One mother of two children who identify as transgender said that she has lost her children to what she called the transgender “cult”. In some ways, the current transgender movement parallels the desire to reject one’s sexual identity that the Heaven’s Gate members experienced. They were all identically dressed in black flight suits and black sneakers: “Their idea of perfection was a kind of androgyny…All buzz cuts, all dressed to erase any trace of sexuality.” Researchers who have studied Applewhite claimed that he was so alienated from his homosexuality that he was teaching people not to have sex: “He would put people of opposite sexes together and force them to learn to become neutral, nonsexual.”įollowing the 1997 suicides, The Washington Post reported that when the suicide victims at Ranch Santa Fe, California were first discovered, police at first believed them all to be male. At the core of their ideology was the belief that the human body was a mere vessel for an asexual soul that could find salvation only in its home in outer space. Together Applewhite and Nettles recruited hundreds of followers around the country and required them to dress alike, cut their hair, and repress any sexual identity. Thomas “after administrators there learned that Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student there.”Īpplewhite then began a platonic relationship with a nurse named Bonnie Nettles, who he met during his stay in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1970 he had been fired from his job as a music professor at the Houston’s University of St. Applewhite had reason to try and repress his sexuality and that of his followers. This rejection of their earthly bodies was encouraged by Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite who was the first to be surgically castrated in an attempt to ensure he remained celibate. All wore exactly the same clothing – black “flight suits” and black Nike sneakers with Velcro fasteners. Female Heaven’s Gate members engaged in Hormone therapy and shaved their heads to appear androgynous. In a letter that accompanied a suicide video that was released shortly after the bodies were found, the members of the Heavens Gate cult claimed that they “came from the Level Above Human in distant space and have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task.” Calling their bodies “vehicles” or “containers” to be shed through their suicides, most of the 18 male Heavens Gate members had already undergone surgical procedures to castrate themselves in order to rid themselves of gendered desires and behaviors.
For the Heavens Gate cult members, the only way to reach this new stage was to first rid themselves of their despised gendered bodies through surgical castration and hormone therapy-and later through mass suicide when they would finally be free of their human bodies. They began to believe that they were actually alien beings from outer space, incarnate in human bodies with a mission to teach others about the possibility of reaching a new stage of existence.
Like transgendered individuals, Heavens Gate members became alienated from their bodies. Just as transgendered individuals claim that they are in the “wrong body,” each of the 39 members of the notorious Heavens Gate suicide cult became convinced that they also were “in the wrong bodies” prior to committing mass suicide in 1997 in a Rancho Santa Fe, California mansion. The current transgender movement has many parallels to some of the most notorious modern-day cults in terms of the recruitment strategies used, the secrecy, the alienation from family and friends, the indoctrination in the transgender ideology in public schools and on social media, and the refusal to allow dissenting voices. Cults are typically most successful when they prey on those who are lonely or isolated-those who feel they do not “fit in” with others-and those who are looking for meaning in their lives and so trust that others have the answers.