You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

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, and they have to be held in the right order. The first is preserving bodily integrity — keeping your child intact and unaltered for as long as possible, because medicalization is the part of this story that does permanent damage. The second is creating the conditions that support your particular child's desistance: helping her want, on her own, to step away from the identity and reclaim the developmental years she's losing to building up an alter ego.
I walk through what desistance actually looks like in practice — rarely a dramatic confession, more often a gradual, face-saving off-ramp through ally identities, sexuality labels, or shifting friend groups. I introduce the frame from my essay "The Load-Bearing Delusion": the identity isn't a free-floating belief you can argue away, it's propping up something fragile underneath. Pull on it and your kid holds tighter.
Then I get practical about leverage. So much of what parents try to control — beliefs, bodies, social worlds — isn't really theirs to control. I map out what is: the emotional climate of your home, your tone, the structure and rules, the money, your own nervous system, and your vision of who your child can become. This is the foundation for the relationship you're building for fifteen years from now.
This episode comes with a companion essay derived from the transcript. If you'd prefer to read rather than (or in addition to) listening, visit my Substack.
[00:00:00] Start
[00:01:00] The Two Goals: Reframing the Work
[00:04:00] Starving Samantha, Feeding Ryan
[00:07:00] What Desistance Actually Looks Like
[00:13:00] The Load-Bearing Delusion
[00:16:00] Where Your Real Leverage Lies
[00:27:00] Regulating Yourself and Holding the Vision
ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

 ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

To support this show, please leave a rating & review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment & share via my YouTube channel. Or recommend this to a friend!
Learn more about Do No Harm.

Take $200 off your EightSleep Pod Pro Cover with code SOMETHERAPIST at EightSleep.com.
Take 20% off all superfood beverages with code SOMETHERAPIST at Organifi.
Check out my shop for book recommendations + wellness products.
Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

Watch NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (our medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation). Stream the film or purchase a DVD. Use code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on X @2022affirmation or Instagram at @affirmationgeneration.
Have a question for me? Looking to go deeper and discuss these ideas with other listeners? Join my Locals community! Members get to ask questions I will respond to in exclusive, members-only livestreams, post questions for upcoming guests to answer, plus other perks TBD.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 the periphery and starts commenting on dinner from across the room, and the family rolls its eyes.
I unpack how this pattern develops: a temperament mismatch between a Gen X dad and a more sensitive child, a marriage dynamic where mom gradually takes over the kids' inner lives, and a cultural script that has trained fathers to undervalue their own role. I look at what this does to children — including how it can show up in trans-identified boys who opt out of masculinity entirely, and in trans-identified girls carrying an unread longing for a father's protective love.
Most importantly, I talk about repair. The way back isn't a grand sit-down conversation; it's hundreds of small moments of presence, side-by-side time, and putting down the running commentary. Moms can help by stepping out of the gatekeeper role and letting dads back in. If you've been on the edge of your family for years, this episode is for you.
If you’re a parent navigating these dynamics in your own family, I created ROGD Repair with you in mind. This podcast episode doubles as an ROGD Repair bonus lesson. In the course, it can be found here, along with a companion essay and reflection questions to help you personalize the material. There’s lots more content like this for you in the program. It’s the closest thing to working with me one-on-one as a coach. ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

 ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

To support this show, please leave a rating & review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment & share via my YouTube channel. Or recommend this to a friend!
Learn more about Do No Harm.

Take $200 off your EightSleep Pod Pro Cover with code SOMETHERAPIST at EightSleep.com.
Take 20% off all superfood beverages with code SOMETHERAPIST at Organifi.
Check out my shop for book recommendations + wellness products.
Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

Watch NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (our medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation). Stream the film or purchase a DVD. Use code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on X @2022affirmation or Instagram at @affirmationgeneration.
Have a question for me? Looking to go deeper and discuss these ideas with other listeners? Join my Locals community! Members get to ask questions I will respond to in exclusive, members-only livestreams, post questions for upcoming guests to answer, plus other perks TBD.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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 politics, and what she eventually came to call a totalitarian philosophy dressed up as "multicultural competency."
We unpack the moment that broke her trust in the program: when she described the Buddhist practice of the non-self — focusing less on your own identity so you can extend loving kindness toward an aggressive client — three separate professors told her, within 48 hours, that this was "invalidating to other identities." She was ultimately deemed unsafe for practicum because she hadn't sufficiently absorbed the program's values around whiteness, privilege, and cultural deference.
From there, the conversation widens into the structural picture. Suzannah walks us through CACREP, the accrediting body that's been quietly building a near-monopoly on counseling education, the ACA Code of Ethics that's now baked into most state licensure boards, and the consortium of organizations that decided — without testing whether any of it produces better clinical outcomes — that critical social justice ideology would be the "professional identity" of American counseling.
We talk about why this matters for patients, what it does to the people who would have been excellent therapists, how we might build alternative training pathways and apprenticeship models outside the current system, and why the problems of the 21st century — including AI psychosis — will demand the kind of pioneering, free-thinking practitioners this ideology is actively driving out.
Suzannah Alexander is the External Affairs Coordinator for the National Association of Scholars. She came to this work after blowing the whistle on ideological indoctrination in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Master's program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Since that experience, through work with FAIR, she has spearheaded OCR complaints against the counseling accreditation body CACREP and Colorado State University, where her reporting work drew attention to the Whitelash Study, documenting public humiliation of white social work students due to their race, and the disparagement of minorities as not good enough to succeed on their own. Now she is focused on policy measures to curtail accreditor and higher education overreach that are threatening free speech on campus.
Substack Diogenes in Exile: https://www.diogenesinexile.com
X/twitter: https://x.com/DiogenesInExile
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DiogenesInExile
Minding The Campus: https://mindingthecampus.org/author/suzannahalexander/
National Association of Scholars: https://www.nas.org
[00:00:00] Start
[00:04:59] What She Found In The Program
[00:14:32] Steel-Manning Critical Social Justice
[00:18:39] Pushed Out Before Practicum
[00:24:05] The Bitter Irony Of Buddhism Rejected
[00:34:37] Realizing The Problem Is Bigger
[00:41:02] Counseling Futures And The Historical Roots
[00:47:09] Who Gets To Be Okay?
[00:56:37] What CACREP Is And Should Do
[01:00:25] Microaggressions And Borderline Thinking
[01:05:47] The CACREP Monopoly Explained
[01:14:38] ACA Code Of Ethics And The Need For Alternatives
[01:22:52] Mia Hughes Parallel And A Field Breaking Down
[01:26:43] AI Psychosis And 21st-Century Problems
[01:30:22] Building New Networks Outside The System

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

 ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

To support this show, please leave a rating & review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment & share via my YouTube channel. Or recommend this to a friend!
Learn more about Do No Harm.

Take $200 off your EightSleep Pod Pro Cover with code SOMETHERAPIST at EightSleep.com.
Take 20% off all superfood beverages with code SOMETHERAPIST at Organifi.
Check out my shop for book recommendations + wellness products.
Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

Watch NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (our medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation). Stream the film or purchase a DVD. Use code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on X @2022affirmation or Instagram at @affirmationgeneration.
Have a question for me? Looking to go deeper and discuss these ideas with other listeners? Join my Locals community! Members get to ask questions I will respond to in exclusive, members-only livestreams, post questions for upcoming guests to answer, plus other perks TBD.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Today I welcome back conflict historian Matt Osborne for his third appearance on the show — and our first since meeting in person at the Genspect conference in Albuquerque. Matt writes at The Distance Magazine, reviews books for Genspect, and brings a perspective to the gender critical movement that almost no one else in our space has: the long view of someone trained to study why human beings fight, kill, and build civilizations — and why they sometimes destroy them.
What is a military historian doing in this fight? Matt's answer takes us from a pivotal conversation with a tenured professor about sex difference and primitive warfare, to his realization that gender ideology and the ideologies that drive war are operating from the same playbook — what he calls "activist mysticism," the belief that saying the right magical words can bend reality to your will.
From there we cover an enormous amount of ground: how transgender ideology hollows out a nation's ability to defend itself, why pacifism makes you less safe rather than more, Ibn Khaldun's cycle of hard times and soft men, the role of ideology in giving people permission to commit violence, and why Hollywood's "girl boss" era has gutted franchise after franchise by erasing sex difference. We talk about Audrey Hale, Pol Pot, World War II rifleman training, Brazilian jujitsu, Project Hail Mary, Outlander vs. Bridgerton, and Thucydides' three causes of war — fear, honor, and interest.
We close on what gives Matt hope: kids who are voluntarily turning back toward analog things, tabletop games, paper books, and the old idea that you go outside until dinner. The questions this conversation aims to explore: What happens to a civilization that can no longer defend itself? Why does ideology — any ideology — eventually end in violence? And is it possible to win this fight without losing what makes us human in the process?
Matt Osborne is a US Army veteran and a former Democrat. He was featured in a 2020 documentary by Andrew Rossi called “After Truth”. The documentary is about his outsider campaign in the 2017 Alabama special senate election that sent Doug Jones to Washington. Matt left the party over gender identity politics in 2018. Since then, he has earned a master’s degree in military history and become an outspoken critic of gender identity politics. He is a book reviewer for Genspect and he has three websites. He covers transgender issues at The Distance Magazine.

-The Distance Magazine — gender critical writing
-Polemology — the study of war 
-Osborne Ink — politics, culture, and everything outside gender and war
Follow Matt on X @OsborneInk, @PolemologyFix, and @DistMag.
[00:00:00] Start
[00:08:28] Marx As Mystic And The Roots Of Ideology
[00:10:25] How Gender Ideology Hollows Out The Military
[00:17:24] Is Vs. Ought And The Inevitability Of War
[00:21:48] Ibn Khaldun's Cycle Of Hard Times
[00:28:23] Why Learning To Fight Makes You Peaceful
[00:36:15] Gender Ideology As Psychological Warfare
[00:40:39] Sex Differences In Conflict And Hierarchy
[00:50:35] The Girl Boss And Hollywood's Decline
[00:59:09] Why Historical Fiction Tells The Truth
[01:06:30] Documenting An Ideological War
[01:09:05] Permission, Riflemen, And Violence
[01:21:17] Thucydides: Fear, Honor, And Interest
[01:25:37] Restoring Sports And A Positive Future
[01:32:06] The Kids Are Going Analog
ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

 ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

To support this show, please leave a rating & review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment & share via my YouTube channel. Or recommend this to a friend!
Learn more about Do No Harm.

Take $200 off your EightSleep Pod Pro Cover with code SOMETHERAPIST at EightSleep.com.
Take 20% off all superfood beverages with code SOMETHERAPIST at Organifi.
Check out my shop for book recommendations + wellness products.
Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

Watch NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (our medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation). Stream the film or purchase a DVD. Use code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on X @2022affirmation or Instagram at @affirmationgeneration.
Have a question for me? Looking to go deeper and discuss these ideas with other listeners? Join my Locals community! Members get to ask questions I will respond to in exclusive, members-only livestreams, post questions for upcoming guests to answer, plus other perks TBD.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Instead of a long-form interview, this week I'm reading you an essay I wrote called The Most Dangerous Moment in the Conversation: What To Do and What Not To Do When Your Child Finally Opens Up. It originally appeared inside ROGD Repair, my comprehensive program for parents of trans-identified youth, and I wanted it to reach more people.
If your child is living inside a trans identity, most of the time she shows you nothing — composed, contained, deliberately blank. And then one day, out of nowhere, a seam shows. A flash of urgency. A disproportionate demand. A flicker of alarm about who will be at a party. These are what I call fractal windows: ordinary-looking moments where the entire architecture of the anxiety organizing her life becomes briefly visible. In this episode I unpack what those moments actually are, why they matter, and how to handle them without slamming the door shut.
The core tool I want to put in your hands is the empathic guess — a tentative, careful statement that names what your child might be feeling, without diagnosing, arguing, or correcting. I walk through what to say, what not to say, and why the 30 seconds after she finally says something real just might be the most dangerous point in the entire process. That's where almost every parent's instincts pull them in exactly the wrong direction — toward defending themselves, correcting the factual or ideological distortions, or winning the point. I'll explain why staying in the emotional register (instead of the logical one) is the whole game, why "permission to buy time" is one of the most underused parenting tools, and what you are actually building over many such conversations: a pattern in your child's nervous system that says: I opened up to my parent, something okay happened, I could do that again.
[00:00:00] Start
[00:00:25] When Your Child Finally Opens Up
[00:01:33] Fractal Windows And The Cost Of A Trans Identity
[00:03:24] The Outermost Knot: Why You Can't Say It All At Once
[00:04:13] Introducing The Empathic Guess
[00:05:05] Stay In The Emotional Register, Not The Logical One
[00:06:33] When The Empathic Guess Lands: The Walls Come Down
[00:07:50] The Pull To Correct Ideological Distortions
[00:08:47] Why You Are Not Endorsing By Not Arguing
[00:09:36] Listen, Reflect, Don't Defend
[00:10:24] Permission To Buy Time
[00:11:10] What You're Really Building: A Nervous System Pattern
[00:11:40] About ROGD Repair And Today's Experiment
[00:14:44] Closing Thoughts
ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

 ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

To support this show, please leave a rating & review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, like, comment & share via my YouTube channel. Or recommend this to a friend!
Learn more about Do No Harm.

Take $200 off your EightSleep Pod Pro Cover with code SOMETHERAPIST at EightSleep.com.
Take 20% off all superfood beverages with code SOMETHERAPIST at Organifi.
Check out my shop for book recommendations + wellness products.
Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

Watch NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (our medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation). Stream the film or purchase a DVD. Use code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on X @2022affirmation or Instagram at @affirmationgeneration.
Have a question for me? Looking to go deeper and discuss these ideas with other listeners? Join my Locals community! Members get to ask questions I will respond to in exclusive, members-only livestreams, post questions for upcoming guests to answer, plus other perks TBD.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★