A few months ago, I blogged about this British woman who sued the NHS  after they transitioned her when she was still very young. At 16, the NHS gave her puberty blockers and testosterone injections. At age 20, they gave her a double masectomy. She regretted what they did to her, and won a case against them in court. She’s posted an article at Persuasion telling her side of the story.

Excerpt:

From the earliest days, my home life was unhappy. My parents—a white Englishwoman and a black American who got together while he was in Britain with the U.S. Air Force—divorced when I was about 5. My mother, who was on welfare, descended into alcoholism and mental illness. Although my father remained in England, he was emotionally distant to me and my younger sister.

I was a classic tomboy, which was one of the healthier parts of my early life in Letchworth, a town of about 30,000 people, an hour outside London. Early in childhood, I was accepted by the boys—I dressed in typically boy clothing and was athletic. I never had an issue with my gender; it wasn’t on my mind.

Then puberty hit, and everything changed for the worse. A lot of teenagers, especially girls, have a hard time with puberty, but I didn’t know this. I thought I was the only one who hated how my hips and breasts were growing. Then my periods started, and they were disabling. I was often in pain and drained of energy.

Also, I could no longer pass as “one of the boys,” so lost my community of male friends. But I didn’t feel I really belonged with the girls either. My mother’s alcoholism had gotten so bad that I didn’t want to bring friends home. Eventually, I had no friends to invite. I became more alienated and solitary. I had been moving a lot too, and I had to start over at different schools, which compounded my problems.

By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet.

You know, the first thing I would do with a girl like this is get her to talk to a doctor about what she should expect. Maybe get her some medication to ease some of the puberty troubles. But mainly, just spend some time with her, talking to her, playing with her, and so on. But really the most important thing would be to tell her the truth about where she stood in terms of value, meaning and purpose. After all – how sad can you really be if Jesus gave his life for you, and has very important work for you to do? Young people seem to put so much emphasis on what their peers think of them, but on a Christian worldview, that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is what God thinks of you, and what he thinks is based on your character inside, not on how you look. He’s not selfish.

More:

Around the end of that first year post-surgery, something started happening: My brain was maturing. I thought about how I’d gotten where I was, and gave myself questions to contemplate. A big one was: “What makes me a man?”

I started realizing how many flaws there had been in my thought process, and how they had interacted with claims about gender that are increasingly found in the larger culture and that have been adopted at the Tavistock.

[…]I was also concerned about the effect my transition would have on my ability to find a sexual partner.

Then there was the fact that no one really knew the long-term effects of the treatment. For instance, the puberty blockers and testosterone caused me to have to deal with vaginal atrophy, a thinning and fragility of the vaginal walls that normally occurs after menopause. I started feeling really bad about myself again.

[…]Five years after beginning my medical transition to becoming male, I began the process of detransitioning. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testosterone in your body, and this affected me too: I couldn’t release my emotions. One of the first signs that I was becoming Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.

The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.

Her article has a lot more information about her experiences with the NHS, and her court case. But what I wanted you guys to see was how important it is to not let children just say “I want this”, which is something they saw on TV, or heard from their peers, or read online. Instead, you need to find out what problem they are really trying to solve. Once upon a time, Christians thought that the Christian worldview and a relationship with God in Christ was the most important thing you had to offer people who were in distress. What happened to that? When did we stop offering truth, and start offering disinterested agreement and shallow affirmation? Did we just want to feel good and have people think we were “nice”?

I’m really starting to get more and more concerned about how people on the secular left view other people’s children. And how they view the parents of those children. Here are a couple of news stories from Thursday that show what’s causing my concern.

First, here’s Biden’s Secretary of Education saying that parents should not be a “primary stakeholder” in their kids’ education:

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Democrat governor says “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”.

Meanwhile, leftist school boards want parents to be treated as “domestic terrorists”.

The Federalist reports:

The leftist National School Boards Association is begging President Joe Biden to use domestic terrorism laws to target parents who oppose anti-science mask mandates for children and the infiltration of racist curriculum in schools.

In a letter sent on Wednesday, NSBA asked the Biden administration and federal law enforcement to “deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”

“Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials through existing statutes, executive authority, interagency and intergovernmental task forces, and other extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our children and educators, to protect interstate commerce, and to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses,” the letter states.

NSBA said local and state law enforcement agencies are already working to “prevent further disruptions to educational services and school district operations,” but that “these threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent” and require assistance from federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service.

Now, I’ve written before about how unionized school teachers give almost all of their political contributions to Democrats, and that’s because Democrats give them maximum autonomy from the parents of those children. They don’t want to be accountable to parents who expect their children to learn useful things, and get jobs.

Here are the top 20 recipients of political contributions from teacher unions, according to Open Secrets:

Top 20 Recipients

Notice anything? That’s right, there’s not a single Republican in the list. And that holds true when you filter for only Senators, and only Representatives, too.

So, what do I learn from this? Two things.

First, conservative Christian men should be very careful about dating or marrying unionized teachers. It’s not unusual to see Christian men have their values changed, and their influence diminished, because they married “Christian” teachers. We just had two Christian men leave the company that I am currently with, who married left-wing teachers. In both cases, those men were opposed to Trump. Their wives made them do it. Every single Christian man I know who married a teacher has had to either become liberal, or act like a liberal, in order to keep peace in his house. It’s just too risky to try, unless the person is reading Thomas Sowell, Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Licona, Michael Behe, etc. I know there are male teachers who read conservative books so they can resist peer pressure, but I’ve never met a female one.

Second, conservative men cannot trust schools with unionized teachers to teach their children. From the very beginning of your education, you should be thinking about what kind of job you can do where you will be insulated from the dogmas of the secular left. Do not let secular leftists have veto power over how you earn a living. My recommendation is to go into some trade or STEM career where you can earn a living. Small companies are better than big ones, and being a freelance consultant is best of all. Why? Because you will have to keep your wife home to homeschool the children, and that costs money. You’ll have to be thinking about money earlier than your father did, because while they could trust the schools, you can’t. You have to have a different plan.

I’ve been thinking lately about how to measure how committed and capable a person is on issues of interest to conservatives. For example, on abortion, most conservatives will say, “I vote pro-life”. But I think a higher level of conviction and commitment is shown when a person can show WHY they are pro-life. And I’m not looking for feelings, here. I’m looking for handling scientific evidence.

So, when it comes to the abortion issue, the first step is to answer the question “what is the unborn?” And again, I’m not looking for an opinion here. I’m not looking for feelings. I’m not looking for what your parents, or your pastor, or your church choir says. I’m interested in whether a person can cite some scientific evidence.

Fortunately, we have first class scientists who have collected the relevant information for us, like Dr. Maureen Condic, She’s an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and recently served on the National Science Board. She earned her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, and has published papers in peer-reviewed journals.

One of her publications (PDF) explains what science tells us about the unborn. The title is “When Does Human Life Begin? The Scientific Evidence and Terminology Revisited”. A good paper to have available, especially if your opponent has nothing but purple hair, tattoos and nose piercings. But if you want something easy, you can just use quotations from a variety of embryology textbooks (PDF).

Like this one:

“Human development begins at fertilization, when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell (capable of giving rise to any cell type) marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”

Source: Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 10th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2016. p. 11

Don’t just use one quotation, use lots.

Also useful to know is what the unborn baby can do during the process of developing.

Here’s an article from the famous Cleveland Clinic that explains:

At the moment of fertilization, your baby’s genetic make-up is complete, including its sex. The gender of your baby depends on what sperm fertilizes the egg at the moment of conception.

And a bit further along:

Month 1 (weeks 1 through 4)

In these first few weeks, a primitive face will take form with large dark circles for eyes. The mouth, lower jaw and throat are developing. Blood cells are taking shape, and circulation will begin. The tiny “heart” tube will beat 65 times a minute by the end of the fourth week.

And a bit further along:

Month 2 (weeks 5 through 8)

Facial features continue to develop. Each ear begins as a little fold of skin at the side of the head. Tiny buds that eventually grow into arms and legs are forming. Fingers, toes and eyes are also forming.

The neural tube (brain, spinal cord and other neural tissue of the central nervous system) is well formed now. The digestive tract and sensory organs begin to develop too. Bone starts to replace cartilage.

The head is large in proportion to the rest of the body at this point. At about 6 weeks, a heartbeat can usually be detected.

Most abortions happen in the first trimester, and that’s why pro-lifers say “abortion stops a beating heart”. It’s definitely human, and it’s definitely killed in an abortion.

So, what’s the point of this post? I’m saying that if you are a conservative, then you have to be familiar with enough evidence to be persuasive to others who do not share your views. Not just on the issue you like, but on EVERY issue – social issues, foreign policy issues, fiscal issues.

It’s not enough for you to be happy that you have the right opinion about one issue. It’s not enough that the people around you like you because they agree with your “right answer”. You have to be able to make a case that crushes your opponent with evidence. Being a conservative isn’t about you or your feelings. It’s about the world out there – can you make a difference by being convincing to other people?

Of course if doesn’t feel good to have to learn how to talk about issues using scientific evidence. It’s work. And of course it doesn’t feel good to disagree with people about controversial issues. But you have to get used to not being ignorant and not being liked. I know a lot of feelings-based Christians who know a lot about sports, fiction, music, essential oils, and other nonsense. They want me to be satisfied that they have the right answer to questions like “Does God exist?”, “does military preparedness deter aggression?” and “does the free market system make people more prosperous than socialism?” But if I am out on a date with you, and I ask you these questions, I’m looking for more than the right answer. I want you to show your work. I want to see you demonstrate your ability to persuade people on the other side, either in your writings or in your discussions.

Don’t cry to me about how you can’t find a husband when you can’t do anything that a husband needs you to do. There is no path to impressing a conservative man that allows you to be lazy, ignorant and cowardly. I expect performance. If you are smart enough to get a college education and a job in the competitive private sector providing value to paying customers, (not a public school teacher or anything disconnected from reality, like that), then you are smart enough to be able to explain your views on moral issues and public policy.

Here is my full list of dating questions.