Judgment defines the debate and slams the dogma on puberty blockers, hormones and surgery
Justice Strum’s decision is the best-yet judicial guide to the debate about youth gender clinics.
Family Court Justice Andrew Strum is careful to state that his 58,000-word decision is about the best interests of a 12-year-old boy and not about transgender rights.
Even so, his decision is the best-yet judicial guide to the debate about youth gender clinics. And it is devastating for the dominant “gender-affirming” model with its promotion of puberty blockers, hormones and surgery.
The child was living with his mother and attending an unnamed gender clinic at a hospital; puberty blockers were on the cards.
His father, separated, opposed this, and the judge decided the father should have sole responsibility.
Along the way, Justice Strum punctured the absurd claim by Australian health authorities that England’s Cass review and its more holistic, less medicalised approach have nothing to teach our gender clinics.
The judge found that the gender clinic failed to carry out the comprehensive assessment that is part of its marketing, an assessment that might have found ADHD or autism, not gender dysphoria, as needing treatment.
Instead, the judge accepted evidence that the gender clinic has an ideological commitment to the medicalised gender-affirming model. He said: “No alternative treatment options are offered by the [gender clinic] for gender dysphoria diagnosed there, other than prescription of puberty blockers by a pediatrician.”
Dr N, whose diagnosis of the child was in dispute, “could not identify a single case of a child who had been referred by her, or one of her colleagues, to a pediatrician at the [gender clinic] who had not been prescribed puberty blockers”.
A doctor identified as Associate Professor L told the court that the treatment guidelines represented “best practice”.
The judge found that Professor L’s dismissal of the Cass review was “misleading” and that the expert’s self-description as “an advocate for trans rights” was at odds with their duty of objectivity as an expert witness.
Professor L repeated a US activist trope whereby Dr Cass’s review is placed in an “anti-trans” tradition going back to a claim that Nazis burned “trans health” books and “murdered thousands of LGBTIQ people in the Holocaust”. The judge said this “demonstrates ignorance of the true evils of Nazism and cheapens the sufferings – and mass murder – of the millions of the victims thereof, which included, but were most certainly not limited to, transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, amongst other groups of people. I consider there to be no comparison whatsoever.”
Back to the case before him, the judge gave weight to the Cass review and the once obvious fact that children develop and change, thereby rejecting the gender clinic dogma that at his young age the child “has an actual, fixed gender identity yet, as opposed to being gender fluid or gender exploratory”.
And even if the child did have dysphoria, the judge would not have approved puberty blockers. He noted the profound risks, uncertainties and lack of long-term data. “I do not accept that the child, at this age and pre-pubertal stage in life, can properly understand the implications and potential risks of puberty blockers,” he found.
“The risks posed by medical (and surgical) gender affirming treatment include risks to fertility, sexual function, bone health, brain development, cardiovascular function and carcinogenesis, as well as the risks of being a lifelong medical patient and of later regret.”
He was surprised that, in defiance of the unknowns, “the [gender clinic] continues to represent to parents and children that puberty blockers are fully reversible and relatively risk-free”. And he observed that the hospital “has only recently employed a PhD candidate to study possible effects despite blocking children’s puberty for several years”.
Bernard Lane, a former journalist with The Australian, writes Gender Clinic News.
