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New study: Mental health issues persist after receiving “gender-affirming” treatment

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This brand new study is authored by one of the pioneers in “gender-affirming” treatment. It was published in the peer-reviewed “European Psychiatry”. The title of the article is “Have the psychiatric needs of people seeking gender reassignment changed as their numbers increase? A register study in Finland”. Let’s take a look at the findings.

The researchers looked at 3,665 people who received gender identity services between 1996 to 2019. This is a huge study. And we’ll see in a minute that the author used to be in favor of gender-affirming treatment – so she’s not biased against it.

Here’s the results section:

The GD [gender dysphoria] group had received many times more specialist-level psychiatric treatment both before and after contacting specialized GIS [gender identity services] than had their matched controls. A marked increase over time in psychiatric needs was observed. Among the GD group, relative risk for psychiatric needs after contacting GIS increased from 3.3 among those with the first appointment in GIS during 1996–2000 to 4.6 when the first appointment in GIS was in 2016–2019. When index period and psychiatric treatment before contacting GIS were accounted for, GR [gender reassignment] patients who had and who had not proceeded to medical GR had an equal risk compared to controls of needing subsequent psychiatric treatment.

Receiving “many times more specialist-level psychiatric treatments” resulted in “A marked increase over time in psychiatric needs”.

And the conclusion reaffirms that:

Contacting specialized GIS [gender identity services] is on the increase and occurs at ever younger ages and with more psychiatric needs. Manifold psychiatric needs persist regardless of medical GR [gender reassignment].

Psychiatric needs persist REGARDLESS of medical gender reassignment. That means gender reassignment – so-called “gender-affirming care” – makes no difference to the patient’s mental health.

This study got picked up in the news, as you might expect, since it contradicts the narrative of the secular left. What’s the narrative of the secular left? “Right and wrong don’t exist. My feelings are very important. You need to not judge me. You need to affirm me.”

Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail that talks about the author of the study:

A woman who led European efforts to give puberty blockers to trans children has bared all about U-turning on gender-affirming care, as it is known, and debunks treatments she now calls ‘dangerous.’

Dr Riittakerttu Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist at the Tampere University Hospital Department of Adolescent Psychiatry in Finland, has revealed why she changed her mind about helping minors medically transition.

Writing in The Free Press, Dr Kaltiala says the Western medical establishment has been cowed by trans activists into a ‘dangerous groupthink’ of pushing risky sex-altering drugs on children.

‘Gender transition has gotten out of hand,’ says Dr Kaltiala.

What I’d like to see now is for conservatives to pass laws that allow people who were victimized by the secular leftist butchers to sue those butchers for compensation. It’s very important that the “don’t judge” crowd is punished for the harm caused by their not judging. That’s the only way that they will understand that the people they think are evil (the moral people, the boundary setters) are actually good. And the people they think are good (the feelings people, the don’t judge people) are evil.

Let’s see some money change hands over this controversy, so everyone can be clear about the value of moral leadership and spiritual leadership.

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Who won the Wednesday night GOP debate on News Nation?

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This time, it’s unanimous. Commentators on the far-left and the far-right agree that Ron DeSantis won the debate on Wednesday night. Below, I have video clips of the best parts of the debate.

If you can only watch one, then watch DeSantis vs Haley talking about bathroom bills. I also loved DeSantis vs Haley debating their actions related to China. And DeSantis’ plan to prevent taxpayer bailouts of student loans. He wants people to do trades and STEM degrees.

Europe Committing SUICIDE With Mass Migration, Says DeSantis

DeSantis on How He’d Promote Election Integrity

Haley, DeSantis Spar Over Bathroom Bills

‘New Sheriff in Town’: DeSantis Outlines Border Policy

DeSantis, Haley Spar Over China

DeSantis: Truck Drivers Shouldn’t Pay for Gender Studies Student Loans

Nikki Haley also denied that she wanted to dox Americans who use an alias on social media (like me!). But here is the video of her saying exactly that. CNN fact-checked her and agreed that she was lying.

And there was a long and fun exchange where Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy both went after Nikki Haley on her connections to woke corporations and support for ESG.

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William Lane Craig on the unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

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You might remember that Dr. Craig used a new argument in his debate with Lawrence Krauss in Melbourne, Australia.

My notes on the debate record it thus:

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics:

  • The underlying structure of nature is mathematical – mathematics is applicable to nature
  • Mathematical objects can either be abstract objects or useful fiction
  • Either way, there is no reason to expect that nature should be linked to abstract objects or fictions
  • But a divine mind that wants humans to understand nature is a better explanation for what we see

And now Dr. Craig has expanded on it in the Q&A section of his Reasonable Faith web site.

The question:

Dear Dr Craig

Firstly can I thank you for all your work. My faith in Christ has been enormously strengthened through studying your work in apologetics in particular and I have grown in confidence in my Christian witness.

My question relates to numbers and mathematics as a whole. On the Defenders podcast you state that as God is the only self-existent, necessary being, numbers and mathematical objects, whilst being useful, don’t actually exist as these too would exist necessarily and independently of God. If this is the case, how can it be that mathematics is so easily applied to the natural world? Surely if mathematics only existed in our minds, we would expect to see no correlation between it and how the physical world actually is?

Michael

United Kingdom

Excerpt from the answer:

As philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng points out, for the non-theistic realist, the fact that physical reality behaves in line with the dictates of acausal mathematical entities existing beyond space and time is “a happy coincidence” (Mathematics and Reality [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], p. 239). Think about it: If, per impossibile, all the abstract objects in the mathematical realm were to disappear overnight, there would be no effect on the physical world. This is simply to reiterate that abstract objects are causally inert. The idea that realism somehow accounts for the applicability of mathematics “is actually very counterintuitive,” muses Mark Balaguer, a philosopher of mathematics. “The idea here is that in order to believe that the physical world has the nature that empirical science assigns to it, I have to believe that there are causally inert mathematical objects, existing outside of spacetime,” an idea which is inherently implausible (Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 136).

By contrast, the theistic realist can argue that God has fashioned the world on the structure of the mathematical objects. This is essentially what Plato believed. The world has mathematical structure as a result.

This argument was also made by mechanical engineering professor Walter Bradley in a lecture he gave on scientific evidence for an intelligent designer. You can read an essay that covers some of the material in that lecture at Leadership University.

Excerpt:

The physical universe is surprising in the simple mathematical form it assumes. All the basic laws of physics and fundamental relationships can be described on one side of one sheet of paper because they are so few in number and so simple in form (see table 1.1).

[…]It has been widely recognized for some time that nature assumes a form that is elegantly described by a relatively small number of simple, mathematical relationships, as previously noted in table 1.1. None of the various proposals presented later in this chapter to explain the complexity of the universe address this issue. Albert Einstein in a letter to a friend expressed his amazement that the universe takes such a form (Einstein 1956), saying:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world to the degree that we may speak of such comprehensibility as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be in any way grasped through thought. . . . The kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s theory of gravity is of quite a different kind. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by a human being, the success of such an enterprise presupposes an order in the objective world of a high degree which one has no a priori right to expect. That is the “miracle” which grows increasingly persuasive with the increasing development of knowledge.

Alexander Polykov (1986), one of the top physicists in Russia, commenting on the mathematical character of the universe, said: “We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.” Paul Davies, an astrophysicist from England, says, “The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me that there must be a God who is responsible for these laws and responsible for the universe” (Davies 1984). Successful development of a unified field theory in the future would only add to this remarkable situation, further reducing the number of equations required to describe nature, indicating even further unity and integration in the natural phenomena than have been observed to date.

The whole paper that started this off is called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, and it is a must read for advanced Christian defenders. You can read the whole thing here.