An Australian obstetrician first warned the world of the dangers posed to unborn babies by the (then) widely prescribed maternal anti-nausea drug Thalidomide. Australia was relatively slow to halt its use – with devastating consequences still being felt decades on.

Today, despite warnings from clinicians in Australia and abroad, Australia risks repeating the same mistake over the medical treatment of children questioning their gender identity or suffering from gender dysphoria.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard, John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, and Maple Leaf House Transgender and Gender Diversity Clinic for children were all scrutinised by committee chair Greg Donnelly in the Budget Estimates Hearing for Health last week.

Donnelly rang the alarm: ‘What we have in plain sight is an absolutely scandalous situation playing out in real time.’

Such warnings are not new.

In 2019, the National ­Association of Practising Psychiatrists backed a call by paediatrician Professor John Whitehall and 257 other doctors for then federal Health Minister Greg Hunt to hold an inquiry into paediatric clinical interventions for gender dysphoria.

Since that unheeded call, the UK’s Cass Review into gender identity treatments for children, led by eminent paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass OBE, found puberty blockers have ‘unknown impacts on development, maturation, and cognition if a child or young person is not exposed to the physical, psychological, physiological, neurochemical, and sexual changes that accompany adolescent hormone surges’.

The UK’s Tavistock children gender clinic is now facing imminent closure as its service model was found by Dr. Cass to be fundamentally failing to provide appropriate care. Finland, France, and Sweden are urging extreme caution, with the renowned Karolinska Institute so alarmed by serious adverse effects and physical deformities in youth three to four years after the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that they have discontinued their use outside of strict clinical studies.

UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid strongly reacted to the revelations of the Cass Review:

‘I’m deeply concerned about the approach to gender identity services for children.’

‘It’s already clear to me from her interim findings and from the other evidence that I’ve seen that the NHS services in this area are too narrow, they are overly affirmative, and in fact they’re bordering on ideological.’

‘As Health Secretary, I was determined to protect vulnerable children from being failed by gender identity services at the Tavistock. This is welcome news and absolutely the right decision based on the independent evidence gathered by Dr Hilary Cass.’

Last week, Minister Hazzard responded by simply dismissing bilateral radical mastectomies being performed on young girls in NSW as ‘complex’, quibbling over party politics and belligerently jousting with Committee member Mark Latham.

Hazzard is typical of those supporting or taking a path of least resistance to the transgender narrative – signalling Woke credentials to avoid the ire of gender ideologues and the rabid left media. Raising concerns about these experimental interventions attracts narcissistic projection from trans-activists who demonise, deplatform, and destroy. I should know, I have first-hand experience.

Both here and overseas, the absence of evidence of the long-term safety or efficacy for these experimental treatments, along with the mounting body count of detransitioners, is alarming. Australian gender clinics, modelled on the Tavistock, are continuing to persist with the ‘affirmation pathway’ to permanently alter the minds, bodies, and genitals of children and young people.

Active Watchful Waiting, a new network of Australian health care practitioners formed to share information on the harms being done to minors from so-called ‘gender-affirming care’, said normal scientific protocols have been overridden due to ideological pressure, and that young people with gender dysphoria or confusion should be helped with active, compassionate, respectful, and exploratory therapy.

Despite a serious three-year mental health history, Jude Hunter’s child was denied this approach by NSW Health. Jude says she declined a referral from John Hunter Hospital for her 17-year-old mentally unwell daughter to the ‘multi-disciplinary team’ for testosterone treatment. But, she has claimed, that the discharge summary from John Hunter Hospital falsely recorded that she had consented. Jude’s daughter was prescribed testosterone after two appointments, and has recently returned home after a three-year estrangement from her family, suicidal with regret over irreversible changes to her body.

Jude and her husband desperately pleaded for help from the multi-disciplinary team now located at Maple Leaf House, but says they were turned away after being told it was not a crisis service. Jude now funds her daughter’s therapy. ‘This is a medical scandal, my daughter should never have been prescribed testosterone as a mentally unwell teenager.’

Maple Leaf House continues to claim puberty blockers are reversible and should be started young. They fail to disclose puberty blockers are contested, experimental, and have not been tested on humans for adolescent gender dysphoria. The three animal studies conducted found harmful impacts including increased anxiety and despair-like behaviour.

During questioning, Minister Hazzard championed the pro-trans charity ACON saying ‘they are doing a very good job’, and ‘I am certainly not going to insert myself into the most complex of complex issues for youngsters who might be suffering from gender dysphoria’. ACON receives an annual special grant of $12 million directly from the NSW Minister for Health with a further $8 million announced this year, partially for establishing a new gender clinic for children at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.

ACON runs a website, Transhub, targeting minors and parents for social, medical, and surgical interventions. It claims puberty blockers are an ‘effective and safe part of the hormone therapy toolkit for young trans people’. Several pharmaceutical companies are ACON sponsors, including AstraZeneca Pty Ltd, manufacturer of Goserelin sold as Zoladex, used for puberty suppression in male children, and promoted on Transhub.

Given that medical negligence litigation is being prepared both here and overseas, political apathy and the influence of a taxpayer-funded charity should not be the reason we continue to sacrifice children on the altar of an ideology that sells a false panacea of affirmation, pharmaceuticals, and surgery as a cure for distress.

Donnelly urged a more careful, considered, and multi-disciplinary approach, ‘It will remain to be seen what detailed responses will be forthcoming.’ Let’s not wait until Hazzard is enjoying his taxpayer-funded parliamentary pension in retirement before we get an answer.

Australia must urgently conduct an inquiry into what will be a medical scandal akin to Thalidomide. We must stop fearing attacks from trans activists – if I can do it, surely the government can put on its big girl pants and do the same. Decades from now, do we really want to be looking back having failed to act when we should have, again?

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