Bernard Lane
Bernard Lane is an Australian journalist on the gender clinics beat; local and global news coverage of the trend for children & adolescents to undergo medicalised gender change.
Litigation over Australia’s youth gender clinics is likely to fix on fertility-destroying treatment, lack of fully informed consent, and medical negligence, the legal academic Professor Patrick Parkinson has predicted.
“There’s now a massive amount of evidence to suggest the need for serious scrutiny of any decision to put a child on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones,” Professor Parkinson, from the University of Queensland, told GCN.
The latest development in favour of greater caution is England’s draft treatment plan for youth gender care which, like Sweden and Finland, would make exploratory psychotherapy the first-line treatment for minors, and tightly restrict access to puberty blocker drugs.
All three countries carried out systematic reviews of the medical literature, each showing a weak and uncertain evidence base for medicalised gender change with minors.
“There’s been an assumption in the Australian case law that once you find a child has got gender dysphoria [a distressing sense of conflict with the body], then the justified treatment is puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and, eventually, surgery,” Professor Parkinson said.
“But that doesn’t follow — you may have a child who fits the diagnosis of gender dysphoria for whom exploratory therapy is the frontline treatment option.”
Professor Parkinson, who is a specialist in family law, gender dysphoria cases and child protection, said he expected litigation would also focus more sharply on whether or not patients under age 18 — often affected by mental illness or autism — and their parents could give fully informed consent to medical transition with hormonal or surgical interventions.
“One of the issues is that they’re just not being told enough at the moment about the risks and the uncertainties in the scientific literature to give a properly informed consent,” he said.
“And so my expectation is that we will see, down the track, very substantial negligence liability for doctors and hospitals, and the taxpayer will end up funding it.”
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