Dr Jillian Spencer’s email signature sparks gender battle at Qld Health
A disagreement over an email signature has triggered an extraordinary legal battle between a child psychiatrist and Queensland Health.
QLD News
Don't miss out on the headlines from QLD News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A disagreement over an email signature has triggered an extraordinary legal battle between a child psychiatrist and Queensland Health.
When Dr Jillian Spencer altered her email signature in 2022 to include the words “woman - adult human female”, medical directors Dr Stephen Stathis and Dr Arun Pillal-Sasidharan said it may be perceived as transphobic and ordered her to remove it.
Court documents show the row over gender identification was the start of four separate actions in the industrial courts that have divided the medical profession - and threaten to split the Crisafulli government.
Spencer wants her suspension lifted so she can return to work at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, documents filed in the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission reveal. And she is seeking compensation for alleged breaches of her human rights.
A bundle of letters and emails presented to the QIRC show Dr Pillal-Sasidharan and Dr Stathis were worried about the ‘non-standard’ pronoun on Spencer’s email signature and the “potential messaging this sends’’. They said it “might cause distress” to staff members at Queensland Children’s Hospital.
“Dr Pillal-Sasidharan and Dr Stathis raised with Dr Spencer that they were aware a number of staff, including those in the gender service, have been confused and concerned by her use of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a woman in her signature block instead of pronouns,’’ the document states.
“Dr Spencer was advised that the wording of her signature block may be perceived by people to be ‘transphobic’.”
According to the document Dr Spencer was ordered to “amend her email signature block, deleting the words ‘Woman - adult female’.”
She was also directed to “use a patient’s preferred name or pronoun in all written communication in the patient’s file and emails, and in verbal communications during clinical meetings across the Children’s Hospital and Health Service”.
Prior to the removal order, Dr Spencer had frequently challenged the culture inside the Queensland Children’s Hospital gender clinic including the overuse of rainbow flags and staff lanyards which she said led to vulnerable children being encouraged and even praised for being transgender, the QIRC was told.
“Dr Spencer had previously raised in emails her concerns that, within the hospital, there is a concerning ideological culture which is supported by managers and manifests itself in an excessive number of trans-pride flags in staff areas and in mental health staff being encouraged to wear rainbow lanyards, wear pronoun badges and initiate conversations with patients by saying: ‘My pronouns are x and y, what are yours?’
“Dr Spencer expressed the belief that this leads to young people being denied the benefit of a more cautious and neutral approach to exploring their gender concerns, with the risk of young people being encouraged to be, or praised for identifying as trans.
“It also has the risk of parents feeling pressured to affirm their children’s gender transition and suppress any instinct to protect the child from medical harms resulting from ill-advised or premature gender treatments and procedures.”
Court documents show Spencer warned Dr Pillal-Sasidharan in an email in April 2022 that she had concerns about transgender activism in the children’s gender clinic that included LGBTIQ+ flags and rainbow signage.
An avalanche of letters and emails tendered in evidence to the QIRC show how the dispute raged behind the scenes between 2022 and 2025.
Queensland Health doctors and bureaucrats accused Spencer of bringing the Queensland health service into “disrepute” by openly criticising the “gender affirmation model”. She hit back saying it was her duty as a child and adolescent psychiatrist to speak up about what she saw were the dangers prescribing puberty blockers and same-sex hormones to children.
Dr Spencer complained her unblemished 20-year record as a psychiatrist was not properly considered as Queensland Health mounted its case to oust her.
Now she is fighting back.
Her solicitor John Theodore Steenhof has filed a submission saying she has been discriminated against by Queensland Health.
Mr Steenhof is seeking a restraining order preventing Queensland Health “committing any further contravention of the Anti-Discrimination Act”.
Mr Steenhof also seeks damages for Dr Spencer in an amount to be determined by the court, and he wants Queensland Health to publicly apologise to her for its “discriminatory conduct”.
The dispute escalated in January 2023 when Craig Kennedy, a Queensland Health divisional director, gave Dr Spencer a “lawful and reasonable direction” to follow the affirmation model.
“In the event a patient may benefit from referral to the gender service, you are to provide them with information that supports this pathway and not dissuade the patient in any way,” he said in a letter before the court.
Mr Kennedy also warned her to comply with the Queensland Public Service Code of Conduct.
In April 2023 Spencer was suspended.
Two months later Dominic Tait, the executive director of clinical services at Children’s Health, told Dr Spencer that disciplinary proceedings against her had begun. She was accused of criticising the model of care at the gender clinic and disparaging her colleagues publicly at gender forums in Brisbane and Canberra.
Mr Tait issued her with a show cause notice saying she was liable to an adverse disciplinary finding “on the basis that you have been guilty of misconduct that is inappropriate or improper conduct in a private capacity within the meaning of the Act”.
Spencer made three public interest disclosures (PIDs) saying there was no reliable scientific evidence to show the gender affirmation model introduced in 2016 was safe. In fact, it was unsafe, she said. She said she had a professional duty to speak out because there was evidence to show puberty blockers and sex change hormones caused infertility, lack of sexual function and long-term physical health consequences and there was the risk of “detransition” or regret. Her PIDs were formally rejected by Queensland Health which argued the gender affirming model did not pose serious or substantial harm.
Spencer is now challenging that decision and seeks to have her PIDs sanctioned by the QIRC to gain official whistleblower status and legal protections that go with it.
In her second whistleblower case before the QIRC Spencer alleges the children’s health service provided false information about the benefits of gender affirming care.
The third whistleblower case concerns online discussions about the gender service approvals for double mastectomies for up to 35 adolescent girls who wanted to change sex. Spencer questions the procedures around patient consent.
In a separate matter, Dr Spencer alleges her human rights were breached. She believes she was discriminated against for her political belief that people cannot change sex. That case is also challenging the hospital’s right to impose a model of health care upon clinicians against their conscience.
In a submission to the commission Mr Steenhof said government policy should “focus on the child’s best interests” rather than directing a child “down a predetermined treatment pathway”.
It was Dr Spencer’s political belief that “government policy should not preclude practitioners from exercising the clinical freedom to take an individualistic approach to a child’s mental health”.
He said Dr Spencer’s right to freedom of conscience and belief that are protected in the Human Rights Act was infringed.
Mr Steenhof went further saying the discriminatory conduct limited Dr Spencer’s capacity to exercise reasonable professional judgment in providing psychiatric care.
Dr Spencer’s legal team will call national and international experts as witnesses to explain the harms, risks and consequences to children from gender affirming interventions. Spencer wants the hearings live-streamed to allow greater public scrutiny.
Spencer’s legal team is buoyed by a decision in the Family Court where Judge Andrew Strum criticised the gender-affirming care treatment guidelines used throughout Australia.
Justice Strum was especially critical of Professor Michelle Telfer, described as Australia’s foremost gender-medicine expert and the lead author of the guidelines.
Justice Strum found Telfer gave misleading evidence in support of a mother who wanted her child to be prescribed puberty blockers.
His judgement in June this year has called into question the integrity of treatment of gender-dysphoric children.
The Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents written by Dr Telfer and her colleagues in Melbourne are used in Queensland and other states.
Justice Strum stripped the mother of custody and effectively blocked the 12-year-old from accessing treatment. He criticised the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne for failing to give the child a formal gender dysphoria diagnosis until the court proceedings had commenced, despite having treated the child for six years.
Justice Strum also questioned the guidelines for not recognising children may not be capable of making life-altering medical decisions about their gender identity.
“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,” he wrote in the judgment.
“The case of the mother … is that because the child says so, the child is, and must unquestioningly be affirmed as being, female in gender identity. However, that overlooks the obvious, namely, that the child is still a child and not even, if it matters, a teenager.”
Justice Strum also criticised the political advocacy of gender clinic doctors and said the standards of care rules were written by transgender advocates.
And he believed parents had been “coerced” into giving assent to puberty blockers.
In Queensland, transgender medicine was championed by the Palaszczuk government in 2016. The then Health Minister Shannon Fentiman told Parliament: “I want to be clear that I define a woman as someone who identifies as a woman and that the Queensland government defines a woman as someone who identifies as a woman.
“Queensland Health is dedicated to supporting trans and gender-diverse Queenslanders.”
The Spencer case, meanwhile, threatens to become a damaging political problem for the Crisafulli government.
Health Minister Tim Nicholls has persistently refused calls for Dr Spencer to be reinstated despite mounting evidence that her skepticism of the gender-affirming approach is valid. The Red Union Hub has called for Mr Nicholls to step aside.
Mr Nicholls is also at odds with several of his Cabinet colleagues who believe Spencer should be reinstated.
LNP branches in Brisbane, Toowoomba, and the Sunshine Coast have signaled they want Dr Spencer reinstated and the gender clinic shut permanently.
The tone was set in Caloundra at the recent annual general meeting where President Lawrence Springborg was warned by party elder Graeme Haycroft the rank and file were threatening a revolt.
Originally published as Dr Jillian Spencer’s email signature sparks gender battle at Qld Health
‘Unlike anything I’ve ever seen’: 2000-strong cast delivers awe-inspiring spectacle
With a cast of thousands guided by some of the best in the entertainment business, the performing arts blockbuster Creative Generation has hit the stage and the show isn’t your typical school performance. Read our review here.
Motorbike rider killed in same region rocked by triple fatal
A motorbike rider has been killed in the same Qld region where three teenagers tragically died in another crash just hours earlier. *Distressing.