It has been apparent for some time that health care in this country is being politicised at all levels. Nothing is off limits, not even children.

Last month it was announced that Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital will offer ‘gender-affirming care’ (the model by which a child’s gender identity is affirmed rather than their biological sex) for children as young as three. In fact, at this hospital alone, the number of young people undergoing medical gender ‘transition’ rose from eight in 2011 to around 820 in 2021 – a 10,000 per cent increase.

In New South Wales, a four-year-old child has been ‘transitioned’, with taxpayer-funded assistance.

What is being ignored in this alarming rise in children being allowed to undertake medical gender transition is that these procedures potentially lead to irreversible damage to children who are still developing and cannot possibly understand their full implications. Additionally, this push for kids into gender transition doesn’t consider the psychological impacts, including potential confusion, regret, and mental health issues later on, even sadly, suicide.

What is more, these are risky medical experiments whose procedures involve hormone therapies and surgeries from which the long-term consequences are unclear. These are serious, life-altering medical decisions for children whose bodies are still growing.

All this is happening in Australia while in many other countries, the ‘gender-affirming’ model is being rolled back because independent reviews have found that it isn’t necessarily providing the best possible outcome for children.

In the UK last week, the National Health Service (NHS) backtracked on ‘gender-affirming care’ and puberty blockers after it found that there was ‘not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment’, and decided that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics.

The NHS says a ‘significant proportion’ of young people with concerns related to their gender can also experience other complexities related to mental health, neuro-development and family or social matters.

Further, after an independent review, the major clinic in England offering ‘gender-affirming care’, the Tavistock clinic, will close this year after it was found the service is ‘unsustainable’ and the review declared that a new model of care is needed.

Elsewhere, following similar reviews, Finland has begun limiting who can access gender-related treatments and Sweden has restricted the use of puberty blockers and hormones to clinical trials. A Norwegian health body and the French National Academy of Medicine have also urged caution. Indeed, as the latter pointed out:

Great medical caution must be taken in children and adolescents, given the vulnerability, particularly psychological, of this population and the many undesirable effects, and even serious complications, that some of the available therapies can cause. In this respect, it is important to recall the recent decision (May 2021) of the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm to ban the use of hormone blockers.

In fact, a recent BMJ study found no scientific evidence that gender-dysphoric youth are at elevated risk of suicide if not treated with ‘gender-affirming’ medical interventions. As the study puts it: ‘Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for.’ Rather, what predicts risk in this population is ‘psychiatric morbidity’. And, despite what the activists say, the study demonstrates that transitioning does nothing to reduce it: ‘Medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.’

What should be even more alarming is the recent whistleblower revelations involving a video and selection of messages from an internal chat system sent between members of the World Professional Association For Transgender Health (WPATH), as revealed here and known as the WPATH Files.

As Michael Shellenberger explains, at the core of medical ethics is the principle ‘do no harm’. Doctors and medical professionals obtain what is known as ‘informed consent’ from the people receiving the medicine or their caregivers.

However, these files outline overwhelming evidence that some gender clinicians associated with WPATH know that they are not receiving consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults or their caregivers. They are fully aware that the so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ they provide can result in lifelong complications and that their patients do not understand the implications, including sterility and the loss of sexual function.

On the WPATH Files, Victoria Smith wrote:

It is staggering to realise just how flimsy the evidence in favour of all this was. Experiments have been conducted on the bodies of children due to the political cowardice of adults. Humans cannot change sex. We cannot go through any other puberty than the one our body is destined to go through. This is what makes us adults. It is obscene that so many have lied to children, and by doing so put them at risk of so much long-term damage.

As a response to all these developments, the Childhood Gender Transition Prohibition Bill 2023 was introduced in the Senate by Senators Alex Antic, Matthew Canavan, Malcolm Roberts, and Ralph Babet. This Bill would place a complete prohibition on children under 18 being able to change their gender, thus putting a stop to uncontrolled medical experiments being conducted on people who, due to their age or mental ability, are unable to consent.

However, the Bill is being blocked by Labor and Greens Senators from progressing further, even from going to a Senate committee for an inquiry.

It absolutely bewildering that people in this country have their heads in the sand about this issue on purely ideological grounds, given developments happening elsewhere in the world, where the ‘gaps in evidence’ are being recognised to stop medical experimentation on children.

In these pages on 20 August 2020, Moira Deeming wrote:

Childhood gender dysphoria is a well-established, historically rare, psychological condition with objective diagnostic criteria. It has a long history of successful treatment using a ‘watch and wait approach’ coupled with psychological support. This approach affirms the child in their biological sex, avoids gender stereotyping, and allows natural puberty to take place, resulting in approximately 85 per cent of children outgrowing their dysphoria.

This isn’t about health, it’s about ideology. And our kids, tragically, suffer the consequences.

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