Get ready for bluster. Our gender clinicians will be busy protesting the irrelevance of the historic decision by England’s National Health Service to end routine use of puberty blocker drugs. It won’t wash.
The decision has international implications and Australia is no exception. Gender clinics in our state children’s hospitals – and in stand-alone facilities such as Maple Leaf House in NSW – are doing the same thing as the London-based NHS Tavistock clinic. They have been authorising off-label hormone suppression drugs – approved to treat other conditions such as hormone-driven cancers and precocious (premature) puberty – to stop naturally timed sexual development.
We’re told blockers save “trans kids” from suicide. But there may be many reasons a young person is in distress, and there is no good evidence that blockers bring more benefit than harm. That is why the NHS decided these drugs would be given only within a future clinical trial, reflecting their experimental nature.
Yet here in Australia we still offer blockers as routine treatment to minors, as young as age 10, who self-identify as transgender or non-binary and who often have a host of other things going on – such as autism, awkward same-sex attraction, depression or a history of abuse. International data suggests the vast majority begun on blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones, with risks including sterilisation and sexual dysfunction. How can there be informed consent? How many of these troubled young people really needed mainstream mental health treatment?
England is ahead of Australia in gender clinic reform partly because its politics and media have been better informed and more intellectually robust. British ministers ignored advice from captured officials, met young detransitioners who regret gender medicalisation, and empowered Cass’s independent inquiry.
Our counterpart program, the ABC’s Four Corners, has uncritically promoted the gender-affirming treatment approach. ABC audiences are given the false impression that concern about gender clinics is a conservative culture war. They have been told next to nothing about the drivers of Europe’s shift to greater caution, which is particularly pronounced in liberal Nordic countries.
Source: Bernard Lane: Gender medical experiment is hurting our kids | The Australian