In the Australia of old, a man who was thought to be overly timid or indecisive might have been denigrated by other men as ‘a woman’. It is a slur that if used today would see the offender at risk of having his tongue cut out. A woman can be many things but, by twenty-first century decree, it is not a biological male with an irresolute nature. It follows that, on today’s standards, Anthony Albanese is not a ‘woman’. He is an XY-chromosome Prime Minister of Australia known for his timidity, indecisiveness and lack of foresight.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the issue of pre-pubescent children deciding for themselves whether they want to be a man or a woman. A wave of devastation, complete with Royal Commissions and mass litigation, is set to crash onto Australian shores but, just as with the circumstances that preceded Bondi, the Albanese government cannot see it coming. As a parent myself of a child who has been undergoing transition at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne (RCH) for four years, I watch on in disbelief, not at the RCH practitioners, who are treating my child in accordance with their charter and with all possible care and support, but at the federal government as it does all it can to bring legal and political catastrophe upon itself.
France, Finland, the UK, most US states, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand have all either banned or put the brakes on the use off of-label drugs to impede the progression of puberty or induce cross-sex hormones. As each successively did so, the Australian government, paralysed by fear of the trans lobby, sat on its hands, saying it was a matter for the states. However, in January 2025, after Queensland followed the international lead, Albanese and his Health Minister, Mark Butler, confessed it to have been a federal matter all along by commissioning the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to review the matter and to ‘develop new clinical practice guidelines for the care of trans and gender diverse people with gender dysphoria under 18’. This was a forthright move, it seems, but wait. The NHMRC has been directed to provide an interim report by mid-2026 and its final recommendations in 2028. This is not kicking the can down the road. It is coming in with a long run up and booting the living daylights out of the can to send it down the road, over the hill and out of sight. Then, instead of suspending the practice after having rendered the existing guidelines invalid, Albanese and Butler have let it continue at pace. No-win no-fee law firms will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.
What an opportunity this gender transition issue presented for Albanese. As state Premiers Malinauskas, Cook and Minns, all ran from it, petrified, Albanese could have stamped his authority on the nation. Instead, by doing nothing, he has let down people on all sides of the argument. The trans community will have believed that Albanese represented their best chance yet for the implementation of a clear legislative framework for youth gender transition. The practitioners in the industry would also have benefited from the security that such a framework would have provided. But Albanese and Butler would not make a decision that way either. It is a leadership void that has led to the farcical proceeding now underway in Queensland, where, in response to trans community fund-raising efforts for children to be able to circumvent the state ban by undergoing transition with private doctors, Medical and Nursing Associations have written to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission arguing that the fund-raisers’ claim that the practice is ‘evidence-based’ is misleading − the ACCC is being asked to rule on the adequacy of the existing practice guidelines.
But outside of Queensland and the Northern Territory, which has also put a stop to the practice, the trans community is dictating terms with next to no resistance. Voices of dissent include Binary, an organisation led by Kirralie Smith; the Victorian group, Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress; journalist Bernard Lane, whose Substack, Gender Clinic News, tracks developments around the world whilst critiquing Australian practices; and Melbourne barrister, Belle Lane, who challenges the ‘evidence base’ in her role as Independent Children’s Lawyer at the Family Court. But there is no public outrage. Whilst our children are being encouraged to make a gender selection, with bodies and voices tailored to suit, all before reaching puberty, Australians walk the streets in silence, lobotomised by the left. Even the conservative side of politics does not step up. Other than an occasional comment from Claire Chandler, the Liberals are mute. Pauline Hanson has been known to speak out but the issue is not found amongst One Nation’s policies. If she was to put it front-and-centre, One Nation might find itself well ahead as the leading conservative party.
For the under-acknowledged truth is that a parent who walks into a gender clinic without a commitment to left-wing ideologies is a trespasser. Throughout history, new medicines have been designed for segments of society as defined by age, biological sex or ethnicity, and as remedies for specific conditions. Now, in a world-first, a medical procedure has been conceived and created by and for those who believe in a particular socio-political way of life. It is a procedure that, for non-left parents, subverts what through all of human history has been thought to be the course of nature. How can a pre-pubescent child know its post-puberty self? I have always thought that it would require paranormal powers for a medical practitioner to be able to discover such knowledge within a child, but powers of this kind are what these Australian practitioners do indeed seem to possess, for they know better than France, Finland, the UK, most US states, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand.
Then there is the matter of parental consent. A parent of a child who wants to transition is in an impossible position. At the RCH, for puberty blockers to be administered, the parent must sign off on the fact that ‘the medical effects and safety of long-term use of GnRHa [the blocker drug] are not fully understood and there may be long term risks that are not yet known’. Unless it were emergency life-saving surgery, no mother or father would sign off on such a thing, but in gender transition a parent has no option but to sign and pray for the best. We live in a time when children know their rights and have those rights reaffirmed to them by their teachers and medical advisers. Nor can a parent play a game of bluff with a threat of self-harm. The RCH maintains a pretense that the parent retains a right to refuse consent when in truth the parent’s only function is to drive the child to and from the appointments. Child gender transition represents one area where the left-wing state has successfully wrested decision-making authority from the parent.
My anger, for all that, is not directed towards the RCH and its gender practitioners. The villain is the government that is leaving the legal status of the practice in limbo. De-transitioners are already bringing litigation against hospitals and gender practitioners in some countries, including Australia, and in recent days the UK has paused its new clinical trial of the treatment on safety grounds. The alarm bells could not be ringing any louder but in an interview in November, Mark Butler on three occasions described child gender transition as a ‘contested’ space, which is Labor Party code for ‘nothing will be done’.
All I can do is place my trust in the RCH practitioners and their advice that transition is the right path for my child in the long term, but if it has an unhappy ending, I will be letting the child know that redress is available – a course of action gifted by the timidity, indecisiveness and gutlessness of the Albanese government.
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