Many of you reading this will have little knowledge of what role paediatric endocrinologists have in treating children in this clinic. It may be that the first time it has come to your attention is during this election campaign, when old tweets by the Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves came to light. In one she tweeted about “vulnerable children surgically mutilated and sterilised”. The uproar and backlash in the media was furious.
There is a simple reason why Ms. Deves tweeted about children being surgically mutilated and sterilised.
It’s because children are being surgically mutilated and sterilised.
Paediatric endocrinologists in gender clinics in Australia and around the world are taking a cohort of physically healthy children and they are suppressing the puberty of these children at its earliest active stage, Tanner Stage 2. Puberty for these children is never allowed to progress. The bodies of these children are frozen forever at this stage, even though they are growing chronologically older. Contrary to the popular belief, puberty blockers are not a “pause”. We now know that at least 98% of children who commence puberty blockers continue along the affirmative pathway onto cross sex hormones.
The Karolinska Institutet, the seat of the Nobel prize for medicine, has recommended immediate cessation of this pathway for all children under the age of 18. Even one of the original Dutch clinicians has expressed concern about the rest of the world adopting this pathway blindly.
The world has started to take notice of the problems this pathway brings and is undertaking a review.
It’s likely I will attract criticism about “politicising children”, given the election. But when are we going to have this conversation in Australia? When are we going to confront and acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to children, even if you’re convinced it’s the right path? If not now, when? When a critical number of those children look back on the life they’ve been given and ask why did it happen? It will be too late. It is already too late for some. Right now, in Australia, there are children, teenagers and adults among us who have been committed to this lifetime of medicalisation. I want to make sure there aren’t any more.
When children go off puberty blockers at Tanning stage 2 and go on to cross hormones will they go through puberty because of the hormones they are taking and pass through Tanning stage 2 ?