In the Australia of old, a man who was thought to be overly timid might have been denigrated by other men as ‘a woman’. It is a slur that if used today would see the offender at risk of having his tongue cut out. A woman can be many things but, by twenty-first century decree, it is not a biological male with an irresolute nature. On today’s standards, therefore, Anthony Albanese is not a ‘woman’. He is an XY-chromosome prime minister known for indecisiveness and lack of foresight.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the issue of pre-pubescent children deciding for themselves whether they want to be a man or a woman. A wave of devastation, complete with royal commissions and mass litigation, is set to crash onto Australian shores but, just as with the circumstances that preceded Bondi, the Albanese government cannot see it coming. As a parent myself of a child undergoing transition at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne (RCH), I watch on in disbelief, not at the RCH practitioners, who are treating my child in accordance with their charter and with care and support, but at the federal government as it does all it can to bring catastrophe upon itself.

France, Finland, the United Kingdom, most US states, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand have all either banned or put the brakes on the use of off-label drugs for gender transition. As each has successively done so, the Australian government, paralysed by fear of the trans lobby, has sat on its hands, saying it was a matter for the states. However, in January 2025, after Queensland followed the international lead, Albanese and his Health Minister, Mark Butler, confessed it to have been a federal matter all along by commissioning the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to review the matter and to ‘develop new clinical practice guidelines’. This was a welcome move, but wait… the NHMRC was directed to provide an interim report by mid-2026 and its final recommendations in 2028. This is not just kicking the can down the road. It is coming in with a long run up and booting the can down the road, over the hill and out of sight. Then, instead of suspending the practice after having rendered the existing guidelines redundant, Albanese and Butler have let it continue at pace. No-win no-fee law firms will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.

What an opportunity this gender transition issue was for Albanese. As state Premiers Malinauskas, Cook and Minns, all ran from it, petrified, Albanese could have stamped his authority. Instead, he has let down people on all sides of the argument. The trans community will have believed that Albanese represented their best chance yet for a clear legislative framework for gender transition. The practitioners would also have benefited from the security of such a framework. But Albanese and Butler would not make a decision that way either. It is a leadership void that has led to the farce now underway in Queensland, where, in response to trans community fund-raising efforts for children to be able to circumvent the state ban by undergoing transition with private doctors, medical associations have written to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission arguing that the fund-raisers’ claim that the practice is ‘evidence-based’ is misleading − the ACCC is being asked to rule on the existing practice guidelines.

But outside of Queensland and the Northern Territory, which has also put a stop to the practice, the trans community is dictating terms. As our children are encouraged to make a gender selection, with bodies and voices tailored to suit, all before reaching puberty, Australians walk the streets in silence, lobotomised by the left. Even the conservative side of politics does not step up. Other than an occasional comment from Claire Chandler, the Liberals are mute. Pauline Hanson has been known to speak out but the issue is not found amongst One Nation’s policies. What might happen for One Nation if she was to put it front-and-centre?

For the fact is, any non-left parent who walks into a gender clinic does so as a trespasser. Throughout history, new medicines have been designed for segments of society as defined by age, biological sex or ethnicity. Now, in a world-first, a medical procedure has been conceived and created by and for those committed to left-wing ideology. It is a procedure that subverts what through all of time has been thought to be the course of nature. How can a pre-pubescent child know its post-puberty self? Discovering such knowledge within a child would require paranormal powers, it has always been thought, but powers of this kind are what Australian practitioners do indeed seem to possess, for they know better than their peers in France, Finland, the UK, most US states, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand.

Parents are in an impossible position. For puberty blockers to be administered, the parent must sign off on the fact that the long-term effects of the treatment ‘are not fully understood and there may be long term risks that are not yet known’. Unless it were emergency life-saving surgery, no parent would sign off on such a thing, but in gender transition in the Australia of today, a parent has no option but to sign and pray for the best. The RCH maintains a pretence that the parent retains a simple right to withhold consent when in truth decision-making authority has been wrested by the state. The parent’s only function is to drive the child to and from the appointments.

The villain, however, is not the RCH. De-transitioners are already bringing litigation and the UK has paused its new clinical trial of puberty blockers on safety grounds.

The alarm bells could not be ringing any louder, but in an interview in November, Mark Butler on three occasions described child gender transition as a ‘contested’ space, which is Albanese code for ‘nothing will be done’.

I want long-term happiness for my child, but if this ends badly, I will be letting that child know that redress is available – a course of action gifted by the timidity and gutlessness of the Albanese government.