‘Generation of kids being experimented on in ways that are completely unacceptable’, says Greens co-founder Drew Hutton

Australian Greens co-founder Drew Hutton wanted to understand why so many young people are determined to change their sex. So he turned to an expert to guide him through the maze of the gender debate | WATCH

Greens co-founder Drew Hutton and psychologist Rachel Hannam at her home in Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

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Drew Hutton’s crash course in gender dysphoria began when psychologist Rachel Hannam reached out, after the Australian Greens elder defied the party he co-founded on trans rights.

Dr Hannam, a former Greens member and election candidate, has skin in this very fraught game: she not only counselled teenagers and young adults intent on changing sex, but had to contend with a member of her own family seeking to transition.

Over the past three years she and Mr Hutton have gone on a punishing journey together. Mr Hutton, 78, has been at loggerheads with the Queensland division of his party, fighting accusations of being transphobic, which he deeply resents and rejects. His expulsion was confirmed this week.

Dr Hannam struggled to cope with the pressure at home and at work in Brisbane, inundated by distraught parents pleading for help for a gender-dysphoric child before it was too late.

They talked. A lot.

“Rachel really opened my eyes,” Mr Hutton said. “Before this thing started with the party, I really didn’t know much about the issues. My concern was basically freedom of speech, not the medicine and science around gender dysphoria.

“But through Rachel, I got to understand that there’s a lot going on here. We’re talking about a whole generation of kids who are really being experimented on in ways that are completely unacceptable.

“I mean, we don’t allow children to drink alcohol or buy tobacco or to drive or vote, and here we are – here’s the Greens – saying children should be able to go to a doctor and have these incredibly radical transformations to their bodies wrought around them with puberty blockers and other treatments.

“And here we have Rachel, saying, ‘well, hang on, these children might be able to be helped by other means’.”

Dr Hannam: ‘I am willing to go on the record and say I’m horrified by how Drew has been treated.’ Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Dr Hannam, 48, questions whether gender dysphoria – a genuine and confronting state of distress where a person denies their biological sex – can mask underlying psychosocial and psychiatric issues. In many cases she believes therapy, not medical intervention, is the answer.

“I’m not denying that there are transgender people in the world, but I do believe a lot of young people have deeper problems and it’s not gender dysphoria,” she said.

“Many of them are autistic or neurodivergent or have experienced trauma – we know that, it’s not debatable.

“I’ve worked with autistic and neurodivergent people for many, many years, and most say that adolescence was horrible for them, terrible. They hated getting secondary sex characteristics. Any teenager, especially girls, can feel distress over the physical changes that happen during puberty but when you’re autistic or neurodivergent it’s next level.

“We need to have sympathy for that, and do what can be done to help. But to affirm that a young person was born in the wrong body as a starting point – I just find that deeply unscientific.”

Dr Hannam knows it is risky to speak out like this, such are the emotions and vitriol swirling around the transgender space. She has already had to defend a complaint to the Health Ombudsman that she was transphobic, an expensive and stressful undertaking. The Psychology Board of Australia cleared her.

But she couldn’t stand by when she learned that Mr Hutton had been breached by the Greens over posts to his private Facebook page questioning the party’s pro-trans rights policies.

They connected in 2022 and have been talking ever since. “I’m willing to go on the record and say I’m horrified by how Drew has been treated,” Dr Hannam said. “All he did was leave some comments on a post … I couldn’t understand why that was grounds for him to be kicked out when he’s given so much to the party over the years.”

His suspension and subsequent expulsion, ratified by the Queensland Greens’ state council last Sunday, brought to a head long-simmering tensions over the purge of members by a “transgender-queer cult” that, Mr Hutton alleges, has seized control of the party.

He told The Australian he had been contacted by more than 30 ex-members who were expelled for refusing to toe the line on trans rights, and many more who complained of being hounded into quitting. Dr Hannam, who ran for a seat on Brisbane City Council for the Greens in 2016, let her membership lapse for unrelated reasons and no longer votes for them.

Mr Hutton set up the Australian Greens in 1992 with his friend, Bob Brown, who has called for his life membership to be reinstated. The veteran activist said his “crime” was to refuse to delete comments made by others on his 2022 Facebook posts decrying the sacking of then Victorian convener Linda Gale, allegedly for denigrating trans people in a discussion paper advocating that the party revisit its pro-rights platform. She denied this.

While his focus was freedom of speech – Mr Hutton says the trans faction ruthlessly crushes internal dissent – he turned to Dr Hannam to help him come to grips with the science behind the controversy. He read studies and academic papers, and pored through the findings of last year’s Cass Review for Britain’s National Health Service that underpinned the NHS’s decision to ban new prescriptions of puberty blockers for under-18s wanting to transition.

And he listened closely to Dr Hannam, as she filled in the gaps in the literature from her experiences of dealing with gender dysphoria at work and in her family. “I realised that there were a lot of questions associated with things like giving children puberty blockers, giving them cross-sex hormones, giving them surgery because they were uncomfortable in their bodies,” Mr Hutton said, catching up with her on Friday.

“I thought, well, that’s wrong. It’s problematic. What’s the alternative? Rachel told me about the things she was doing with children and their parents and it was so positive.

“You don’t simply give kids puberty blockers or a medical procedure and just say, ‘you’re in the wrong body, here you are, change your body’.

“Rachel was just saying, ‘let’s go through this journey with the kids’ and see if we can get through it in a far less intrusive, far less destructive way.”

Dr Hannam said parents were often left with nowhere to turn when “good science was substituted for ideology”, leaving health and medical professionals reluctant to get involved in gender cases for fear of the blowback. Some families were told that dysphoric children and young people were at risk of suicide unless their demands to change sex were met.

She believed in an “exploratory approach rather than a blanket affirming approach” in dealing with these cases. “I am not denying the existence of transgender people, as I know Drew is not, either,” she said.

“But … we’ve seen psychiatric epidemics through all of human history. What if this is another one? What if we’re making some huge mistakes. I believe we need to slow down and really dig deeper into what else might be going on.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg for a lot of these young people. And underneath the waterline we see neurodivergence, we see trauma, we see social isolation, we see other mental health struggles, and I have enormous amounts of compassion for that.”

The personal cost to each of them has been severe. Mr Hutton lost friends of decades’ standing over his fallout with the party, among them new Greens leader Larissa Waters. Pulling the “cult” into line was a test of her leadership mettle, he said.

He is in the process of obtaining legal advice on the standing of the disciplinary process that led to his expulsion, having put Senator Waters on notice that he would also explore other “political options”.

“I am not going away,” he told The Australian.

Dr Hannam has been so scarred by the situation in her family she no longer sees gender-dysphoric children and young people as clients, though she does work with parents. “It’s been a really tough time,” she said. “Everything was sort of OK, and then the politics of this issue infiltrated my family life.”