It is the most emotionally coercive move in politics. They did it during the gay ‘marriage’ plebiscite – Australian Marriage Equality warned of the day, ‘When the first gay kid dies at his own hand because of the hate and fear-mongering’ –but that was baseless emotional blackmail. They hinted at it during the Voice referendum – announcing millions in the budget for an Aboriginal youth mental health crisis that would be caused by No-voters. That was bunkum. But they play this card most effectively to sway those who have misgivings about the experimental ‘transition’ and sterilisation of gender-confused kids.

‘Transition or die’ is the cruellest lie. Parents Jude and John told Channel 7’s Breaking the Silence documentary that doctors advised them to accept their daughter’s transition because of the suicide risk: ‘Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?’ Chloe Cole was put on puberty blockers age 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15, after her parents were likewise asked, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?’

Even the self-proclaimed ‘Australian Standards of Care’ from the Gender Clinic at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital contains a veiled threat to those who resist the gender-transition model. It warns about ‘the withholding of gender-affirming treatment potentially exacerbating distress and increasing the risk of self-harm or suicide’.

I assume the Melbourne authors sincerely believe there is a higher risk of suicide if the gender-affirmative path of puberty blockers and hormones is not taken. But what matters in medicine is not sincere belief but evidence, and the evidence shows their belief is wrong.

There has been an academic earthquake in the field of gender medicine: systematic reviews (the gold standard for medical evidence) conducted by both the UK’s National Institute for Health and the Swedish National Board of Health find no reliable evidence that the benefits of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones outweigh the risks, or that they are effective in improving mental health for children and adolescents. That is why the UK’s National Health Service confirmed on 12 March that puberty blockers ‘are not available as a routine treatment option’, and Britain’s only gender mega-clinic for children, the Tavistock, closes its doors this month.

It bewilders me that the Australian government is not acting on the British and Scandinavian findings, preferring to let the ‘experimental treatment’ (as the Finnish Health Care Council calls it) of gender-confused Aussie kids continue.

It bewilders Queensland paediatrician, Dr Dylan Wilson, who said, ‘Sterilising children and leaving them sexually dysfunctional for the rest of their lives, on the basis of their declared identity, is a medical scandal.’ It bewilders Queensland child psychiatrist, Dr Jillian Spencer, who told the Australian newspaper, ‘Why on earth are puberty blockers still being prescribed? Puberty blockers have been in use for at least 20 years and there still isn’t any reliable evidence that they improve psychosocial outcomes. However, there is growing evidence of their harms.’

And now, as a knockout blow to those who would still play the trans-suicide card to shape public policy, a major Finnish study (Ruuska, 2024) has appeared in the British Medical Journal. It analyses all 2,083 adolescents referred to Finnish gender clinics between 1996 and 2019 and makes two vital findings: first, there is no evidence that gender dysphoria leads to increased suicide amongst adolescents. None. Second, that ‘medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk’ – meaning it makes no difference to suicide risk whether the adolescent gets puberty blockers and hormones or simple supportive care.

Read those two conclusions again, dear activists and politicians and good-willed doctors, and then cease and desist from your unjustified claim that gender dysphoria makes adolescents more likely to suicide. Likewise, stop telling parents that gender ‘transition’ will reduce their child’s suicide risk.

Risk-reduction is only achieved by managing other psychiatric conditions, not by fetishising gender. Autism, personality disorders, psychosis, depression, etc, are all heavily over-represented in children presenting to gender clinics and can account for the tiny but tragic number of actual suicides.

When our best medical evidence points in a new direction, doctors should amend their practice. Let’s start by seeing the Queensland Children’s Hospital Gender Service tear up its flyer, ‘Information for parents’. On the flyer’s front page (you can view it online) we see a ‘father of a 10-year-old trans boy’ tell other parents, ‘The real concern was the statistics on suicide… I didn’t want my son to be one so I supported him in the decisions ahead and informed him as best as possible.’ The suicide theme continues on the flipside: ‘Studies show that strong parental support of their gender diverse child leads to a 93 per cent reduction in suicide attempts, comparative to parents who are unsupportive or only somewhat supportive.’

Did you hear that, parents? If you are not strongly supportive of your child’s gender journey, you abandon your child to a much higher rate of suicide attempts! How could any parent resist such a powerful statement of fact, coming from trusted doctors?

The flyer’s sole reference for its 93 per cent claim is an obscure survey by a Canadian lobby group called TransPULSE that was never published in a medical journal, not peer-reviewed but simply posted at the group’s website. A small, unrepresentative sample of 84 anonymous youth a decade ago: no control group, no in-person interviews, no follow-up to clarify the claims of attempted suicide.

Should such an incendiary 93 per cent claim, based on borderline junk science, still be portrayed to parents as medical truth? Why would a children’s hospital still frighten parents with ‘the statistics on suicide’ when high-quality evidence finds their child’s gender dysphoria does not increase the risk of suicide and medical ‘transition’ does not reduce it?

A senior psychiatrist in the field of gender dysphoria, Stephen Levine, wrote in 2022, ‘Providers of gender-affirmative care should be careful not to unwittingly propagate misinformation regarding suicide to parents and youths.’

Queensland Health, that’s you. Tear up that flyer, and that unwitting card.