that strips its target of humanity and fuels hostility toward trans people by portraying them as a fabricated threat to women and girls.

To give these observations a more rigorous framework, we can turn to the work of psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. In his groundbreaking 1950s study of brainwashing and ideological totalism, based on research with prisoners of war and members of authoritarian cults, Lifton identified eight criteria for “thought reform” environments: high-control groups that demand ideological purity and suppress independent thought.

When you examine the gender-critical movement through the lens of Lifton's criteria, their accusations start to look less like observations and more like confessions. The specific “symptoms” they diagnose in the trans community provide a strikingly accurate roadmap to the behaviours, tactics, and thought patterns found within their own ranks. Let’s unpack six common examples that map onto Lifton’s model.

1. Loading the Language: The Dogma and the Slogan

• The Claim: Gender-critical activists argue that the phrase “Trans women are women” is a dogmatic, thought-terminating cliché. They frame it as a meaningless mantra, supposedly born from a recent academic ideology and repeated only to enforce belief and shut down debate.

• The Reality: This is a strategic misrepresentation of both history and purpose. First, for the trans community, the phrase is not a debate-stopper. It is a concise statement of identity and a plea for basic dignity. It summarises a long-held and deeply personal understanding of self. Second, the concept it rests on, “gender identity,” is not some recent invention of the social sciences. It has been a foundational part of medical and psychological discourse since the work of Robert Stoller in the 1960s. Attributing this understanding to “Queer Theory” from the 1990s is factually incorrect, as the concept of gender identity predates that academic field by decades. This misattribution reveals a common tactic: conflating the lived reality of a group of people with an academic theory the critic dislikes. It allows critics to reframe a human identity as a hostile, abstract “ideology” that can be fought, rather than as a group of people who happen to share it. “Trans women are women” is not a quote from a recent textbook used to enforce dogma. It is a request for recognition, grounded in a well-established psychological understanding of selfhood.

• The Mirror: In Lifton’s model of thought reform, Loading the Language is a hallmark of high-control movements. Phrases like “Adult human female” and “Sex is real” are repeated endlessly on t-shirts, social media bios, and protest signs. These slogans aren’t used to open a discussion, but to end one. Ironically, they are the very thought-terminating clichés the movement accuses others of using. They create a false simplicity, shutting down nuanced conversation about biology, identity, and society, while enforcing loyalty to the group’s rigid worldview.

2. Community Support vs. "Love Bombing"

• The Claim: Gender-critical rhetoric asserts that LGBTQ+ communities “love bomb” vulnerable youth. They argue that the overwhelming affirmation and support a young person finds when they come out is a manipulative recruitment tactic to lure them into a “trans ideology.”

• The Reality: Imagine spending years with a fundamental secret about who you are, terrified to tell your family for fear of rejection. When you finally find a group of people, online or in person, who say, “We see you, we get it, and you’re okay,” that feeling is not manipulation. It is profound, life-altering relief. For countless LGBTQ+ youth, this sense of belonging is the single most important factor that keeps them safer from depression and suicide. It’s a lifeline, not a lure.

• The Mirror: Gender-critical online spaces for distressed parents are textbook examples of actual love bombing and what Lifton’s model calls the Dispensing of Existence. As leaked Genspect discussion forums show, these are spaces where parents are specifically validated for refusing to affirm their children. They are flooded with messages that recast this rejection as a heroic act: ‘You are not alone,’ ‘It’s not your fault,’ ‘You are a brave hero for standing up to this.’ This powerful validation isn't just about comfort; it's a recruitment strategy. It offers simple answers and a sense of community, but it’s conditional on accepting the group's ideology and, often, enlisting in a broader political crusade.

3. Family Isolation and "Brainwashing"

• The Claim: A cornerstone of the gender-critical "cult" narrative is that if a young trans person distances themselves from their family, it’s proof that the “cult” has brainwashed them and is isolating them from their loving parents.

• The Reality: This accusation wilfully ignores decades of painful LGBTQ+ history. The dynamic with transphobic parents today is identical to that of homophobic parents who, for generations, meant that coming out brought relentless abuse at home and, for some, being kicked out with nowhere to go. When a home becomes a place of constant misgendering, emotional abuse, and threats, a young person's choice to create distance isn't "brainwashing"; it's a calculated act of survival. Choosing to disconnect from those who hurt you isn't proof of a cult; it's proof of sanity.

• The Mirror: It is the gender-critical movement that actively provides tactics for isolation. The leaked conversations from their private forums mentioned above reveal parents being advised to cut off their child's internet access, to pull them from supportive schools, and to systematically distrust any therapist, teacher, or doctor who affirms their child. They create an environment where parents are told to trust only the movement's ideology over all other experts and, ultimately, over their own child's declared reality. This is not protecting a child. It is building a cage. Lifton identified this as Milieu Control, the tactic of controlling a person’s environment to enforce ideological conformity.

4. The Sacred Science of Social Contagion

• The Claim: To explain the rise in young people identifying as trans, the gender-critical movement heavily promotes the idea of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). They present it as a scientific phenomenon where teens are catching gender diversity like some kind of a social disease.

• The Reality: ROGD is not a real medical diagnosis; it's a political narrative constructed from parental reports on anti-trans forums. The original paper by Lisa Littman did not interview a single transgender young person. When researchers conduct studies that do involve speaking directly to trans youth, they find the opposite: the vast majority have known they were trans for many years. What these parents are witnessing is not “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” but “Late Onset Parental Discovery.” A young person in a hostile home learns to keep their identity secret, only coming out when they have built a support network. From the family’s perspective, it seems “sudden.” For the young person, it’s part of a much longer journey.

• The Mirror: The gender critical movement's approach to ROGD is a perfect illustration of Lifton’s concept of Sacred Science. The movement accuses affirming healthcare of being ideological while clinging to a scientifically and ethically bankrupt concept, contradicted by multiple peer-reviewed studies, as an article of faith. Mainstream science discards failed hypotheses; a closed ideological group elevates them to unimpeachable truth. They call others a cult, yet cling to a debunked theory like it was gospel.

5. Demand for Purity: The True Believer Test

• The Claim: Gender-critical activists often accuse trans communities of enforcing rigid ideological purity. They say that anyone who questions “trans orthodoxy” risks being shamed, harassed, or “cancelled” for even minor deviations.

• The Reality: Disagreement exists in every movement, but in most trans spaces the focus is on survival, solidarity, and mutual care rather than doctrinal perfection. Disputes over language, strategy, or political alliances happen in the open, and people continue to collaborate despite differences. While strongly held views can lead to conflict, the narrative of a single, unified “trans orthodoxy” ignores the diversity of perspectives across geography, race, class, and lived experience. It also disregards the power imbalance: trans communities are marginalised and have little institutional control. Portraying them as a powerful ideological machine that crushes dissent is a way to delegitimise their advocacy and reframe grass roots disagreement as authoritarian control.

• The Mirror: Within the gender-critical movement, purity tests are common. Some members proudly adopt the label “ultra” to mark themselves as uncompromising standard-bearers. Others are attacked for being too moderate or for engaging respectfully with trans people. Those who deviate from core narratives by supporting healthcare for adults, acknowledging non-binary people, or criticising harassment tactics are branded “captured” or “traitors.” This is exactly what Lifton described as Demand for Purity: the constant division of the world into the pure and the corrupt, where even insiders are policed for signs of impurity. The standard they accuse trans communities of enforcing is alive and well in their own ranks.

6. Doctrine Over Person: Knowing Without Asking

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the gender-critical movement is how its self-proclaimed experts operate. Authors like Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier, and Kathleen Stock hold themselves out as authorities on the trans experience. They claim to know what trans people truly think and feel, asserting that they transition due to social contagion, trauma, repressed homosexuality, or sexual fetishes.

Their expertise, however, is based almost entirely on their own preconceptions and prejudices. The method is simple: they declare that transgender people are unreliable narrators of their own lives. This is the ultimate expression of what Lifton's model calls Doctrine Over Person. The pre-written doctrine that being trans is a harmful delusion is treated as more true than any individual's lived reality. If a person’s experience contradicts this belief, it is the person who is dismissed as confused or dishonest, never the doctrine that is questioned.

This tactic allows them to treat an entire population as objects to be analysed from a distance, not as human beings to be listened to. By dismissing the very people they write about, they ensure their own prejudice is the only evidence that matters. It’s how they construct their fantasy of a ‘trans cult’: by ensuring no real trans voices can get in to complicate it.

The Final Mirror: Who The Experts Were Actually Talking About

And so, we return to the 'De-Cult' conference in Christchurch. The gender-critical activists were seemingly outraged that the event was ignoring what they called the "neo-rainbow cult." But the reality is far more tragic.

The conference did have a session on LGBTQ+ people. It was titled "Invisible rainbow youth: Purity, conversion and coming out of cults" about the queer individuals trapped inside actual cults, forced to doubly suppress their identities and often subjected to conversion practices.

The supreme irony is this: the gender-critical activists demanded the experts condemn the trans community as a cult. Instead, the conference explored how actual cults harm queer people through coercive suppression and conversion practices, the very tactics that the leaked internal chats show groups like Genspect actively strategise around and promote to parents.

They looked at a conference dedicated to fighting coercive control and saw only their projected enemy. They couldn't see that the conference's description of a harmful group, one that polices identity, demands conformity, and promotes conversion practices, was looking right back at them. Every accusation a confession, they were just unable or unwilling to recognise their own reflection.