Jedi Mind Tricks, Hypnosis, and the Koans of Transgender Indoctrination

How Unwise, but Common Methods of Trance Induction Appear Prevalent in Gender Education and Philosophy

Photo by Lukas Denier on Unsplash

By

Shannon B Douglas

I was drawn into the transgender wars when my teenage daughter, who had grown up as a cuddly girlie girl who loved pretty clothes and who insisted that I paint her bedroom bubble-gum pink, declared that she suddenly felt that she was a boy who needed cross-sex hormones to be who she really was.  Like many liberal parents, I unconditionally accepted her exploration of labels like pansexual and bisexual in her tween years, though in retrospect I believe I should have guided her to ask more profound questions.  I thought it was a passing phase until it was too late.  Like so many other parents I struggled to understand why my child, who showed no signs of typical masculine behavior or traits before, could suddenly decide she was trans and how, bafflingly, and incomprehensibly, can some people claim they are gender non-binary.  I wondered if the radical spike in cross-sex identification in teenage girls is a social contagion.  Is it a mass psychosis?  Is it a conspiracy of predatory pharma companies or activists so consumed by theoretical knowledge that they live in alternate universes?  These kinds of confounding questions cross the minds of concerned parents as they attempt to understand what’s happening to their children.  As my daughter became possessed with the idea that she is not a girl, I became captured with a passion to understand why and how this is happening.  For those who have seen gender ideology take over the minds of someone, it’s as if some influence, like the dark side of the force, suddenly turns them.

I’ve spent my career making people aware of how biases and emotions can have long-term consequences in decision making.  As a lifelong learner with a deep curiosity about the world and about who I am, I’ve gradually assembled a tool kit to help me better understand human nature.  This explains my eclectic bookshelf of eastern philosophy, behavioral finance, economics, comparative religion, and archetypal psychology.  It also explains my habit of immersing myself in topics of interest and plumbing the depths of rabbit holes in my quest to understand more about myself and the world. 

I once completed four-hundred hours of course work and practice that led to a certification in clinical hypnotherapy.  Though I never practiced formally, understanding that we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, and how those parts of us function has been invaluable to me in my life and career.  Jonathan Haidt, though he doesn’t speak about hypnotherapy, shares a useful way of thinking of this division between conscious and unconscious in his book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” in which he suggests that our psyche could be understood as a rider and an elephant, as a rational mind and emotional, instinctive mind.  Hypnotherapy is the study of how to train the elephant, which has a mind of its own, but this knowledge also helps us understand how people exert undue influence and how they can manipulate others into bizarre and destructive behaviors.  

The idea of hypnosis conjures images in the mind of stage magicians with pendulous pocket watches convincing burly male volunteers that they’re chickens, or of regressing suggestible mid-life ladies into acting like they’re six-year-olds at a tea party.  One clucks and the other clutches an imaginary doll as the audience laughs, wondering if these people could really believe and act out these outrageous identities without self-consciousness.  We wonder how a person could influence another to act in such ways, or how people fall for gaslighting charms and subtle suggestions like those of the fictional Force-wielding Obi wan Kenobi.  “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”  

Stage tricks, Star Wars, and therapy aside, we know that a certain percentage of the population is highly suggestible to the influence of others.  We also know that while trained clinicians use trance to help people to train the elephant that can run rampant in their lives, these techniques, used unconsciously or more terrifyingly, when used deliberately, are just as accessible to grifters, manipulators and psychopaths.  

Trance is not an exceptional state of swirling cartoon eyes or weak-minded storm troopers directed by Jedi mind tricks. We are all in a trance all the time, embedded within a field of attention and sensory information.  The question is: what type of trance, and whose trance are we in?  Suspending disbelief when watching space operas about a mystical Force that pervades everything is a type of personal trance and so is going down rabbit holes on Tumblr and TikTok.  We can also observe collective trances at music concerts, sports games, and at charismatic religious events but these trance states are not normally ones in which we become highly suggestible.  This happens only when our conscious mind, the rider, is distracted in specific ways or knocked off the elephant completely allowing someone else to take the reins. 

Eastern mystics, upon whose cosmology the concept of The Force is based, give their students Koans and paradoxical thought problems which occupy the rider and tame the elephant to break down fixed thinking in the quest for enlightenment. “What’s the sound of one hand clapping,” they ask?  “How does one pass through the gateless gate?”  These masters have many decades of meditation and training, and they guide students seeking profound spiritual experiences towards a psychic liberation, but the goal of manipulative tyrants and authoritarians who exploit these techniques, is to deepen control over their targets.  

In hypnotherapy we understand that Koans, paradoxes and thought problems can puzzle, shock and capturing conscious attention; they can occupy the rider, creating opportunities to train the elephant, to literally program the unconscious mind.  These pattern interrupts throw people into what some hypnotherapists call “the void,” which is a state of confusion or even a state with no thought, induced with ambiguous and multi-layered language like double-binds and double negatives.  While the mind is occupied trying to make sense of “what won’t happen if you don’t quit smoking,” a skilled hypnotherapist can layer in commands to help the individual make significant life changes.  A skilled manipulator however can use the void state to gaslight their targets into ignoring abuse and into denying reality.      

One of the most profound and widely circulated Koans in public consciousness today is this concept of the non-binary identity – a state supposedly existing between male and female, or perhaps a combination of both.  This is connected to the mentally confounding introduction of pronouns which, in the language of hypnotherapy, presupposes the existence of a gendered soul.  This novel cosmology assumes the existence of a separation, not between conscious and unconscious, between soul and body, but between gender identity and biology.  This dissociates children from their sexed bodies with impossible metaphysical questions.  Non-Binary identities are of course fictions and the wisest among us know that in a dualistic world of light and dark, up and down, mother and father, non-duality is impossible for the mind to comprehend.  These conundrums are not stopping gender ideologues and fanatical social justice warriors however, and many of us wonder to what degree this ideology is contributing to the skyrocketing numbers of kids in the western world who believe they were born in the wrong body.  As a longtime student of human potential and psychology, giving children these incomprehensible paradoxes fails to instill in them the more important and universal question: Who am I?   

In the east, the goal of seeking to understand The Force and its mysterious ways, and the goal of the wisest masters, is to liberate the soul and to facilitate their students in the attainment of greater spiritual awareness.  This enlightenment, as I’ve long sought to understand myself, is sometimes described in the literature as a non-dual awareness, one of the highest and most difficult levels of spiritual attainment of legend.  As far as I can tell after thirty years on this quest myself, no wisdom tradition, guru, mystic, elder or Rinpoche have ever presented gender Koans to children.  It leaves me with an ongoing mental puzzle myself, wondering how do we break out of this collective trance??  

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Thanks for reading. For more musings from this author read Why does Social Justice Create Injustice?

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