Shine light on transgender meds

Young people suffering from gender confusion or unease and their families are badly served by the secrecy surrounding treatments. The claim by one of the nation’s largest public gender clinics, Maple Leaf House in Newcastle in NSW, that it has no data on how many children it is putting on hormone therapy or what their sexes were at birth defies logic. Either it reflects gross incompetence in record keeping or an intentional strategy of cover-up. There is no good reason to keep the data under wraps. Transparency is more important than ever following the recent findings of a comprehensive review in Britain of services for children with gender dysphoria. Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found there was no good evidence to support the prescription of hormones to children under 18 to halt puberty or assist transition to the opposite sex. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was right when he said that, given lack of knowledge about the long-term impact of such medical interventions, “extreme caution” was needed.

Andrew Amos, a James Cook University academic who chairs the Queensland section of rural psychiatry, Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, writes that the primary goal of public gender services in Australia, judging by their guidelines and practices, is not to improve the health of gender-diverse Australian children. “If it were, they routinely would measure patient health and publicly report the benefits and harms of their treatments,” Dr Amos argues in this newspaper. “Instead, such services and their enablers among medical authorities continue to do everything they can to avoid the scrutiny that led to bans on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria in England, Sweden and Finland.”

Australians, unfortunately, are largely in the dark about the use of puberty blockers. Despite prescribing the powerful drugs, as health editor Natasha Robinson reported on Monday, Maple Leaf House has been unable to respond to Freedom of Information requests about the sex at birth of its patients, which is not kept on a central record system, or how many of its patients have been placed on cross-sex hormone therapy, which frequently follows the prescription of puberty blockers.

NSW Labor MP Greg Donnelly has done the community an important service by using state FOI laws to obtain previously unknown data on the number of Australian children being treated at children’s hospital gender clinics. Last year, 420 children were prescribed puberty blocker medications in children’s gender clinics in NSW, Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria. The highest rates of prescription occurred at the Queensland Children’s Hospital gender clinic and Maple Leaf House, where almost one in four patients was given the drugs.

According to the Cass review, Dr Amos notes, the medical profession in Australia supported the rapid expansion of a model of care with no reasonable evidence of benefit to patients. That model is now entrenched despite “compelling international warnings about the harms being caused”.

In view of such serious warnings, it beggars belief that the RANZCP is resisting calls to make a statement acknowledging the findings of the Cass review. It is its duty and responsibility to speak up.