Gender medical experiment is hurting our kids

Watch Australia’s gender clinicians dismiss the relevance of England’s decision to end routine use of puberty blockers for children. But it won’t wash.

We’re told blockers save “trans kids” from suicide. But there may be many reasons a young person is in distress, and there is no good evidence that blockers bring more benefit than harm.

Get ready for bluster. Our gender clinicians will be busy protesting the irrelevance of the historic decision by England’s National Health Service to end routine use of puberty blocker drugs. It won’t wash.

The decision has international implications and Australia is no exception. Gender clinics in our state children’s hospitals – and in stand-alone facilities such as Maple Leaf House in NSW – are doing the same thing as the London-based NHS Tavistock clinic. They have been authorising off-label hormone suppression drugs – approved to treat other conditions such as hormone-driven cancers and precocious (premature) puberty – to stop naturally timed sexual development.

We’re told blockers save “trans kids” from suicide. But there may be many reasons a young person is in distress, and there is no good evidence that blockers bring more benefit than harm. That is why the NHS decided these drugs would be given only within a future clinical trial, reflecting their experimental nature.

Yet here in Australia we still offer blockers as routine treatment to minors, as young as age 10, who self-identify as transgender or non-binary and who often have a host of other things going on – such as autism, awkward same-sex attraction, depression or a history of abuse. International data suggests the vast majority begun on blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones, with risks including sterilisation and sexual dysfunction. How can there be informed consent? How many of these troubled young people really needed mainstream mental health treatment?

The practice of gender medicine – a hybrid of identity politics and medical technology – is arguably more extreme in Australia than in England. I’ve not heard of any suggestion the Tavistock would refer a 15-year-old girl for a double mastectomy; that is reportedly what the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne has done.

In per-capita terms, Australia may be freer with puberty blockers; good data is scarce. The Tavistock is thought to have treated about 2000 minors across a decade; in Australia, there were more than 600 patients taking blockers in 2019 alone. Fewer than 100 will remain on blockers in England after the Tavistock closes on March 31. In the NSW city of Newcastle, Maple Leaf House alone had 95 minors on blockers in September 2022. At the RCH clinic, which pioneered the ideological “gender-affirming” treatment approach in Australia, 154 minors began blockers in 2022-23.

There is another sense in which the Tavistock appears more cautious. In England, they acknowledged that giving blockers to younger children was unsupported by data, so they ran a 2011-14 study (although they didn’t wait for the full results before mainstreaming early puberty blockers). In Australia, RCH and its interstate counterparts just introduced early blockers as routine treatment. No research until later.

In 2019, as criticism of gender medicine sharpened, the RCH team published a protocol for a longitudinal study, declaring “an urgent need for more evidence to ensure optimal medical and psychosocial interventions”. (We’re still waiting for key outcome data from this study to be published.)

Then, in 2022 – shortly after England’s independent reviewer, Dr Hilary Cass, reported serious concerns about puberty blockers – two RCH authors and a trans activist argued in the British Medical Journal that clinics giving minors blockers and cross-sex hormones could not wait for long-term safety data. They wanted Cass to give blockers the thumbs up on the basis of the existing, paltry evidence and what they called “international consensus” – meaning the view of fellow gender-affirmers that they know these drugs are lifesaving.

England is ahead of Australia in gender clinic reform partly because its politics and media have been better informed and more intellectually robust. British ministers ignored advice from captured officials, met young detransitioners who regret gender medicalisation, and empowered Cass’s independent inquiry.

Our federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, has officials giving him a misleading, gender-affirming take on the Cass review, judging by briefing documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws. Not a single state health minister shows any outward sign of engagement with the international medical debate about gender clinics. However, there is an increasing number of well-informed and worried politicians, both federal and state.

In Britain, multiple media outlets covered the accounts of Tavistock whistleblowers. The flagship investigations program of the BBC, Newsnight, did a sustained job of scrutinising the claims made by gender clinicians.

Our counterpart program, the ABC’s Four Corners, has uncritically promoted the gender-affirming treatment approach. ABC audiences are given the false impression that concern about gender clinics is a conservative culture war. They have been told next to nothing about the drivers of Europe’s shift to greater caution, which is particularly pronounced in liberal Nordic countries.

In Finland, Sweden and England, health authorities and experts ran independent systematic reviews of the evidence for hormonal treatment of minors with gender distress. The evidence is so weak that routine treatment cannot be justified. It’s that simple.

Bernard Lane is a former journalist with The Australian and now writes the newsletter genderclinicnews.com