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The questionable practice of subjecting minors to puberty-blocking drugs is usually met with government indifference and little attention in the local media.

However, Queensland Health’s recently announced restriction on this treatment for all new child and adolescent patients has clearly provoked the Albanese Labor government’s health minister Mark Butler into action.

On 31 January, he announced a review into gender therapies, to be conducted by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with an interim report to be delivered in mid-2026.

This is seen by many to be a stalling tactic to avert the action initiated by Queensland’s recently elected Liberal National Party government.

Predictably, the Australian Human Rights Commission and media outlets such as Crikey.com have protested about so-called right-wing “ideology” preventing “trans and gender-diverse” children from accessing this controversial form of medical treatment; but Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and his government must stand firm for the sake of thousands of innocent children.

Note that in Queensland, 600 current “gender” patients will nonetheless continue to receive treatment with puberty blockers or hormonal drugs.

Social Contagion

Up-to-date statistics are uncertain, but the numbers undergoing gender treatment each year have been increasing in all states. In Queensland, the number of patients soared from 190 in 2017 to 922 in 2022. In Victoria, it increased from 472 in 2019 to 1,290 in 2023, with a lengthy waiting list.

It is believed that social media, classroom indoctrination and the entertainment industry — not to mention the ill-considered “advice” of sections of the healthcare industry — are responsible for this surge. In Victoria, health professionals and others are threatened by legal penalties from seeking to dissuade children and others from this irreversible course (see below).

The only recognised guidelines for gender-reassignment practices in Australia are the model developed by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and a similar framework promoted by NSW Health. Both were recently described by Sydney journalist Bernard Lane, as “nothing less than the blueprint for gender-affirming medicine in Australia”, created by its very practitioners. Paradoxically, Mr Butler’s intervention, belated as it is, confirms the inadequacy of the RCH and similar guidelines.

Children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria are often also suffering from other psychological problems. These include depression (74.6 percent) and other conditions such as suicidal thoughts and autism (Australian Trans Pathways Studies in Youth, 2020).

Why normal standards of care, relying on evidence-based research, have been ignored in these cases is explained by Australian psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos in a revealing study published last year in Australasian Psychiatry. He explains that the principle of the gender-affirming model of care is that “all health clinicians have an ethical responsibility not to question or evaluate patient-reported gender identity, even when that identity is unstable, changes rapidly, and is co-morbid with severe mental illness”.

Dr Amos points out that these practitioners “assume access to gender-affirming interventions is a human right that should be available to anyone competent to request them”. That is, they reject the need for any systematic evaluation of whether these treatments have benefited patients.

Dangerous and Divisive

Despite a torrent of information from overseas warning of the dangers of this treatment, and the new restrictions on its use for minors in Finland, Sweden, the UK and some US states such as Florida, Australian governments have persisted with transgender “treatments” of children. At no point have they ever felt obliged to produce evidence to justify their practices which lead to the irreversible sterilisation of children too young to make a mature decision about many other facets of their lives.

So-called healthcare professionals have driven a wedge between family members, and bullied parents into withdrawing their objections to their children being subjected to transgender treatment. In Victoria, parents, doctors, teachers and counsellors face heavy penalties if they offer advice, or even prayer, contrary to transgender ideology, as stipulated by the counselling censorship provisions of the state’s draconian Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021.

We have seen in the UK the 2019 scandal surrounding the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). In April 2024 came the bombshell report by Dr Hilary Cass, OBE, commissioned by NHS England, on gender identity services for children and young people. In addition, Scandinavian and US reviews have found the evidence favouring hormonal treatment of gender-distressed minors to be very weak and uncertain. In reality, gender-affirmation or sex-reassignment is impossible, owing to unalterable chromosomes. Moreover, surgical reconstructions are only cosmetic.

Long-term studies overseas do not record positive outcomes, especially for those who later regret an irreversible choice made when they were children.

Australian governments and even courts have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the weight of evidence from overseas pleading caution. This is how an Australian Family Court judge resolved the case of parents disputing the administering of testosterone to their 16-year-old trans-identifying daughter. He ruled last November that, in the absence of evidence-based guidance, it is “common sense” to accept the “best available guidance” and a “consensus favouring gender medicine”. This judge used masculine pronouns throughout when referring to the daughter and rejected the relevance of “potential later interventions” when endorsing testosterone treatment.

Lifelong Regret

Nowhere in the gender-affirming literature published in Australia does the word “de-transition” appear. There is no acknowledgement of the many youngsters who subsequently regret what has been done to their bodies.

I once wrote a review of American author Walt Heyer’s book, Gender, Lies and Suicide: A Whistleblower Speaks Out (2013), in which he describes how, in a bid to overcome a major depressive illness, he underwent so-called gender reassignment after which he tried to live as a woman named Laura Jensen. He explains how he was seduced into this treatment and how his mental health problems returned with a vengeance once the initial euphoria had worn off. After eight years of suffering increasing regret about his decision, he “de-transitioned” and now lives as a man.

More heart-rending are the cases investigated by Channel Seven’s Spotlight program, “Breaking the silence: The reality of de-transitioning” (August 2023), in which teenagers tell of their disillusionment with transgender treatment and the knowledge that there is no way back from the medical sterilisation and surgical mutilation that they have undergone. Chloe is an American girl, who, after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, began medical treatment at 12 and underwent a double mastectomy at 16. She declares, “I asked for help, and they gave me mutilation.”

The Australian Christian Lobby has been particularly active in warning parents, children and teenagers against the transgender cult’s deceptive promise that it has a simple silver-bullet remedy for their mental health issues. The ACL has produced a two-part documentary, “The gender experiment: The truth revealed”, which is available online. It exposes the fraudulent promise of the transgender lobby and features accounts from Chloe Cole and her Australian counterparts on how they were seduced into transitioning and how disillusioned they became with the result.

In the course of the documentary, Queensland child psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer explains that adolescents prioritise short-term gains and that brain development and deferred gratification come only with maturity. She describes the tragedy of parents losing custody of their children when they object to their children undergoing gender reassignment, and the unrelenting pressure she has experienced from her professional colleagues to defer to transgender ideology. The ACL documentary is highly recommended.

All this shows how important it is for the Queensland Crisafulli government to stand firm on its moratorium on transgender treatments of children. The public has every right to be sceptical about the “independence” of the process being undertaken by the NHMRC. The transgender medical lobby has already established a bridgehead into the heart of federal government decision-making through an LGBTIQA+ health advisory group chaired by assistant health minister Gerardine “Ged” Kearney.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that the states’ chief health officers will break rank and examine sceptically treatments which have divorced themselves from evidence-based medicine. Notwithstanding being unable to produce “gold standard evidence” to support its recommendations, a particularly accommodating review for the NSW government in 2024 by the Sax Institute alleges that puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormones could be beneficial.

The Australian public should demand much better standards from healthcare professionals, especially for youngsters believed to be suffering from gender dysphoria, which, if left untreated, usually dissipates by adulthood — without harmful interventions… 

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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Adobe.