Mass Hysteria and Moral Panic
There were no witches in Salem or Satanists running childcare centres
Moral panic is a condition where an imaginary threat to society is over-hyped by a small group who perpetrates their false claims successfully through the mass media of the era and can cause great harm, especially to a target group of the population.
Mass hysteria is a phenomenon where a breakout of an abnormal illness whose causes cannot be identified suddenly and unexpectedly afflicts large numbers of people, seemingly spontaneously.
Moral panic and mass hysteria would seem to be something that is part of the human condition since we can find so many examples from antiquity to the present day and in many different cultures and countries around the world.
One of the best-known cases of both these phenomena was the Salem witch trials (1692−1693) in colonial Massachusetts, USA, where spontaneously, many adolescent girls had convulsions that were considered to be caused by witchcraft. This resulted in the Salem witch trials, a series of hearings which led to the execution of 20 people and the death of five other people while being held in jail.
On a lighter note, parents of teenagers in the 1950s experienced moral panic over the music that their children seemed to be transfixed by. And not by just how “sexy” the beat made this music sound (and how sexualised the dancing appeared to be), but by the possibility of race mixing it seemed to encourage. To have young, teenage white girls in America screaming to someone like Little Richard as he's singing "Good Golly Miss Molly, you sure like to ball. When you're rocking and rolling, can't hear your mama call." was terrifying to many parents.
So, what is the form of the current mass hysteria and its accompanying moral panic?
Transgenderism.
The current American driven idea that we can change our sex, that we can choose from an unending number of genders and sexes, and that feelings and beliefs should predominate in every aspect of society is a perfect example of mass hysteria.
But before believing the myth that mammals can change their sex, let’s look at another more recent moral panic that not only created great harms to those caught on the ‘wrong side’, but inadvertently hurt the purported victims it was supposed to be protecting. The parallels are striking.
In 1957, a book was published that turned out to be an unlikely success. “The Three Faces of Eve” was made into a smash hit movie and brought to the attention of the general public the concept of multiple personalities as a result of childhood trauma.
The next box office hit in the genre, “Sybil” (1976), based on the book of the same name published in 1973, confirmed to many that this mental health condition was the ‘real deal’.
In 1980 just in time for the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) a book was published called “Michelle Remembers” by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder (who started out as her therapist and ended up as her husband, which is a very dodgy origin story).
The DSM-III had a brand-new mental health diagnosis: Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). This was revised for the DSM-IV (1994) and morphed into Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Mental health professionals claimed that this disorder was a direct result of extreme childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse. It was characterised as a defensive response that worked by suppressing memories of this abuse, so introducing for the first time the concept of “recovered memories”. This could only be fixed by extensive therapy that allowed for these repressed memories to emerge again.
According to the DSM-III, the outcome of severe childhood trauma manifesting as adult problems arising from horrific abuse that had been forgotten about was extremely rare. That did not stop the incredible surge in diagnosis:
Before 1944 there were just 76 cases of multiple personality disorder reported (Taylor and Martin,1944). Before 1970 there were a total of 79 well documented cases in the world literature (Lilienfeld and Lynn, 2003). Prior to 1980 there were around 200 (Bliss, 1980). By 1986 cases had risen to 6,000 (Coons, 1986). By the mid-1990s estimates put the number of MPD/DID cases at 40,000 in north America (Ross, 1997).
Does this sound familiar? It should.
Traditionally, a transgender identity was almost exclusively claimed by a very small number of boys, but no longer:
In 2009/10 there were 32 girls and 40 boys referred to Tavistock GIDS. [The Tavistock Gender Identity Service is the leading gender clinic in the UK.] In 2011/12 the sex ratio reversed and the gap between boys and girls has continued to widen year on year ever since. The total number of referrals for 2018/19 in England alone is 624 boys and 1,740 girls. In less than a decade there has been a 1,460% increase in referrals of boys and a staggering 5,337% increase in girls.
There is as much actual evidence of girls with genuine gender dysphoria as there was for women with MPD/DID. Which is none actually. Choosing to ‘opt out’ of womanhood in an hypersexualised and patriarchal society is not gender dysphoria or evidence that you are “born in the wrong body” (because, well, nobody is); it’s despair at a perceived future that instructs girls that there is only one way to be a woman, and that is to be at the mercy of men and their desires.
In 1980, a new element to the MPD/DID came into play with the publication of “Michelle Remembers” by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder. The world was introduced to Satanic ritual abuse by Michelle’s “survivor” story that included “recovered memories” of being tortured and sexually abused by a Satanic cult who imprisoned her for a year at age five. Here we are told that until she had 200 hours of therapy with the man she went on to marry, she had totally forgotten about this experience. The things she forgot included: being kidnapped from her family and held for a year while she was “raped, sodomised with candles, being forced to defecate on a Bible and a crucifix, witnessing babies and adults butchered and sacrificed, spending hours naked in a snake-filled cage, and having a devil’s tail and horns surgically attached to her.”
And the great Satanic Panic was born.
In 1983, a mother who was later found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, initiated a court case that was to have a global impact. The McMartin preschool abuse trial was the costliest trial in American history. Seven years and US$15 million dollars later, no one was ever convicted of anything, and those who spent years in jail never got those years back either.
Judy Johnson was the mother of a two-year-old boy who was cared for at the McMartin preschool about ten times in 1983. She complained that the 25-year-old son of the owner (who was employed by the preschool) had molested her son. Her son could not identify this man, but that didn’t stop authorities from searching his home, where ‘evidence’ was found implicating him. That he had a Teddy bear and a copy of “Playboy” magazine was enough to damn him to a nightmare that lasted for over seven years (five of which were spent in jail), but led to no convictions against him or any other employee of the preschool.
This would have been bad enough on its own, but the case spawned an entire industry in tandem with the changes to the DSM.
As the Satanic Panic spread through the USA and then around the world, the playbook was the same. First, interview the children using leading questions and coercive techniques. Because of course except in exceptional, rare circumstances, there was no abuse of any sort at all, let alone ritual Satanic abuse, so children would deny anything had happened. These were children under five years of age, and some of them were non-verbal as they were so young.
The denial of abuse by children was met with more leading questions and offers of rewards for the ‘correct’ answers and manifested in more and more bizarre claims by children including events and acts such as being taken to a church where children were made to watch a baby being beheaded and then forced to drink the blood. Being sodomised while their head was in the toilet and being taken to a car wash while locked in the boot (trunk) of a car. Teachers at schools were accused of chopping up rabbits and affixing satanic symbols to children’s bottoms and of burning areas of their skin (that remarkably, their parents had never noticed even though these children were too young to bathe unsupervised).
Children like to please adults, especially those they trust. They also prefer to gain praise, rather than dissatisfaction from those around them. As they were interviewed repeatedly, the stories grew and grew as the adults became more fascinated with them. Kids are good at reading the room and quickly figure out what gets them attention and rewards; at their level of understanding anything they say is their ‘truth’.
So, leaving the satanists behind for a moment, what are the parallels with so called “trans kids”?
According to the trans lobby, children know even as fetuses that they are “really” transgender.
So called trans children are an invention of the trans agenda because children are not thinking along gender distinction lines until some adult indoctrinates them. Ironically, for a movement which talks about “spectrums” the trans lobby “born in the wrong body” discussion only gives children a choice of two “identities”: boy or girl. Or a third choice may be “neither boy nor girl” (nonbinary), which is a totally made-up term that ignores the binary reality of reproduction in mammals.
Which in its simplest iteration means that if your daughter likes to climb trees, play with trucks, not dolls and avoids the colour pink, rather than just being a kid, she is clearly a boy. And if your son likes sparkles, tutus and glitter then look out world, he is a girl, despite his having a penis.
“Trans kids” serve several purposes for adults, but are a betrayal of trust for children. It can be hard to admit this, but most parents are thrilled if the world recognises that their child is ‘special’; I mean who wants an average kid? As Garrison Keillor said at the end of his Lake Wobegon monologues: "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." The internet has been a bonanza for publicity hounds and many of these otherwise unremarkable people were seemingly blessed with a ‘special’ child, who also turned out to be a family financial goldmine. The young “I am Jazz” star is going into adulthood with more than “her” parents’ blessings; a hefty bank balance will make “her” future brighter than average.
Parents may have their own, previously undiscovered mental health issues that they manifest through their child. Transitioning a child can take a very long time and will require a lot of parental input and focused attention that may not be attainable for a parent otherwise. And there would appear to be no end to the hubris of some doctors who not only become fabulously wealthy, but glide along on a comfy cushion of fame derived from the mutilation of children.
And then there are the parents who would rather end up with a mutilated child than a gay child. The poster girl for this is none other than Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, the taxpayer supported group in the UK that advises children to lie to their parents, gives them scripts to learn to obtain harmful hormone prescriptions and sends breast binders to young girls without parental consent. When he was only 16 years old, Susie arranged for her son to be castrated because she was afraid he was gay. See also this story from the US where growing up to be gay was not going to be acceptable to this mother.
Considering that the trans agenda is not just deeply misogynistic, but homophobic as well, it’s no surprise that young people are choosing a trans identity over a gay or lesbian reality. Gays and lesbians are now ‘ordinary’; in Western countries they can largely live their lives under the same set of laws and obligations that govern the behaviour of heterosexual individuals. There is no glamour or shock value in coming out as gay or lesbian anymore.
Announcing to the world that they are trans has been a truly wonderful gift for kids who do not fit the societal standards for traditional gender roles. Imagine what it must feel like to go from unpopular and possibly bullied unremarkable kid to a “stunning and brave” special child that everyone caters to. Feminine looking boys and neurodivergent girls suddenly ‘belong’ in their school communities and become untouchable to those who previously may have teased and tormented them on a daily basis.
The children in the McMartin preschool trials were interviewed multiple times and participated in many court appearances. Even the prosecution admitted after watching interview tapes that the children embellished their stories with each telling.
The beginning of the long nightmare of many hours of interviews and court appearances for all the children caught up in the Satanic Panic was a group of normal, healthy kids doing what kids do: making up games, playing pretend and creating their own worlds. They were abused, not by any preschool staff, but by psychologists and other health professionals and by their own parents who allowed them to be increasingly rewarded for embroidering events that never happened in the first place to the point where any credulity had vanished.
The other group who paid a high price for this particular moral panic were childcare workers, especially men. Job loss, imprisonment (that often didn’t lead to a conviction) and the immense social stigma that follows an accusation of this sort are not easily discarded. Some cases took 30 years to exonerate falsely accused staff.
The parallels here are astounding.
The starting point for the Satanic Panic and transgenderism is the same: normal, healthy young children just being kids. There is nothing more magical than a child’s imagination. They can be anything, however improbable and if the loved and trusted adults in their lives play along by suspending reality for a time, great. But when those adults confirm childish delusions or worse, prime children to accept something that is not true or achievable, permanent harm ensues.
No children were subjected to satanic ritual abuse in day care centres, but staff were jailed, in some cases for extended periods.
No child is trans as this is a fiction created by a fusion of mental health conditions and capitalism, which has no problems coining a considerable profit, regardless of real-world consequences.
Added to this is the fact that the vast majority of children who are unhappy with the sexed body they have will, if supported through the turmoil of adolescence, come to terms with their reality.
False memories are actually easy to create, especially within the context of a trusted relationship. It is not a challenge for a therapist to get a client to ‘remember’ something that never happened, and it is not hard for an adult to convince a child that something bad happened or that if they do A (play with trucks) it means they are “really” B (a boy, but without a penis).
“Follow the money” will give you many answers to the question of what drives the mass hysteria of both the Satanic Panic and transgenderism lobby.
Literally billions of dollars were spent prosecuting innocent childcare staff. Children were left convinced that adults who were supposed to be caring for them, harmed them instead. The real damage to these children was caused by those who profited by their false ‘memories’.
Likewise, children who are told that they can be whatever sex they choose and this has nothing to do with their sexed bodies, are being lied to by adults they trust to care for them. Hospitals, health professionals, Big Pharma and the entire capitalist structure have much to gain from the creation of lifelong medical patients.
There were no witches in Salem. Rock and roll music does not turn teenagers into sex fiends. Satanists did not use childcare centres for their rituals.
And no child can change their sex.
This is okay, but I have a couple of issues with it. The first is that MPD/DID is the fracturing of the child's personality to protect her/himself from abuse. The second is that the 90s spread of MPD is not the same as the trans social contagion of the last decade. Similarly to bulimia when that was given a name, magazines and the like reporting on this new disorder was what caused it to spread, as a semantic contagion. Social contagion as we've seen among trans-identifying individuals is the spread between friend groups, and tends to predominantly affect teenaged girls.