When I was a young adult, I decide to read two books on every kind of policy. Health care, education, firearms, abortion, divorce. I wanted to quickly get up to speed on how everything in the world really works. I read a book by Dr. Jay P. Greene on education policy, called “Education Myths”. He has put out a new study for Heritage foundation on “gender affirming care” and suicide rates.

Here is the study.

Summary:

Lowering legal barriers to make it easier for minors to undergo cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent does not reduce suicide rates—in fact, it likely leads to higher rates of suicide among young people in states that adopt these changes. States should instead adopt parental bills of rights that affirm the fact that parents have primary responsibility for their children’s education and health, and that require school officials and health professionals to receive permission from parents before administering health services, including medication and “gender-affirming” counseling, to children under 18. States should also tighten the criteria for receiving cross-sex treatments, including raising the minimum eligibility age.

Key points:

• U.S. policymakers are seeking to make it easier for minors to access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones based on the claim that doing so reduces suicide risk.

• Studies finding that “gender-affirming” interventions prevent suicide fail to show a causal relationship and have been poorly executed.

• A superior research design shows that easing access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors without parental consent increases suicide rates.

And this is the interesting part:

In the past several years, the suicide rate among those ages 12 to 23 has become significantly higher in states that have a provision that allows minors to receive routine health care without parental consent than in states without such a provision. Before 2010, these two groups of states did not differ in their youth suicide rates. Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access those medical interventions became observable.

Rather than being protective against suicide, this pattern indicates that easier access by minors to cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent is associated with higher risk of suicide. The Heritage model plotted the difference in a three-year rolling average of suicide rates between states with minor access provisions and states with no such provision. Chart 2 plots the trend in this difference for those ages 12 to 23 who could have been affected by the policy when cross-sex medical interventions became available. For comparison, Chart 2 also shows the trend in this difference for a group ages 28 to 39, who could not have been affected by these policies, since the people in this group would have been at least 18 when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became available.

Without making any adjustments, suicide rates among those ages 12 to 23 (blue line) begin to spike in states that have provisions that allow minors to access health care without parental consent relative to states that have no such provision around 2016, after cross-sex medical interventions became more common. By 2020, there are about 3.5 more suicides per 100,000 people ages 12 to 23 in states with easier access than in states without an access provision. There is no similar spike in suicide rates among those ages 28 to 39 (grey line) at that time.

I have a few thoughts about this.

First, secular leftists form their beliefs based on what makes them feel good, and what makes people have a high opinion of them. There is no rational, evidence-based case for giving depressed children access to drugs and surgeries that cause permanent effects on those children. These are not views that people come to by studying evidence and processing fair, reasoned debates.

Second, it’s important to understand that there is a continuum from secular leftism to infanticide to child abuse. With rare exceptions, secular leftists accept the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. They have no rational grounding for human rights. They are incapable of subjecting their own desires to boundaries prescribed by the moral law. If they are not actively participating in infanticide and child abuse, then they are voting to make these things legal, to make them subsidized by taxpayers, and finally to punish anyone who disagrees with it… up to and including seizing the children of those who dissent. (This is currently being done in Canada and the United States)

Third, to stop these secular leftists from abusing our children, and driving them into suicide, we need to make all the actors involved in grooming the kids – teachers, school administrators, counselors, doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, librarians, police officers, legislators, social media companies, etc. – subject to civil lawsuits filed by the children once they are old enough to file. We need to clean out the bank accounts of the secular left child abusers. Just let the children name anyone who influenced them in a lawsuit, and then force those “don’t judge” people to defend the charges.

If you’re thinking that traditional morality is gone for good, then I have a nice post for you. Sometimes, when people go down a wrong road, they realize that they have made a terrible mistake and they turn back. One way that people realize they have gone wrong is by being honest about the consequences of their own actions. Instead of defending the bad choices, they admit they chose badly.

Here’s the latest from Christina Buttons, over at Daily Wire:

After conducting a systematic review of evidence, England’s National Health Service has proposed new guidelines for treating trans-identifying youth, abandoning their previous endorsement of the “gender-affirming” model of care for a more cautious approach to treating gender dysphoria in minors.

The NHS now recognizes that children and adolescents identifying as transgender may be experiencing a “transient phase” and warns that doctors should not encourage them to change their names and pronouns, as “social transition” is not a “neutral act” and could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning.”

The new guidelines “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” for young children. The guidance states that instead of encouraging transition, physicians should take “a watchful approach,” directly contrasting the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2018 policy, equating “watchful waiting” with a “harmful” form of “conversion therapy.”

The NHS guidelines indicate that services will now be led by medical doctors rather than therapists, and will consider the impact of autism and other common co-occurring mental health issues. The new guidance also bans the use of puberty blockers in patients under 18, making exceptions only in certain cases for strict clinical trials.

I blogged about how the NHS is being sued by people who transitioned as children and now blame the National Health Service for manipulating them into doing it. I think this is fair. Grown-ups are supposed to provide children with wisdom. They are not supposed to let children make dumb decisions, and just sit their applauding. If grown-ups lead children astray and cause them permanent harm – infertility, permanent removal of organs, etc. – then the grown-ups should have to face legal consequences.

The UK is only the latest country to get more cautious as they learn more about how these things really work.

The New York Post reported on Sweden last month:

 In February, Sweden — a progressive country previously on the cutting edge of providing medical services to transgender youth — also reversed course. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare updated its guidelines for treating trans youth, scaling back the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, saying there hasn’t been enough research on their efficacy or side effects.

The Epoch Times reported about France and Finland  in May 2022:

France’s National Academy of Medicine posted in March this year (pdf) that “great medical caution must be taken in children and adolescents, given the vulnerability, particularly psychological, of this population and the many undesirable effects and even serious complications that can be caused by some of the therapies available.”

[…]Finland also announced in 2020 a policy shift for gender dysphoria treatment, with the Finnish Health Authority issuing new guidelines backing psychotherapy rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children.

Sadly, America is being led by someone who doesn’t form his views as carefully. Joe Biden is still supporting social transitioning, puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and yes – even sex change surgeries.

Here’s a report from Christian Post:

President Joe Biden declared his support for allowing children and adolescents with gender dysphoria to undergo body mutilating surgeries or use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to look more like the opposite sex despite unknowns about longterm side effects.

In multiple documents released Thursday, which is observed by some as the Transgender Day of Visibility, the Biden administration backed what it described as “gender-affirming health care” for children.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs released a document titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People.”

[…]The document lists “top” surgeries —  elective mastectomies and breasts enhancements — and “bottom” surgeries — removal of genitals — as “gender-affirming care.”

That was in march, but he has the same position now. Look at this article from the UK Telegraph:

The US president who hosted a popular trans TikToker at the White House last week, said he believed it was both a moral and legal issue as he spoke to a panel of activists for the NowThis News presidential forum.

When asked if conservative states should have the right to pass laws limiting access to gender reassignment treatments, Mr Biden said in comments published on Sunday: “I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that. As a moral question and as a legal question, I just think it’s wrong.”

A number of Republican governors and lawmakers have backed bills blocking doctors from performing such treatment, especially when it comes to minors, claiming it is dangerous and has the potential to cause irreversible changes in younger patients.

I think we should learn from the mistakes of other countries. But it doesn’t seem like Joe Biden and the Democrats are willing to let the facts mess with their faith.

We get to vote on who should be leading us in November. I hope you go vote, and make sure to put out a yard sign. I’ve had good conversations with neighbors and visitors, because I have 4 on my front yard. Now is the time for good conversations.

If you look closely at this blog, you’ll see that I am currently reading  a book called “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos“. Well, there’s an ongoing series of posts about the book at Evolution News, and one of them caught my eye. They are talking about the origin of life, and what’s needed to create life from non-life.

Here is the post from Evolution News.

The article starts by explaining the what is required to show how non-living components could be organized into a living system:

• plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA.
• ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow.
• the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly.

The leading naturalistic explanation to solve these problems is called the “RNA world” hypothesis:

The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world.

The article lists several problems with the RNA world hypothesis. Dr. Walter Bradley lists two of those problems.

First, the assembly of RNA requires intelligent design:

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.³ In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”⁴

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”⁵ Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”⁶ Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”⁷ In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design.

The second problem is that the RNA world hypothesis is that it requires the existence of a self-replicating RNA molecule in order to get started. But this self-replicator contains a lot of biological information that is beyond the reach of chance to produce:

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.¹⁰ How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication.

Whenever I sit down to write some code or to write a blog post, I can start with one letter, then add another, then add another, until I have a functioning program, or a legible blog post. It might be possible for random chance to make a meaningful word out of 3 letters, like “the” or “hat”. But it’s not possible to make a self-replicating RNA molecule that way. The required sequence is just too long, and every letter has to be just right in order for it to function as a self-replicating system. The simplest self-replicating molecule is extremely complicated.

Anyway, check out the article, and if you want to read all about Walter Bradley (my role model), there is a new book out about him called “For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley” which I finished, and it was great.