The questionable practice of subjecting minors to puberty-blocking drugs is usually met with government indifference and little attention in the local media.

However, Queensland Health’s recently-announced restriction on this treatment for all new child and adolescent patients has clearly provoked the Albanese Labor government’s health minister Mark Butler into action.

On January 31 he announced a review into gender therapies, to be conducted by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with an interim report to be delivered in mid-2026.

This is seen by many to be a stalling tactic to avert the action initiated by Queensland’s recently-elected Liberal National Party government.

Predictably, the Australian Human Rights Commission and media outlets such as Crikey.com have protested about so-called right-wing “ideology” preventing “trans and gender-diverse” children from accessing this controversial form of medical treatment; but Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and his government must stand firm for the sake of thousands of innocent children.

Note that in Queensland 600 current “gender” patients will nonetheless continue to receive treatment with puberty-blockers or hormonal drugs.

Up-to-date statistics are uncertain, but the numbers undergoing gender treatment each year have been increasing in all states. In Queensland, the number of patients soared from 190 in 2017 to 922 in 2022. In Victoria, it increased from 472 in 2019 to 1,290 in 2023, with a lengthy waiting list.

It is believed that social media, classroom indoctrination and the entertainment industry — not to mention the ill-considered “advice” of sections of the healthcare industry — are responsible for this surge. In Victoria, health professionals and others are threatened by legal penalties from seeking to dissuade children and others from this irreversible course (see below).

The only recognised guidelines for gender-reassignment practices in Australia are the model developed by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and a similar framework promoted by NSW Health. Both were recently described by Sydney journalist Bernard Lane, as “nothing less than the blueprint for gender-affirming medicine in Australia”, created by its very practitioners. Paradoxically, Mr Butler’s intervention, belated as it is, confirms the inadequacy of the RCH and similar guidelines.

Children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria are often also suffering from other psychological problems. These include depression (74.6 percent) and other conditions such as suicidal thoughts and autism (Australian Trans Pathways Studies in Youth, 2020).

Why normal standards of care, relying on evidence-based research, have been ignored in these cases is explained by Australian psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos in a revealing study published last year in Australasian Psychiatry. He explains that the principle of the gender-affirming model of care is that “all health clinicians have an ethical responsibility not to question or evaluate patient reported gender identity, even when that identity is unstable, changes rapidly, and is co-morbid with severe mental illness”.

Dr Amos points out that these practitioners “assume access to gender-affirming interventions is a human right that should be available to anyone competent to request them”. That is, they reject the need for any systematic evaluation of whether these treatments have benefited patients.

Despite a torrent of information from overseas warning of the dangers of this treatment, and the new restrictions on its use for minors in Finland, Sweden, the UK and some US states such as Florida, Australian governments have persisted with transgender “treatments” of children. At no point have they ever felt obliged to produce evidence to justify their practices which lead to the irreversible sterilisation of children too young to make a mature decision about many other facets of their lives.

So-called healthcare professionals have driven a wedge between family members, and bullied parents into withdrawing their objections to their children being subjected to transgender treatment. In Victoria, parents, doctors, teachers and counsellors face heavy penalties if they offer advice, or even prayer, contrary to transgender ideology, as stipulated by the counselling censorship provisions of the state’s draconian Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021.

We have seen in the UK the 2019 scandal surrounding the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). In April 2024 came the bombshell report by Dr Hilary Cass, OBE, commissioned by NHS England, on gender identity services for children and young people. In addition, Scandinavian and US reviews have found the evidence favouring hormonal treatment of gender-distressed minors to be very weak and uncertain. In reality, gender-affirmation or sex-reassignment is impossible, owing to unalterable chromosomes. Moreover, surgical reconstructions are only cosmetic.

Long-term studies overseas do not record positive outcomes, especially for those who later regret an irreversible choice made when they were children.

Australian governments and even courts have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the weight of evidence from overseas pleading caution. This is how an Australian Family Court judge resolved the case of parents disputing the administering of testosterone to their 16-years-old trans-identifying daughter. He ruled last November that, in the absence of evidence-based guidance, it is “common sense” to accept the “best available guidance” and a “consensus favouring gender medicine”. This judge used masculine pronouns throughout when referring to the daughter and rejected the relevance of “potential later interventions” when endorsing testosterone treatment.