Des Houghton The Courier Mail January 3. 2024
Congratulations to transgender activists. You have had a resounding victory over the medical fraternity, elected representatives and educators in Australia. Or so it would seem to me. Taxpayer-funded gender clinics in public hospitals continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormones to children who believe they are living in the wrong sex.
No matter that radical “gender-affirming care” has now been discredited globally. Puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgeries have been banned or sharply restricted in the UK, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway and several US states. More are to follow. President-elect Donald Trump will outlaw them completely for anyone under 18.
So why not here? And why won’t anybody talk about it? Have our state and federal health ministers been silenced by the powerful medical colleges – or gender activists?
Or have they kept quiet because they are anxious not to be denounced as intolerant, prejudiced or ignorant?
The controversy seems to have flummoxed federal Health Minister Mark Butler, Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and the AMA. They decline interview requests.
Yet there is no escaping the dangers of gender identity treatments highlighted by Dr Hillary Cass in a landmark study in England. She is a world-renowned pediatrician who has worked in child health all her life, especially in the fields of autistic spectrum disorders, palliative care, cognitive impairment and epilepsy.
Cass, 66, is the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and now a baroness. After an exhaustive four-year study with input from a range of specialists, she exposed the “shaky foundations” on which the National Health Service expanded gender identity treatments. This led to the closure of the famous Tavistock centre, a dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people. But it is business as usual in similar Australian clinics.
The Cass report highlighted inconclusive evidence to back some of the clinical decision making.
Cass said children had been “let down” by the lack of reliable evidence on how safe transitioning was for them. Cass said the service could do more harm than good. The powerful drugs prescribed had numerous harmful side effects not fully understood. Yet her report has been brushed aside in Australia.
Years before Cass handed down her report, a brave Queensland child psychiatrist had reached similar conclusions. Dr Jillian Spencer was stood down by Queensland Health for saying so in a Sky News interview.
Like Cass, Spencer suggested a number of young people and pre-pubescent children were directed towards life-changing drug treatment or surgery that a number of young people did not require and after a time realised they did not want.
Spencer believed a number of young people complaining of gender-related distress or “gender dysphoria” may be suffering from autism spectrum disorder or have hidden traumas or distress due to family breakdowns or bullying and exclusion at school.
In an interview with The Courier-Mail in July last year, Spencer also claimed children and their families were being pressured into affirmation treatment care, with kids not provided adequate mental health assessments prior to treatment.
In that interview, she said a state government review of the clinic was “stacked” with “hard-line gender clinician activists” with links to the gender clinic.
Nevertheless, Queensland Health has brushed aside the Cass report, ignoring valid concerns raised in parliament by LNP and Katter’s Australia Party MPs.
Just before Christmas, the director of Children’s Health Queensland Child and Youth Mental Health Services, Craig Kennedy, said in a group email that the clinic was expanding with extra staff, and an extra psychiatrist.
He said the department was adopting recommendations from the Miles-government review, “including development of a framework for an integrated statewide networked model of care to meet pediatric trans healthcare needs”.
Kennedy said extra staff would “ensure the team is well supported to progress action items and manage the gender waitlist”. He added: “Our recent update presentations to both the CHQ Board and the CHQ Executive Leadership Group were well received with strong advocacy and support expressed by members.”
He hoped to “position the service towards a Children’s Health vision where gender is everyone’s business in healthcare”.
Spencer said the hospital was clearly not listening to the grave concerns raised around the world.
“The hospital is continuing on with the same discredited affirmation model and is expanding the clinic’s services in line with the recommendations of the sham evaluation of the Queensland Children’s Gender Service,’’ she said.
Spencer said the evaluation panel was biased and “contained at least three public advocates for gender-affirming care”. “Private child and adolescent psychiatrists … were not invited to provide input,” she said.
Yet transgender advocacy organisations were invited and panellists included members of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health.
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1/ Dr Jillian Spencer is a psychiatrist at the Queensland Children’s Hospital who has challenged gender affirming care for gender questioning young people. Image Supplied
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