The ABC is cheerleading for radical rainbow medical experimentation on children.
The war over what your children and grandchildren are taught about their gender is intensifying. And "your" ABC is leading the charge.
Remember, politicians like Queensland’s Education Minister Grace Grace have said same-sex marriage law means children must be taught that their gender is fluid.
Several state governments, including Queensland, have made gender fluid indoctrination compulsory and there is now an epidemic of confused children reporting to youth gender clinics.
As the war rages, in one corner the taxpayer-funded ABC, with its $1.1 billion a year budget, is deploying its resources to cheerlead for radical rainbow gender medical experiments on children.
In the other, the courageous journalism of The Australian’s Bernard Lane covers the growing global debate about the ethics of putting children on a pathway to gender transition.
You won’t hear a peep of this on the ABC.
Last Monday’s 4 Corners - Not a Boy, Not a Girl - was completely one-sided. Once known for investigative journalism, it was openly barracking for taking gender confused children down one path and one path only - experimental sex change treatments of drugs and surgery or "non-binary" pathways.
I was so disturbed after watching it, I recorded this commentary and uploaded it to my YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, Bernard Lane in The Australian is the only journalist doing serious investigative work into youth gender clinics and their experimental treatments on children.
He is continually stonewalled by the biggest such clinic run by the secretive Dr Michelle Telfer at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.
Lane’s article today is a must read and I have reproduced it below.
It begins by reporting on the response to Health Minister Greg Hunt of his request to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians for advice on whether or not there should be a national inquiry into the controversial treatment of gender confused children with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.
Like rabbits caught in a rainbow strobe light, the RACP recommends no investigation because that would only upset people.
When did the medical profession eschew scientific inquiry? When it became hi-jacked by rainbow politics, is the answer.
The rainbow activist playbook is to pull out the “kids will commit suicide” card to stifle public discussion.
Remember, the Greens used this argument in the same-sex marriage debate as well.
And as Lane reports, there is no evidence to support this idea. But it is effective at silencing debate.
Let’s hope Hunt doesn’t cave and holds a proper inquiry.
From today’s Weekend Australian
Only ‘limited’ evidence for trans kids’ medicine but inquiry too ‘dangerous’
Inquiring into transgender youth medicine not welcome
BERNARD LANE
ROVING EDITOR, LEADER WRITER, DATA JOURNALIST
@Bernard_Lane
9:43PM MARCH 6, 2020
The evidence for life-altering medical intervention in youth gender clinics suffers from “gaps” and “limitations” but a national inquiry would be “dangerous”, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has been told.
The inquiry urged by more than 200 doctors and clinicians “would further harm vulnerable patients and their families through increased media and public attention,” the Royal Australasian College of Physicians said in a letter to Mr Hunt on Friday.
In August, after this newspaper began reporting concerns about the safety and ethics of “transgender” medical treatments for vulnerable minors, Mr Hunt sought “urgent” advice from the college, which covers paediatricians.
It has since emerged the college had lobbied with paediatrician Michelle Telfer — whose Royal Children’s Hospital gender clinic in Melbourne spearheads the pro-trans “affirmative” treatment model in Australia — for easier and quicker underage access to hormones and less oversight by the Family Court.
On Friday, Mr Hunt’s spokesman said the minister would review the college’s advice and consider what might need to be done.
There is intensifying global debate about the reasons for an exponential rise in often already troubled teenagers, mostly girls, diagnosed with gender dysphoria (distress at being “born in the wrong body”) and asking for puberty blocker drugs, opposite-sex hormones and surgery such as mastectomy.
On Thursday, the former British minister for mental health and suicide prevention, Jackie Doyle-Price, called for “more control over gender treatment for children”, citing litigation involving a regretful “detransitioner”, Keira Bell, 23, who said the NHS Tavistock gender clinic in London “should have challenged me more” over medical transition.
“Puberty is not the time for anyone to consent to life-changing treatment,” Ms Doyle-Price said in a tweet.
This week brought the launch of a new global body, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which argues that the low quality of the evidence for the affirmative model has been obscured by dramatic but unsupported claims that young people are likely to kill themselves if denied hormones and surgery.
“Given the lack of evidence of benefits of these treatments on long-term mental health, and the evidence of alarmingly high rates of post-treatment suicide, the use of affirmative care outside of rigorously designed clinical trial settings is inconsistent with ethical medical practice,” the SEGM spokesman, US-based endocrinologist William Malone, said on Friday.
Before the rise of the affirmative model and teenage-onset dysphoria, the condition typically occurred in a small, stable percentage of pre-school boys, with the vast majority coming to accept their bodies as they matured and many emerging as gay or bisexual.
Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, which supports a national inquiry, said he found it “very surprising” for a medical college to claim it would be “dangerous” to hold “a balanced, comprehensive inquiry into the most effective and safe treatments for gender dysphoria”.
“An inquiry that comes up with consensus on the best treatments would give confidence and support to parents and children.”
Dr Morris said the health minister would be “very disappointed” with the college, having asked it for a verdict on what was “clinical best practice”.
“(The letter) gives him no advice about the competing merits of the affirmative approach versus supportive, more conservative treatments of children with gender dysphoria; it provides him with no information on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones in children and adolescents.”
Treatment side-effects include infertility, loss of sexual desire, cardiovascular problems, and possible cognitive impairment.
‘Validation’ for Dr Telfer
Friday’s letter from the college warning Mr Hunt not to hold a national inquiry was welcomed by the gender clinicians’ lobby AusPATH, and RCH chairman Rob Knowles and chief executive John Stanway.
RCH said the letter had “validated” Dr Telfer’s work, and backed the college’s appeal for more public funding to spread gender clinic services, especially in rural and regional areas.
In the letter, RACP president Mark Lane said young people with gender dysphoria suffered “extremely high” rates of self-harm and attempted suicide. The college did not supply any evidence when asked.
Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker, a world authority on gender dysphoria and editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, has dismissed as “pure dogma” the affirmative model line to parents hesitating on the brink of treatment for their child, “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”.
“If you are depressed, your suicidality risk is going to be elevated, but you see that in kids who are depressed but don’t have gender dysphoria,” Dr Zucker told The Australian last year.
“The idea that adolescents with gender dysphoria are at a higher risk of suicide per se is dogma — and I think it’s wrong.”
In his letter, Dr Lane said youth gender dysphoria was “an emerging area of healthcare”, and the evidence on treatment outcomes was “limited”, and this was similar to the state of affairs with conditions, such as rare cancers, affecting a small number of patients.
He suggested federal funding for long-term research; a new “national framework” for consistent, high quality care across the country; and new “evidence-based fact sheets” on treatment.
“To facilitate a high level of informed consent, patients and families must be provided with information about the limitations of available evidence regarding gender dysphoria,” he said. “For example, there should be an informed discussion of the burdens and benefits of treatment options in a way each child or adolescent can understand.”
‘No merit or courage’
Sydney clinical psychologist Dianna Kenny, a critic of the affirmative model, said the college’s statement was “so politically correct as to lack any scientific merit or moral courage”.
Professor of paediatrics John Whitehall, another critic, said it was odd for the college to not want “public attention” for the issue of medical transition of under-18s.
“I would have thought there is already a great deal of attention, though all one way (in favour of the affirmative model),” he said.
“The RACP boasts of interest in public health and that usually involves full and frank discussion of all side-effects as part of preventing harm. Here, it is essentially (saying), ‘Be quiet and accept the experimentation’.”
In a 2018 submission to the National Children’s Commissioner, which was reporting on progress under the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, the college said taxpayers should subsidise puberty blocker drugs (which cost $5000 a year for each trans youth) as well as trans surgery, while “gender identity” should be taught in schools and medical courses at university.
The college did not answer a question about whether its advice to Mr Hunt was affected by any conflict of interest.
SEGM’s Dr Malone said there were rare circumstances in which untested treatments might be used as a last resort but challenged the college’s comparison between gender dysphoria and cancer.
“Gender dysphoria is not a fatal disease: no single, quality study has demonstrated that gender dysphoria causes suicides in young people,” he said.
“Treatment with hormones and surgeries to halt puberty deny young people a chance for natural resolution of gender dysphoria.”