Whistleblower Psychiatrist Jillian Spencer Cleared After Three-Year AHPRA Fight
Jillian Spencer, a Queensland psychiatrist suspended for questioning childhood gender treatments, has been cleared by AHPRA, as her hospital prepares to release its own statement.
Australia’s medical regulator has cleared child psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer to continue working, ending a three-year investigation sparked by her warnings about childhood “gender medicine”.
Spencer announced the outcome on X, telling followers the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency was “taking no further action” against her. “I get to keep working as a psychiatrist!” she wrote, thanking supporters who “got me through this” and urging other doctors to “please be emboldened to speak up against the scandal of paediatric gender medicine”.
The probe followed a notification from Queensland’s Office of the Health Ombudsman, which alleged Spencer’s social media posts had criticised “gender-affirming care” and encouraged followers to petition against it.
A separate dispute with her employer, Queensland Health, over her 2023 suspension and later dismissal from Queensland Children’s Hospital, is resolved, Spencer told a Brisbane rally on 12 July — though she said she could not disclose details.
The Australian reported that Spencer’s dismissal is still being challenged through a Supreme Court application for judicial review, in a case yet to be heard.
Spencer’s Three-Year Fight
Spencer, a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist who has worked for 20 years at Queensland Health, was stood down in April 2023 after raising concerns about the hospital’s treatment protocols for gender-distressed children. She was suspended later that year and issued a termination notice in September 2025, which she challenged through a Supreme Court application for judicial review.
Her union, the Red Union Support Hub, called the dismissal “a miscarriage of justice”. An open letter from the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society and the Nurses’ Professional Association of Australia told Queensland Health ministers that Spencer had suffered the very “professional isolation” the department’s own safety framework was meant to prevent.
Spencer has consistently maintained her objection was clinical, not ideological. At Saturday’s rally, organised under the banner “Reclaim Our Rights, Fix the Act”, she told several hundred attendees that “the gender transitioning of children is a medical scandal”.
She said the Australian model involves affirming a child’s claimed gender identity, prescribing puberty-suppressing drugs, and later administering cross-sex hormones ahead of surgical referral.
“Over the last six years, there have been multiple systematic reviews of the worldwide research literature that have found that gender interventions lack evidence of benefit and cause serious harms,” Spencer told the crowd, citing infertility, loss of sexual function and regret among the documented risks.
An Ideology Under Scrutiny
At the rally, Spencer said AHPRA “had aligned itself with the perspective of gender activists” and accused the regulator of punishing practitioners who raise concerns rather than the clinicians prescribing the treatments.
As evidence for her claim, she noted AHPRA’s formal partnerships with two LGBTQIA+ workplace schemes, arguing they embed a particular ideological position “at all levels of its organisation”.
A survey of more than 18,000 Australian health professionals, reported by The Daily Declaration in March, found the overwhelming majority believed medicine had become politicised.
Spencer shared Saturday’s platform with Giggle founder Sall Grover, former Queensland Greens founder Drew Hutton, and One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts. The rally called for the Sex Discrimination Act to be amended to restore biological definitions of sex, following the Federal Court’s Tickle v Giggle ruling that the protections in the Act extend beyond biological sex to claimed gender identity.
Queensland Children’s Hospital is expected to issue its own statement on Friday covering Spencer’s employment status.
Update
Statement from Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, 17 July 2026:
Since 2022, Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service (CHQ HHS) and Dr Jillian Spencer, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist have been in dispute in relation to Queensland Children’s Gender Service policy approach to gender treatment for children and adolescents and Dr Spencer’s clinical concerns and public statements on that topic.
Dr Spencer and CHQ HHS confirm that those disputes have now been settled. CHQ HHS has agreed to make this statement as part of that settlement.
CHQ HHS confirms that Dr Spencer has concluded her employment with CHQ HHS.
The CHQ HHS acknowledges that these are matters of legitimate professional and public debate, and that clinicians play an important role in raising concerns about patient safety and clinical practice. Dr Spencer has been a strong advocate for change in Queensland in the model of care for children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria. One of the features of the clinical approach that Dr Spencer has sought is the delay in medical interventions for such patients until adulthood, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, because they are serious decisions regarding their body and long-term health.
CHQ HHS accepts that Dr Spencer’s concerns were grounded in her training and background as an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist.
In 2025, in accordance with the Health Service Directive titled ‘Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents with Hormone Therapy’ dated 28 January 2025 and Ministerial Directions titled ‘Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents with Hormone Therapy’ dated 28 October 2025 and 15 January 2026, the State Government effected a temporary pause on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in the treatment of new patients in Hospital and Health Services across Queensland.
CHQ HHS acknowledges that health practitioners must take a clinical approach to the treatment of gender dysphoria that focuses on the best available research and the child’s best interests rather than directing a child down a pre-determined treatment pathway. Health practitioners must employ a holistic clinical approach that comprehensively assesses all relevant factors – including any comorbidities or other mental health conditions – and use information gathered from that process to determine the best available mode of treatment and care for the patient.
CHQ HHS also acknowledges Dr Spencer’s service and her contributions to child and adolescent psychiatry during her tenure.
All matters between the parties have been resolved by mutual agreement. All disciplinary proceedings against Dr Spencer have been discontinued.
The terms of the resolution are confidential.
CHQ HHS wishes Dr Spencer well in her future endeavours.
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Yes, medicine is politicised, as is everything in Australian society. If you do not ” toe the (Marxist) line about “Climate Change”, multiple sexes, etc, you do not get a job , or, it’s the end of your career if you deviate from the official line. No wonder Australia is “going down the gurgler” by excluding its best minds. I scored 3rd in an IQ Test to enter the Australian Public Service . Would I get offered a job in today’s society ? No way ! Would I remain in my previous job as High School teacher, recommended for Senior Mistress after only one year’s experience of teaching because I took a class of illiterates — Class IPQ (first Year High School) considered a class of the hopeless who could not read or count, to one which loved poetry, history, could read and count –3 of my pupils were transferred the following year to the A Class. I’d be sacked now, not promoted !
I add to my previous comments that we, the Elderly Australians , are the generation , who, in the 1960s made “Australia Great ” and Rich. My personal associates, all Adelaide University graduates with me–one got a job designing the Toronto Airport; 2 rocket scientists were head -hunted by NASA .
We produced Australia’s 1st female Supreme Judge (from my old convent school ) –Her Honour, Roma Mitchell. Many Adelaide UNI graduates left permanently for jobs in the USA.
Did you know that the oil Fields of Iran were first discovered by an Australian called Darcy ? What do we produce now? Illiterates and Communist Marchers(the enemies of Australia ).
A huge win for justice and truth!
Congratulations Dr. Jillian
Well said Leonie.
Jillian, may your work flourish as you honour our Lord.
Thank God for a small mercy in our nation which horrifically and lawfully prevents, mutilates, orphanises, barbarically dismembers, poisons or starves children in their “mothers’ ” wombs, corrupts them with pornographic “education” and mutilates them without remorse or caution when they are teenagers. All legal. All ferociously guarded and protected as the “rights” of criminally insane and evil adults.
I will vote for any candidate who vows to reverse the culture of destruction and death of our children. The longer these terrible abuses continue, the slimmer the prospect of Australia surviving. As it is, the country I became a citizen of in 1970 has changed – dramatically for the worse – and is now poorer, dirty, crowded, violent and unsafe.
Unless a critical mass turn back to Christ and rebuild a culture of chastity, true marriage and of love, welcome and care of new life itself, we will perish.