Hazelden and Rehabs in Trans Church

Worshipping on Bended Knee at the Trans Altar

In 2006, I had the privilege of undergoing treatment at the beautiful Hazelden drug and alcohol addiction center in Center City, Minnesota, USA. A few days into my stay, my team of counselors called me on the carpet and told me to go and pack my bags. I had broken their rules: While walking with my “sisters” to the dining room, a guy from my country of birth was returning with his “brothers” from lunch, and we spotted each other. “Hey! Good to see you," we mouthed and waved over our groups heading in opposite directions. My punishment for this crime was to be sent home. Hazelden policy strictly forbade patients to have any contact whatsoever with patients of the opposite sex, and that apparently extended to saying “hi” in public, broad daylight (Hazelden did relent, however, and allowed me to complete my stay). 

A young woman close to my family needs the services of Hazelden Plymouth (for young patients, ages 12–25). Being concerned for her welfare, I visited Hazelden’s website to make sure that their once impeccable safeguarding standards were still in full force. 

Hazelden-Plymouth website states: “Once stabilized, a client moves into one of the gender-specific [not sex-specific; i.e. not reality-based] residential...halls. Each gender specific suite has a full bath…separate sleeping and living area…separated by a privacy wall.” I reread the sentence to make sure I hadn’t misread or misunderstood it. “Gender-specific” suite? A “privacy wall”? Hazelden, which had been ready to kick me – and I was no 12-25 year old spring chicken at the time – off their campus for saying “hi” to a male compatriot in public, in broad daylight, has decided that there is nothing wrong with allowing vulnerable young women and girls to share sleeping and living quarters with male drug/alcohol addicts who “declare a female gender identity.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Last year, the Church of Trans managed to  manipulate Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Conference into violating AA’s own 10th Tradition, no small feat – “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy” – when it changed the wording of its 1947 Preamble from “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women…” to “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of people...”, thus giving a nod to an ideology that demands we celebrate an entirely made up “trans” identity and eradicate biological sexual female and male identities from our language and society. 

The “trans" ideology has a stranglehold on the rehab/addiction industry. All the Minnesota rehabs I contacted have discarded basic safeguarding principles and divide its patient population according to “gender identity” (I wonder if they trawl the “genderfluid” individuals back and forth between units). My family would like our young family member to receive treatment for her substance abuse problem, but we cannot – we will not – send her into the “care” of people who allow adult male drug/alcohol addicts who “identify as females” to share living and sleeping quarters with an autistic, addicted girl not yet out of her teens. 

I wouldn’t without reason suspect that a male, whether or not “identifying” as a female, a cat, or a helicopter (according to Facebook’s wisdom, there are sixty “gender identities”), had nefarious intent. But it doesn’t matter. We cannot know people’s intent, which is why safeguarding principles – that were held inviolable by all institutions and schools until only a few years ago – were created in the first place. To guard and protect the vulnerable women in their care, Hazelden professionally and appropriately followed to the letter the most important preventative rule of safeguarding – maintaining strict separation of the sexes. Dismissing this cardinal rule is dangerous, irresponsible, and unprofessional. It will inevitably result in harm and already has. Most boys and men are good – most people are good – but there will always be a few bad apples. The most notable recent example is the Loudoun County School District case. The judge in the case said of the teenager (who had identified as “gender fluid”) found guilty of sexual assaults in a school girls’ bathroom that she had “read countless psychosexual evaluations, but…this one scares me.” 

Gender ideology has no base in reality. It is a neo-religious doctrine to which women are losing their sex-based rights and which has unconstitutionally been enshrined into federal and state laws. If you criticize or question this creed–The Church of Trans–you, the heretic, will be accused of hate and bigotry–heresy and blasphemy–and the TransInquisition will mete out punishment, that can include the loss of your livelihood. 

Hazelden is a private institution. It is under no obligation to pay heed to federal directives that order public schools and institutions to violate women and girls’ sex-based rights in favor of ideological poppycock. Yet Hazelden – like most of our cowardly institutions on bended knee before the Trans Church altar – has decided that the rights of vulnerable addicted women and girls to safety, privacy, and dignity must take a back seat to the rights of addicted males who “identify as females. Hazelden and the institutions that have adopted this misogynistic, homophobic, anti-reality cultish creed believe we must at all cost protect the rights (and “rites”) of Trans Church members (who are mostly white, straight men) to share living and sleeping quarters with vulnerable women and girls.

“When people can be made to believe en masse that biological sex isn’t real, we have lost our collective tether to reality and become agents of chaos.” 

– Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist

Íris Erlingsdóttir Lee is an Icelandic journalist. She lives in Northfield, Minnesota.