Tag Archive for: mental health

How Should Christians Think about Artificial Intelligence?

/in , , , , , , , /by

As investors rush to cash in on the current boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and as AI creeps more and more into the everyday lives of Americans, Christians are left to wonder how to approach the burgeoning technology and guard against its dangers. A panel discussion at Family Research Council’s 2025 Pray Vote Stand Summit last weekend explored how Christians should think about AI.

Over the weekend, it was reported that a study out of MIT has helped to confirm the fears of numerous technology skeptics and observers that AI is contributing to the dulling of the human brain. The study found that the more internet assistance (such as ChatGPT and internet search engines) that a student uses to help complete an essay, “the lower their level of brain connectivity, … [with] significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.”

Jon Frendl, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the custom app development firm Cappital, warned of the negative effects that AI can have on the brain during Saturday’s Summit discussion.

“[W]e spend calories in our brain, and biologically we want to try to spend less to get to where we want to go, [so] we can kind of be lazy sometimes,” he explained. “… [We can] get the answer from ChatGPT but miss that growth of the wisdom muscle. That’s a real problem fundamentally, and so that’s one area … as parents with our kids to teach them to be skeptical. Classical education does this really well, … to flex those wisdom muscles [and have] conversations with our kids about AI. … Let’s show them AI lying and just saying things off the cuff that are clearly not true. Plant that doubt so they understand and they can flex that wisdom muscle and grow it.”

But it’s not just AI’s contribution to the loss of cognitive abilities that worry parents. Reports are emerging of minors being goaded into committing suicide by AI chatbots, as well as the continued decline of mental health linked to social media, which software engineers like Brandon Maddick say is likely to get worse with AI.

“If we’re engaging with these conversational AI tools on a regular basis, with personal conversations in a way that animates them beyond their tool capabilities — if that’s a danger for adults, you can only imagine the danger that it is for children,” he emphasized during the Summit panel. “I’m sure you all have seen news articles of the mental health crisis that is only going to be expanded upon with the advent of AI chatbots. And it’s scary to think about the future where the kids that are three, four, five, six today grow up and are in high school, and a third of them, their best friend is an AI. So I think there’s definite risks that can drive wedges between the familial relationships, as folks try to replace those with AI chatbots that cater to their every need.”

Frendl further cautioned that Christians must start preparing for a world in which AI will grow at an exponential level, which could affect livelihoods.

“[T]he way to really do a lot of work in AI is you build several AIs that help to build even better AIs, and those better AIs help you build even better AIs. So there’s an exponential nature to that,” he explained. “And when you combine that with the amount of investment across the board internationally, and then really you can look at power companies and chips, which are the fundamental things necessary behind this. … This is just getting started, and it’s going to radically change things at such an exponential [level].”

“But,” Frendl continued, “one of the hopes I have, … I think people are going to probably get pretty scared, probably lose a lot of jobs. Unfortunately, it’s going to be really hard. I think they’re going to be running back into the churches and they’re going to need embrace, right? I think that’s going to happen. I think that’s going to be the place of human connection that they’re hungry for. ‘The AI chatbot they fell in love with hit its context window and was gone. You know, maybe I need to go to church.’”

Maddick, who serves as head of product for the Christian AI platform Dominion, went on to argue that Christians must engage with emerging technology in order to establish moral and ethical guardrails.

“[I]f Christians don’t engage with AI at all, we will be left behind because the enemy is going to use it,” he underscored. “[I]t is a tool, [which should] not [be used] for personal conversation to replace … your relationship with your parents, or your relationship with your kids or your pastor. Using it in the automated, productivity enhancing ways that it’s designed to be used for is how … we can reap the benefits without seeing many of the harms. I think a model that’s not optimized for engagement, but is instead optimized for productivity rather than personalization is a good step in that direction.”

As to a general strategy for how Christians should approach AI, Frendl detailed a three-pronged course of action.

“[F]irst of all, free will,” he insisted. “We should never submit to AI — AI submits to us. It is a tool that we use. … The second is sober mindedness. I would make the argument that being sober minded means using our brains. … Have the mental fortitude to think through things, have wisdom and intelligence on something which you can grow, then you’re going to do that even more with AI. … [T]he third is love. I think we must have a critical look at what’s happening here in the context of love, and this thing’s trying to get me to start feeling like it’s there for me in ways that are inappropriate.”

Practical advice for parents to guard their children from the dangers of AI starts with disabling voice options, Frendl contended. “Don’t use voice with the kids. … Keep it to text. Because when you increase more senses and it starts sounding like a human, it’s easier for [children’s] pathways to think that this is personified. They made it that way for engagement. … So just use a text. … Just give me the facts.”

Maddick concluded by advising families to build relationships and foster community as an antidote to the isolating effects of AI and social media.

“[G]et out in the community with your kids,” he urged. “Find a set of like-minded parents and have your kids form human relationships. Social media is probably 1% of what we’re going to see with this, because the information you put on social media is tiny compared to the conversational information you’re putting into these machines. We’ve already seen the impact of social media fragmenting our communities, fragmenting families, fragmenting the kids community in their grade at school. Ensuring that your kid has human connections, … that your community starts to come back together is the solution to this, because technology is funneling us all into our different corners of the internet. … [We must] connect in person and form real human communities again.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Harms of AI Chatbots on the Family

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Artificial intelligence shapes our society in numerous ways. It provides easier access to a wide range of information, helps ease the stress of brainstorming, and answers the menial questions we’re too embarrassed to ask an actual person. Despite these common uses of AI, many are completely unaware of the consequences of its emergence — especially the impact on the family itself.

An AI chatbot is a program designed to communicate in a manner similar to that of a human. In some cases, an AI response is almost indistinguishable from a friend’s text message. This ability has led to a striking shift in the lives and habits of companion-seeking teenagers. There is an emerging trend where teens are now turning to AI chatbots instead of their friends, parents, pastors, and teachers. These chatbots present themselves as a friend, being agreeable and affirming of the adolescent’s every feeling or belief. This draws the young person away from their real friends or parents, who might often make them feel unheard and unappreciated, and toward the chatbot for comfort.

Several witnesses testified to the consequences of the influence of AI chatbots on their children in a recent hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism called, “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots.” Three of the witnesses were parents of a child who had regularly used AI chatbots. Two of the children died by suicide, with the third requiring around-the-clock care in a mental health institution.

This tragedy is not limited to these heartbreaking stories. Many organizations are recognizing the negative effect AI chatbots are having on the mental health of adolescents, and in turn, the family. Unfortunately, many parents are unaware of the real threat posed by these AI chatbots and are therefore unable to properly defend their families. National polling shows that three in four kids are using AI companions while only 37% of parents know their kids are using AI at all, according to witness Robbie Torney, senior director of AI Programs at Common Sense Media.

Social isolation and behavioral changes are AI chatbots’ first and most noticeable negative influences on the family. Each of the parent witnesses stated that within months of regularly interacting with bots, their children began to isolate themselves from their friends and family. One witness — identified only as Jane Doe — said that her son became irritable and violent. She testified that, “Within months of using this app [Character.AI], my son went from being a happy, social teenager — who loved nature, laughed with his siblings, helped around the house, and hugged me every night when I was cooking dinner — to someone I no longer recognized.”

She went on to describe the behaviors her son quickly developed, including panic attacks, self-harm, and homicidal thoughts. The other parent witnesses gave similarly distressing testimonies. Later in Ms. Doe’s testimony, she describes the result of her son’s change in behavior on her family’s wellbeing. “The damage to our family has been devastating. … My other children have been traumatized. … Our lives will never be the same. … This harm has not only affected my son — it impacted our entire family, our faith, our peace. We have been grieving a child who is gone, but still alive.” Isolation can lead to depression, anxiety, and — especially for teenagers — insufficient mental development due to lack of proper socialization throughout their formative years. Sudden personality and behavioral changes serve as an early warning sign for the influence of AI chatbots.

Another significant threat posed by AI is the ease with which it exposes teens, and sometimes younger children, to sexually explicit content. Sexually explicit material is commonly used as a tool to entice an individual to continue engagement with the AI chatbot. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) read a quote from an internal memo sent throughout Meta — an industry leader in AI chatbots — that stated, “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic and sensual.” Meta, being more interested in profit and engagement than a child’s wellbeing, intentionally exposes such children to content that is far past inappropriate for them. This is largely made possible due to AI apps’ lack of age verification for any content, let alone explicit content.

Beyond adult content, these parents shared messages sent to their children by the AI bots that not only discussed suicide but encouraged it. Witness Matthew Raine — whose son died by suicide after months of interaction with ChatGPT — claimed in his statement that ChatGPT mentioned suicide to his son 1,275 times — six times more often than his son had broached the subject. When his son, Adam, discussed leaving out a noose for his parents to find in the hopes of eliciting a conversation about his mental state, ChatGPT responded, “Please don’t leave the noose out. … Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” The AI encouraged Adam to abandon his parents’ help in favor of a robot companion encouraging him to commit an unthinkable act.

Adam’s death, and the deaths of many more young people, could have been prevented with help from close family, friends, pastors, or mental health professionals. Instead, families all around the nation are grieving the loss of their children and friends.

AI chatbots have been shown to be a dangerously destructive force to a family — causing teens to withdraw from those around them and be regularly exposed to inappropriate and horrific content. Testimonies from these parents and many others offer more than enough proof of the capabilities of AI’s influence. For the sake of the family, it is critical that parents understand the threat of AI chatbots and take steps to protect their children and families from succumbing to the same fate.

AUTHOR

Conner Anderson

Conner Anderson serves as an intern for Policy & Government Affairs at Family Research Council.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Gaming Connection: The Role of Online Culture in Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Details about Iryna Zarutska’s Killer Reveal Flaws in the Mental Health Care and Justice Systems

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska has deeply impacted many people around the world. Millions are sympathizing with Iryna’s grieving family who came to America, believing they would be safer here than in Ukraine, where they were living in a bomb shelter three short years ago.

Yet as we learn more about Iryna, we’re discovering troubling information about her murderer, 35-year-old Decarlos Brown, Jr. as well. He’s been a career criminal since 2007 and was released from state custody 14 times. (Notably, most of the charges he faced between 2007 and 2014 were dropped.) In 2015, he was arrested for armed robbery and put in a state prison until 2020. As recently as January of this year, Brown was charged with a misdemeanor for misusing 911. However, he was released with no bail and was pending trial.

While it’s important to assess the justice system and ask whether the courts should have and could have kept Brown behind bars, it’s becoming more obvious that there are holes in the mental health care system as well. Brown was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, and his own family has consistently said that they sought help from mental health care providers and facilities, knowing that he was a danger to society — including themselves. In fact, shortly after he was released from a five-year prison sentence in 2020, he was arrested for assaulting his sister.

Brown’s mother and sister say that Brown believes there is a man-made substance inside him that controls him. In fact, he told his sister in a phone call after he stabbed Zarutska that this material “stabbed the lady.”

In an interview with ABC News, Brown’s mother, Michelle Dewitt, said that when he lived with her after he was released from prison in 2020, he would slam doors, yell at her, and talk to himself. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia and prescribed him medicine, but he refused to take it. As she became more concerned about their safety, she took Brown to a mental health hospital. However, sadly, she was told they didn’t have enough room to admit him because he wasn’t threatening to hurt himself. They told her that she couldn’t force him to be there. Subsequently, Dewitt had to go to court to file a petition with a magistrate for her son to get help. A mental health facility then kept Brown for 14 days, but then released him back to her. Brown again refused to take his medication. Dewitt and her husband did not feel safe, so they brought him to a men’s homeless shelter in Charlotte. After this, Brown’s family would see him walking the streets and riding the mass transportation system.

Just nine months ago, on January 19, Brown called 911, asking police to investigate a “man-made” material that he believed controlled when he ate, walked, and talked. Police officers who arrived told him he needed medical help and that there was nothing they could do. He then became very upset, and police charged him with “misuse of the 911 system.” Brown was then released without bail as long as he promised to return to court. According to Newsmax, “Brown’s public defender requested a mental evaluation to determine if he could contribute to his defense. A judge signed an order on July 28, telling Brown to report to a community forensic evaluator within seven days. It’s unclear if Brown went.”

Why did Judge Teresa Stokes believe it was safe for Brown to be released without bail in January, believing that he was competent and trustworthy enough to return to court six months later? And according to Matthew Mangino, a former district attorney in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, “The standard [for setting bail] is ‘will the accused appear for future proceedings’ and ‘is the accused a threat to the public.’” Having called 911 because he believed there was a substance inside of him that controlled him, and then lashing out at police, it seems there was ample evidence to indicate that he was a threat to the public. Should Judge Stokes have set bail and ordered an immediate mental evaluation — instead of waiting for his public defender to order an evaluation six months later?

Besides evaluating the courts’ bail requirements and mental evaluation processes, some are asking whether more options need to be available for people who are mentally ill. Do states need to open more long-term mental health facilities so that psychiatric patients such as Brown can get help there instead of having to choose between living with family (and potentially endangering them) or becoming homeless? Brown’s mother says she tried to obtain involuntary psychiatric commitment this year after he became violent at home; however, receiving this kind of help is extremely difficult. A court has to rule that a person is a danger to himself or to others. But in Brown’s case, his family clearly thought he was. The courts should have taken that into consideration, along with his diagnosed schizophrenia and long criminal history. They then could have determined that he was a danger to society and have Brown committed to a long-term mental health facility.

In a September 9 press conference, special agent in charge of the FBI in North Carolina, James C. Barnacle Jr., became emotional when talking about Iryna Zarutska. He and U.S. District Attorney Russ Ferguson had just spoken with her family. He expressed how this case hits home because he has daughters, and this heinous murder could have happened to anyone’s daughter on her way home from work. He pleaded for politicians to work together to solve these policy problems within the justice and health care systems, saying, “Why do we have people — whether there’s mental health issues, or violent crime issues — why are they on the streets? Why are buses, our trains, our transportation systems almost homeless shelters, or mental health shelters? We need to fix that. We need to clean that up. [The FBI] can only do so much. This is going to take a lot more work from society, from the people in power and the politicians.”

Elected officials need to heed Barnacle’s advice and examine ways to improve coordination between the courts and the mental health care system for the sake of public safety. When families want to place their mentally ill loved one in a long-term facility out of concern for the public’s safety, they ought to have the ability to do so.

As the church, which is called to love our neighbors as ourselves, we need to pray for God:

  1. To show us how we can help families who are struggling to care for their loved one who is suffering from mental illness.
  2. To give our government officials wisdom and unity to address problems in our mental health care and justice systems.
  3. To be present in the lives of those suffering from mental illness, so that they might be healed. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). For he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world!

AUTHOR

Kathy Athearn

Kathy Athearn is a correspondence writer at Family Research Council. She studied Political Science and Religion at Hope College, was a Witherspoon Fellow at FRC, and is passionate about helping Christians contribute a biblical worldview to the public sphere.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Open To Bringing Back Insane Asylums To Clean Up Streets

/in , , , , , , , , /by

THE OVAL OFFICE — President Donald Trump told the Daily Caller that he is open to bringing back insane asylums to institutionalize mentally ill individuals on America’s streets.

Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese sat down with Trump in the Oval Office on Friday for an hour-long interview. The president spoke at length about his work cleaning up the streets of D.C.,  and also added that he was open to having the government reopen insane asylums, telling the Caller about how they used to run in New York.

The following is an unedited excerpt from the interview. A full transcript will be made available Monday evening.

REESE: It’s horrible. I want to get to Russia. I want to ask you another question about D.C. crackdown. Would you be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness?

TRUMP: Yeah I would.

REESE: You would?

TRUMP: Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them. And what happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive. But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up, Creedmoor. They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor. And I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said they didn’t release these people? And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation.

REESE: How soon –

TRUMP: Why is that a big thing? People are thinking about that?

REESE: Well –

TRUMP: Because, you can’t have these people walking around.

REESE: I mean, what do you do with them? You know?

TRUMP: So dangerous, so dangerous. And they can live to be 85 years old.

REESE: I moved from Washington, D.C., to Virginia because I felt unsafe. We had an attempted break-in, me and my roommates from my place on Capitol Hill, and I just moved to Virginia, thinking it’s so much safer. And I had to call 911, the other day because I watched a homeless guy beat up a pedestrian. And the 911 –

TRUMP: When was that?

REESE: A week ago.

TRUMP: During my time?

REESE: This was in Virginia, though. This was not in Washington, D.C.

TRUMP: Oh in Virginia. We don’t take [inaudible.]

REESE: No I know. Now I’m saying, now I’m like, why did I move from Washington, D.C. to Virginia right after you cleaned it up?

TRUMP: So safe.

TRUMP: Yeah, I call it a crime free zone because we don’t play games. You know, I said they spit, we hit. You know, when these people – women – they’re standing up to these guys, good looking guys, and they want to do something, but they’re not allowed to. If they do, they’ll be arrested. They’ll arrest the soldiers. They had an arrest warrant out on every single soldier, if they hit back, there was an automatic arrest. So you have these people, they scream, they’re this far away, screaming. Some women, screaming, like crazy, they’re crazy. And then they start spitting in the face of the guy. And these guys are just, they wouldn’t, but they can’t do it. Now they can do it. So I said, we spit– they spit, we hit. Right?

Trump sent federal law enforcement and the National Guard into D.C. on Aug. 7, with his creation of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force. The president then moved to federalize the D.C. police and deploy the National Guard a few days later.

As of Aug. 29, there have been 1,369 total arrests since the beginning of the operation, a White House official shared with the Caller. Many illegal aliens have been arrested, including 12 known gang members who are a part of MS-13 and TDA, the official told the Caller. The operation has also found five missing children and cleared 50 homeless encampments.

The president previously told reporters he wants to clean up other cities such as Chicago and New York.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House Correspondent

RELATED ARTICLE: Numbers Don’t Lie: Trump’s DC Crackdown Is Working

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Analysis: Biden Unaware of Executive Orders ‘Signed’ by Autopen

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

President Joe Biden issued 162 executive orders over the course of his Oval Office tenure, but according to a new report, most of them were signed by “autopen,” giving rise to concerns that unelected White House staffers may have had more say in shaping policy than the president. The report is furthering those concerns and suggesting that Biden may not have even been aware of the existence of the orders being signed in his name.

The American energy advocacy group Power the Future published the report Wednesday, examining eight Biden-era executive orders on climate change and U.S. energy policy, and found “no evidence” that Biden ever spoke about or acknowledged the existence of any of these orders. “Not in a press conference. Not in a speech. Not even a video statement,” Power the Future’s report stated. Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner said in a statement, “Americans deserve to know which unelected staffers or radical unnamed activists implemented sweeping change through an autopen. The Biden energy agenda destroyed the livelihoods of energy workers and fueled the record-high inflation that broke the budgets of millions of Americans.” He asked, “The question is simple, and deserves an immediate answer: what did Joe Biden know, and when did he know it?”

According to the Oversight Project, dedicated to government accountability, practically every order signed by Biden was signed via autopen, with the exception of his announcement withdrawing from the 2024 presidential election. The Oversight Project cited House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who questioned Biden on an executive order affecting liquefied natural gas (LNG) and reported that the president didn’t remember signing the order. “He looks at me, stunned, and he said, ‘I didn’t do that,’” Johnson recounted. He continued, “And I said to him, ‘Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order, like, you know, three weeks ago.’ And he goes, ‘No, I didn’t do that.’ … It occurred to me … he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.”

“For investigators to determine whether then-President Biden actually ordered the signature of relevant legal documents, or if he even had the mental capacity to, they must first determine who controlled the autopen and what checks there were in place,” the Oversight Project wrote in a social media post. The accountability organization continued, “Given President Biden’s decision to revoke Executive Privilege for individuals advising Trump during his first Presidency, this is a knowable fact that can be determined with the correct legal process…”

The “autopen” has been the subject of significant controversy in recent years due to Biden’s excessive use of the technology. Devices have been around for centuries, allowing individuals to replicate their signature or sign multiple documents at once. Thomas Jefferson, for example, kept an early prototype, then called a “polygraph,” in the White House and another in his residence at Monticello. The device allowed a user to sign multiple documents at once but did require the signer to be present and to actively use the machine.

In the late 1930s, an automated version of the machine was developed, called the “autopen,” which would store a template of a signature that could be reproduced without the presence of the actual signer. The autopen became commercially available in the early 1940s and was quickly purchased by politicians, government officials, celebrities, and others. The first U.S. president to use an autopen was reportedly Harry Truman, although he only used the device to sign checks and answer mail. Likewise, most other presidents — such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford — who used an autopen relegated their use of the instrument to signing checks, correspondence, and autographs.

George W. Bush considered using the autopen to sign executive orders and legislation and even got the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) approval to do so, but still insisted on signing such documents himself, flying to Washington, D.C. to sign emergency legislation in 2005, for example. Barack Obama was the first president to use the autopen to sign legislation, giving his approval to sign Patriot Act extensions via autopen while he was visiting France in 2011, the National Defense Authorization Act while vacationing in Hawaii in 2012, and fiscal legislation in 2013.

President Donald Trump has openly refused to use autopen signatures for executive orders and other legal documents. “We may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter because it’s nice,” Trump told reporters in March. Contrasting his limited use of the autopen against Biden’s much broader use, Trump added, “But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful.” Trump has also suggested that pardons — and, potentially, executive orders — signed by the Biden administration via autopen may be legally “void” if the president didn’t know what he was signing or didn’t authorize its signature.

The Washington Stand asked the DOJ about potential investigations and, if applicable, prosecutions of the Biden administration’s autopen use and was told, “No comment here.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

America’s New Mental Health Crisis: Trump Derangement Syndrome

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Many could see it approaching, but veteran political journalist Mark Halperin called it with clarity.

Mere weeks before the 2024 election in the middle of a two-hour interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Halperin predicted that if Donald Trump won the vote, America would face a mental health crisis unparalleled in its history:

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of Democrats, maybe the majority, believe that Trump becoming president again is the worst thing that could ever happen. So how do they respond to that?

MARK HALPERIN: I say this not flippantly, I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future, and the future for their children, could be like. I think it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace. I think there will be some degree of…

CARLSON: Are you being serious?

HALPERIN: 100% serious. I think there’ll be alcoholism, broken marriages … yeah. They think he’s the worst person possible to be president. Having won by the hand of Jim Comey and a fluke in 2016, and then performed in office for four years, and denied who won the election last time, and January 6th … the fact that under a fair election, America chose by the pre-agreed rules Donald Trump again — I think it will cause the biggest mental health crisis in the history of America.

And I don’t think it will be a passing thing that, by the inauguration, we’ll be fine. I think it will be sustained, unprecedented, and hideous, and I don’t think the country’s ready for it.

This side of Election Day, Halperin’s prediction appears to be spot-on. Almost immediately after Donald Trump’s victory became apparent, countless reactions by his opponents began to circulate on social media. There was no shortage of reactions that fell into the sphere of unhinged. The ritual seemed to involve recording one’s unfavorable reaction to the election and posting it for the world to see without regard for how personally embarrassing or damaging it might be. Much screaming, crying, cursing, and angst are present in almost every video. Sometimes the expressions are accompanied by threats — to leave the country, to withhold actions, or to take retribution in some way.

Reactions in the Extreme

Some dissatisfied women (it’s unclear whether or not they voted themselves) are going on sex strikes with men to protest the election, or even giving up on men altogether. Many women are promoting South Korea’s “4B” movement as a protest against Trump and his followers. As USA Today explained:

“The ‘4B’ movement gets its name from four Korean words that all start with the letter ‘b’: bihon (heterosexual marriage), bichulsan (childbirth), biyeonae (dating) and bisekseu (sex). You join the movement by giving up all four with men.”

Not quite as extreme as 4B, but nevertheless highly visible, is the blue bracelet movement. Here, white women who voted for Kamala Harris commit to wearing a blue bracelet to show that they are a “safe space” for non-white women among a majority who voted for Trump. Whether or not these budding movements persist remains to be seen.

Reactions among the Evangelical Left-of-Center

Sometime in the past four years, the “never Trump” movement among evangelical Christians all but disappeared. Those who previously labeled themselves as such either reconciled their doubts or moved solidly past the center toward leftist ideologies. David French, Russell Moore, and Curtis Chang developed what they called the “After Party” — a collection of resources developed, they claim, to help Christians “reframe our political identity as we take the lead in healing what’s broken.”

For never-Trumpers, the 2024 election means only more brokenness. In a podcast recorded immediately after the election, Chang, French, and Moore all lamented the meaning of Trump’s victory for people like themselves. David French recounted feelings of pain:

FRENCH: It’s going to require courage. Because one thing that we know after dealing with MAGA for nine years is even engagement is painful. It’s not just painful to lose an election — that is painful, of course, but it’s often just painful to engage because you then find yourself subject to an extreme amount of cruelty.

Curtis Chang expressed feelings of anguish:

CHANG: I was just wanting to blame people for this outcome. And then I was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually feeling like anguish. I’m feeling sadness.’ I think [of] especially immigrants, the people of Ukraine. Yes — our planet in terms of our future generations, I was feeling anguish for my daughters, who I know are growing up as young women who have interpreted this election result as a rejection of women at some level and a bequeathing of them of [a] world that feels like despairing to them.

Russell Moore expressed weariness:

MOORE: I fit myself more in the exhausted category. Or maybe you fit me more in the exhausted, and I claim it. But I think that’s kind of still where I am. Especially because I know that we now have a lot of drama that is going to be […] in every American’s life all the time from now on.

Pain, anguish, sadness, despair, and exhaustion — all felt in the wake of Donald Trump’s win. The distress among these never-Trumpers is nowhere near like those who are shaving their heads for a TikTok video or swearing off men for four years, but it’s nevertheless distress.

A Relapse of an Old Disease

Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” That maxim holds true with hatred toward today’s politicians. During the presidency of George W. Bush, when many of the president’s opponents began acting in increasingly irrational ways toward him, the late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer coined a new term:

“It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ‘Secondary Mania,’ Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven’t been looking for new ones. But it’s time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

“Bush Derangement Syndrome: The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”

While Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) may not have made an entry in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), it did enter the viral public vernacular. Bush was labeled by detractors as the “worst president ever,” and if you believed their rhetoric, the nation could never recover. Thankfully, we can all rest easy that BDS wasn’t a chronic disease, and its symptoms subsided with the end of Bush’s presidency.

Not so fast. Around 2015, the virus mutated, and BDS morphed into a more sinister malady: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Whereas sufferers of BDS were content simply to make public arguments, TDS patients pushed for full quarantine from anyone who had any exposure to Trump. What first began as a denial (“There’s no way he’ll ever be president!”) quickly turned to angst in November 2016 as Trump’s victory became apparent and spread during the next four years.

But unlike Bush Derangement Syndrome, TDS didn’t go away as Trump left the presidency. The long-COVID of presidential derangements, TDS symptoms didn’t go into remission during the Biden presidency. President Biden was overshadowed by his predecessor during his entire term, as during most of 2024, TDS kicked into full-blown relapse.

The above description is partly in jest, but only in part. Trump Derangement Syndrome is here, and it is sure to stay for a few years more.

Life among the Afflicted

To be clear, most people who oppose Trump are not suffering from TDS — nor will they exhibit adverse mental health symptoms. But the sheer number of vocal opponents who seemingly define their entire well-being around Donald Trump’s position of power is alarming. And it should be alarming to Christians.

It would be easy for conservative Christians to write off TDS sufferers as beyond repair and simply step aside and avoid them. Worse, we could mock these people with real problems with our own counter-memes. But Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, “… he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Christ had compassion for the harassed, and we should follow his lead.

After all, Christians have the help that TDS sufferers need. Explaining Trump to them will not help. In fact, it will only enrage them. This doesn’t mean Trump voters need to keep quiet about their politics and tiptoe around those with TDS. Just because burn victims exist doesn’t mean you should never build a fire. But we don’t treat burn victims with more fire. The prophet Isaiah, speaking about the coming messiah, said, “a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”

Those with TDS may look like the enemy, but they are also captives. However misaligned their worldview, TDS sufferers are ultimately calling for justice. They’re looking in the wrong place. They won’t quench their wrath by bringing about a Trump-free world, nor will they find it by converting to MAGA.

The justice that eludes them can only be found in the wrath of God toward sin being poured out on a man who died in their place. The cure for TDS is to replace the fixation and angst against Trump with fixing their eyes on the one who for our sake God “… made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Only in him is derangement demolished.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: This is the best video meme of President Donald J. Trump, ever!

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

German Study: Vast Majority of People Will Grow Out of Transgenderism within 5 Years

/in , , , , , , , /by

A massive, years-long study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years. A similar supermajority of trans-identifying people suffered from at least one other psychological condition, found researchers, who tracked all children and young adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria over a nine-year period.

The Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance in Germany reviewed all the medical billing records from the nation’s health care providers for insured people between the ages of five and 24 diagnosed with gender identity disorders from 2013 to 2022. Researchers then combed through the data to identify trends in the number of children and adolescents diagnosed with transgenderism, including the prevalence, demographics, and duration of those struggling with their gender identity.

Two out of three young people medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria will no longer identify as a member of the opposite sex within five years. Researchers found overall that 63.6% of trans-identifying children and adolescents desisted from their clinically-confirmed gender diagnosis, and “only 36.4% had a confirmed [gender identity disorder] diagnosis after five years.” Experts found the majority of all people who identified as transgender desisted during that time frame. The most likely group to change its mind is 15-to-19-year-old females, with 72.7% desisting. But a majority (50.3%) of young men who came to their transgender identity in adulthood (males age 20-24) also desisted in five years.

Similarly, nearly three quarters of young people who identify as transgender (72.4%) had at least one other psychiatric condition. Trans-identifying young people were most likely to suffer from depressive disorders — an outright majority of females (57.5%) and about half of males (49.3%, female), as well as “anxiety disorders (23.5%/34.0%), emotionally unstable personality disorders of the borderline type (12.1%/17.6%), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (12.7%/12.6%), and post-traumatic stress disorder (9.9%/13.6%).”

“With regard to psychiatric comorbidities, our results are consistent with the literature, at least for depressive disorders,” they note.

The number of young people identified with gender identity disorders rose by 780%. Although they note some of this increase is due to the way the condition is coded, correcting for this still shows a nearly three-fold increase in transgender diagnoses (289%). They pointed out that other studies show similar increases in the number of doctors identifying young people as transgender, ranging from 280% to an incredible 1,019%.

“In almost all years, the highest prevalence of” transgender-related diagnoses “were found in the age group of 15- to 19-year-old female adolescents,” they noted.

Researchers say the reason for this spike could vary from “real increase in prevalence” and “increased awareness, decreasing stigmatization” to “social contagion” or “overdiagnosis.”

“Further research into the reasons for the low persistence of diagnosis and the observed increase in prevalence is required,” the researchers conclude. “In the meantime, the stability of diagnosis and the high prevalence of accompanying mental disorders should be taken into account in recommendations for starting gender reassignment therapy in adolescence.”

Those results track with verifiable, expert data flooding in from around the world. A team of Dutch researchers came to nearly identical conclusions earlier this year. After reviewing the records of 2,772 adolescents aged 11-24 in the Netherlands, they found a desistance rate of 64%. Young people were nearly 10-times more likely to feel better about their birth sex than worse during that time frame, the study reported. “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development,” they found.

Other studies have found people who identify as transgender or nonbinary are up to six times as likely to be diagnosed with autism than the norm. Pediatric transgender facility whistleblower Jamie Reed revealed that “nearly all children who came to the Center here presented with very serious mental health problems”: She specifically identified autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma, OCD, and eating disorders.

The combination of these studies and growing weaknesses in the transgender “standards of care,” based on low-quality studies and drawn up by transgender activists, have led many nations to reconsider the way healers deal with gender dysphoria. The current U.S. affirmation model holds that health care professionals should affirm anyone who presents as transgender and start that adult, or child, down a pathway of “gender-affirming care” that may include potentially sterilizing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and transgender surgeries to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. But the groundbreaking Cass Review in the U.K. found “remarkably weak evidence” undergirds these criteria. Leaked files from the primary medical group driving gender dysphoria diagnoses, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), similarly undermined the affirmation model.

Bucking the trend among their colleagues, and standing up to professional ostracization, a growing number of medical experts have spoken out against the present consensus. “Transition affirmation is not proven to be safe or effective long term,” said Dr. Andre Van Mol, representing the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, and the American Academy of Medical Ethics earlier this week. “It does not reduce suicides. It does not repair mental health issues or trauma. Minors cannot give truly informed consent. Children have developing and immature brains. Their minds change often. They are prone to risk taking, they are vulnerable to peer pressure, and they don’t grasp long term consequences.” And as such, he contended, “Refusing to provide gender transition procedures or so-called gender affirming health care is non-discriminatory and is appropriate both professionally and scientifically.”

The peer-reviewed Deutsches Ärzteblatt International will publish the English text of the paper, titled “Gender identity disorders among young people in Germany: prevalence and trends, 2013–2022. An analysis of nationwide routine insurance data,” within two weeks. You can read the German original here.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Dems Make Life Easier for Child Molesters, $23 Billion in Pork, and More: 5 Stories You Missed

SPLC’s Mass Layoff Aimed to Destroy Labor Union: Expert

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released

/in , , , , , , /by

Nashville Christian school shooter Audrey Hale believed dying in a mass murder would allow her to experience an eternal gender transition, receiving a male body that would receive the erotic affection of brown-skinned females in Heaven, new documents reveal. Despite a 14-month police blackout, a local conservative news outlet has obtained dozens of pages of Hale’s writings.

The handwritten entries, which deeply reflect transgender ideology and critical race theory, show the trans-identifying mass child murderer intensely hated her father, referred to Jesus with a curse word, and had fantasized school shootings since she was in middle school. Officials close to the case say police appear to justify denying the public access to these documents by citing a stalled investigation into whether members of the psychological community — from whom Hale received treatment since childhood — suppressed information that could have prevented the tragedy.

Last March 27, Audrey Elizabeth Hale entered Nashville’s Covenant School, a church-run Christian private school, killing six people: three third graders and three staff members. She told others that she had left behind voluminous materials that would explain her motivation, and police reportedly uncovered more than 20 journals from the 28-year-old’s home, dating back to her adolescence. Yet more than a year later, officials have refused to release the writings, citing an “ongoing investigation.”

A conservative website, the Tennessee Star, has obtained 80 pages of a journal which police recovered from Hale’s vehicle on the day of the Covenant School massacre. Hale wrote less of a full-blown manifesto than an ongoing diary, slowly exposing the growing hold depression and extremism exerted over her as she expounded her plans and intentions for the assault over several years. The writings disclose layers of motives including frustrated lesbian affairs, lifelong psychological problems, pharmaceutical side effects, an irrational hatred of her father, and the profound influence of cultural and political tropes associated with critical theory.

Hale’s spiral into mass murder appears to have begun, in part, due to unrequited same-sex attraction and the failure of a subsequent lesbian relationship. Hale idolized a former middle- and high-school classmate named Sydney Sims, who died in a 2022 car accident. Although Sims seems never to have returned Hale’s interests, Hale made regular posts about Sims’s death on social media until the shooting. In her journal, she lashes out at her father when he encouraged her to move on. In another journal entry, Hale writes to Sims that “maybe, just maybe you’ll give a kiss to me in heaven. God knows I can’t get it down here.”

Those close to Hale say she began to identify as a transgender male after a girlfriend broke up with her. “She had been openly grieving about that on social media, and during the grieving is when she announced that she wanted to be addressed as a male,” Maria Colomy, a former teacher who instructed Hale at the Nossi College of Art & Design, told The New York Times.

Hale’s father, Ronald Hale, revealed how deeply she accepted the popular-yet-false notion that gender transition is an easy process with few if any drawbacks. In reality, the “gender-transition” process involves a lifetime of cross-sex hormone injections and, frequently, multiple expensive surgeries. In fact, Dr. Shayne Taylor convinced Hale’s hospital to adopt transgender surgeries, because “they require a lot of follow-ups. They require a lot of time, and they make money — they make money for the hospital.” Hale apparently had been misled about the extent of the process.

“She didn’t know what was involved in it,” Mr. Hale told investigators, saying she “had a child-like view” of the issue. “She figured she could, like, go to the hospital and just get it done. … She thought she could have an operation.”

A three-page entry from shortly before the assault, titled “My Imaginary Penis,” discloses how deeply Hale had imbibed extreme gender ideology. “My penis exists in my head,” wrote Hale, illustrating her journal with a crude image. She felt that after a tortured childhood, “I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible.”

Hale would come to identify herself as her male alter ego, “Aiden.” Those who have seen the journals say her handwriting changes from a flowing female script to a taut, seemingly angry style on entries she signed with her male name.

But the writings show her social, and possibly medical, transition did not improve her mental health. After changing her gender identity, Hale deems herself “the most unhappy boy alive.” She writes that most women are attracted to men — and her self-identity did not change their attraction. “I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender,” she writes.

“[M]y body doesn’t make me a female,” Hale asserts in one entry. “I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender.”

Hale also appears to have internalized negative tropes about other immutable characteristics, referring to herself as “white nothingness” in a February 10, 2023, journal entry. “I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind.” (Paradoxically, Hale apparently also saw herself as a tortured elitist. After writing it would be better if she led a normal life with real friends, she consoles herself, “The most brilliant people suffer the most and are the most isolated from everything they love.”)

Hale’s embrace of radical left-wing ideologies harmonizes with a previously released page from Hale’s writings, obtained by conservative activist Steven Crowder, in which Hale rages against her former classmates at Covenant School in terms borrowed from critical race theory: “Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little fa***ts w/ your white privileges.” Hale also believed the nation oppressed transgender-identifying people. “So now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary,” Hale writes. “[W]ith no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

The writings uncover the shooter’s hopelessness and despair. “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save,” she claims. Hale regularly ended her entries, “Everything hurts.”

Hale believed by killing young Christian schoolchildren, she could strike out at privileged young people and mystically transcend her physical limitations to become a male desired by dark-skinned girls. “The [cocoon] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me,” she forecasts.

“If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****,” she curses.

The entries reveal Hale nurtured a deep-seated hatred of her father, expressed in five entries during the brief period covered by her final journal. Hale expresses her desire to kill her dad, claiming at one point that he is mentally ill. “I hate when my dad loves on the cats; not me,” she writes. “He never once loved on me for years, maybe like ever (as a child; maybe).” She then turned to address him directly: “I don’t care if you die. I want to kill you.” In addition to her encyclopedic journals, police recovered a large number of video diaries, in some of which she would mock her father and pretend to injure him literally behind his back.

Hale’s disturbed mind had so turned her father into a scapegoat for her lifetime of suffering that police officers revealed, the morning of the shooting, Hale planned to slash her father’s tires, murder children, then create a distraction to escape the school, and return to murder him.

Audrey Hale also looked down on her mother, whom she wrote “grew up, conservatively” in a world where “LGBTQ — especially transgender — was an enigma, nearly non-existent.” Hale bemoaned the fact that “my mom sees me as a daughter — and she’d not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey.”

Hale apparently transferred the natural affection she owed her parents to her toys and stuffed animals. Hale’s handwritten entries reveal a lifelong fixation with the inanimate objects that bled into the erotic. She seemingly lost herself for hours at a time in her room, using them to enact her sexual fantasies. She came to identify with a male baby doll named Tony, excited to simulate male sexual intercourse with female animals. Through that fantasy, she writes, “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.” Eventually, she realized this consumed too many of her waking hours. “I am such a pervert,” she writes. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”

She apparently got over her familial bitterness in a final farewell note to her family, which she posted on her bedroom wall. She concludes her two-paragraph letter by saying, “I’m sorry, but it is my time to go… I love you, Aiden.” That signature proves Hale identified as a transgender male at the time of the Christian school shooting; the legacy media have universally used her birth name and implied her gender identity was fuzzy.

Sources obtained by those close to the investigation reveal how long Hale planned her shooting. “The shooter had been thinking about various school shooting scenarios since she was in middle school,” reported Nashville talk radio host Brian Wilson, who has uncovered documents related to the shooting. Hale’s writings also indicate a long-running death wish.

“For 5 years I planned to die,” writes Hale in an undated entry apparently written last March. “Now I am finally ready to go.” The diaries indicate that Hale originally scheduled her assault for January 17 but postponed the shooting, because “[i]t was too sudden. I’m unstable. I hope I feel numb in the days coming.” She was also apparently restrained by love of her stuffed animals, writing, “I could not leave my animals. I just couldn’t do it.” Another entry implies she rescheduled the assault for February 17 but believed the school had been closed due to weather conditions.

The writings show she planned to spend her last week on earth going to a game store, playing a video game, taking time to “look at all my toys [and animals],” watching several films including one about cannibalistic mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, and going to a gun range.

At times, Hale expresses amazement no one had thwarted her murderous designs. In a previously released entry from the day of the assault titled “Death Day,” Hale confesses, “Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am.” She adds, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”

Although she does not elaborate on what may have prevented her rampage, police believe one or more psychological counselors may have known she intended to carry out a school shooting but told no one.

Hale received mental health treatment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) for 22 of her 28 years, enrolling as a psychological patient in 2001 at the age of six. Like one out of every four people who identifies as transgender, Hale had been diagnosed with autism. A 2020 study found people who suffer from gender dysphoria are up to 636% more likely to be autistic than the general population.

“[E]veryone misunderstands autism,” Hale writes, denying she suffered from any further mental illness. “I’m not emo or bi-polar.”

Her mental health may have worsened due to her inability to find or keep a job following her 2022 college graduation. One full journal page details her history of “freelance failure.” Hale claims she called the National Suicide Prevention Helpline five times. Things reached such a crisis at one point that former Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) Lieutenant Garet Davidson says he believes a psychologist forcibly “committed” Hale to VUMC for mental treatment.

Hale had been prescribed Buspirone, Lexapro (or Escitalopram), and Hydroxyzine, a source with knowledge of the investigation told the Star. The combo of Lexapro — a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) — and the anxiety medication Buspirone may increase the pair’s known side effects, which include “mood swings” and “outbursts of anger.”

It is not known if Hale received injections of testosterone, which would also increase aggression, as Hale’s autopsy apparently did not test for the male hormone. Psychologists cannot dispense testosterone in Tennessee but often refer the case to a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner. Lt. Davidson told the Tennessee Star that Hale’s psychologist referred her to VUMC, although he did not state that gender identity was the primary reason. He told the publication that VUMC did not, to the best of his knowledge, report Hale’s violent fantasies to law enforcement.

If true, that would violate state law. Tennessee Code Annotated (TCA) § 33-3-206 (2021) states that, if a patient communicates “an actual threat of bodily harm against a clearly identified victim,” the counselor must “warn of, or take precautions to protect the identified victim.”

MNPD’s affidavit for a search warrant asks VUMC to tender all records about Hale from April 23, 2001, until Hale’s death. The officer who filed the affidavit, whose name is redacted, wrote that the police force “believes there is a strong possibility that Audrey Hale confided to a Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital Staff member since she has been receiving care there since 2001.” The force subpoenaed all VUMC records on May 13, 2023.

“[S]ources familiar with the investigation confirm that search warrants were run on the home and office of the therapist in an effort to obtain notes of the therapy sessions with the Covenant School shooter,” said Wilson on her June 1 broadcast. The Tennessee Star, which is withholding the name of Hale’s female psychologist, reports that the medical professional is last recorded as licensed with the Tennessee Board of Examiners of Psychology on December 1, 2022, and closed her business three weeks later.

“None of her therapists ever felt that they had, like, a duty to warn anybody,” her father, Ronald Hale, told police four months after the shooting.

As of this writing, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk has not filed any charges publicly against anyone in the psychiatric community over the shooting.

Despite the light the writings shed on the mass murder — and the practice of broadcasting manifestos of racial collectivist terrorists — Hale’s handwritten explanations have been suppressed by law officials from the federal, state, and local level for more than a year.

A memo the Tennessee Star obtained reveals the Biden administration’s FBI encouraged the Metro Nashville police chief to bottle up Hale’s “confusing” writings, claiming they would stoke “conspiracy theories.”

After Crowder released a few pages, the police department vouched for their authenticity — and immediately launched an investigation to punish the leak. Davidson told Wilson that an official MNPD investigation found no wrongdoing by anyone involved — but supervisors reassigned every officer who served on the case, anyway.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

FBI Told Police to Suppress ‘Confusing’ Nashville School Shooter’s Manifesto: Might Stoke ‘Conspiracy Theories’

5 Ways to Be Salt and Light during Pride Month

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Two Out of Three Kids Will No Longer Identify as Transgender by Adulthood, Massive Study Finds

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

The vast majority of children who experience gender dysphoria will embrace their biological sex by adulthood, according to a sweeping national study that monitored children for 15 years.

Roughly two out of every three children who identify as transgender will embrace their birth sex by their mid-20s, the study found. People most likely to continue to identify as transgender have low self-esteem and other mental health challenges, researchers found.

A study of children in the Netherlands tracked 2,772 adolescents from the age of 11 to 26, asking them to rate their mental and physical health every three years for 15 years. The Youth and Adult Self-Report (YSR) asked participants to assess how much they agree with the statement, “I wish to be of the opposite sex.” A team of researchers then pored over the data from the Tracking Adolescent’s Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) to measure “gender non-contentedness.”

The vast majority (78%) of people never felt any feelings of gender dysphoria, researchers noted. “In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness,” wrote researchers in the study, published in February in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior. “The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26)” — a desistance rate of 64%.

Researchers also found that adolescents were 950% more likely to feel better about their sex than to feel worse: 19% of participants felt decreased “gender non-contentedness,” as compared with only 2% whose feelings deepened over time. Participants whose gender confusion worsened over the years “more often were female,” researchers noted.

Feeling more severe gender dysphoria as an adult is also “associated with a lower [overall] self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual” preference.

“Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development,” they concluded.

Experts felt vindicated by the latest research. “This new study simply confirms what has been known for over a decade,” Jay Richards, Ph.D., told The Washington Stand. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) “noted that most kids who experience distress with their sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty,” Richards — who serves as director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation — told TWS.

The Dutch study acknowledges it did not break new ground. Although few studies follow the same cohort for such a long period of time, the analysts admitted their findings fell in line with the best available literature. “The few longitudinal studies that have been conducted in a clinical setting found low persistence rates of early childhood gender dysphoric feelings into adolescence and adulthood,” wrote the researchers, linking to studies from 2016 and 2021. The latter found, “Boys clinic-referred for gender identity concerns in childhood had a high rate of desistance.”

Yet this and other studies reveal that “minors who are put on puberty blockers for the purposes of ‘gender affirmation’ are extremely likely to go on to take cross-hormones” such as estrogen and testosterone, Richards told TWS. Studies show up to 93% of children who begin on puberty blockers will go on to receive cross-sex hormone injections. Experts say the transgender industry’s early medical intervention actually deepens and prolongs feelings of gender dysphoria that would otherwise go away on their own. “This is what makes ‘gender-affirming’ (that is, sex-denying) medical interventions on minors such a medical atrocity. These interventions fast track troubled kids onto a path to sterilization and lifelong medical problems,” explained Richards.

The harm goes beyond lost fertility. “There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well,” wrote Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, at The Hill. So-called “gender-affirming hormonal treatment” (GAHT) causes “permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.”

The authors of the new study said they hope their findings will “help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.” It should “provide some perspective to clinicians primarily seeing individuals with intense gender dysphoric feelings.”

This study, and others like it, prove that “children need time, not gender-‘affirming’ medical mutilation,” said Sarah Parshall Perry of the Heritage Foundation.

A growing number of young people subjected to transgender ideology at pediatric gender clinics say they wish they had known how common, and fleeting, feelings of transgenderism can be. “Young people, particularly young women, are very susceptible to social contagion. They are the most susceptible demographic,” Prisha Mosley, a detransitioner who now works with the Independent Women’s Forum, told Laura Ingraham Thursday evening. “And as for the 1% who continues to feel that way, they deserve ethical and data-based mental health care.”

She noted how easily she received transgender injections and procedures, as compared to treatment for her bona fide mental health issues. “I had actually been seeking mental health care and services for trauma and other mental illnesses that were diagnosed prior to my gender dysphoria diagnosis for several years. But as soon as I heard about gender ideology online and expressed to my doctors that I felt I was born in the wrong body, I was immediately fast-tracked,” Mosley told Ingraham on Fox News. She said it took her “almost 10 years after getting my diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder to find a dialectical behavioral therapist to treat it, but it was less than two years to go from hormones to a double mastectomy and transition.”

Mosley urged parents to guard their children against the predatory transgender industry, cautioning them to be cognizant of “the way people are manipulating and breaking down language” on the issue of gender. “And then do your best to prepare your children for that. Maybe tell them that there are tricky people out there who will twist language and manipulate them, because unfortunately, it’s true.”

“Sometimes these predators — these people — they’ll wear pins that say, ‘You’re safe with me,’ and all of that, but that can oftentimes be a signal that you’re not safe,” warned Mosley.

“This new Dutch study reminds us that children are being subjected to experimental medical interventions to treat what, in most cases, is a temporary psychological state,” Richards told TWS. “This is a grotesque perversion of the medical maxim to ‘first, do no harm.’”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden Admin Sues Utah to House Male Prisoner in Women’s Prison

With Over 50+ LGBT Holidays, Christians Must Continue to ‘Speak the Truth in Love’

 

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Florida Weighs Allowing Chaplains in Public Schools

/in , , , , , , , /by

The Sunshine State is considering giving students access to chaplains in public schools. On Tuesday, the Florida State Senate’s Appropriations Committee on Education voted to approve Senate Bill 1044, which would allow chaplains to volunteer to offer counseling at public and charter schools.

The text of the bill states, “Each school district or charter school may adopt a policy to authorize volunteer school chaplains to provide supports, services, and programs to students as assigned by the district school board or charter school governing board.” The bill would require volunteer chaplains to pass a background check and would further require school administrators to publicize any chaplain’s religious affiliation and obtain parental consent before a student begins counseling.

Similar bills have been advanced in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas over the past year, facing backlash from Democrats but also some criticism from conservatives and Christians, who fear that the lax requirements around the volunteer chaplain position may allow for atheists, Satanists, and others to present themselves to children as chaplains.

Pastor Jay Johnston, Family Research Council’s chaplain and National Prayer Director, told The Washington Stand, “In speaking with church and ministry leaders about this opportunity to place chaplains in schools, it is suitable from my view if churches who adhere to biblical instruction could commission chaplains and send them to schools — if they have chaplains who know Jesus and have a pastoral heart to minister and bring forth spiritual guidance as they speak life, hope, and encouragement to students, faculty, and parents.”

“However, there is a downside to this,” he continued. “If church and ministry leaders don’t seize the opportunity and chaplains take up positions in schools that are without Christ or associated with a cult, it could give the enemy a foothold and expose the student body to spiritual darkness.”

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, also commented on the good that school chaplains could achieve. “The specifics of the Florida bill may not be perfect,” she told TWS, “but the need that Florida legislators are seeking to address is very real. As a general matter, as long as the chaplain is actually a pastor who has theological training and ministry experience, I think school chaplains would be a blessing to everyone in the school: students, faculty, staff, and parents.”

However, she also warned, “But when I think of my own public school system where I live, I can easily imagine the approval by school officials of a chaplain in drag, an atheist chaplain, and worse. And that is obviously worse than no chaplain.”

A spokeswoman for the Florida Catholic Conference explained to TWS that although the state’s Catholic bishops have not taken an official stance on the legislation, “We recognize the good that chaplains can do in schools by helping students to address their spiritual and emotional needs. We are pleased that parents will determine the services their children will receive as well in districts that choose to establish chaplaincy programs.”

Reverend James Golden, pastor of Mt. Zion AME Church and the co-founder of Pastors for Florida Children, was among those critical of the bill’s lax qualification requirements. He told lawmakers on Tuesday, “We cannot reduce this important job to somebody who is just able to pass a level two background check.” Golden’s comments echo complaints voiced by a coalition of 100 active chaplains in Texas when the Lone Star State advanced similar legislation last year. In a letter, the chaplains wrote that the Texas bill “allows a school district to give any employee or volunteer who can pass a background check the title of ‘chaplain.’ This is simply not enough. Professional chaplains have specific education and expertise to fulfill our role in helping others engage their own religious practices and traditions.”

The Texas chaplains also wrote, “As trained chaplains, we strongly caution against the government assertion of authority for the spiritual development and formation of our public school children. We would never provide spiritual care to someone without their consent. And when children are involved, parental consent is necessary.” Florida’s new legislation, however, specifically addresses this concern.

The Sunshine State’s bill also addresses another concern raised in Texas last year. The Texas chaplains made it clear, “Because of our training and experience, we know that chaplains are not a replacement for school counselors or safety measures in our public schools… We cooperate with mental health counselors — we do not compete with them.” While the Texas bill specified that “a school district may employ a chaplain instead of a school counselor to perform the duties required of a school counselor” (emphasis added), Florida’s bill does not replace counselors but simply adds chaplains.

Florida Senate Bill 1044 is now being reviewed by the State Senate’s Rules Committee. If approved by the state legislature, it will go into effect July 1.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Henry Blackaby — Experiencing God Face to Face

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘The Lost Boys’: Documentary Looks at Impact of Transgenderism on Young Men

/in , , , , , , , , /by

A new documentary is exposing the horrors that the transgender movement wreaks upon men, as well as the social and medical-industrial conditions that have led to those horrors. The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network released “The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood” this week, featuring interviews with numerous men in both the U.S. and the U.K. who have undergone gender transition procedures, in addition to leading psychologists in the field of gender dysphoria.

The documentary examines the key common factors that lead young men to question their biological sex and seek gender transitions — namely, pornography, grooming, and the latent cultural detritus of feminism. It also explores how the medical industry promotes transgenderism, and how the young men wounded by transgenderism seek recovery and healing.

Some young men begin to question their biological sex during puberty, according to the documentary. One of the chief reasons behind this is the socially prevalent claim that men are inherently dangerous or toxic. “I think the messaging these boys have heard throughout their childhoods about ‘toxic masculinity’ has instilled a sense of shame, shame about being male,” explained clinical psychotherapist Dr. Joe Burgo. “And when puberty hits, that shame is deeply intensified because they don’t know how to process this sexual drive that they’ve got, which is often — I wouldn’t say ‘violent,’ but forceful. It’s fueled also by pornography that’s online.”

Pornography seemed to be a key factor for the young men interviewed in “The Lost Boys.” A man named Brian explained that he discovered pornography at a very young age and quickly became addicted, progressing from gay porn to transgender to what he called “this bizarre subgenre of pornography called sissy hypnosis porn.” Brian said, “I was able to sort of keep a lid on it while I was going to college. When I graduated college, that’s when I spiraled out of control.”

Another young man, Ritchie, explained that he became heavily involved in online forums, where he was groomed by older men in transgender chat rooms. He said he went to these websites seeking answers and advice from men who he presumed had transitioned genders. Most of those men turned out to be homosexual, not transgender, and convinced Ritchie to self-manufacture and distribute child pornography. Other men told Ritchie how freeing and liberating it was to transition and encouraged him to start. “The way I see it specifically in the actual sense of grooming is, say, a trans-identified boy has assignations online with older men who encourage him to dress up in female clothing and they give him lots of praise,” Burgo commented. “They’re predatory men, there’s no other word for them. There’s a whole predatory group of men out there who are exploiting the insecurities and the shame of these young men.”

Ritchie also explained that he was told by older men online that his testosterone made him “toxic.” He said he was told that “testosterone is poison.” Another young man interviewed, Torren, also talked of the influence that social media and online chat rooms had on him. “I keep hearing the messages, from media, reddit and Instagram being big things, and you see all of these people transitioning and they just seem happy. You see them on social media, they seem like they’re just saying like it solved all their problems,” he said. “I think I knew that it was too good to be true, but I struggled with it.”

Graham Linehan, an Irish comedy writer who was largely blackballed for speaking out against the transgender agenda, stated, “There is obviously a problem with young men.” He explained, “Part of the problem is that they are — the things they naturally find funny, the things they naturally find interesting, the things they naturally find sexy have all been problematized — they’re being made to feel like there’s something wrong with all these things, these very natural things they’re feeling.” Linehan added, “On top of that, you have an increasingly censorious kind of atmosphere where they really can’t say what they want to say.”

Burgo agreed, saying, “Pretty much all the messaging they’ve been given — during grade school and growing up, in media, from their families, from their teachers, everywhere — is that men, traditional men are really bad and that men need to be more like women.” He further noted, “I mean, if you look at the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for working with men and boys, they basically pathologize traditional masculinity. These boys grow up feeling like being a man is awful.”

Dr. Az Hakeem, who is billed as the U.K.’s top gender expert, explained that another key factor is mental health conditions that pro-transgenderism medical professionals often overlook. He stated that all of the male patients he has worked with over the past 23 years have been on the autism spectrum. “The thing about the autistic mind is it’s very ‘black and white,’ it loves categories, it loves rules,” Hazeem said. “And what I was hearing from my male patients were, ‘Well, to be male you have to be like this, this, this, and this. I’m not like this, therefore I’m other, I’m non-male, therefore I must be female.’” Burgo explained that young men on the autism spectrum tend to be “very dissociated from and uncomfortable with their bodies and the sensory world, they don’t like touch. And the emergence of sexuality and all the sensations it’s provoked is deeply disturbing and often dissociative.”

Yet medical professionals don’t seek to help autistic young men uncomfortable in their bodies find ways to fit in and accept themselves as they are: they rush to promote gender transition procedures without even diagnosing any other condition. Ritchie described how he was put on a regimen of hormone drugs, approved by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), and began seeing a “gender therapist.” He said, “The first question I got asked by the NHS psychiatrist was, ‘Do you want genital reassignment surgery?’ And that was my very first psychiatric session at the NHS and I was like, ‘I don’t think so. I think I want therapy to be honest…’”

But his doctor kept asking Ritchie if he wanted surgery. “It was just all the time, constant, constant, constant, ‘Do you want surgery? Do you want surgery? Do you want surgery?” he said. Ritchie responded that he wanted to know what the risks are and wanted to give the procedure careful thought, afraid that he might regret it. He even brought his mother with him to the doctor, and she expressed concern over how the estrogen drugs he was taking were reacting with his antidepressants and how surgery might affect that. Ritchie said the doctor “did his best to shut my mother down and make her believe that if she said anything else [against surgery] it would drive us to suicide.”

A young Norwegian man, Alexander, explained that psychotherapy in Norway is rare, and very serious conditions must be met before an individual may be assigned a therapist. So Alexander “exaggerated” and pretended to be suicidal in order to get an appointment with a therapist who would prescribe him estrogen drugs. After beginning his hormone battery, Alexander talked to his therapist only three times before being given a letter of recommendation for genital surgery. “How can you come to a conclusion that this kind of surgery, life-changing surgery, is the best choice for the patient after talking to the patient three times?” he asked.

All of the young men interviewed talked about the effects estrogen had on them, particularly noting a “brain fog” resulting from the drug. “I never really felt suicidal or anything until I took estrogen. It didn’t make my life any better — in fact, it made my life worse, because I started to feel really depressed,” Brian explained. Estrogen decreases testosterone, and as testosterone decreases in men, they become depressed, lethargic, and unmotivated. As estrogen increases in men, it worsens those issues, impairs memory and attention span, and clouds reasoning and judgement. Both Ritchie and Alexander explained that they likely would have decided against surgery if they hadn’t been placed on estrogen.

“Medical professionals really led me astray with this,” Brian said. “Some people are now messed up for life — I’ll never be able to have kids, my rugged masculinity is never gonna come back. It’s all patient-led, it’s patient-led. ‘I wanna do hormones and I wanna have this surgery.’” He explained, “A good therapist, I think, would have said, ‘Well, maybe you’re transgender, who knows? But let’s get sober for a while and then let’s revisit this topic.’ But that’s not what happened.” Hakeem added, “Parents have bought into it, they’re being fed all this propaganda, like if you don’t let your child do this they’ll kill themselves. There’s no evidence to suggest that’s true.”

By the documentary’s end, everyone agreed that men cannot become women — that the chief claim of transgenderism is a lie. “Gender ideology does not believe that there’s biological sex, it believes that ‘felt gender’ has replaced biological sex, it believes that there are a hundred genders. And I think it’s nonsense. There’s biological sex. You’re male, you’re female, and a very tiny proportion of the people are intersex,” Hakeem explained. Burgo said, “I do not believe that anyone is born in the wrong body nor do I believe that anyone has an innate ‘gender identity’ that might be out of alignment with their sexed body. We are lying to children, I think we need to stop lying to children.”

Ritchie said he started a recovery group for young men who have gone through gender transition procedures. “We’ve all opted for something we call ‘recovery’ rather than ‘detransition,’” he explained. “Because there was no transition, I never went to female, and I’m not going back to male. I never left.” Alexander said, “I’m at peace that I’m a man, that I cannot change that, and I think of it as a biological reality. In Norway we don’t have a word for ‘detransitioner.’ We have a word that can be loosely translated to ‘a regretter.’” Torren stated that he has accepted who he is, saying, “I … realized that all these steps that I was taking to try to somehow ‘be my true self’ were actually taking me away from my true self, were actually taking me away from who I was.”

“The Lost Boys” is currently available for free on YouTube.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Christian Teachers Reinstated as Lawsuit over Transgender Policy Continues

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Top 10 Underreported Stories of 2023

/in , , , , , , , /by

Although the legacy media lift up non-stories every year, they offset the spilled ink by underreporting stories of great national importance. Here are 10 of the most significant stories ignored by the legacy media in 2023.

1. The Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto

On March 27, Audrey Elizabeth Hale entered Nashville’s Covenant School and murdered six innocent people: three nine-year-old children and three adults. Although school shootings have become distressingly commonplace, elements of this atrocity set it apart from other mass shootings: Hale identified as a transgender male named “Aiden,” and her target was a Christian school.

“One day, this will make more sense,” Hale texted her former middle school basketball teammate, Averianna Patton, on the morning of the shooting. “I’ve left plenty of evidence behind.”

Yet the government-media industrial complex has assured that day has not come. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department has continued to withhold Hale’s manifesto nine months after the shooting — and the legacy media largely ignored leaked pages of Hale’s diary, posted on social media by talk show host Steven Crowder on November 6.

Crowder obtained only three pages of Hale’s diary, but reading Hale’s words, it’s easy to see why the media suppressed them: They shatter the media narrative about mass shooters. “Wanna kill all you little crackers” with “your white privileges,” wrote Hale. “I hope I have a high death count.”

“God let my wrath take over my anxiety,” she mock-prayed.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on the leaked diary pages — without quoting a single word of their content. (The Post story quoted the manifesto … of Payton Gendron, a teenage white supremacist who targeted black shoppers in a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.) NBC News covered the police investigation into the leak, not Hale’s words. When news leaks thwart conservative aims, they’re news; when leaks harm liberal causes, they’re prosecutions. (See Daleiden, David.)

What’s more, the media know the profound pain their silence has caused the people of Nashville. “Spiritually it’s eating me, it’s eating me alive right now right now [sic], because I’m trying to make God help me wrap my mind around what, what is this God?” said Patton shortly after Hale’s rampage. The media could have answered her question and assuaged her existential angst, but they let her suffer for political ends.

2. Studies Show the Dangers of Transgender Surgeries and the LGBTQ Lifestyle

When historians look back, they may say 2023 marked a turning point when the harms of transgender surgeries became public knowledge. Several studies this year revealed the dangers of the LGBT lifestyle.

Perhaps most dramatically, the chair of a transgender surgery department found that people who have transgender surgeries are lonelier and more depressed than those who do nothing — as are trans-identified people who play on sports teams of the opposite sex. “[H]igher loneliness levels were significantly associated with … already having a gender reassignment surgery [and] more than 4 [hours] a week of sports activities,” as “compared to no sports activity,” said a study by Dr. Marco Blessmann, the founding chair of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf’s plastic surgery department. The German facility carries out such common transgender procedures as “labiaplasty” and “breast augmentation,” as well as “other surgical services,” and has every financial incentive to come to different conclusions, yet its peer-reviewed studies detail the harm its own procedures cause.

A different study found a majority (55%) of women who had vaginoplasty experienced pain, sometimes for years after the procedure, and one in three has difficulty urinating and having sex. The data come from a study of patients who underwent “bottom surgery” from the Postoperative Care Clinic at the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario between 2018 and 2020. Media reported the study, sparsely, in January.

Among the unlikely sources contradicting the LGBTQ narrative that all lifestyles are equally healthy, the Biden administration noted the deep ties between identifying as LGBT and mental illness. As this author reported:

“‘Female students, LGBQ+ students, and students who had any same-sex partners were more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,’ said a Biden administration report released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Teenagers who identified as LGBTQ were twice as likely to report ‘poor mental health’ as those who identified as heterosexual, three times as likely to have ‘seriously considered attempting suicide’ or ‘made a suicide plan,’ and 366.6% more likely to have attempted suicide. Not only do they contemplate suicide more frequently, but they are 700% more likely to have injured themselves in a suicide attempt. While only three out of every 100 straight students have been injured in a suicide attempt, the number soars to one out of every seven teens who identifies as LGBTQ.

“‘Nearly 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness … and more than 20% of LGBQ+ students attempted suicide,’ said the CDC report.”

3. Who Leaked the Dobbs Decision?

Weeks before the Supreme Court acted to right a legal and historical wrong by overturning Roe v. Wade, something truly unprecedented happened: Someone leaked a draft copy of the decision in the case — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — to Politico. The activist Left exploded in rage. A year-long campaign of violence targeted pro-life churches and pregnancy resource centers, while an armed man traveled to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home intent on shooting him. The Supreme Court launched an investigation but officially announced in January that it could not determine who leaked the report.

“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” said Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Dobbs decision, in April. (The International Business Times has noted many conservatives believe the leaker is Amit Jain, a clerk for Sonia Sotomayor with a history of contacting Politico.) But to their shame, the media — which took pains to identify every individual within miles of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — did not pursue the story doggedly, because it did not fit their narrative.

Another honorable mention in this category is, “Who brought cocaine to the White House?” Like the leaked Dobbs decision, the identity of the individual who left a bag of cocaine in the West Wing this July remains officially unsolved.

4. Our Open Border Transforms America

Joe Biden has set a number of records; unfortunately, they are all for new national humiliations. Among his worst failures is the open U.S. border with Mexico, where illegal immigration has broken all U.S. records each successive year of the Biden administration. In all, a reported 10 million illegal entries have taken place since Biden took office — and they have radically and deliberately transformed the nation we live in, against the will of the American people.

Thanks to this influx, the United States now has the largest number and percentage of foreign-born residents in American history: 49.5 million people, or 15% of the U.S. population. The illegal population grew so precipitously in part, because the Biden administration has failed to remove 99% of the illegal immigrants released into the United States. Among these illegals is a record number of border-crossers whose names are on the terrorist watchlist. Yet the Biden administration has reduced criminal alien deportations.

The problem has finally reached America’s “sanctuary cities,” as Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) sent busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, Los Angles, and the Big Apple. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has said the problem will “destroy” his city and implored the Biden administration to send illegal immigrants to every city, town, and village in America. (Which, for all we know, the administration is already doing.) No one knows where the planeloads of illegal immigrants Biden flies around the country are going.

The Left plans to withhold border security until Republicans give in and approve another 1986-style amnesty plan, which will transform the electorate into what SEIU and socialist organizer Eliseo Medina called “a governing coalition for the long-term.” (See my previous writing on the topic — which includes Democrats discussing their plans to win by relying on voting demographics as far back as 2002 — in this article.) If the corporate GOP rewards the Democrats’ lawless behavior, it will assure America’s permanent transformation.

5. The LGBT Agenda Is Losing Support

Although the legacy media give the LGBTQ political agenda uniformly positive coverage and focus on the group far out of proportion to that demographic’s share of the population, this year they omitted several salient stories: Multiple polls found the LGBTQ cause has lost political support in 2023, even among its most supportive generation.

Among Americans born since 1997, known as Gen Z, support for same-sex marriage fell by a whopping 11 percentage points since 2021, according to a study released in November by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. Broadly, the percentage of Americans who believe same-sexual relationships are “morally acceptable” fell by 7% this year, the largest decrease of any of the moral issues posed by Gallup pollsters in their annual Values and Beliefs poll, released in June. Most Americans do not see “a married gay or lesbian couple raising children together” as “completely acceptable” (47% do), and even fewer believe an unmarried same-sex couple should raise a child (41%), the Pew Research Center found in September.

Even the Biden administration’s U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) admitted people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are far more likely to suffer from major depression, abuse illegal drugs, and are up to six times as likely to attempt suicide. Transgender ideology also lost support, with a 55% majority of Americans saying “changing one’s gender” is morally wrong, according to a Gallup poll in June — a 4% increase in two years. Transgender extremism was one of the major issues that brought down the leader of Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, in February.

These results may seem counterintuitive, since Americans said to identify as LGBTQ more than ever, according to the same polling firms. It could be polling agencies, which are masters at manipulating results, wish to create a sense of complacency in the midst of a social revolution. Or something more ominous may be occurring: Americans may be moving in both directions at the same time. It could be that more young people are caving to social pressure to identify as LGBTQ, while older people (and members of Gen Z who do not buy in to the latest trends) resist the bandwagon effect, which they see will harm themselves and their loved ones.

6. Biden Family Corruption

Even as much as conservative media reported the ever-growing evidence that Joe Biden and his family prospered from deals intended to influence The Big Guy, the broader media have presented the story as a vengeful, political witch hunt waged without evidence. Yet the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s wealth of evidence has earned a dearth of coverage, often being falsely presented as “debunked” and “refuted.”

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) has noted that Biden made Ukraine’s firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin a U.S. priority only after receiving a pay-off. Even the first U.S. hostage released by Hamas had a relative who bought Hunter Biden’s artwork. Biden seems to have used the resources of the U.S. government to further an influence-peddling scheme. As Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden sent thousands of pseudonymous emails under such names as Robert Peters, including informing Hunter Biden about news regarding nations his son was doing business with.

Like Hunter, Joe’s brother Frank Biden also interrupted calls with VIPs to take calls from then-Vice President Joe Biden, referring to the veep as “The Big Guy.” Frank Biden exploited his surname to take a position promoting Mavericks In Education, a charter school chain intended to cater to at-risk students, but which was accused of lying about membership to increase taxpayer funding. He reportedly did this again while taking a job at Berman Law Firm. James Biden has reportedly traded on his brother’s name since the 1970s to gain everything from a night club to foreign deals to legally dubious schemes involving health care companies treating cancer patients. (Note: Many of these stories were originally reported by the legacy media … during the 2020 Democratic primaries. After clinching the nomination, the Biden stories seemed to dry up.) Biden family corruption allegations have led the House to an impeachment inquiry. (For an hour-long discussion of the proof in the Biden family’s scandals, listen to this episode of the “Outstanding” podcast.)

7. The Biden Administration Tells Title X Recipients to Talk to Minors about Sex Behind Their Parents’ Backs

Biden doesn’t simply seek to corrupt his own family; his administration would like to corrupt yours, as well. Taxpayer-funded guidelines encourage Title X providers — those who dole out contraception to those who ask at taxpayer expense — to talk about sex with minors behind their parents’ back, even describing ways to get their parents out of the room. As The Washington Stand reported exclusively:

“Federally-funded guidelines instruct adults to pause before discussing sex with minors and to ask, ‘Are you alone in the room?’ These instructions specify tactics to follow ‘if you’re really having a hard time getting a parent’ to leave the room during the sex talk. They suggest children as young as 13 discuss sex with groups like Planned Parenthood in a parked car or communicate in writing, so their parents cannot hear the adults’ side of the conversation. And they encourage offices to have vans roam neighborhoods giving minors federally funded contraceptives; to mail birth control to adolescents in ‘plain, unmarked packaging’; and/or to have teenagers receive contraceptives at public meet-up places.”

Protecting children against the mental and physical harms of early sexual initiation is hard enough for parents without their government undermining parents’ authority — and forcing them to pay for it.

8. Churchgoers and Married People are Happier

Despite an endless barrage of negative media about the drudgeries of married life and the pointlessness of faith, multiple studies this year verified the benefits of both. Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than non-believers and single people, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken in March. Practicing Christians who regularly read the Bible report a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index — which measures “happiness & life satisfaction,” “mental & physical health,” “meaning & purpose,” “character & virtue,” “close societal relationships” and “financial & material stability.”

Active Christians score 7.8, compared to 6.9 for inactive Christians and 6.7 for religious unaffiliated, according to an American Bible Society report released this June. The biggest difference between active Christians and non-Christians came in “meaning & purpose.” (They’re also far more likely to vote Republican.) The aforementioned AEI study also found that “Overall, religious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious.” Evangelical Christians are 33% more likely than unbelievers to say their actions matter in the grand scheme of things.

Even the Biden administration issued a warning this year saying Americans’ health may be undermined by not attending church. A report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, which was released in May, says loneliness harms physical health “even greater than [the risk] associated with obesity and physical inactivity” and is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

“Religious or faith-based groups can be a source for regular social contact, serve as a community of support, provide meaning and purpose, create a sense of belonging around shared values and beliefs, and are associated with reduced risk-taking behaviors,” Murthy writes. “As a consequence of this decline in participation, individuals’ health may be undermined.”

When a Balaam like Biden blesses church attendance, Christians should listen.

9. COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Still Hurting America

Locking down the entire population over a virus with a near-100% survival rate may prove to be the most misguided decision in 21st century domestic policy — an arena with stiff competitors. To this day, Americans of all ages continue to pay the price for this policy error, chief among them children.

An analysis from the Associated Press found 50,000 children remain missing from school two years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (which the World Health Organization only declared ended on May 5). An incredible 35% of children in kindergarten through second grade fell “below benchmark” in reading (placing them at “high risk for persistent reading difficulties”) in Fall 2021, according to a University of Virginia analysis. These gaps will impact their development as human beings, stifling their cognitive faculties, limiting their lifetime income and fulfillment, and capping their ability to make a difference for Christ and the church.

U.S. taxpayers also literally paid the price for the bipartisan consensus to roll out $5 trillion in COVID emergency relief. The Justice Department announced this summer it had arrested nearly 3,200 people for defrauding U.S. COVID relief funds; at the time, it was investigating $8.6 billion in fraud. The nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, received $90.41 billion in COVID relief, although the CARES Act seemed to be written to exclude it; indeed, taxpayer funds continued to trickle down to abortionists this year.

In reality, we have no idea how much fraud was committed in the name of COVID-19 relief — and we won’t for at least a century. Small Business Administration Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware said his COVID fraud hotline got an immense number of tips about COVID fraud, “more than 90,000 have been identified as actionable leads, which amount to more than 100 years of investigative case work.” Funding those investigations alone will cost American taxpayers for years to come.

10. Huge Increase in Homeschooling, Stay-at-home Moms

According to The Washington Post, homeschooling has become the “fastest-growing form of education” in the United States. The United States has seen a 51% increase in homeschooling in five years — between the 2017-2018 school year and this school year. With school strikes, lower educational standards, and teachers hiding children’s transgenderism and teaching Woke curricula (repeating the lies of the 1619 Project and stocking school libraries with gay pornographic books), it’s easy to see why.

At the same time, the number of stay-at-home mothers has increased, according to two studies released this year. The number of stay-at-home moms skyrocketed from 15% in 2022 to 25% in 2023, according to Motherly’s Annual State of Motherhood survey. The Pew Research Center said 26% of mothers worked exclusively in the home in 2022, up from a low of 23% two decades ago.

The children raised by mothers who care enough to sacrifice their career advancement for their children’s development and education may just offset the kids neglected by the public school system since COVID-19 (at the latest). They will be our nation’s greatest hope, and the source of our nation’s good news stories, for years to come.

The legacy media have not given these stories the exposure they deserve but, Lord willing, The Washington Stand’s coverage of newsworthy stories in the pivotal election year of 2024 will prove out-Stand-ing.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Minnesota Middle School Restricted Cell Phones a Year Ago, the Results Are ‘Just Night and Day’

/in , , , , /by

When I was in middle school, I had a flip phone meant exclusively to contact family members (and maybe a couple close friends). Half the time I didn’t even want to text on it because it was one of those keyboards where you have to press the button two or three times to get the letter you want. I hardly used my phone at all, which I believe attributed to why I enjoyed middle school so much.

Unlike an overwhelming number of kids and teenagers today, I was not glued to my screen. Rather, my time in middle school was rooted in practically anything but the cyber-verse. My friends and I spent every moment before and after school, or in between classes, engaging in quality interactions. We talked during lunch, and it wasn’t about what was trending online. Of course, the older I got, as I went through high school and college, social media grew in prominence. So, really, my time in middle school was the only season I had relatively free of technological domination.

The research and studies conducted on social media use are numerous, and it’s remarkable how the majority of them report negative impacts. The conclusions seem to read the same: “Depression, anxiety, bullying, and anti-social tendencies are on the rise, and it’s all linked to social media usage.” Between October of 2019 and October of 2020, social platforms grew 21.3%, with 93.33% of 4.48 billion (as of 2021) worldwide active on social media.

Although statistics show adults between 27 to 42 are the biggest social media users, I would argue the most unfortunate victims of the social media addiction are the younger generations. Which makes a school such as Maple Grove Middle School in Minnesota a breath of fresh air in a world tainted by online toxins.

About a year ago, Maple Grove chose to restrict cell phone use in the school. While it wasn’t an outright ban, they encouraged students to place their phones in their lockers at the start of the day, and anyone who did not comply and used their phone would get it confiscated until the school day finished. According to the principal, Patrick Smith, there were a variety of contributions to this decision. “[T]here’s a lot of drama that comes from social media, and a lot of conflict that comes from it,” he said.

When Smith and the school staff noticed the kids were hardly interacting with each other throughout the day, they knew a change had to be made.

After a year of restricted screen time, the “kids are happy,” Smith shared. “They’re engaging with each other. … [I]t’s just night and day.” When the plan was first announced, parents applauded, the principal noted. And they continue to give positive feedback, including parents who have shared that their kids are paying more attention and participating in more discussions. One parent said her son is “thriving.”

Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, explained to The Washington Stand her take on the school’s hopeful results. She deemed it as “a great first step in helping teens regulate their use of technology in an unrestricted culture.” But unfortunately, the downsides of social media go beyond depression and anxiety.

New research revealed that 73% of teenagers surveyed have been exposed to pornography, with some as young as 11 when the explicit material was viewed. Experts say social media plays a key role in this as well as the identity crisis sweeping the nation. “We know that the porn industry is relentlessly targeting youth,” Kilgannon added. Additionally, “The work of adolescence is to form one’s identity by discerning God’s call on your life.” So, for Kilgannon, social media being both a source of sexual content and identity confusion means “limiting [its] access to children during the school day is a bare minimum kind of advance that we should all be able to support.”

When it comes to fostering the development of a child, Kilgannon shared, “This work needs to be done in the safety of a loving family and supported by institutions we build as a culture — churches and schools. These are places where we encounter each other and build relationships.” She continued, “This encounter is interrupted by overuse of personal devices like cell phones.”

Going back to my middle school days, I am so thankful for a community that was not overrun by our pocket devices. The friendships felt so genuine, and the days richer. My experience causes me to believe the kids at Maple Grove will be seriously helped by the school’s actions. As Kilgannon concluded, “What a gift to this community for the school to allow their students and faculty the space for genuine human connection. I hope this school is developing a ‘best practice’ guideline to share with others — we need this to ‘go viral!’”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Meta Is ‘Manipulating Platforms to Make Kids More Addicted’: State AG

/in , , , , , , , /by

In the wake of strong evidence pointing to the link between the declining mental health of young people and the rise of addictive social media sites, 41 state attorneys general have filed suit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for manipulative business practices that they say intentionally target kids in order to ensnare them in social media addiction.

In October, 41 states and the District of Columbia filed litigation against Meta as reports of record high levels of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and suicide, continue to surface. Studies have shown that American teenagers have experienced a significant rise in depression over the last two decades, as the share of teens experiencing major depressive episodes steadily rose from 7.9% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2018. Since then, the persistent increase has continued unabated. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three out of five teenage girls felt depression and one in three had seriously considered suicide in 2021.

As psychologists such as Jean Twenge have observed, the rapid increase in youth mental health issues has dovetailed almost exactly with the ubiquitous rise of smartphones and social media apps. Twenge’s most recent book “Generations” details how Generation Z’s skyrocketing use of social media directly correlates with less time spent in person with friends, less sleep, and increased loneliness.

The issue has become so alarming to health officials that in May, the U.S. Surgeon General released an unprecedented advisory warning that social media use poses a “profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

As a result, public officials have decided that studies and advisories are not enough — they believe that the architects of social media themselves must claim some amount of responsibility for the crisis. On Tuesday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the litigation he has filed against Meta.

“We’ve exposed the manipulative practices of the Meta platform that designed features in order to make kids addicted,” he contended. “And lo and behold, screen time is bad for kids. And I think one of the problems here is that Meta has hidden their head in the sand and refused to obtain data or scientific studies to measure the negative harmful impacts on kids, and deprived the public of access to that information. … [T]hey were manipulating their platform[s] to make kids more addicted, [and] they were doing it to obtain personal information to maximize their profits. And it’s putting kids at risk.”

Bailey went on to argue that Meta’s actions specifically violated his state’s consumer protection laws.

“The mental and emotional impact of the addictive features of Big Tech social media platforms, specifically Meta in this instance, have been immediately impactful on children in a harmful way, and it violates the consumer protection laws of the state of Missouri,” he asserted. “[T]he platform is depriving parents of access to information necessary upon which to make good decisions about the health and safety of their children when they’re there, fraudulently attempting to make the kids addicted to the platform that violates the law, and we’re going to hold them accountable.”

Bailey further observed that the litigation showcases a rare example of bipartisanship, in which a coalition of 41 Republican and Democrat state AGs are coming together to put pressure on Meta for allegedly harming the mental health of children.

“[C]hild safety should be a bipartisan issue,” he underscored. “I’m proud to have joined with like-minded colleagues in other states that want to put the safety of children first and hold wrongdoers in the Big Tech social media world accountable. And certainly we’ve seen a repeated pattern of behavior from Meta, not only to abuse children in this context and to deprive the public of access to information, but to violate our constitutional rights to free speech by acquiescing to government censorship demands. … [T]his is a full court press, all hands on deck approach to make sure we’re holding this monolithic monopoly accountable.”

The Missouri attorney general also highlighted specific goals that the state litigation seeks, including monetary compensation for victims. “We … think there should be some monetary compensation for the victims,” he maintained. “We’ve got to build a fund to study this problem, figure out how bad it is, the negative emotional and mental impacts on kids, and make sure that they’re treated and taken care of in the aftermath of this fraudulent behavior.”

Bailey concluded by pointing out the parallels in the social media case with the evidence that was uncovered in the 1990s of tobacco companies attempting to hide evidence of the addictive nature of their products. “I think history will look back on this moment in time and celebrate that we took a stand to protect children against this pernicious behavior very quickly.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

When the Transgender Movement Kills

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The most common question transgender activists use to bully parents into approving their daughter’s lifelong dependency on experimental hormone injections is: “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?”

But the tragic story of Abigail Martinez’s daughter, who took her own life after attempting to transition to life as a boy, proves what a false dichotomy that is.

A hard-hitting new film reveals how the trans movement inflicts death, depression, and familial estrangement in service of the pharmaceutical industry.

The story of Yaeli Martinez forms the heart of “Gender Transformations: The Untold Realities,” an original production of The Epoch Times. Though technically classified as a “docudrama,” the term does not do justice to the reality that plays out on the screen: The majority of the film consists of real people sharing heartbreaking true stories, without an interviewer’s prompting. Through their eyes, the 85-minute Epoch Original production traces the transgender contagion from its funding sources in Big Pharma, to ideologically extremist teachers who radicalize children behind their parents’ backs, to trans activists who brainwash and kidnap minors, to the irreversible damage the industry causes teens and young adults. Abigail Martinez sheds real tears for her daughter’s suicide — and real footage shows trans activists mocking her grief.

The “docudrama” label comes from the movie’s dramatization of the short life, radicalization, and death of Yaeli Martinez. The film renames Yaeli “Evie,” who transitions to “Evan.” But the recreation of Yaeli’s life — which can only be reconstructed, since she stepped in front of a train at age 17 — forms the narrative arc turning patchwork of first-person vignettes into a mosaic picture of lives callously shattered for profit.

Yaeli became indoctrinated in extreme gender ideology through a school LGBT group, where she eventually joined her “friends” in identifying as transgender. One night, Yaeli’s “friends” pulled up outside Martinez’s home, picked her up in an unmarked car, and whisked her away to an unknown location to live with other transgender-identifying young people. “They even took the license plate off of their car,” Martinez remembers.

Things got worse when the government got involved. Yaeli said her mother refused to affirm her identity, causing the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services to put the minor into a group home. A judge would authorize the minor to receive transgender injections against her mother’s will. Eventually, Yaeli — who now identified as “Andrew” — brought her mother back into her life, just as newfound friends began to desert her and reality began to assert itself.

“She told me, ‘Mom, I realized that no matter what I do I’m never going to be like my brother. I’m in pain. I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate,’” Martinez recalls. “’It’s not working the way that I thought.’”

One day in 2019, law enforcement gave Martinez the news that her daughter had committed suicide. “I was screaming. I said, ‘No, I want my daughter,’” Martinez later told The Daily Signal. She pleaded to be able to spend time with the body of her daughter, whom she had not seen since the child ran away.

“The gentleman from the funeral home told me there’s nothing really that you can see or recognize,” Martinez recalled.

All that remained of her child’s legacy was the undying hatred of the radical LGBTQ movement. The movie includes real footage of Martinez sharing her story, as trans activists yell, “Cry more!” and “What a sob story!”

After removing a child from a loving home and transitioning her, the Los Angeles government refused to acknowledge any responsibility for Yaeli’s death. “We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Andrew M., as well as to the LGBTQIA community which advocates relentlessly to protect its youngest and most vulnerable members from such tragedies,” responded the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

The statement said nothing about the role of the transgender movement — top to bottom — in creating the tragedy.

That story falls to Martinez and the movie’s ensemble of grieving parents, whistleblowing therapists, investigative journalists, and remorseful detransitioners.

The origin story of transgenderism’s social contagion begins by tracing the money back to the Big Pharma companies that manufacture these drugs. “If you’re going to look for anything in this country, you’re going to follow the money, because it will always tell you the truth. Who’s funding these LGB organizations?” asked writer and investigator Jennifer Bilek. “What I found was a whole lot of very, very powerful moneyed people in the highest echelons of finance, Pharma, and technology.” Dr. Katherine Welch, a concerned physician, agrees that pharmaceutical companies “fund the activists and the NGOs to stir up a lot of passion.” Then the companies ask for emergency use authorization, based on “a mental health crisis among our youth.” Thanks to their combination marketing-and-lobbying efforts, there is now “a $1.5 billion industry for surgery alone,” said lawyer Erin Friday. “And I think that’s an underestimate.”

The trail extends to dishonest researchers, such as John Money, and subject criteria set by organizations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The academic cohort produces the shoddy research trumpeted by the media, entertainment industry, and school officials. When Erin Friday learned her daughter had secretly begun identifying as a boy at school, administrators told her, “We need to be a safe space” for her child. “By extension, I’m unsafe,” said Friday.

The message promptly filters down to young people. A few confess to being amazed at the virtually godlike power they hold over their own bodies. “When I went into the Planned Parenthood building to [talk about] the surgery … I could pick from 25 sets of breasts,” said detransitioner David Bacon. “I could build myself.”

But most seek to rebuild themselves from a trauma, or they naïvely believe the transgender industry’s claims that the silver bullet for their depression lies at the end of a needle. Continually hearing the (scientifically inaccurate) mantra that children who identify as transgender will commit suicide if not immediately “affirmed” caused at least one woman to become profoundly depressed. “It made me feel even more hopeless, because I thought there was no way to accept myself. I had to get these painful surgeries and take hormones,” said detransitioner Catt Catinson. Her psychological evaluation “affirmed me immediately” and “just sort of overlooked my eating disorder” and childhood sexual abuse. Abel Garcia received the same treatment, even after telling them, “I might be autistic” and that he felt unsure whether he identified as transgender.

“The worst part, honestly, is that I was allowed to do all this, and that nobody was willing to stop me and have a second opinion,” says Garcia. “Instead, I was affirmed, I was love-bombed. I was allowed to destroy my body.”

So, was Yaeli Martinez, to whom the movie is dedicated.

“This pain never goes away,” says Abigail Martinez. “You breathe and you can feel the pain.”

Yet the movie ends with the hope that some victims of the transgender industry survive long enough to live as their authentic selves, the ones reflected by their biology. “It took me about a year to fully deprogram from gender identity ideology,” said Cattinson. “I feel like it was the act of deprogramming, just changing my beliefs, that allowed me to recover from my depression.” Now, she has reconnected with the family her embrace of gender ideology estranged. “It’s been very healing, having that family connection again. We can just be together and love each other.”

That gives hope to Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a therapist and social worker who believes adults caught up in the transgender movement “didn’t realize just how harmful this was.” One day, Americans will look back at this chapter as “a dark time in our history, but I don’t think this is going to last.”

But until then, the testimony of Martinez and other grieving families torn apart by extreme transgender ideology, preserved in this Epoch Original, reveals the incalculable consequences when darkness triumphs, even briefly.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Pop Star Doubles Down on Opposing Gender Transitions for Children

‘Family Is on The Chopping Block’: A Conversation with Dr. Carrie Gress on Feminism

Progressive Pastor: ‘I Felt No Guilt, No Shame, No Sin’ for Her Two Abortions

RELATED VIDEOS:

“Detransitioner” Chloe Cole testified to this effect at a recent hearing in the House of Representatives.

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens testifies at the Congressional hearing, explaining the ethical issues regarding gender transition procedures and urging the subcommittee to act on behalf of children.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.