A distinguished pediatrician who went public with his view that gender-distressed teenagers cannot possibly consent to transgender mastectomies has been hit with a complaint from the health professions regulator.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency surfaced a six-month-old anonymous complaint against Professor Gary Geelhoed within days of him challenging AHPRA over its treatment of Queensland psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos, who was banned earlier this year from social media commentary on pediatric medical transition.Professor Geelhoed, a former chief medical officer of Western Australia and ex-director of the emergency department at the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, was quoted in a January 2026 article in The Australian, which reported that the Perth Children’s Hospital gender clinic enables the referral of teenage girls to the private sector for double mastectomies to “affirm” their trans identities.
Also in January, Professor Geelhoed, who served as Assistant Director General for Health WA, wrote an opinion article for Gender Clinic News in which he said the hormonal and surgical treatment promoted as “gender-affirming care” for minors represented “the biggest medical scandal of my time in medicine”.
On July 16 this year, he submitted a complaint to AHPRA deploring its February 26 “immediate action” order that Dr Amos cease his online criticism of affirmative treatment for minors as a practice based on identity politics not medical evidence.
Five business days later, an AHPRA official phoned Professor Geelhoed sounding apologetic to be belatedly sending him a complaint targeting his remarks six months ago in The Australian and Gender Clinic News. The anonymous complaint was lodged in February this year.
The complainant objected to Professor Geelhoed’s characterisation of under-age medical transition as a scandal, his description of mastectomies as “mutilating surgery”, and his general framing of “gender-affirming care as ideologically driven and poorly evidenced”, AHPRA said by email on July 23.
The agency had nothing to say in response to Professor Geelhoed’s July 16 statement that “AHPRA’s close association with (trans activist) organisations such as ACON raises serious questions about perceived impartiality when adjudicating what are fundamentally clinical and scientific matters”.
The Australian asked AHPRA if there was any connection between Professor Geelhoed’s July 16 challenge to the regulator and the surfacing of a six-month-old complaint against him.
AHPRA did not answer the question, but said that “Under the National Law, we are limited in what we can say publicly about an individual practitioner or matter”.
Source: AHPRA silent on gender activist ties as inquiry calls grow | The Australian