The well-deserved comeuppance for the groomers, gender-whisperers and child mutilators has been a long time coming, but at last it’s coming hard and fast. In the UK, the Cass report blasted the ‘shaky foundations’ of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ (which in reality is neither). In the US, both the federal and several state governments are cracking down on the practice of ‘transitioning’ children, while a pro-‘trans’ doctor was exposed for deliberately hiding evidence of the harm inflicted on children.
Now, an Australian judge has excoriated the country’s leading ‘gender clinic’, and its supposedly ‘foremost gender-medicine expert’ doctor.
Judge Andrew Strum this week handed down a ruling in the case of a 12-year-old child whose mother wanted her child prescribed puberty blockers. The Family Court stripped the mother of custody and effectively banned the child from accessing ‘gender-affirming’ treatment. In making his judgement, he blasted the Royal Children’s Hospital’s chief of medicine, Professor Michelle Telfer, whom he stripped of previous court-ordered anonymity.
Telfer, he said, gave misleading evidence to the court, withheld crucial evidence, and put her ideological obsessions ahead of providing best-practice care for children. Strum’s judgement is set to shake the entire basis of ‘gender medicine’, at least for children, in Australia.
Judge Andrew Strum […] criticised the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne for failing to give the child a formal gender dysphoria diagnosis until the court proceedings had commenced, despite having treated the child for six years.
[Telfer], he said, cheapened the suffering of victims of Nazism when she suggested a landmark review that recommended limitations on medication for gender-dysphoric children formed part of a wave of transgender oppression commencing with the Nazis.
Justice Strum also questioned the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, authored by Professor Telfer, for not recognising children may not be capable of making life-altering medical decisions about their gender identity.
Justice Strum noted the “oddly binary approach” adopted by the gender ideologues, “to affirm unreservedly those who present with concerns regarding their gender, brooking no questioning thereof”. He also questioned the practice of accepting without question the whims of children.
The matter centred on the mother who believed her biologically male child was gender dysphoric, and needed to be prescribed puberty blockers.
However, the child’s father wanted to hold off on treatment and “let the child be the child”. Justice Strum in his judgment sided with the father, who did not wish to “pigeonhole” his child, and decided “all options” in the child’s life should be open.
Strum did not hold back in his criticism of Telfer, originally anonymised by the court as “Associate Professor L”. Telfer, as he pointed out, defends her clinical practice as relying upon the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines (ASCTG), which, she says, are “best practice”. Just coincidentally, none other than Telfer herself wrote the first draft of the ASCTG, and approved the final draft.
In his original judgment, Justice Strum took caution with Professor Telfer’s evidence about the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines, describing her as “the proverbial judge, jury and executioner”, and saying her opinion that they are “best practice” was “essentially tantamount to her agreeing with herself”.
Notably, Telfer lets her ideological slip show, by calling her own work the “most progressive and trans-affirming guidelines” in Australia. Telfer also put herself at odds with the UK’s Cass review. which “manifestly runs contrary to her life’s work as an ‘advocate’ for the cause”.
Professor Telfer during hearings likened the Cass review to the victimisation of LGBTIQ+ people by Nazis in the 1930s, and said it formed part of a “third wave of transgender oppression”. Justice Strum said the characterisation had “no place whatsoever in the independent evidence that should be expected of such an expert”.
“It demonstrates ignorance of the true evils of Nazism and cheapens the sufferings – and mass murder – of the millions of the victims thereof, which included, but were most certainly not limited to, transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, amongst other groups of people,” he wrote. “I consider there to be no comparison whatsoever.”
Strum also had harsh words for another doctor, anonymised as “Dr N”, who, after six years of treatment, only diagnosed the child as gender-dysphoric as the trial date approached. The timing of the diagnosis, he said, was “more than merely coincidental”.
Justice Strum rejected the hospital’s gender dysphoria diagnosis of the child. He said the court was “not concerned ‘in what the community thinks’ or ideologies, but only what, on the evidence, is in the child’s best interests”.
“Ideology has no place in the application by courts of the law, and certainly not in the determination by courts exercising jurisdiction under the (Family Law Act) of what is in a child’s best interests,” he wrote.
Strum’s forthright judgement is almost certain to have far-reaching political implications, as the Albanese government is clearly sensing the political winds shift on ‘trans’ ideology. Health Minister Mark Butler has already directed the National Health and Medical Research Council to undertake a comprehensive review of the ASCTG.
James Cook University academic and psychiatrist Andrew Amos said he expected the review to find “there is no good evidentiary basis for providing puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and certainly not surgeries for gender confused kids”.
“I would expect that they would recommend that those treatments not be offered in Australia in the same way that they’re being rolled back across the rest of the world,” he said […]
Former Queensland Children’s Hospital senior staff psychiatrist Jillian Spencer said the only way the NHRMC could return a review supporting current guidelines was “ if they’ve been captured by the gender activists”.
A long-overdue sanity check is coming at last. The question now is, will the same doctors and activists, who preened and strutted in the spotlight of media attention for years, be equally held to account for what they’ve done to vulnerable children?
