News

New study: trans kids prescribed MORE anti-psychotic drugs after starting transition than before

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Transgenderism is the hot topic of discussion between secular leftists and moral people these days. Every time I see a study about this issue, I’m blogging about it, so that I can find all the studies I need when I have to debate this. One thing you hear from the secular left is that parents must allow kids to transition, or they will suffer declines in mental health. But what does the data say?

Here’s the latest study, reported by Fox News:

Children taking anti-psychotic medication in the military health system for serious mental illness were later administered “gender-affirming pharmaceuticals,” according to Department of Defense health records, with one of its air base physicians claiming the gender drugs could “melt away” psychotic conditions such as a schizophrenia diagnosis.

A study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2021 entitled, “Mental Healthcare Utilization of Transgender Youth Before and After Affirming Treatment,” discussed internal DoD health records from 2010-2018.

The review showed that transgender kids in the DoD health system were being given heavy psychotropic medications such as anti-psychotics while being sent through a “gender-affirming” pipeline.

So, the authors of the study thought that transitioning children would cause their mental health problems to just disappear. But the study actually found the opposite:

The study yielded unflattering results on the effects the gender treatments had on kids’ mental health. Not only did it find no significant psychological benefit, but many children had their psychotropic medication increased after gender-related drugs were administered.

“Among 963 [transgender] youth using gender-affirming pharmaceuticals, mental healthcare did not significantly change and psychotropic medications increased following gender-affirming pharmaceutical initiation,” the study said.

“The most pronounced increases in psychotropic medication were in… anti-psychotics and lithium,” a mood stabilizing medication commonly used to treat bipolar disorder.

The secular left likes to say that hormone therapy is a treatment for the mental illnesses that these young people have. But this study doesn’t show that, it shows that they were taking even more psychotropic medications after beginning their sex changes.

Here are some of the other studies I’ve blogged about before:

Videos

Physicist Victor Stenger debates William Lane Craig: Does God Exist?

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This debate took place on March 1, 2010 at Oregon State University.

In this debate, Victor Stenger does affirm his belief that the universe could be eternal in his second rebuttal (1:02:30), thus denying the standard Big Bang cosmology. He also denies the law of conservation of energy and asserts that something can come from nothing in his concluding speech (1:33:50). He also caused the audience to start laughing when he said that Jesus was not moral and supported slavery. There is almost no snark in this summary. Instead, I quoted Dr. Stenger verbatim in many places. I still think that it is very entertaining even without the snarky paraphrasing.

The debate includes 30 minutes of Q&A with the students.

Here’s the video of the debate:

Dr. Craig’s opening speech:

  • The ontological argument
  • The contingency argument
  • The cosmological argument
  • The moral argument
  • The resurrection of Jesus (3-fact version)
  • Religious experience

Dr. Stenger’s opening speech:

  • There is no scientific evidence for God’s existence in the textbooks
  • There is no scientific evidence for God acting in the universe
  • God doesn’t talk to people and tell them things they couldn’t possibly know
  • The Bible says that the Earth is flat, etc.
  • There is no scientific evidence that God answers prayers
  • God doesn’t exist because people who believe in him are ignorant
  • Human life is not optimally designed and appears to be the result of a blind, ad hoc evolutionary process
  • The beginning of the universe is not ordered (low entropy) but random and chaotic
  • It’s theoretically possible that quantum tunneling explains the origin of the universe
  • The laws of physics are not objectively real, they are “our inventions”
  • Regarding the beginning of the universe, the explanation is that something came from nothing*
  • Nothing* isn’t really nothing, it is “the total chaos that we project existed just before the big bang”
  • If something has no structure, then “it is as much nothing as nothing can be”
  • Consciousness is explainable solely on the basis of material processes
  • There are well-informed, rational non-believers in the world and God would not allow that

Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal:

Stenger’s argument that there is no objective evidence for God’s existence:

  • First, it is not required that God rely only on objective evidence in order to draw people to himself (Alvin Plantinga)
  • Second, God is not required to provide evidence to everyone, only to the people who he knows would respond to him
  • Third, Craig gave lots of objective evidence, from science, history and philosophy
  • Stenger asks for certain evidence (answered prayers, prophecy, etc.), but Craig presented the evidence we have

Stenger’s argument that the balance of energy is zero so “nothing” exists:

  • if you have the same amount of assets and liabilities, it doesn’t mean that nothing exists – your assets and liabilities exist
  • Christopher Isham says that there needs to be a cause to create the positive and negative energy even if they balance
  • the quantum gravity model contradicts observations
  • the vacuum is not the same as nothing, it contains energy and matter
  • the BVG theorem proves that any universe that is expanding must have a beginning

Stenger’s argument that mental operations can be reduced to physical operations:

  • mental properties are not reducible to physical properties
  • epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with self-identity over time
  • epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with thoughts about other things
  • epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with free will
  • substance dualism (mind/body dualism) is a better explanation for our mental experience
  • God is a soul without a body
Dr. Stenger’s first rebuttal:

Craig’s cosmological argument:

  • Craig’s premise is “everything has a cause”, but quantum mechanics has causeless events
  • There are speculative theories about how something could have come into being uncaused out of nothing
  • “I don’t know of a single working cosmologist today who believes there was a singularity prior to the Big Bang”
  • “If there wasn’t a singularity then there’s no basis for arguing that time began at that point”
  • “There’s no reason from cosmology that we know of that the universe can’t be eternal”
  • “When I talk about an eternal universe, I mean a universe that has no beginning or end”
  • The Hartle-Hawking model doesn’t have a beginning
  • “There was no violation of energy conservation by having a universe coming from nothing”
  • “The universe could have come from a previous universe for example or even just from a region of chaos”
  • The paper by Vilenkin is counteracted by other papers (he doesn’t specify which ones)

Craig’s moral argument:

  • Dr. Craig is arguing from ignorance
  • But morality can be decided by humanity just like governments pass laws, and that’s objective
  • Dr. Craig has too little respect for the human intellect
  • I don’t need to tell me that slavery is wrong
  • The Bible supports slavery
  • Atheists can behave as good as theists
  • Morality just evolved naturally as an aid to survival

Craig’s resurrection argument:

  • No Roman historians wrote about the execution of Jesus
  • The empty tomb is doubtful because it is only mentioned in the gospels, not by Paul
  • John Dominic Crossan says there was no empty tomb
  • Christianity only survived because the Roman empire thought that they were useful

Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal:

Craig’s cosmological argument:

  • There is no reason to prefer an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics
  • Dr. Stenger himself wrote that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are possible
  • The vacuum in quantum mechanics is not nothing
  • The quantum vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal
  • The cosmological argument does not require a singularity
  • The Hartle-Hawking model is from 1983
  • Hawking says that there is a beginning of space and time after that model
  • The Hartle-Hawking model does still have a beginning of time – the model is not eternal
  • The BVG theorem that requires a beginning for expanding universes is widely accepted among cosmologists

Craig’s moral argument:

  • Stenger redefined objective to mean that most people agree with it – but that’s not what objective means
  • Objective means right and wrong whether anyone accepts it or not
  • Richard Dawkins himself says that on atheism there is “no evil and no good” – why is he wrong?
  • Even Dr. Stenger says that morality is the same as passing laws – it’s arbitrary and varies by time and place
  • But on his view, right and wrong are the same as deciding which side of the road to drive on
  • But somethings really are right and some things are really wrong

Craig’s resurrection argument:

  • Josephus is a Roman historian and he wrote about Jesus, for example
  • There were four biographies of Jesus are the best sources for his life
  • The scholars that Stenger mentioned are on the radical fringe

Dr. Stenger’s second rebuttal:

Knowledge and the burden of proof:

  • Dr. Craig has to bear the burden of proof, not me – because his claim is more “extravagant”
  • “I don’t have to prove that a God was not necessary to create the universe”
  • “I don’t have to prove that a God did not design the universe and life”
  • “I don’t have to prove that the universe did not have a beginning”
  • “I don’t have to prove that God did not provide us with our moral sense”
  • There are a lot of books written about how morality evolved naturally
  • “I don’t have to prove that the events surrounding the supposed resurrection of Jesus did not take place”
  • Bart Ehrman says that the gospels are generally unreliable (Note: Ehrman accepts all 3 of Craig’s minimal facts)
  • Just because people are willing to die for a cause, does not make their leader God, e.g. – the Emperor of Japan

Aesthetic concerns about the universe:

  • I don’t like dark matter and I wouldn’t have made the universe with dark matter
  • I don’t like the doctrine of penal substitution
  • I don’t like the doctrine of original sin
  • I don’t like the heat death of the universe

Dr. Craig’s conclusion:

The case for atheism:

  • Dr. Stenger had two arguments and he has to support his premises
  • Dr. Craig addressed his two arguments and each premise and Dr. Stenger never came back on it

The contingency argument:

  • Dr. Stenger has dropped the refutation of this argument

The cosmological argument:

  • The theoretical vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal

The moral argument:

  • He asserts that things are wrong, but there is no grounding for that to be objective on atheism

The resurrection of Jesus:

  • There are surveys of scholars on the empty tomb and 75% of them agree with it
  • Bart Ehrman agrees with all 3 of the minimal facts that Dr. Craig presented
  • Ehrman’s objection to the resurrection is not historical: he’s an atheist – he thinks miracles are impossible

Religious experience:

  • No response from Dr. Stenger

Dr. Stenger’s conclusion

The cosmological argument:

  • “I argued that we have very good physical reasons to understand how something can come from nothing”
  • “There is a natural tendency in the universe… to go from.. simpler thing to the more complicated thing”
  • The transition from a vapor to a liquid to ice shows how something could come from nothing
  • “It cannot be proven that the universe had a beginning”

The moral argument:

  • Objective morality, which is independent of what people think, could be developed based on what people think
  • “Jesus himself was not a tremendously moral person… he had no particular regard for the poor… he certainly supported slavery… he was for the subjugation of women” (audience laughter)

The resurrection argument:

  • Bart Ehrman says that the majority of the gospels are unreliable

Religious experience:

  • I don’t see any evidence that there is anything more to religious experience than just stuff in their heads

God’s purpose of the world should be to make people feel happy:

  • God could have made people feel happier
  • God could have made people not die
  • God could could have made the universe smaller: it’s too big
  • God could have made it possible for humans to live anywhere “even in space”
News

Are modern women building their resumes to attract to marriage-minded men?

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I’ve been watching a bunch of episodes of the @whatever podcast, and really enjoying the fact that the Christians are allowed to say what they think about dating and relationships, and that the non-Christians are explaining in their own words what their view of relationships is. And it’s very interesting to see how modern women have a disconnect between “in the moment” and “some day”.

So, I have a couple of clips from a show to show you what I mean. In this clip, the men on the left of the room – Brian Atlas, the host, and Chase, the evangelical Christian – challenge the two non-Christian women on the right side of the room. They ask whether a boyfriend can expect his girlfriend to stop going to bars and night clubs. These are places where alcohol is served, women wear sexy clothes, and men flirt with drunk women and try to take them home for sex. All the non-Christian women on the panel call this demand that they not go to bars and clubs “controlling”. They don’t see why being in a relationship should cause them to have to give up any aspect of their pursuit of pleasure. If they want validation from hot guys, and maybe some extra sex, then they should be able to look for it in bars and night clubs.

Remember, this video has a lot of bad language. It’s not for kids.

So, watch this clip from 1:05:21 to 1:28:45: (23 min and 24 seconds)

So, these young women want to focus on having fun in their early 20s, because that’s what they want to do. And then later on, when they get much older, then they might be ready for a man to marry them and give them children.

A marriage-minded man is looking for a woman who is willing to control her behavior so that she becomes safe to marry. So that she can focus on her husband. So that she can spend time nurturing and raising her children. She can’t spend money on frivolous things. She can’t spend money on vacations and entertainment and alcohol. She can’t smoke while she’s pregnant. She can’t buy expensive hand bags and get cosmetic surgery. But these young women aren’t willing to give up any of these things. They want to have fun. And marriage is seen as “boring”, until they decide in their late 30s that they finally want it. Men who want to focus on marriage early are “controlling”. Men who want women to focus on preparing to build a home and a family are “controlling” men.

The problem with this, as one of the men points out, is that those bar and night club experiences do not make the woman attractive or stable for marriage. Marriage is an enormous financial and legal risk for men. They can be thrown into jail for inability to pay alimony and child support. They can lose custody of their kids in family courts. They can have their parental rights nullified by feminist judges. Women are actually more likely to commit non-reciprocal domestic violence than men, according to this recent study:

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.

Men have to be extremely careful about marriage. And when young women are taught to be self-centered from 18-35, this is not good preparation for being a wife and mother. “Hoe phases” and “party stages” doesn’t look good on a resume. I would not hire a college grad to write software, if their entire resume was playing video games and memorizing movie scripts. If you want the job, you have to be able to show that you can do the job. Jobs are not meant to entertain you. There is work to do, and results are expected. The same thing is true of marriage. Men are making the hiring decisions, there, and we do look at women’s resumes.

Men are the keepers of commitment. If a woman wants commitment, she has to apply for commitment, and prove she is worth being committed to. Men are looking for marriage-related behaviors and capabilities. Chastity. Sobriety. Conservative political views. Accurate theology. Apologetics. Experience building others up to be useful for God. Spending restraint. Saving and investing. STEM degrees. Cooking ability. The ability to be content at home. Willingness to learn what husbands like, and to play with husbands. Fitness. Nutrition. Respect for male leadership. Etc.

Consider this clip from 2:32:54 to 2:43:24: (10 min, 30 seconds)

Here the Christian co-host Chase explains to the women that if they pick a Christian man, he will be able to lead them to focus on the most important things in life early on. The single mother is excited that some men would want to help to avoid mistakes with bad boys. But again, the two blondes who insisted on hedonism rebel against the leadership of good men. They want to be free to pursue pleasure, and not listen to the leadership of Christian men. They don’t want to focus on marriage. They don’t want to prepare their character for marriage. They don’t want to control their desires, so they can get a long-term result. They want to SAY that they want marriage and children “some day”, but they want to choose what feels good “in the moment”. And they definitely prefer hot bad boys who are permissive. They don’t want good men who want to lead them to get into shape for marriage.

I think the older generation of Christian women has NO IDEA that this is what younger women are like. 70 years ago, women would jump into the arms of men who wanted to step in and lead on moral and spiritual issues. They were not interested in “tingles” caused by physical attraction. They were interested in men who could step in and make marriage and parenting easy for them. Men who were serious about earning. Men who were serious about fighting evil. Men who were involved in the home, and effective at leading the children to have accurate beliefs and good moral character. But those days are long gone.

Today, young women are choosing men based on the feelings they get from being validated by those men. They like men who “don’t judge”. They like men with attractive appearances who are having a lot of sex with other women. They like men who spend their money on displayed wealth, rather than save for a downpayment on a home. Good men are ignored until these women realize that their plan isn’t working, and suddenly they want to “settle down”. But good men know that a woman who makes a good man her “last resort” in her late 30s will never respect him as a leader in the home.

Men don’t HAVE to get married and have kids in order to be happy. We can just work hard, stack our cash high, retire early, and work on our ministry goals. Working for God on evangelism and apologetics is enormously fulfilling for a man. Just ask Paul.