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Australia’s health regulator restricted a psychiatrist from speaking about child gender treatments following complaints from activists. Nearly 18,000 of his colleagues say they understand why he’s afraid.

A national survey of more than 18,000 Australian health professionals has found that almost all believe medicine has been politicised, following regulatory action against a Queensland psychiatrist who questioned child gender treatments.

The survey, conducted by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) and the Nurses Professional Association of Australia (NPAA), found that 95 per cent of respondents considered the evidence base for puberty-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones in minors to be inadequate. Ninety-six per cent said clinicians should be able to question child gender treatment guidelines without fear of reprisal.

“When clinicians are afraid to question policy, medicine stops being science,” NPAA president Kara Thomas and AMPS member Dr Andrew McIntyre wrote in The Spectator Australia. “It becomes state compliance.”

The survey results follow disciplinary action against Queensland academic psychiatrist Professor Andrew Amos, whom AHPRA has ordered not to speak publicly about child gender treatments. No finding of patient harm or unsafe clinical practice was found against Professor Amos.

A Pattern of Suppression

The Amos case is not isolated. An open letter from AMPS and NPAA to Queensland Health ministers details the suspension of Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior child psychiatrist at Queensland Children’s Hospital stood down after raising clinically grounded objections to aspects of Queensland’s child gender treatment model.

Dr Spencer was issued a termination notice one month before an independent panel was due to deliver its findings — a decision now subject to legal challenge.

The AMPS–NPAA letter states that Queensland Health’s own Patient Safety Escalation Framework acknowledges the risks faced by staff who raise concerns, including “professional isolation, disapproval… legal and financial impacts.”

The organisations say Dr Spencer experienced precisely those consequences in spite of the framework’s stated protections.

The letter calls for Dr Spencer’s reinstatement pending a fair review, an independent inquiry into clinician suppression, and a formal independent review of child gender interventions across Queensland Health — with terms of reference informed by the UK Cass Review.

Queensland’s LNP Government has separately suspended the initiation of puberty-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones for minors across the state’s gender clinics until at least 2031 — the same interventions for which Dr Amos now faces professional restrictions on speaking publicly.

Regulators and the Limits of Their Mandate

Thomas and McIntyre argue that AHPRA has drifted from its core function. Rather than investigating unsafe clinical practice, they say, the regulator is increasingly policing speech.

They note that Senate inquiries have raised concerns that only around a quarter of AHPRA investigators have a health background — meaning that highly qualified specialists can find their professional opinions restricted by investigators with no clinical training.

Parliamentary scrutiny has recommended that AHPRA notifications be limited to clinical issues relating to patient safety.

Thomas and McIntyre highlight the 2022 amendments to the National Law governing medical regulation, supported by both Labor and the Coalition, which placed greater emphasis on maintaining public confidence in the health system.

“Confidence manufactured through censorship is not the same as safety,” they warn.

The Evidence Gap

The survey findings come as international authorities continue their retreat from the “gender affirmation” model for minors.

The UK’s Cass Review — a four-year NHS-commissioned inquiry — found the evidence base for puberty-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones in minors to be “remarkably weak”. The UK subsequently restricted routine prescribing while further evidence is gathered.

The US Department of Health and Human Services released a review in May 2025 finding that child gender transition protocols had been “rapidly implemented without sufficient scientific and ethical justification”.

Australia’s own Therapeutic Goods Administration has acknowledged it lacks the data required to properly assess the risks of these interventions in minors.

The AMPS–NPAA letter notes that Australia’s child “gender medicine” standards were rated just 19 out of 100 for rigour of development by the Cass Review — raising questions about the legal defensibility of adhering to those guidelines in future litigation.

In Re Devin (Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, 2024), the presiding judge described the risk of harm from puberty-suppressing drugs as “unacceptable” and criticised a gender clinic’s policy of unreserved affirmation.

The judgment also found that Professor Michelle Telfer, lead author of Australia’s child gender treatment guidelines, had provided misleading evidence and failed to remain impartial as an expert witness.

A Queensland Health review of the Cairns paediatric gender service subsequently identified a “negative patient safety culture” and found children as young as 12 had been prescribed puberty-suppressing drugs without adequate multidisciplinary assessment.

Thomas and McIntyre say the pattern is clear. “The doctors and nurses speaking out today are not the problem,” they write. “They are the warning system.”

AMPS and NPAA have called on Queensland Health ministers to act, with the first deadline for Dr Spencer’s reinstatement having passed in June 2025 without a public response.

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Image courtesy of Unsplash.