A Permanent Solution To A Temporary Problem

Transgenderism is the current fad sweeping the world. It has greatly impacted children and young adults in America and in other countries. Some parents have gone along with or even encouraged their children to undergo medical procedures or drug regimens that will impact them for the rest of their lives. Some of the changes that are made are irreversible and result in the children involved not being able to bear children or father children as adults. Unfortunately, an eleven-year-old child may not be equipped to make such a life-changing decision, and the decision may cause a lot of sorrow down the road. Yesterday (updated today), The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about a recent study in the Netherlands about transgenderism in children and young adults.

The article reports:

The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study.

Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.

Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness‘ to varying degrees.

But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.

The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’

The article includes the following chart:

If you have a child starting down this road, please reconsider the long-term effects of any medical actions you might take.

The article also includes the following chart:

The article concludes:

Dr Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, told DailyMail.com: ‘We’ve known for over a decade that most kids who experience distress with their sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty. 

‘Indeed, we can infer from the DSM 5 [2013] and other sources that as many as 88 percent of gender-dysphoric girls and as many as 98 percent of gender-dysphoric boys in previous generations desisted if allowed to go through natural puberty. 

‘These two facts make it clear why “gender-affirming care” on minors is such an outrage. It leads, in the end, to sterilization and in many cases to a complete loss of natural sexual function. 

‘There is no good evidence that this helps minors long term. Moreover, it medicalizes what could very well be temporary psychological symptoms.

‘History will judge this medicalized “gender-affirming care” on minors as we now judge eugenics and lobotomies.’

The research was published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. 

How will the children whose bodies have been surgically altered feel when they mature and realize the mistake they have made?

The Circus Continues…

According to a March 2024 Gallup Poll, about 68 percent of Americans identify as Christians. About 41 percent attend church at least once a month.

In March 2018, the AARP reported:

When broken down by age, results from the multiple surveys show that the oldest Americans — the Silent Generation, born before 1946 — are 84 percent Christian. The figures for younger cohorts: boomers (born 1946 to 1964) 76 percent; Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) 67 percent; and millennials (born 1981 to 1996) 49 percent.

The Christians in America are the voters who are likely to be offended by the Biden administration’s declaration of Easter as “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

According to PJ Media:

By now, we’re all aware that the White House managed to commit the most sacrilegious act imaginable — or at least made the biggest possible slap in the faces of Christians — by emphasizing “Transgender Day of Visibility” over Easter. While the holiday honoring our secular state religion of transgenderism is fixed on March 31, it could have and rightly should have taken a backseat to the moveable feast that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus.

Instead, Joe Biden, his handlers, and the rest of his administration chose to double down on honoring a tiny minority of transgender Americans over the millions of Christians who celebrate Easter Sunday. The White House statement on Easter was only 94 words, while the proclamation of “Transgender Day of Visibility” clocked in at a whopping 635 words. On the president’s X/Twitter account, the “Transgender Day of Visibility” tweet was twice as long (45 words) as the Easter tweet (20 words).

The proclamation (which we’re supposed to believe is Biden’s words) makes ridiculous statements like, “Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation.” It also falsely claims that states enacting laws preventing children from undergoing life-altering hormone treatments and surgeries “target and terrify transgender kids and their families.” To hear the White House tell it, keeping kids safe from making decisions they’re likely to regret denies people “the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child.” (And I thought this administration only cared about killing children.)

Considering the percentage of transgenders and other alphabet groups and their tendency not to vote, this was a really stupid political move. A semi-apology has been issued, but I am not sure voters will forget this in November.

Pushing Back On Bad Medicine

On of the most frightening trends right now is the increase in the number of young children and teenagers who believe that they are in the wrong body with the wrong sex. Part of that trend is due to social media and the lies told there, and part of that trend is due to the normal confusion of puberty. On Wednesday, The Federalist posted an article showing some of the problems with the narrative that transgender medical procedures are a good thing.

The article reports:

The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.

Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.

No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.

…From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.

The article notes:

Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.

It’s time that parents and grandparents demand that children be protected from unnecessary medical procedures that will have life-long consequences.

A Puzzling Move

On Saturday, The American Spectator reported that last month Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed Nigeria from the State Department’s list of countries hostile to religious freedom. In April, the U.S. government’s own Commission on International Religious Freedom had urged Secretary of State Blinken to keep Nigeria on the list.

The articled reports:

In 2020, the Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) on religious freedom. In a letter, the Family Research Council and host of other organizations committed to religious freedom have asked Biden: “How can it be, less than a year after that significant designation, that Nigeria’s CPC designation has been dropped without a public explanation?”

The groups note in the letter that anti-Christian persecution in the country has grown even more intense since 2020: “The ongoing violence, killing, and displacement against Christians and others have only increased. In fact, during 2021, massacres happen almost nightly, while by day, young boys are killed in the fields. Pregnant women are brutally dismembered, their babies mutilated before their eyes. And now, an entire church congregation has been abducted and held captive.”

Armed Islamic terrorists and radicals “have become even more brazen, torching entire villages and farms, ambushing, and killing innocent people in gory, unspeakable ways,” they write. “Mass killings—the kind that used to be sporadic—are now a national emergency. Catholic News Agency reported in July, ‘an estimated 3,462 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021, according to a new study. This equates to 17 Christians being murdered every day in Africa’s most populous country.”

The article concludes:

Biden has declared the promotion of transgenderism abroad a “priority” of American foreign policy. That apparently stands at the apex of his hierarchy of rights.  “[The State] Department has committed to increasing U.S. engagement on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) human rights issues abroad,” says Blinken. “As we do so, we work with partners around the world who bring to bear expertise on their unique challenges and innovative solutions. We recognize that, through these partnerships, we will be able to build a safer, more inclusive global society for all LGBTQI+ persons.”

This is what preoccupied Blinken in the months preceding the collapse of Afghanistan. Then after it fell, he told Congress that he was “focused on” the plight of the “LGBTQI+ in Afghanistan” under the Taliban.

Talk about an “unbalanced” agenda. Blinken can strain at the gnat and swallow the camel. As he trivializes human rights abuses, monstrous ones are occurring in a country that he claims is no longer a foe of religious freedom. Never mind that an organization called Genocide Watch says “Nigeria has become a killing field of defenseless Christians.” The group says that “between 11,500 and 12,000 Christians have been massacred since June 2015 when the Buhari Government of Nigeria came to power. These statistics are based on careful records kept by church groups that include the names of victims and dates of their murders.”

That Biden can overlook this while prattling on about the supposed glories of transgenderism and chastising Russia for its insufficient enlightenment (Blinken said that Biden rebuked Putin at their summer meeting for not supporting the LGBTQ agenda) reveals much about this administration’s bankrupt agenda. Only a president that prizes religious freedom at home will care about its loss abroad.

I believe that our President has mixed up his priorities.

Telling The Truth Causes An Uproar

The latest adolescent fad being promoted on social media is transgenderism. Unfortunately it is a fad that can do permanent damage to a young person who simply follows what he or she sees on social media. Recently “60 Minutes” did a segment about state regulations on transgenderism and included people who as teenagers underwent medical procedures to change their sex and then regretted it later.

Today Legal Insurrection posted an article about the reaction to the “60 Minutes” segment.

The article notes:

A recent 60 Minutes segment talked about red states denying hormones and surgery to transgender youth. However, the news program made the grave mistake of including a part about young people who regret transitioning.

The left is furious that 60 Minutes included dissenting voices.

This is one of the stories included in the “60 Minutes” piece:

One young woman described her experience after she went on hormones, had her breasts removed, and then detransitioned all in one year. Transcript via the Daily Wire:

Lesley Stahl: Did the therapist not question you about how deep the feeling was and what it was stemming from?

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: She didn’t go — really go into what my gender dysphoria might’ve been stemming from. We only did a few sessions.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION): Because she was over 18 and didn’t need parental consent, she says she merely signed an informed consent form at a clinic and got hormone shots.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: They asked me, “So, why do you wanna go on testosterone?” And I said, “Well, being a woman just isn’t working for me anymore.” And they said, “Okay.”

Lesley Stahl: So, that was that. You got your prescription for testosterone?

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: Uh-huh. Yup.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION): Just four months after she started testosterone, she says she was approved for a mastectomy, what’s called top surgery, that she told us was traumatic.

Lesley Stahl: You know, I’m kinda surprised because, based on everything you’ve said up to now, I would’ve thought you’d have a great sense of relief.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: I started to have a really disturbing sense that like a part of my body was missing, almost a ghost limb feeling about being like, there’s something that should be there. And the feeling really surprised me but it was really hard to deny.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION):And so she detransitioned by going off testosterone and then went back to the clinic and, she says, complained to the doctor that the process didn’t follow the WPATH guidelines.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: I can’t believe that I transitioned and detransitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of, like, less than one year. It’s completely crazy.

The article also includes one reaction to the segment:

Jezebel called the report an “attack” on trans kids:

60 Minutes’ Segment About Republican Attacks On Trans Kids Was Itself an Attack On Trans Kids

This is not an issue that needs both-sidesing. But on Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes did something even worse—the primetime show decided to air a segment that, while ostensibly addressing the Republican-led assault on trans young people’s health care, ended up focusing heavily on the favorite topic of conservatives who would like nothing more than for trans people to not exist, and who wish to paint transition as a painful, regret-suffused process—people who have detransitioned.

First of all, Republicans are not attacking trans kids, they are simply trying to prevent teenagers from doing something irreversible during a period in their lives when their decision-making process is not fully developed. Secondly, this is not health care–it is serious surgery that cannot be reversed and needs to be entered into with extreme care. In a few years there will be many young adults walking around seriously regretting what they have done with no way to correct their mistake. That is sad.

Common Sense Is Not Always Appreciated

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about some recent comments by Dr. Ben Carson.

The article shows us how a smear campaign works. The article reports:

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson issued an agency-wide email Friday attacking a “blatant mischaracterization” of his comments about transgenderism during his visit to California this week, which reportedly offended bureaucrats in San Francisco.

The Washington Post broke the story on Thursday, citing “three people present” at a HUD meeting:

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson expressed concern about “big, hairy men” trying to infiltrate women’s homeless shelters during an internal meeting, according to three people present who interpreted the remarks as an attack on transgender women.

While visiting HUD’s San Francisco office this week, Carson also lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women, two of the agency staffers said.

Carson’s remarks visibly shocked and upset many of the roughly 50 HUD staffers who attended Tuesday’s meeting, and prompted at least one woman to walk out in protest, the staffers said.

A HUD official, who had not been present at the meeting, defended Carson, saying he never used derogatory language against transgendered people. The official added that “Carson was referring to men who pretend to be women to gain access to battered women’s shelters — and not singling out transgender women as “big, hairy men.”

The article concludes:

In May, Carson announced a new HUD rule that would allow local homeless shelters to decide for themselves if they wanted to use biological sex, not gender identity, as a basis for deciding how to provide housing. The policy under the Obama administration had been a one-size-fits-all rule forcing all shelters to recognize gender identity.

Carson has decided that the safety of homeless women must come before transgender concerns about identity — and before the political sentiments of agency bureaucrats based in a state that has failed to tackle growing homelessness.

The issue here is the safety of women seeking shelter from abuse. What is to stop an abuser from saying he is transsexual to gain access to a shelter and then terrorizing the women in it? Who wants to be responsible for the first death in a women’s shelter caused by a man who gained access by claiming to be a transsexual when he was not?

The policy here is common sense. It is in place to protect women. Are we willing to sacrifice the safety of abused women in order to placate the transgender movement?

Preventing Truth

One of the major ideas the political left is currently supporting is transgenderism. The traditional idea of two genders–male and female–is regarded (by the left) as old fashioned and (in some cases) bigoted. Never mind what your DNA says–it’s how you feel that matters. There have been a number of people who have gone through the process of a sex change and regretted it, but somehow they have not received the positive coverage of those who parade their change around. Well, even science has gone political on the matter.

Breitbart is reporting the following today:

Bath Spa University stopped Psychotherapist James Caspian from examining cases of people who had surgery to reverse a “gender reassignment” after finding they regretted the decision.

…He pointed out that studies of the percentage of people regretting “transitioning” their gender ranged from a couple of per cent to 20 per cent, and said new research was needed as attitudes changed and practitioners observed a rise in those reversing surgery.

The university initially approved his research, but after he proposed finding more participants online and sent his ideas to the ethics sub-committee for clearance, he was told: “engaging in a potentially politically incorrect piece of research carries a risk to the University”.

“Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university,” university authorities added, The Times reports. “The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”

So if the truth may be unpopular or cause anything negative to be said about the University, the University does not want to know what the truth is. Wow. So much for the scientific method!