I actually met Gwen and spent a weekend with him sometime ago. They were a roommate of my friend for a while. The person I knew doesn’t resemble the lunatic in the news article articles at all, but I have no doubt is physically/legally them. Cult indoctrination is a hell of a thing.
There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.
However, it turns out that when you do this, the brain as a whole does not get adequate sleep, even if you alternate hemispheres. People had symptoms of sleep deprivation while still being semi-functional. Ziz took if a step further and had some sort of secret initiation process where both hemispheres were trained differently to produce multiple personalities. At least that was the assumption from those of us on the outside gathering scraps of info being dropped.
Get you 8 hours of sleep everyone. Sleep is important.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, Gwern has never written anything on his site about this purported single-hemisphere sleep, see https://gwern.net/doc/zeo/index for the details of what he has written about.
And unihemispheric sleep (Gwen’s word for what they do; they like to invent their own terms) is one of the techniques the Ziz cult uses.
I haven't attempted unihemispheric sleep, and it sounds like a phenomenon that isn't represented in the literature, but it also sounds like it wouldn't get past an IRB anytime in the last decades, so I assume it's probably real.
There are many strange altered states of consciousness found by experimentation, and I can totally believe that some form of auto-hypnosis + sleep deprivation - which would parallel many well-attested mind-altering practices in many different cultures & religions - could have bizarre effects or induce psychosis and hallucinating demonic entities, and turn an activist vegan into a murderer. (Their specific interpretation of 'unihemispheric' sleep may or may not be true. I would say that it's worth checking... except I'm not sure how one could either prudently or ethically investigate it, given the apparent consequences.)
And it would answer the question many people have been asking about how these unlikely-seeming murderers were made, in a way that the rest of it all does not.
When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).
Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.
So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.
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Oh yes, this is totally a thing. They're also weirdly obsessed with I.Q. comparisons. They're the kind of community where you might actually witness someone talking about "High I.Q." and "Low I.Q." individuals - and making a claim like "my I.Q. is one of the highest", way before someone else made that cool.
Make no mistake, there are egos at play here too.
Do you really believe Trump and his goons want to show "compassion and help" to trans people, by taking away their passports, their medicine, barring them from the military, accusing them of grooming children, etc.? The list goes on.