Another major peer-reviewed study on so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has been published, and predictably, Australia’s political class has responded with the same thing it offered after the Cass Review: silence.
The study, published this month in Acta Paediatrica, is as robust as research in this contested field ever gets.
Gender distressed adolescents had three times the rate of serious psychiatric morbidity before attending a gender clinic compared with controls (45.7 per cent versus 15.0 per cent).
This pattern has already been established in Australia. A peer-reviewed 2021 study by Kozlowska and colleagues at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead documented the same picture in 79 patients presenting at the hospital’s gender clinic: anxiety (63.3 per cent), depression (62.0 per cent), behavioural disorders (35.4 per cent), autism (13.9 per cent), and suicidal ideation (41.8 per cent), alongside high rates of adverse childhood experiences – bullying, parental mental illness, family conflict and documented maltreatment. Our own clinicians have known this for years.
When the UK Cass Review – the most exhaustive independent examination of paediatric gender medicine – was published in April 2024 and found the evidence base for medical gender interventions to be ‘remarkably weak’, Health Minister Mark Butler, in my view, dismissed its findings as irrelevant to Australia.
The UK has restricted gender hormones for minors, banning puberty blockers altogether. The US Department of Health and Human Services has issued its own damning review. Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have pulled back on the affirmation model of care. Meanwhile, Australia is conducting a ‘routine update’ on a three-year clock, with no interim safeguards, while children continue to be referred for irreversible medical transitions.
Disappointingly, the Federal Liberal Opposition has said nothing. A party that wants to convince the electorate it can be trusted on evidence-based policy remains silent on what may prove Australia’s worst medical scandal since Thalidomide – because the issue is politically inconvenient.
In 2021, Australian clinicians at Westmead warned the evidence wasn’t there. In 2024, the Cass Review warned the evidence wasn’t there. In 2026, the Finnish data shows active harm. It is my opinion that children are being irreversibly damaged right now, while our leaders calculate electoral risk. How many more studies, how many more detransitioners, how many more broken young bodies will it take before our political leaders on both sides of the chamber find the spine to do their jobs?
Source: Australia’s shameful silence on youth gender medicine | The Spectator Australia