This is a report from a discreet delegate to the November 2-4 conference of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), which is a hybrid professional-trans activist organisation.
The conference was attended by medical professionals, but the majority of those present were people who considered themselves part of the trans community and identified as trans or gender diverse. The field is now dominated by workers with “lived experience”—workers with professional and research degrees focused on their lived experience and workers without professional qualifications relying on their “lived expertise”.
The quality of research presented at the AusPATH conference was surprisingly poor.
Most papers, panels and workshops, however, focused on personal, emotional and subjective accounts of lived experience and/or superficial accounts of studies with poor research bases, methods and analysis.
The toilets at the conference were made gender neutral. This news was delivered as an important announcement at the outset. One bathroom was labelled “toilets” and the other was “toilets and urinals”. The entrances were next to each other. Amusingly, at every break across the three days, there was a line for the “toilets” bathroom. Waiting in that line were women, men in dresses who identified as women, and women in suits who identified as men.
The only people I never saw in line were men wearing pants.
At the conference, the phenomenon of detransitioners was minimised—they were fleetingly mentioned, but glossed over in a way that suggested that denying them acknowledgment would stop them from existing.
Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria was derided as disinformation spread by malicious forces against the trans community.
Young people were presented as fully informed by gender-affirming healthcare workers of the risk to fertility—and as entirely unconcerned by it.
Neither funding sources for the conference, nor connections with government or industry were addressed at any point.
It was recommended that health professionals tell parents that 48 per cent of trans youth have attempted suicide—a statistic from a low-quality online survey—and that the single biggest risk to their child would be a lack of parental support in transition. This approach was described as “empowering” parents to effectively stop their child committing suicide, and not acknowledged as emotional blackmail.
AusPATH did not present as a healthcare professionals’ organisation using its expertise for advocacy; it presented as an advocacy organisation using its healthcare credentials for ideology.
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