Voices, Visions, and Scalpels: Transgenderism and Demon Possession

From Inanna’s effeminate servants to Rome’s self-castrated galloi, transgenderism has always been a demonic liturgy

JD Hall, 8/31/25

Every once in a while the world accidentally tells the truth. The news cycle was chewing on the Minneapolis shooter when a word slipped out. He was not troubled. He was not misunderstood. He was not simply mentally ill. He was demonic. For one brief moment, the commentators dropped the DSM-V and reached for a vocabulary older than psychiatry and sharper than therapy. They reached for the word that names what polite society keeps trying to deny.

That word is a flare in the night sky. When people look mutilated, when their eyes glaze over with madness, when their lives are a chain of cutting, screaming, hallucinating, and alienation, even the secular heart knows what it is staring at. It is staring at hell with skin on.

This is not a new problem. It is not a progressive “identity journey.” It is the same infestation the world has seen countless times. It is the hiss in the garden, the shriek among the tombs, and the frenzy in pagan temples. We dress it up today in clinical jargon and rainbow flags, but the fingerprints are the same. Voices. Visions. Compulsions to cut the body. The sense of an alien identity hijacking the soul.

We will start where we are, in the modern West where transgenderism is paraded as liberation. We will listen to what its disciples themselves say about their visions, their voices, and their compulsions. Then we will step back into history and watch the same spirits cavort through the cults of Cybele, Dionysus, and Inanna. Finally we will step onto biblical ground and hear God’s verdict. The conclusion is simple. Transgenderism is not new. It is demonic possession dressed in clinical vocabulary.

MODERN DYSPHORIA AND DEMONIC ECHOES

When psychiatrists speak, they reach for cold language. They prefer words such as “comorbidity,” “psychosis,” and “dissociation.” They line up the syllables to make the darkness sound clinical. Strip away the lab coat vocabulary, however, and the old story plays again. People are tormented by voices. People are haunted by visions. People are compelled to mutilate their flesh. The priests of medicine keep insisting that this is normal, treatable, and affirmable. Anyone with eyes can see that it is the same theater that played out in the Gerasene graveyard.

Dysphoric testimonies are filled with voices. One says, “I did not choose this, the voice inside told me what I was.” Another says, “Every night I hear her, the girl inside me, demanding I obey.” A third speaks of whispers that mock and taunt until he gives in to their commands.

Psychiatrists call it “auditory hallucination.” The Bible calls it lying spirits. The voices always speak the same script. They do not say, “Be content.” They say, “Cut yourself.” They do not say, “You are God’s image.” They say, “You are a mistake.” They do not say, “Stand firm.” They say, “Obey or die.” These are not the voices of sanity. They are the voices of devils.

THE VISIONS THAT HAUNT

Dysphoric testimonies are haunted by visions. A young man stares into the mirror and says, “That is not me. I see someone else looking back.” A woman dreams repeatedly of a goddess-like figure who tells her to transition. Another reports waking apparitions of a second self hovering nearby. The clinicians call it dissociation. The prophets would have called it possession.

I recently went down the rabbit hole in the r/trans group on reddit and read their “conversion” (interesting term, right?) testimonies (another interesting word, right?). What I saw there was incredible. They were obvious testimonials of what it was like to be possessed of devils. 

One user told a psychiatrist, “The girl inside me said to cut my hair off and wear dresses.” Imagine if that child had been taken to the apostles. They would not have nodded gravely and drawn up a transition plan. They would have prayed, fasted, and commanded the spirit to leave. Instead, the doctors handed her to a surgeon. The altar has new priests, but the sacrifice is the same.

Even when not reporting full hallucinations, dysphoric people describe themselves in ways that mirror possession. One says, “It felt like another personality took over.” Another confesses, “I am not the one in charge.” A third insists, “I have to listen to the other person inside me.” Another says, “The mirror shows someone else.” These are not the words of self-discovery. They are the words of people being puppeted.

This is not an “identity journey.” It is the oldest hostage situation in the world. The language is consistent across cultures and centuries. Something else speaks. Something else directs. Something else steals.

THE CUTTING OF THE BODY

The proof is written in blood. The numbers for self-harm among the dysphoric are staggering. When it is not arms or thighs, it is sex organs. Mutilation with scalpels is celebrated as liberation. The medical guild calls it reassignment. 

Read Mark 5. The demoniac cried out night and day, slashing his flesh with stones, alienated from his community, and filled with voices. That story is not locked in the past. It is the front page of our newspapers and the brochure of our clinics. Legion still stalks the tombs. Only now the tombs have fluorescent lights and billing codes.

Consider where the transgender movement is most at home. It finds its welcome in witchcraft circles, neo-pagan temples, and online forums where spirits and guides are called upon to affirm someone’s transition. There are entire occult communities dedicated to binding gender dysphoria to goddess worship. Ishtar, Inanna, and Cybele all reappear. The old demons never left. They simply learned to speak with hashtags.

If this were merely a matter of identity, there would be no magnetic pull toward the occult. Yet trans forums are filled with talk of ancestors, spirit animals, and goddesses confirming gender. The answer is not complicated. Like attracts like. Spirits recognize their own.

WHAT PSYCHIATRY WILL NOT SAY

Here is the scandal. Psychiatry knows about the voices. It knows about the visions. It knows about the compulsions. The doctors have the notes, the testimonies, and the studies. They know the rate of psychosis is astronomical. They refuse to interpret. They refuse to say the obvious.

Instead they sanctify the voices. If the voices say “you are in the wrong body,” the doctors declare it gospel truth. If the visions say “cut yourself,” the doctors sharpen the scalpel. If the compulsion says “bleed,” the doctors build an altar and call it gender affirming care. This is not science. This is priestcraft. The men in lab coats are not neutral. They are officiants at a ritual. They are presiding over sacrifices, body by body, child by child.

Strip away the rainbow flags and the pattern remains unchanged. The signs are all there. Voices. Visions. Cutting. Compulsion. Alienation. Exactly what the apostles saw in the demoniac. Exactly what the prophets saw in Baal worship. Exactly what the church fathers condemned when they described effeminacy and sodomy as demonic inversion.

The West has lost its categories, so it no longer has a name for what it is seeing. Yet the people know. That is why, when a shooter’s face is plastered across the news, someone blurts out the forbidden word. Demonic. The secular man does not know the theology, but he knows the look. He knows what he is staring at.

If someone in the first century church had said, “I hear voices commanding me to cut my flesh. I see visions of another self. I feel something alien inside taking control,” the congregation would not have debated pronouns. They would have called it what it was. They would have driven out the spirit in the name of Christ.

PAGAN PRIESTS AND POSSESSED CULTS

If transgenderism feels new, that is only because our culture has wrapped it in medical gowns and rainbow flags. Strip off the marketing and it is the same old phenomenon that has stalked the world for millennia. The ancients were more honest about it.

Every pagan culture of note had its cross-dressed priests. They strutted in women’s robes while claiming that spirits had chosen them. They castrated themselves in frenzy. They prostituted themselves in temple rites. They blurred the line between male and female because the demons they served delighted in mocking God’s creation. The modern world congratulates itself for being progressive. In reality, it has resurrected the gallows humor of idols.

INANNA AND THE EFFEMINATE PRIESTS

The trail begins in Mesopotamia, cradle of idolatry. The goddess Inanna, also known as Ishtar, was a deity of sex, war, and chaos. Her priests, the assinnu and the kurgarru, were men who lived as women. They wore female garments, painted their faces, and spoke in ecstatic gibberish. Ancient texts describe them as being “seized by the goddess.” They performed ritual prostitution as acts of worship, selling their bodies in the temple as though that were a holy vocation.

The ancients did not speak in the language of “gender dysphoria.” They said the goddess herself had transformed them. They were not men pretending to be women. They were vessels of the divine. That was the entire point. Their inverted bodies and blurred identities were proof that the goddess had taken hold of them. In other words, it was possession.

CYBELE AND THE SELF-MUTILATED

Move westward to the cult of Cybele in Phrygia, later imported into Rome. The priests of Cybele, known as the galloi, were infamous for self-castration. At the height of their festivals, worked into frenzy by drums and flutes, they would take knives and cut away their manhood. Then they would don women’s clothing and serve as eunuchs of the goddess.

Roman writers mocked them as effeminate and degenerate, but they tolerated them because religion demanded it. The priests begged in the streets, flaunted their emasculation, and claimed to speak with the voice of Cybele. The connection to modern “gender reassignment surgery” is impossible to ignore. Today the knives are sharpened in sterile operating rooms. In Phrygia the knives were stained in blood-soaked streets. In both cases the spirit is the same. It is the mutilation of the image of God presented as a sacrament to a false deity.

DIONYSUS AND THE MADNESS OF GENDER

In Greece the cult of Dionysus followed the same pattern. His worshippers were marked by frenzy, drunkenness, and ecstasy. The men often became effeminate in their rituals, abandoning masculine dress and embracing softness as proof of their inspiration. To be possessed by Dionysus was to lose all boundaries, whether of sobriety, morality, or gender.

Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae describes how men caught up in the god’s frenzy abandoned their households and danced in women’s garments. The gender inversion was not incidental. It was the mark of divine madness. The blurring of male and female showed that Dionysus had shattered ordinary categories. Once again, the outward expression of possession was the rejection of God’s created order.

These examples are not isolated curiosities. They are the normal pattern of paganism. Wherever men rejected the true God and bowed to idols, sexual confusion and gender inversion followed. Paul described it in Romans 1: when men exchanged the truth of God for a lie, they dishonored their bodies and engaged in unnatural passions. The pagan mind, once enslaved to idols, had no anchor for manhood or womanhood. The result was inevitable. Men cut off their own manhood and dressed as women, women abandoned the natural use of their bodies, and spirits laughed over the ruins.

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