The tide is turning overseas on gender transitioning for children, yet in Australia no one seems to want to ask the hard questions |Caleb Bond

With the rest of the world waking up to the dangers of gender transitioning for children, Australia seems to be going full steam ahead writes Caleb Bond.

While the rest of the world is waking up to the dangers of gender transitioning for children, Australia seems to be going full steam ahead.

Nearly 300 child referrals were made to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic between March 2022 and 2024.

More than 80 of them were aged between six and 10 and – extraordinarily – three were aged between three and five.

Why on Earth does a three, four or five-year-old need to be referred to a gender diversity clinic?

A natural part of childhood is exploring yourself and the world so you can understand your place within it.

That sometimes means doing things that seem outside the norm – little boys try on dresses because that’s what they see mum do or they want to play with their sister’s Barbie dolls.

It’s not cause for concern – it’s called being a kid.

I enjoyed the film Mrs Doubtfire as a child and started rocking around the house in a grey wig pretending to be a woman.

That didn’t mean I was going through any kind of gender dysphoria – I was being a child and that sometimes involves a bit of harmless gender bending.

It has crossed my mind that if I were born a few years ago and started doing that today, my parents may well trundle me off to the closest clinic to see if I was transgender.

I also had an imaginary friend and I didn’t turn out to be a lunatic (though some of you, dear readers, may disagree).

Childhood is difficult and full of constant change.

And some children will question their gender and feel like they’re in the wrong body.

That is fundamentally a mental health issue, not a physical one.

The Women’s and Children’s gender diversity clinic delivers gender-affirming care that supports children to transition to a different gender.

That includes “support with social transition”, including free chest-binders for girls to flatten their breasts, and the prescription of hormone treatments and puberty blockers.

The use of puberty blockers for transgender children was banned by the UK’s National Health Service in March.

“We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” an NHS spokesman said at the time.

Yet we continue here.

Even the New York Times – famously not a right-wing publication – recently published a feature about children who thought they were transgender but later grew out of it.

The tide is turning overseas but no one seems to want to ask the hard questions in Australia.

Transitioning gender is a serious and dangerous thing.

Some of these treatments can cause lifelong, irreversible changes to the body.

It is thanks to the work of upper house MP Frank Pangallo that we now know how many children are being referred for treatment.

He tried to launch a parliamentary inquiry into gender dysphoria but it was knocked on the head.

What do they have to hide?