Australia’s taxpayer-funded national broadcaster has a rather dubious record when it comes to spruiking child abusers. In the 70s, it notoriously allowed leftist darling Richard Neville (who openly boasted of shagging underage girls in his memoirs) to give a sympathetic platform to a panel of “paederasts”. Now, it’s openly shilling for the abusive practices of child “transgender” activists.
Positive publicity from an ABC Four Corners program may have been worth $6 million to Australia’s busiest youth gender clinic. Paediatrician Michelle Telfer, clinic director at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, said it was “really interesting” that the TV program, called Being Me[…]went to air just before the 2014 state election won by Labor’s Daniel Andrews.
Six months later, the Andrews government announced a special, “life-saving” injection of $6 million over four years for Dr Telfer’s clinic.
“It’s the personal stories that make the difference,” Dr Telfer told Victoria’s mental health royal commission in July, just before The Australian began reporting global concern about the safety and ethics of the “affirmative” transgender medical model.
In a sense, that’s true enough, though not in the sense Telfer would obviously prefer to claim. Evidence is mounting that much of the otherwise inexplicable surge in transgender cases, in teenage girls especially, is driven by “social contagion”. In other words, impressionable teenagers jumping on the latest fad.
Except that, unlike Justin Bieber or “Scene Girls”, transgenderism endangers the mental and physical health and normal development of teenagers – potentially permanently.
In August, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt called for urgent advice on this patient safety question from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and a month later the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists disendorsed RCH “world’s most progressive” treatment standards for trans youth, pending “further review” of evidence.
But the ABC are ‘progressive’, donchaknow, and they’ve got an agenda to push.
On Monday, Four Corners returns to the topic with a program called Not a Boy, Not a Girl[…]produced by investigative journalist Janine Cohen[…]
Ms Cohen also produced the 2016 ABC Australian Story program, About a Girl, featuring a high-profile patient of Dr Telfer’s and an introduction by Premier Andrews.
Ms Cohen was the reporter on the 2014 Being Me program.
Someone seems to be pushing a barrow – an obsession apparently shared by her employer.
The 2014 Four Corners program does not mention any downside to puberty blockers[…]Under its website listing for “media advocacy”, the Telfer clinic includes nine positive ABC broadcasts and reports.
A search of the ABC website gives 12,900 results for the word “transgender” but none for “detransitioners”.
At least some overseas are starting to ask critical questions.
In Britain and Sweden, sceptical coverage of youth gender clinics — with public broadcasters doing investigative reports on puberty blockers, detransitioning and exaggerated suicide statistics — may help explain signs of a peak in patient numbers.
In Stockholm’s youth gender clinic, there was a drop-off in new referrals in 2018, according to new data.
In May that year, the Swedish press began publishing critical commentaries following a national inquiry[…]two critical documentaries by Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT — with the series title The Trans Train — were “widely watched”.
[…]In the UK, new referrals to the NHS Tavistock youth gender clinic seem to have peaked in the third quarter of 2018-19, according to data published in January.
Media scrutiny of the Tavistock clinic has come from The Times, The Economist, The Observer, The Daily Mail, Sky News and the BBC’s flagship investigative program Newsnight, with its medically trained journalist Deborah Cohen also reporting on the puberty blockers controversy in the British Medical Journal.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/four-corners-story-linked-to-6m-grant-for-australias-busiest-kids-gender-clinic/
But it’s all sunshine, rainbows and amputating teenagers’ genitals, over at the ABC.
The ABC is failing the Australian public and endangering the health and wellbeing of young Australians with its foolish, uncritical advocacy.
For more than a billion dollars a year, Australian taxpayers deserve better than dangerous ‘progressive’ promotional campaigns.
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