You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Anita Bartholomew, author of Sacrificial Lambs , joins me for her third appearance to take on a question every critic of gender ideology hears: "Why do you care so much?" We dig into why that question works as a conversation-stopper, and why Anita argues the issue reaches far beyond a small number of people. We begin with queer theory and its roots, including Gayle Rubin's essay "Thinking Sex," an...

Adam B. Coleman returns to the podcast to tell the story behind his powerful essay, " I Found My Real Father. " Adam spent his whole life believing his father was a Trinidadian man who paid child support but showed almost no interest in him. Then an Ancestry DNA test pointed to Mississippi, not Trinidad, and within weeks Adam was on the phone with cousins, an uncle, and a 76-year-old father who ne...

In this episode, I talk with Noelle Mering, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of No Contact, about how "going no contact" shifted from a last-resort response to abuse into a normalized, even celebrated, way to handle political and ideological disagreement. Noelle offers a striking analogy: a healthy immune system expels real threats, but what we're seeing now looks more like...

Dr. Kristopher Kaliebe returns to the podcast (his first visit was episode 158) to talk about the capture of psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry in particular, by gender ideology. He is a child, general, and forensic psychiatrist at the University of South Florida, a former AACAP committee co-chair, one of the authors of the HHS review of pediatric gender medicine, and co-author of the...

Watch the video for the site tour. Click here to watch this on YouTube . Click here to watch it on Substack. If you take one thing from today’s episode, let it be this : parents of gender-confused youth can now take a quiz on my website to identify which archetypal themes they’re struggling with and which ROGD Repair lessons can help. That’s the big news here. If you take a second thing from today...

Pastor and counselor Chris Legg returns to talk about something he sees in nearly every grad student who arrives for training at Aletheia Family Counseling Center: fear. After 25 years of training new therapists from seminaries, secular universities, and everything in between, Chris says most show up convinced a lawsuit is coming the moment anyone learns what they personally believe. We start with...

Katy Faust returns to the podcast, and this time the conversation goes somewhere I didn’t expect. Katy founded Them Before Us to defend children’s right to their mother and father, and she opens by laying out the three principles that drive her work: children have a right to life, children need their mom and dad, and children should not be bought and sold. Those convictions put her at odds with al...

I'm eager to welcome back Lynn Chadwick, a retired NICU nurse and founder of Themis Resource Fund, to discuss the critical landscape of detransition lawsuits and legal accountability in medical transition. We dive deep into the first detransition lawsuit victory—the Varian v. Einhorn case—where a therapist was found 70% culpable, and what this landmark decision means for mental health professional...

I can’t believe I’m doing this.  My friend Soad Tabrizi — therapist, founder of Conservative Counselors, and a returning guest — asked if she could reverse-interview me about my own story, and I said yes. What came out was far more than I planned to share, and even if you’ve been following my work for years, it’s probably all new to you. I talk about growing up a white girl near Compton and Inglew...

The psychedelic renaissance is here — money is pouring in, states are legalizing, and a federal executive order has fast-tracked ibogaine research for veterans. But if you’re a conservative, a skeptic, or just politically homeless, is there room for you in this movement? In this episode I welcome back therapist Karen King (last heard in episodes 81 and 97 ) alongside her co-author Wesley Smith, a...

Retired Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Elspeth Cypher returns to the podcast (her first appearance was episode 183 ) to map the legal landscape of the gender turf wars, fought on four major frontiers: prisons, schools, sports, and therapy. As president of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) , Elspeth walks me through the Chandler case challenging California’s SB 132, which eliminated...

I'm welcoming back filmmaker Simon Esler, who first appeared on this podcast back on episode 54 to discuss his documentary Cut: Daughters of the West . This time, we're diving into his new docuseries You Are Here , which explores the landscape of cognitive warfare—the idea that human cognition itself has become the most contested territory in modern conflict. We start with the chilling case of Bar...

I'm so glad to welcome back my friend Kim O for her third appearance on the show. Kim is a relational soul coach and author who works directly with ROGD-affected teens and their parents — one of a very small handful of people doing work that closely mirrors my own. In this conversation, we dig into what it actually looks like to believe in your child's soul when everything about their behavior is...

This is Part Two of Teens and Screens, and it's the counterweight. Last episode, Dr. Johann D'Souza made the case for keeping toxic screens out of your teenager's hands entirely. Today I'm joined again by Dr. Will Dobud — social worker, researcher, and co-author of Kids These Days — who thinks the story we tell ourselves about phones and youth mental health is far bigger than the evidence behind i...

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on teens and screens, and I'm starting at one end of the spectrum on purpose. Today I welcome back Dr. Johann D'Souza, a clinical psychologist specializing in OCD and behavioral addiction, for an unapologetically hardline conversation. His position: never give your child a smartphone — and say no to the three "toxic screen uses" of video games, social media, and...

Today I welcome back Róisín Michaux — the Irish writer based in Brussels who covers women’s rights and free speech in the context of the transgender movement — for her second appearance on the show. When I booked this interview I had no idea what we’d cover; I simply trusted her to bring something worth digging into. What she brought is her ongoing investigation into the new World Health Organizat...

I’m welcoming back Diana Lutfi — independent legal expert, healthcare regulatory and bioethics consultant, and coalition builder — for a conversation about just how broken the American healthcare system has become, and how that brokenness is now colliding with the fight over therapist speech. I open with a personal on-ramp: my own recent ordeal getting diagnosed and treated for SIBO, and everythin...

My friend Ryan Rogers returns to the podcast for our third conversation. He's an addictions counselor in Texas, host of Reality Therapy , and now the author of two books — The Woke Mind and his new release, The Carpenter's Recovery , a Christian guide to 12-step recovery. We start with what's being called "gas station heroin": a chemical called 7-OH, extracted from kratom, that's roughly thirteen...

We've talked a lot on this podcast about institutional capture — whistleblowers, mission drift, what happens when ideology takes the steering wheel. Today my guest takes a different angle on all of it. Tanya de Grunwald hosts This Isn't Working, a podcast about workplace dynamics, and runs This Is Working, a business community for employers. From 2018 to 2024 she ran a club for early-careers heads...

Why does your teen tune you out? It might have to do with the role your message unconsciously casts her in. "Alter-casting" refers to the way every message you send implicitly assigns a role or identity to the person you're speaking with. If the role you cast your child in conflicts with how they want to see themselves, your message will be rejected — no matter how accurate, loving, or urgent it i...

In this solo episode, I'm diving into one of the most pervasive and underappreciated cognitive patterns I see across ROGD families: black-and-white thinking. It's the tendency to categorize everything in terms of two mutually exclusive extremes — all or nothing, perfect or ruined, success or failure — with no middle ground. I explain how this pattern is a normal feature of adolescent brain develop...

In this solo episode, I share one of my favorite metaphors for understanding how desistance actually unfolds in practice — because it rarely looks the way most parents hope it will. Many parents carry a fantasy version of desistance in their heads: a tearful moment of confession, an apology, a sudden reversal. That's almost never what happens. What actually happens is slower, messier, and far less...

In this solo episode, I pull back the curtain on the work I do the rest of the week as an ROGD parent coach. Most parents arrive with one goal in mind: convince their trans-identified child to stop believing in gender ideology. I explain why that's the wrong place to put your energy, and why I won't help you do it as a first step. The belief is downstream. There are two goals that actually matter,...

In this short solo episode, I introduce you to a figure who shows up again and again in my ROGD parent coaching work: the disenfranchised dad. He's usually a decent man — hardworking, opinionated, loves his kids — but somewhere along the way he ended up on the outside of his own family's emotional life, looking in. His wife is the emotional center. The kids bring everything to her. He drifts to th...

In this episode, I sit down with Suzannah Alexander — counseling-education whistleblower, writer of the Substack Diogenes in Exile , and now organizer with the National Association of Scholars. Suzannah enrolled in a Tennessee counseling master's program after 25 years as a stay-at-home parent, only to discover that what was being taught wasn't psychology at all. It was demographics, identity poli...