Supporters of LGBTIQA+ gender-fluid ideology are playing a dangerous game with the lives of vulnerable children. An article in the latest issue of the Weekend Australian carried bombshell revelations about previously suppressed medical opinion that gender clinics are harming children.

A leaked 2019 letter from the Medical Affairs Committee of the Endocrine Society of Australia (ESA) questioned the so-called ‘affirmation approach’ of the gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) Melbourne, whose practices all other Australian clinics follow.

RCH asserts that gender-confused children must be ‘affirmed’ and put on a path to treatment which often includes irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and in some cases, surgical removal of genitals and breasts.

The Weekend Australian revealed that the ESA wrote to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP ) in November 2019, saying it could not support the ‘affirmative approach’ to children’s gender confusion. The letter said:

ESA does not support formal RACP endorsement of the RCH document at this time. This is a complex area, the evidence base is limited, and the RCH document largely reflects the authors’ opinion because, as the authors themselves state, ‘The published evidence on the topic prohibited the assessment of level (and quality) of evidence for these recommendations.’ Secondly, there are sufficient concerns expressed in the correspondence received by RACP and by other parties to warrant further inquiry prior to making a decision on endorsement.

These concerns were covered up, and the Australian reports that the consultations to draft the advice were ‘highly charged’ and some committee meetings descended into ‘screaming matches between experts amid ­accusations the RCH-dominated paediatricians’ faction was made up of activist doctors’. It appears that the ‘activist’ doctors ultimately won the battle because the ESA has recanted the position it put forward in 2019.

The decision of medical elites in Australia to persist in advocating an ‘affirmative’ approach stands in stark contrast to the UK, which last year closed its child gender clinic, the Tavistock Centre, after it was sued by victims.

Last month, England’s National Health Service also banned the use of puberty blockers for children, saying: ‘There is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.’

Finland and Sweden have also begun limiting the use of puberty blockers, and France and Norway are urging caution.

In contrast, Australia’s child gender conversion therapy clinics continue to prescribe puberty blockers, falsely claiming their side effects are reversible.

The website for Melbourne’s RCH child gender clinic states that ‘as (puberty blockers) are reversible in their effects, should an adolescent wish to stop taking them at any time, their biological puberty will resume.’

But as the ESA stated in 2019 in its now-recanted letter:

There are gaps in the evidence that the RCH document does not adequately address, one instance being the statement that GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormones) analogs to block puberty progression are reversible. The evidence in children for that statement is limited: one review is cited of long-term follow-up of children treated with GnRH analogs for central precocious puberty. For boys, that summarises the only four very small, disparate, and inconclusive studies available, two of which describe no long-term follow-up, and none showed any meaningful evidence of ‘full reversibility’.

Family First reiterates its call for an urgent Royal Commission into Australia’s child gender clinics. Like Tavistock, they should be closed pending such an inquiry. What we are witnessing is a medical scandal of the highest order. Liberal and Labor politicians have been ignoring the evidence for years. Labor governments in Queensland, the ACT, and Victoria (with the support of Liberals) have made it illegal for doctors, counsellors, or priests to offer any alternative to the ‘affirmation’ pathway to gender-confused children. Jail terms apply, and in Victoria, under its Change and Suppression Act, the jail terms apply to parents who try to stop their child from going to a gender clinic. Not many Australians know this. As a result, Australian children continue to be subjected to dangerous LGBTIQA+ gender conversion practices.

Lyle Shelton is the National Director for Family First.