Tag Archives: Mental Illness

Brown University suppresses new study showing transgenderism is not genetic

What's the best explanation of this data? Genetics or cultural pressure?
What’s the best explanation of this transgenderism data? Genetics or cultural pressure?

Are people on the secular left interested in conforming their beliefs to what scientists discover about the universe? Do they greet the progress of science with an open heart and an open mind? Well, we already know that secular leftists are hostile to what science has shown about the origin of the universe, and the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. But what about moral issues like transgenderism?

Consider this study, which was reported by Science Daily:

This month, a Brown University researcher published the first study to empirically describe teens and young adults who did not have symptoms of gender dysphoria during childhood but who were observed by their parents to rapidly develop gender dysphoria symptoms over days, weeks or months during or after puberty.

[…]The study was published on Aug. 16 in PLOS ONE.

Littman surveyed more than 250 parents of children who suddenly developed gender dysphoria symptoms during or after puberty.

The pattern of clusters of teens in friend groups becoming transgender-identified, the group dynamics of these friend groups and the types of advice viewed online led her to the hypothesis that friends and online sources could spread certain beliefs. Examples include the belief that non-specific symptoms such as feeling uncomfortable in their own skins or feeling like they don’t fit in — which could be a part of normal puberty or associated with trauma — should be perceived as gender dysphoria; the belief that the only path to happiness is transition; and the belief that anyone who disagrees with the teen is transphobic and should be cut out of their life.

“Of the parents who provided information about their child’s friendship group, about a third responded that more than half of the kids in the friendship group became transgender-identified,” Littman said. “A group with 50 percent of its members becoming transgender-identified represents a rate that is more 70 times the expected prevalence for young adults.”

Additionally, 62 percent of parents reported their teen or young adult had one or more diagnoses of a psychiatric disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before the onset of gender dysphoria. Forty-eight percent reported that their child had experienced a traumatic or stressful event prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria, including being bullied, sexually assaulted or having their parents get divorced.

This suggests that the drive to transition expressed by these teens and young adults could be a harmful coping mechanism like drugs, alcohol or cutting, Littman said. With harmful coping mechanisms, certain behaviors are used to avoid feeling negative emotions in the short term, but they do not solve the underlying problems and they often cause additional problems, she noted.

Well, this seems like a OK study, and, as a Christian, my gut response to scientific data is to agree with it, and adjust my beliefs accordingly. I am a little concerned that her data is coming from self-selected individuals who are self-reporting, but it can be hard to find transgender test subjects.

This article at The Federalist had a few examples to illustrate the conclusion of the study:

The study includes other eye-opening information, such as case studies of several children’s stories.

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.”

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.”

I thought this quote from that article was interesting as well, given the culture’s obsession with “bullying”, which is a nebulous term that can mean actual bullying, or mere disagreement.

The study also may indicate that school “anti-bullying” programs typically created by LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign may help accelerate children identifying as transgender by pushing peers and authority figures to profusely express their support. It also may suggest that Marxist-style identity politics that brand heterosexuality as oppressive increase gender dysphoria.

Coming out as transgender means instant fame and popularity, because you’re a victim, and everyone has to be nice to you… or else:

“Great increase in popularity among the student body at large. Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens,” wrote one parent on the study response form. Another wrote, “not so much ‘popularity’ increasing as ‘status’ … also she became untouchable in terms of bullying in school as teachers who ignored homophobic bullying …are now all at pains to be hot on the heels of any trans bullying.”

Very interesting. But the secular left had a completely different reaction to the study.

The Daily Wire reports:

In any case, this Brown University study could not stand — any effort to actually research the environmental component of transgenderism is met with raucous calls for censorship. And Brown immediately caved. The University pulled down a news article about the study. Realistically, Brown and the journal in which the original comment was published, PLOS ONE, turned against the study because it offended politically correct sensibilities about transgenderism.

Here’s what the spokeswoman for Brown University had to say about pulling the study:

Independent of the University’s removal of the article because of concerns about research methodology, the School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.

[…]There is an added obligation for vigilance in research design and analysis any time there are implications for the health of the communities at the center of research and study.

So much for the spirit of free inquiry and academic debate on the Brown University campus. The progress of science has been overridden by the hysterical reactions of the secular left.

The future is Canada

In Canada – a country that does not have free speech protected by law – it’s actually a criminal offense to make transgender people feel bad by disagreeing with them.

A Canadian human rights lawyer explained what the law is in Canada:

Brown, who appeared with Peterson before the Senate last May to argue against Bill C-16, said a “small cadre of trans activists” have “made a successful revolution” by instantiating a social construct into law.

Denying gender theory under Bill C-16 could result in jail or bankruptcy, he said.

A human rights tribunal can levy fines, or assign a “public interest remedy,” such as sensitivity training, and non-compliance would be considered contempt of court, said Brown.

[…]He advised people watch the case of Barry Neufeld, a British Columbia school trustee facing a human rights complaint for “transphobia” for criticizing the province’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI 123) curriculum.

If you want to know what’s coming to America in ten years, just look north to Canada. Right now, we are having gay activists sue Christian business owners who refuse to take part in same-sex weddings. Canada was doing that in the late 90s and 2000s. Now Canada is arresting people, bankrupting them, and putting them in jail, for using the wrong pronouns when referring to transgender people. That shows you where the secular left in America would like to take our country. Are you comfortable with having your free speech limited like this?

Why are so many women with good careers being forced to freeze their eggs?

Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?
Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?

The New York Times says that more and more women are having to freeze their eggs because they can’t find good men to marry. The NYT doesn’t think that women are doing anything wrong. They blame the men for refusing to commit. According to feminism, women who value careers, abortion rights, no-fault divorce, big government, high taxes, etc. are doing everything right. But does it work?

I thought it might be a good idea to help Western women to make better decisions with men and marriage. Although setting out boundaries seems harsh and restrictive, it’s actually protective and loving. If we want women to get to a stable marriage and children, (what they really need long term, after they lose their looks and youth), then we should be bold about leading them.

The first thing to point out is that the women celebrated by the New  York Times are intentionally delaying marriage for their education and careers.

Another New York Times article explains:

It could be that the new generation of millennial women is delaying having children even longer than the women who came before them, as prime childbearing years are also critical years for advancing in a career. A recent study shows that the marital pay gap that springs up after a first child is born typically does not close if the birth happens between age 25 and 35.

Shannon Hettinger, a 32-year-old from Washington, D.C., said she definitely wanted children. She grew up in a large family in a small town in Pennsylvania and almost all her high school friends are married with children. But she moved to Washington, and spent her 20s deciding on a career. Now that she has one she loves — she works in residential real estate sales — she is not going to stop until she gets established. That means not having children for a while.

“I just want to build my book of business and see where I can go from here,” she said. “My whole focus is career growth. That’s my No. 1 priority.”

“Once I achieve a certain level of success,” she added, “then I’ll start thinking about a family.”

Ivy Gray-Klein, 26, who lives in Philadelphia and works at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, said she was open to having children but cannot imagine doing so until she is 30 or 35. She wants to feel settled in her own life first. Now she has three roommates, is paying down her student loans and is working to build a little bit of savings.

“I’m just really trying to get myself to a place that is solid,” she said by phone. “Having a child right now would be so destabilizing. Children just seem like such an enormous financial undertaking.”

As far as I’m concerned, once a woman reaches 30 , she’s actually chosen not to marry, and not to have children. Marriage is something that men are willing to do with women in their early 20s. They want a woman to commit and invest herself in his life early. They don’t commit to a woman who has spent her 20s running up debts, traveling, being promiscuous, etc. The pattern of selfish behavior that  women get into damages their ability to be good wives and mothers later. And men know that.

But in this post, I’m discuss something that I think is responsible for women not finding good men: and that’s the fact that many women are not looking for good men. In fact, some women are very attracted to very bad men.

Here’s the first editorial about women and domestic terrorist Dzhokar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston marathon bombers.

Excerpt:

Mostly, though, they think Dzhokhar is cute. The Bambi eyes (looking right out of his Instagram-doctored photos at you!), the hipster facial stubble, the masses of wine-dark tousled hair — adorable! Impassioned believers have written “Dzhokhar is innocent” on their hands and plastered “Innocent until proven guilty!!!!” posters around their towns. An 18-year-old waitress interviewed by the New York Post vowed to have Dzhokhar’s last tweet before the bombing tattooed onto her arm: “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”

[…]But the real cause of the Jahar craze more likely lies in something more primal and less pretty in the female psyche. I’m betting that women, young and old, are drawn to Dzhokhar not because he is a good-looking late adolescent but because he is a good-looking accused killer. He’s a classic “bad boy” of the sort to whom women are chronically attracted because they want to reform them, or minister to their wounds, or be the healing presence they’ve never had — but mostly because they find them sexy.

That article also noted:

It’s not surprising, then, that every homicide perp on death row who is reasonably attractive has groupies. Consider the handsome (and widely philandering) Scott Peterson, sentenced in 2005 for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay. The day he checked into San Quentin, he received three dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become the second Mrs. Peterson.

Some of the tweets and other fangirl comments about Tsarnaev were collected in this New York Post article.

Lots of Western women from the UK, France, Russia, etc. all picked up and moved to the Middle East to become ISIS jihadi brides.

Excerpt:

Western women joining Islamic State are increasingly from comfortable backgrounds and often well educated with romantic notions of adventure often quickly dispelled by the harshness of life as a “Jihadi bride”, according to a British research report.

Some 550 women from Western countries have left their homelands to join Islamic State, which has captured swathes of Syria and Iraq, said the report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London.

[…]It said female recruits were increasingly younger, some from comfortable backgrounds and often well-educated, and were playing “crucial” propaganda and recruitment roles.

That article is three years old, the numbers have more than doubled since then. The most common reasons cited for leaving are romance and adventure.

Psychology Today has some comments about why some women do this:

In her post, “Women Who Love Serial Killers,” PT blogger, Katherine Ramsland, offers some suggestions about why some women can be so attracted to, or hopelessly beguiled by, the most terrifying of human predators. At first, she provides explanations from the women themselves, women who actually married these dangerously unhinged criminals. Their reasons (somewhat elaborated here) include the assumptions that:

  • their love can transform the convict: from cunning and cruel, to caring, concerned, and compassionate.

  • there’s a wounded child nested somewhere inside the killer that can be healed through a devoted nurturance that only they can provide.

  • they might share the killer’s media spotlight, and so triumphantly emerge from their anonymity, and maybe in the process even land a book or movie deal (an aspiration about as cynical as it is narcissisticand self-serving).

And this is even more interesting:

To simplify this work’s findings for my present purpose, however, let me begin by emphasizing that Ogas and Gaddam find substantial evidence from Web searches, posts, and many 1,000s of romance novels that women demonstrate a strong erotic preference for dominant men. Or toward what’s now commonly referred to as alpha males—in the authors’ words, men who are “strong, confident, [and] swaggering [as in “cocky,” and the pun is intended].” Unfortunately, what these descriptors often imply is behavior sufficiently bearish, self-centered, and insensitive as to often cross the line into a physical, mental, and emotional abuse that can be downright brutal.

[…]Moreover, in responding to the question as to whether some men, such as “serial killers, violent offenders, and rapists,” might be too dominant for women to accept, Ogas and Gaddam note: “It turns out that killing people is an effective way to elicit the attention of many women: virtually every serial killer, including Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and David Berkowitz, have received love letters from large numbers of female fans” (p. 98).

Women choose good-looking bad boys, because they think that they can change them:

The fantasy that seems to be operating in such devotees, and that constitutes the plot of virtually all erotic/romantic novels written with women in mind, is that the “misogyny and jerkdom” they might have to battle with in such super-dominant males is only temporary. That it doesn’t really represent the man’s innermost reality. That his violence and lack of tender feelings is only the beginning of the story, and that their unsparing love, affection, and dedication can ultimately transform his character by helping him get in touch with his, well, “inner goo.”

I blogged before about feminists going after pro-choice bad boys like William Clinton, Peter Strzok, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, Harvey Weinstein, etc. These men support selfish policies like abortion and no-fault divorce. Women seem to not understand that men who support selfishness as policy might actually BE selfish in their own lives. Men who are able to commit and raise children are not pro-abortion and pro-divorce. Those are the men who women should be pursuing, and during their early-to-mid 20s.

Is anyone on the secular left not an intolerant bigoted violent domestic terrorist?

Harassing women is just fine, according to this radical feminist UK Guardian writer
Harassing women is just fine, says radical feminist UK Guardian writer

Well! Whenever there is an attack on conservatives by deranged secular leftists, I try to write about it. Over the years, there have been many – but they were infrequent. Now the left is becoming so violent that it’s a daily occurrence. I decided to collect together a few articles to show you how intolerant and threatening the secular left has become.

Here’s something from The Federalist by Kelsey Harkness, a female conservative:

Jessica Valenti revealed a new standard for liberal feminists on Tuesday: Driving women out of restaurants is wrong, unless they’re a Republican. If that woman is named Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, the behavior is not only acceptable — it’s to be applauded.

The situation began when the head of the D.C. branch of Democratic Socialists of America tweeted the restaurant name and exact addresswhere Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen sat down for dinner. The dinner came after a very public day for Nielsen, who defended the Trump administration’s decision to fully enforce U.S. immigration laws against all who illegally cross the border — a policy that in some case results in separating children from their illegal immigrant parents due to a settlement entered into in 1997 by the Clinton administration.

The protesters marched through MXDC Cocina Mexicana uninterrupted for 11 minutes, screaming things at Nielsen such as, “Shame, shame, shame,” “Fascist pig,” ‘End Texas concentration camps,” and “No borders, no walls, sanctuary for all.”

The protest was supported by many on the left, including an editor at The Washington Post and Valenti, a feminist writer who recently penned a New York Times op-ed telling conservative women they can’t be feminists. Valenti, who supposedly stands for the championing of women, described the harassment of Nielsen “VERY satisfying” to watch.

“She should never be able to show her face in public again,” she said.

So, according to this feminist writer who writes for the UK Guardian, harrassment and intimidation of women is OK, as long as the woman is conservative. Female conservatives and black conservatives seem to get the maximum level of hatred from people on the secular left. There’s nothing like this level of harrassment by conservatives. If we disagree with something, we write about it or vote against it. We don’t shoot you full of holes like the Bernie Sanders supporter did with the Republican legislators, and like the gun-wielding gay activist tried to do at the Family Research Council.

It wasn’t just the UK Guardian, either… it’s CNN, too:

CNN says that harassing women is totally OK, if they're conservative
CNN says that harassing women is totally OK, if they’re conservative

Another female conservative Joy Pullmann had a lot more details on the hate coming from the intolerant secular left. This is from The Federalist again:

A few weeks ago, this same local chapter of socialists, about 60 to 70 strong, marched down the middle of the street to the northern Virginia home of Lora Ries, who assisted the Trump transition team with homeland security policy and has worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They stood outside her home chanting things like: “No borders! No nation! F-ck deportation!” “Aqui estamos! No nos vamos!” (Spanish for “Here we are, we’re not going.”) “Lora Ries, you’re a villain, locking up immigrant children.” “No bans, no wall, sanctuary for all.”

[…]Meanwhile, activists have also begun a doxxing campaign to enable further aggressive social agitation against the homes, privacy, and careers of people who work for ICE and other federal officials.

The “activists” screen scraped LinkedIn to find all the people who enforce the border security, in order to publish their personal information. The goal was to make them easier targets for threats, violence, harassment, vandalism, etc.

Just to remind you, the last time something like this happened, it was the Southern Poverty Law Center publishing the address of the Family Research Council, a conservative think tank. The result was that a gay activists went into the building with a gun, with the goal of mass murdering everyone inside. He was later convicted of domestic terrorism. Nothing was ever done to the SPLC.

Speaking of gay activists, consider this article from the Daily Signal about the kinds of comments that Christians get when they decline to participate in same-sex weddings.

Excerpt:

We were penalized $135,000 for the “emotional damages” we caused by politely explaining our religious convictions and why we could not create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex ceremony.

The outrageous magnitude of that penalty—based largely on the fact that we dared to quote in our business the scriptures we hold sacred—is, we think, the type of anti-religious bias Kennedy had in mind when he determined that Jack’s commissioners “violated the state’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.”

We hope the justice system will undo the damage Avakian’s lack of respect and neutrality has inflicted upon us. When the government acts with hostility to someone’s religion or religious beliefs, citizens take that as license to treat one another with even greater hostility.

While Avakian was publicly judging our religious beliefs, Nicole B. voiced her opinion on Facebook: “I hope your shop burns and you never make another cake, wh—.”

Matthew M. wrote: “If being a Christian means being a prejudiced, stupid piece of s—, you both are great Christians!”

But Briana T.’s was one of the most painful to read: “We hope your children get cancer and die … . You are worthless.”

Beyond that, our business was shut down, our vehicles were vandalized, our home was broken into, and we have received more death threats than we care to count.

I was just reading a tweet by the Family Research Council on Twitter, and there are threats of violence in the replies by secularist leftists. Just in case you didn’t know, the FRC publishes research papers showing the benefits of natural marriage for children over other arrangements like cohabitation and same-sex relationships. That’s it, that’s how they got labeled a “hate group”.

Look at the reply to their tweet below:

Threats of violence against the FRC by secular leftists abound
Threats of violence against the FRC by secular leftists abound

Is this what normal rank-and-file secular leftists are like? Should we now think that everyone who identifies as a secular leftist is a potential domestic terrorist? They seem to all either be actively involved in this violence / vandalism / intimidation / harassment, or actively condoning it. They don’t make arguments. They don’t marshal evidence. They just make threats. They just shout and scream. They just vandalize. They just open fire on unarmed people that they disagree with. This is the secular left in America.