ABC silence on key trans issues hints at dangerous dark age

ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose ‘has not grasped the fundamental problem’ at the national broadcaster.

A few weeks back, actor Ralph Fiennes remarked that cancel culture had become dumb. “It has no nuance,” he told The New York Times. The same could be said of our stunted conversations on the intersection of medicine with trans culture, especially where it concerns children. Only it is worse than dumb. Censorship in this area has become dangerous. The failure to consider nuance, areas of grey and complexity will harm vulnerable people, again, especially children.

Gender dysphoria is a serious and complex issue. It ought to invite serious and complex responses, and reporting of a similar standard. In the past six months, there are critical signs the orthodoxies are being challenged by those who work closely with children who say they are suffering from gender dysphoria. These developments could mark a turning point in how vulnerable children are treated by the medical profession. And yet our national broadcaster, comprised of thousands of journalists, editors, producers, researchers and other staff, has failed to report these important changes.

In Britain, the National Health Service has recently released a guidance note for doctors in which it switches to a “watchful approach” and asks doctors to “explore all” underlying health problems, including mental health issues, to better reflect the complexity relating to gender identity development in children.

This is an important change from the earlier “affirmative approach” adopted by the Gender Identity Development Service in Britain where a child’s claim that he or she was born with the wrong gender was used to explain other complex problems the child may be facing. The increasingly discredited affirmation approach was practised at London’s Tavistock clinic, the NHS’s main gender identity clinic for young people in England.

An interim report by Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, documented the concerns of many medical professionals that the NHS was too quickly prescribing irreversible puberty-blocker medication to children.

This report led to the closure of the Tavistock clinic. And these two developments led the NHS to review its treatment of children and issue new interim guidelines.

NHS England’s new approach, dated October 20, states: “The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence, being mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for prepubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes.

“A significant proportion of children and young people who are concerned about or distressed by issues of gender incongruence, experience coexisting mental health, neurodevelopmental and/or family or social complexities in their lives,” it goes on to say.

Our national broadcaster has been silent on these advances in the use of medical treatments on children who claim to suffer from gender dysphoria. It has resources no other media organisation in the country has. Many ABC journalists, especially high-profile ones, spend publicly funded airtime pursuing issues about the trans community. And yet, across the entire organisation, there was no news report when Tavistock was closed in July following the Cass review. On August 15, Media Watch drew attention to the ABC’s failure to cover that important development. Two days later, the closure of Tavistock was mentioned on an afternoon chat show in Melbourne.

Having failed to report this important news, the national broadcaster has, again, failed to report recent changes in Britain to the medical treatment of such children. The ABC’s silence is a disgrace, not just to journalism.

These are matters of importance for our society. Yet the taxpayer-funded ABC behaves as an activist lobby group for the trans community, not as an impartial news organisation. These reporting failures are compounded by clueless leadership. In an interview with Stellar magazine last weekend, ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose said she is “not supposed to be friendly to anyone in politics … I’ve always thought journalists need to be apolitical. We’re meant to be unbiased. We’re meant to be able to deliver both sides of the story and let the public decide. We’re meant to deal with facts and not opinions.”

Buttrose still has not grasped the fundamental problem at the ABC. The issue is less about politics and more about culture. Is she blind to the slow-burn cultural activism on show daily at the ABC?

From climate change to sexual politics to programs that start with “we come to you from Gadigal land”, many ABC journalists and producers shamelessly use our public broadcaster to drive cultural change to suit personal agendas. It is bad enough that staff have hijacked the joint to use it as an instrument of social and cultural engineering. These are garden-variety derelictions of the ABC’s legal duty to present news that is accurate and impartial.

The failure to report on matters of medical significance concerning gender dysphoria is a different, more dangerous, genre of cultural activism. By censoring news of medical developments, the ABC news division is letting down vulnerable children.

Medical treatments of all kinds must be open to scrutiny. And scrutiny within one country must be reported in other countries. In other words, developments in Britain deserve to be understood and reported in Australia so our own medical professionals and regulators can learn from the experiences of others. This is the essence of medical advancements, be it treatments for cancer or medical treatments aimed at gender dysphoria.

When an orthodoxy becomes so cemented it cannot be challenged, where developments elsewhere are not reported, we stand on dangerous terrain. If the intellectual failures at the ABC were repeated across society, we would be assured of a new dark age. Not just a dumb one, but a dangerous one. Too many ABC journalists who call themselves progressive routinely reject intellectual curiosity when it interferes with their cultural agenda.

When the pattern of omission concerns critical developments in the medical treatment of children, it is time for Buttrose to rip off her staff-tinted glasses.

We don’t need a friendly ABC. But we are entitled to demand our national broadcaster impartially reports important news about the medical treatment of children.