Rita Panahi: Australia has become a backward outlier when it comes to gender-affirming care for kids

Australia has become a backward outlier when it comes to so-called gender affirming care for kids, with confused children being sent down the path of irreversible treatments.

Australia has become a backward outlier when it comes to so-called gender affirming care for children.

Confused kids, often with pre-existing issues including autism and mental health challenges, are being put in danger by being set down the path of experimental, irreversible treatments.

We’ve seen a reckoning from the UK to Scandinavia to much of the US with an acknowledgment that activist data and ideological zealotry led to policies that put gender confused kids in considerable peril.

The use of puberty blockers for under 18s is banned or heavily restricted in a number of countries including Sweden, Norway, France, Italy and Finland.

In the UK, the left-wing Labour government welcomed the National Health Service’s decision to stop the use of puberty blockers, after the NHS concluded “that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones”.

Australia has become a backward outlier when it comes to so-called gender affirming care for children. Stock image.

In Australia we continue to bury our heads deep in the sand, swallowing the activist “research” and allowing the trans movement to set the agenda.

But all that could be about to change with what could be a landmark ruling in the Family Court where Judge Andrew Strum removed custody from a mother wanting her 12-year-old to be prescribed puberty blockers, and he called out the shoddy work underpinning the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents.

Judge Strum questioned how the nation’s guidelines do not recognise that children may not be capable of making life-altering medical decisions.

How can a teenager or tween make decisions that may ultimately leave them with lifelong health issues, including infertility.

“It is concerning that an oddly binary approach is adopted in relation to children, especially of the age of the child the subject of these proceedings; that is, to affirm unreservedly those who present with concerns regarding their gender, brooking no questioning thereof,” Judge Strum wrote.

Associate Professor Michelle Telfer. Picture: ABC

He also pointed out that Australia’s leading gender-medicine expert, Michelle Telfer, “wrote the first draft and approved the final draft of the ASCTG” and that she was essentially “agreeing with herself”.

“Insofar as Associate Professor L (Telfer) relies upon the ASCTG, describing it as ‘best practice’, and as the ‘most progressive and trans-affirming guidelines’ in Australia, I approach her evidence in this regard with caution, in the circuitous circumstances where she is the lead author thereof,” Judge Strum wrote.

In this case, the 12-year-old child has been saved from being prescribed puberty blockers but only because the child’s father took legal action to stop the treatment.

How many other vulnerable children have not been so fortunate? It is clear that an urgent inquiry into so-called ‘gender affirming care” is needed.

And, one that is not run by activists or those beholden to them.

Originally published as Rita Panahi: Australia has become a backward outlier when it comes to gender-affirming care for kids