A shortened version appeared in The Spectator Australia – here.
In the Australia of old, a man who was thought to be overly timid 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 timidity 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 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 has successively done so, the Australian government, paralysed by fear of the trans lobby, has sat on its hands, saying it is a matter for the states. However, in December 2024, after the UK’s decision, Health Minister Mark Butler said that, seemingly for the first time, he had spent ‘quite a lot of time reading and thinking’. Then, a few weeks later, after Queensland followed the international lead, he and Albanese admitted it to have been a federal responsibility 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 welcome move, 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 redundant, 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 was for Albanese. As state Premiers Malinauskas, Cook and Minns, all ran from it, petrified, Albanese could have stamped his authority on the nation. In years to come he could have looked back on his period in office knowing that he had at least taken a stand on something. Instead, 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 farce 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 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. 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. As our children are 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. What might happen for One Nation if she was to put it front-and-centre?
For the fact is, any non-left parent who walks into a gender clinic does so as a trespasser. Throughout history, new medicines have been designed for segments of society as defined by age, biological sex or ethnicity. Now, in a world-first, a medical procedure has been conceived and created by and for those committed to left-wing ideology. It is a procedure that subverts what through all time has been thought to be the course of nature. How can a pre-pubescent child know its post-puberty self? Discovering such knowledge within a child would require paranormal powers, it has always been thought, but powers of this kind are what the 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.
Parents are 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 affirmed 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 simple right to withhold consent, when in truth, decision-making authority has been wrested by the state. The parent’s only job is to drive the child to and from the appointments.
Albanese is a please-all leader. ‘Australia is a place where we all love each other’, he said in the days following Bondi. But as Pete Seeger wrote, ‘If you want to have great love, you’ve got to have great anger’ – a lyric which speaks to a deficiency in the make-up of our Prime Minister.
My own anger is not directed towards the RCH Gender Clinic. It is concentrated on the government that is leaving the legal status of the practice in limbo. In January this year, a New York jury found in favour of a de-transitioner who brought an action for negligence against her practitioners and advisers. A similar case is currently on foot in Melbourne in the Victorian County Court against the Monash Medical Centre, whilst just last week, the UK paused its new trial of puberty blockers on safety grounds. The alarm bells could not be ringing any louder, with even criminal proceedings being mooted, but in an interview in November, Mark Butler on three occasions described child gender transition as a ‘contested’ space, which is Albanese code for ‘nothing will be done’.
I put my faith in the RCH practitioners and their advice for the long-term happiness of my child, but if it ends badly, I will be letting that child know that redress is available – a course of action gifted by the timidity and gutlessness of the Albanese government.
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