Landmark puberty blocker decision a blow to transgender activists

A Family Court judge dealt a blow to transgender activists this week by giving a father the custody of a boy whose mother was trying to put him on puberty blockers, writes Des Houghton.

The court decision is a blow to transgender activists.

A Family Court judge dealt a blow to transgender activists this week by giving a father the custody of a boy whose mother was trying to put him on puberty blockers.

Justice Andrew Strum’s landmark judgment contains many broad criticisms of gender clinics and how hospitals treat children who question their gender.

He went much further, criticising the “political advocacy” of gender clinic doctors.

Strum also found the unnamed gender clinic that treated the 12 year old failed to formally give a gender dysphoria diagnosis until the court proceedings had commenced, despite having treated the child since he was six.

The landmark decision will send shudders through Queensland Health. It suspended psychiatrist Jillian Spencer for similarly questioning the role of gender clinics.

Court documents show that Spencer was criticised by several executives at Queensland Children’s Hospital and admonished for declining to use children’s preferred pronouns and warning against the use of puberty blockers and same sex hormones.

Queensland Health is opposing Spencer’s move to have several of her public interest disclosures recognised in the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.

She is also planning to go to the Supreme Court alleging her human rights were trampled.

The lengthy Strum judgment throws more doubt on the shaky foundations of gender clinics exposed by the Cass report in the UK, which has led to a virtual global ban on puberty blockers.

Gender clinics around the world shut after the Cass report but remain open in Queensland.

Justice Strum believed parents at the unnamed clinic had been coerced into giving assent to puberty blockers and told, inaccurately, that if they didn’t consent their child was “a high risk
of suicide”.

He added: “This is especially important in a situation which involves vulnerable minors and their families who might be presumed to be at risk of being unduly influenced or coerced by prestigious physicians and powerful institutions.”

Strum ultimately rejected the hospital’s diagnosis of the child as being gender-­dysphoric, and found the mother had attempted to use the child’s gender fluidity to damage the relationship with the father.

He said the court was “not concerned ‘in what the community thinks’ or ideologies, but only what, on the evidence, is in the child’s best interests”.

“Ideology has no place in the application by courts of the law.”

Originally published as Landmark puberty blocker decision a blow to transgender activists