Morning Wire - How One Teen Escaped the Transgender Cult

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

Luke Healy shares how he was drawn into the gender ideology cult as a child, the role his mother played in saving him, and his mission to warn others about the lies surrounding gender transition. Andrea Mew from Independent Women’s Features joins the discussion. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's been more than a decade since the transgender kids issue entered the mainstream. Now more young adults are coming forward with stories about how they were groomed as teens into altering their bodies. While a disproportionate number of detransitioners are female, in our episode today, we speak with a unique voice, Luke Healy, about his experience and mission. Luke is featured in a new series called Identity Crisis. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Saturday, August 16th. is Morning Wire. Joining us now is detransitioner Luke Healy.

He's joined by Andrea Mew. She is the Independent Women's Features Managing Editor, working on their new series Identity Crisis. Luke and Andrea, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having us. Now, Andrea, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about this documentary series that you're making. Yeah, at our W features, we have a wealth of stories of detransitioners.

we've been working on since 2022 for our identity crisis series. We came across Luke's story and learned that his mother was an integral role in saving him from the transgender ideology and from the grasp of that movement. We got in contact with Luke and knew that we needed to feature his story as he's been speaking out in front of California legislatures and online as a male detransitioner, which is a very important voice to have in the movement. We do often see a lot about female detransitioners. There are fewer male detransitioners that speak out, and that really resonated with us as something that we needed to cover at IW features. Additionally, we care deeply about the role of parents

in a child's health decisions, and we believe that parental rights are being overrun by gender ideologues. And what happened with Luke's story is that his mother was able to step up and stand up against the gender ideologues. Now, Luke, I want to get to your story. First, let's just start at the beginning. When did you begin having confusion about your gender and how did that begin? Thank you for having me again and thank you for the question. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I became immersed in internet spaces that were very dominated by many perverse adults that were in all kinds of chat rooms and other styles of communities with children, with minors, right, with me. And I became exposed more and more to gender ideology, homosexual ideology, etc. and through this, I began questioning feelings that I believe now, and I think most people believe now that are normal for adolescence and for being a young man or a young woman, of just being uncomfortable with myself.

And I began to as as Andrea put very well, these ideologues wanted to be assigned to them. So instead of just being, you know, 12 or 11 and 10 and thinking, oh, you know, I have normal feelings of being self-conscious as a little boy or a little girl, this must be that I'm a girl or I'm a boy or I'm gay or I'm this. And that's kind of the whole MO of their movement. It's just taking normal feelings of children and young men and young women and adults as well and turning them and interpreting them through their own kind of dark lens that they interpret everything through. Now, what kind of chat rooms were you finding this in? I mean, what does the pipeline look like, let's say, from just a normal website that a child might be in to encountering these types of people? That's a really great question. There's definitely a diversity of it, especially that I'm seeing now. Children are accessing this stuff through all kinds of means. I mean, unfortunately, nowadays, unlike when I was a kid, you're starting to see this in local libraries in small towns. My own small town has a library now with gender ideas. all over it. But for me personally, I was going to a website called Cumbler to do like kind of we call it like role playing, but it's basically like writing in different fandoms for things that are normal for a kid to be interested in, video games, different books and everything.

So it was really innocuous, which is why, you know, I have people ask me, well, how did your parents not know this is going on? It's very insidious. It never starts with like, oh, I'm joining the, at least back for me, it never started with, oh, I'm joining the transgender community or I'm joining the transgender chat, right? It was all things that it's normal for kids to like and art for kids to like. But slowly, adults started introducing more and more just like abominations within art, within communications with me, within ideas to me, that were just completely perverse. And so starting with like Tumblr and going onwards from there, it just started with really, like I said, inocuous hobbies and turned into something a lot darker.

So what was it that was so attractive about this ideology that made it seem like this was truthful and that this was something alluring to you as a kid? I'm just trying to get into the mind of a child who comes across this. What was it that drew you into it? When I was a child, I had a very good life. I have a family that I would not trade anything. I would not trade them for anything in the world. And I grew up in a good size. solid town. Unfortunately though, for whatever reason, I had some things that I was embarrassed about, that I was self-conscious about. And I believe that when I was a child, the answers of, this is normal when you're this age, when you're that age, right, being told that they weren't satisfactory to me

for some reason. They couldn't address some kind of, like, I guess the word would be like melancholy that I had, like this kind of feeling that everything was sort of dower or wrong with me. And this was an easier, it was a simpler solution, a more immediately gratifying solution, but of course it's not the correct solution. But unfortunately, I think at that age, you're much more likely to reach out and grab for something that sounds simple rather than the complex answer that like you might just grow out of this and this is normal and this is just the human condition. Yeah. Now, how long did it take from the time you encountered this stuff on? on say Tumblr to being convinced that you were trans?

I mean, I would say looking back on it, it was a process of only like months maybe. Like already questioning it at weeks. I mean, these ideas, I think, were almost as dangerous as children being exposed to drugs for me. I mean, it's just immediate. It's dopamine, right? It's encouraging immediate instant gratification.

So, I mean, I went from being, I don't want to say normal, right? Because, you know, kids are just different. That's how they are, I think. But I was a pretty well-adjusted, you know, human being for that age. And then within a matter of weeks and months, I became completely irrational, completely convinced of something that just simply cannot be true. And of the idea that the only way to assuage the feelings I had within myself

that I hated myself was to completely change myself. I'm curious, Andrea, is his answer similar to answers that you heard from other families and other kids? It's not just the families and kids that we've been covering at IW features where we're hearing these same stories.

I can speak firsthand to this as well. I may seem like a very long-time conservative figure writing for IW features, writing for EV magazine, producing these documentaries for IW features. However, I grew up Democrat by default, and I was exposed to a lot of the same gender ideology, radical feminism, you name it, on websites just like Tumblr. I would have been

best friends with a Luke Healy. He and I were joking when we were looking back at some of the pictures of when he was in the transition stage. He was feeling a little bit self-conscious about the longer hair, understandably so. It's not a lot of. awkward time of your life where you're identifying as something that you now know you are not. And so I decided to send him a picture of myself with short green hair because I was part of those communities. I never personally identified as transgender because I've always been very firm in my identity as a woman. But I would have been best friends with a Lou Keely and I told him, you know, I would have bleached your hair. We would have dyed our hair together. We would have

had fun. I know these stories firsthand, because so many of the people that I grew up with are now identifying as transgender, friends that I don't speak to you from high school anymore that have breasts. They did not have breasts before. They are men that are on hormones. They had normal hormonal function from what I understand, but now something is going to be disrupted in their cycles. So I personally take interest in the stories of detransitioners, not just from the conservative angle, but as someone who has seen firsthand how it can completely change a person's life. I personally don't feel like I know the people that I grew up with anymore because, frankly, I don't. They're not the same people. And it can often feel like

you've lost your friends. Right. Now, Andrea, where did you grow up? I also grew up. I also grew up in California, though Southern California. Now, in the email you sent, I'm not sure if it was your words, Andrea, or if it was Luke's words, but the gender ideology was described as cult-like. What makes it cult like? I'll ask you first, Luke, and then Andrea, you can piggyback if you have something you want to add. Gender ideology is, there are contrasts and there are similarities. The cults that we think of traditionally are very, they're very easy to spot, right?

They have an organization. They usually have a treasurer. They usually have a location. I mean, there's a few here close to me in rural California that I can think of off the top of my head right now. The contrasts sort of end there. And the diffuse nature and the decentralized nature of gender ideology makes it an even more insidious cult. Because you can't launch a prosecution necessarily of the entire movement is a funny word for it. but movement, if you want to use that word, because it is so insidiously, like, enmeshed with

different parts of society. But it's a cult in the sense that I had many, many friends who are, you know, trans-identified. And not all of them, but 99% of them will not speak to me anymore. They think, you know, I'm the devil. They think I'm a bigot. They think I hate them. And that right there is one of the biggest things that they had to do to me. as a child. They had to make me hate my family. They made me hate my country. They made me hate the

idea of a family, of men, of women. They have to make you hate everything except them. And they do that through convincing you that the world hates you. I mean, this is a pattern with many radical ideologies and many, you know, on all sides of the spectrum, radical ideologies want to isolate you from the family because the family is the anchor upon which every good thing in our country. and probably in our world rests. And if they can rip you away from that structure and make you hate it, they can make you hate everything except them. And then at that point, you're alone because you've made yourself alone.

And so the only people you have to depend on are them, which is extremely cult-like. And, you know, as someone that has family history in cults that are a little more recognizable in the world, there is, the similarities are very very important similarities are very striking. And now, Andrea, do you have anything you want to add to that? Well, Luke put it perfectly in the idea that it is all about divorcing us from tradition, divorcing us from family values. And it goes beyond just the parent and the child relationship.

It's also about divorcing healthcare professionals from being able to do their jobs, educators from being able to do their jobs. These are additionally stories that we cover at IW features about how we need to reclaim biological reality, not just for America's youth, but for America's professionals, as we are increasingly unable to speak truth in the workplaces. And thankfully, President Trump has made some great strides in resetting the culture and the narrative for our nation, but each state has a lot of action that it must take in order to get an alignment with President Trump. Now, Luke, back to your... personal story. You came out as trans to your parents. What age was that and how did that go?

Coming out, so to speak, as they call it, was around 12 or 13, 13, I think. And it went poorly. But it was because my parents were completely taken aback by this. They didn't even comprehend it. You know, I liked girls pretty early on. I was pretty normal other than being a little insular and a little bookish. and a little, you know, they call it nerdy now. And they were just like, I think just like dumbfounded by the way that the internet and that these these cults of adults had completely turned me into something that they didn't recognize and completely warped my worldview so severely that I was propositioning for them to voluntarily and gladly, that's what I wanted them to feel.

I wanted them to feel glad to mutilate their son's body. What about other adults in your life? How did they respond? Other adults in my life, there were various kinds of acceptance. And when I say acceptance, right, I don't mean it in the positive way that that community tends to put things. A lot of adults around me were confused. A lot of them thought that this was a good idea. And they were looking at my parents and saying, why aren't you doing this?

Why aren't you helping your, you know, they would have been calling me their daughter. but why aren't you helping your son, right? Why aren't you doing this for him? You're a bigot. You're not helping him. You're making him worse. My parents endured an onslaught from other adults of what those people would have called very logical, rational arguments. But of course, they're all based on the irrationality that a man can become a woman and that distorting a child's biology and disrupting those processes is a good idea.

There were some good ones, though, too. I grew up in a good community, and a lot of them were voice. concern. A lot of confusion too. This wasn't quite as popular yet. It was getting there, but it wasn't quite as popular yet where I lived. So there was definitely a mixed reaction, but a lot of confusion on both sides of that dichotomy. Now, when you say other adults, are these people from your school, healthcare professionals? Were these people with any authority over your life that were pressuring your parents? Who were these adults? Doctors, psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, many people from Kaiser Permanente and other such

institutions that I was working with from my parents. My parents brought me to these institutions trying to figure out why my mental health was declining so rapidly. They did not want to affirm me, but unfortunately all they were really offered, the only help, so to speak, that we were offered was, well, you should affirm and these things will be fixed. My parents were losing their child and there was not one institution except our community in my hometown and my dad's community as a public servant that would help him. Every educated official, so to speak, every educated healthcare professional was fully supportive of destroying their child. So you finally reach age 18. You're free to make your own health care

decisions. What happened then? At age 18, I was struggling immensely with alcohol abuse and other problems. My mental health continued to decline through my teenage years. And basically, what happened then was that through organizations like Planned Parenthood and other unsupervised medical practitioners, if you can even call them that, began administering me hormones. Many of them lacked proper testing on me, especially one of them never even saw me physically, never did assessments on me that even the transgender supportive medical community thinks are necessary to protect the health of people. And my life continued to decline. I continued to spiral into experimenting with drugs. I just devolved into all kinds of debauchery and degeneracy and essentially criminal behavior

towards others and really towards myself. My life spiraled. My hormones were all over the place. There are consequences still today from these hormones and from this part of my life that are hard to undo. I'm curious, what made you begin to have doubts about being transgender? At first, it was kind of a slow learning experience

of seeing what the so-called transgender community was doing, especially as I got later into my transition, perverts like Dylan Mulvaney and Leah Thomas, were becoming more popular. They were becoming more vocal, becoming more visible. And despite me being transgender identified, I looked at those men and said, I don't want to be this way.

I don't want to treat women like this. I don't want to be in women's spaces like this. I don't, I'm not this. I don't associate with this kind of perversion. But I was confused because I still felt, well, I can't be a man. And then I began watching things like Jordan Peterson's overviews of like the W Path Files and other things coming out from outlets like yours and outlets like just conservative outlets that were actually looking

at this stuff very logically and thinking to myself, when they're talking about these patients that are being exploited for money and they're being treated like numbers and being treated like every one of them is just a new guinea pig for someone to try some new strange experiment on, am I one of these people that's being done this on? And then there was also a poll towards Christ and a pull towards my faith, a pull towards my church. I spoke with, you know, Catholic priests. I heard what Catholic priests had to say online and them drawing me towards the Lord and towards faith and realizing that this isn't what God wants for me and it's not what God made me for. I still don't know today what exactly God made me for, but I know for sure it was not that.

Now, I'm going to follow up with you about that, but I also want to ask Andrea, his description of getting funneled through these medical procedures with very little oversight. Is that the typical trajectory and how other people are experiencing the health care system when they become trans? From what we've seen, it's kind of a mixed bag, but there are often these really shocking cases where there is such little oversight, particularly with very important substances that should be controlled. Hormones should be controlled substances that aren't just given out. nilly to children if they, you know, go to their school counselor and they discuss feeling a

little bit strange about how their body is developing during puberty. We've had several detransitioners we've spoken to at IW features who unfortunately underwent double mastectomies before they were even legal adults. We're talking women like Chloe Cole. Prisha Mosley, we're talking additionally, but some new ones that we're going to be featuring later on in this year. And it's really tragic that people aren't able to seek retribution for what these medical professionals, so-called professionals, have been able to do to their bodies. Oftentimes, the statute of limitation runs out for these women. But, you know, there are some strides being made to potentially fix legislation in such a way where statutes of limitation are extended for people who have undergone this so-called

transgender care, which is really just bodily harm. And I hope that that's going to be the case, because a lot of these detransitioners don't realize until it's too late, frankly, with the statute of limitations that this had been a mistake. And there's no wrong time to realize that it was a mistake. There's no wrong time to have that calling to Christ, if that's what brings you to realize that you are living out a lie through transition. Now, Luke, you mentioned that you started listening to Jordan Peterson and also looking at some Catholic sermons online. How did you get interested in those resources and what did you take away from them? My mother, who's a very intelligent and well-read and compassionate woman

for years, had been studying these things, had found people like Dr. Peterson and others that were looking into these things more critically. Mr. Walsh, for example, as well, well, Matt Walsh, all these kind of figures that were looking into these things with very clear eyes. And she had urged me for years to look at the other side. And there's a hesitancy too, right? Because you're being, you've been groomed by this cult to know, to understand that these people hate you, right? And that they're going to mock you. And so there's kind of like a, oh man, like I don't want to watch something that's going to be mocking me. And when I watched Mr. Peterson and talk about this stuff or these things,

I saw an intellectual engagement with these ideas that are harming thousands of children everywhere and were harming me at the time and we're harming me spiritually and harming me physically and harming my family. And I just started seeing the consequences that he was talking about others and I have not experienced the full range of consequences

that like Ms. Cole, for example, who was mentioned in other T-transitioners, but I've experienced a lot of them and seeing Dr. Peterson talk about them and seeing his response to them because finally listening to my mom and trying to just listen to the other side for a second, I was unable to look away at that point. I could not look away because I couldn't look away just from what he was saying. I couldn't look away from myself because what he was describing

and what these other people that were talking about this issue were describing were things that I had already done and seen in my own life. they were describing things that they couldn't in my mind possibly know because these were stories that only myself and a few other people knew because they were about me. I saw myself in these words and I thought this isn't right. I can't do this. I need to change. Well, Andrea and Luke, thank you so much for coming on today. This was great. And thank you so much. It's very powerful. Thank you so much for having us. That was Luke Healy and Independent Women's Features, Andrea Mew. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.