Australian Family Court Allows Cross Sex Hormones for Teen

Shocking in so many ways. The cavalier attitude hormone therapy is one thing, but the fact that a chat between two children about egg sharing was taken seriously enough to reference is so shocking that it dwarfs the testosterone issue.
Then there's the fact that the judge suggests surrogacy as the solution if any fertility issues arise in the future.
Wow.

The judge is clearly a zealot. He should have recused himself from this case because of his religious beliefs.

Decisions like being sterilised? I don't think so.

I don't know if the judge expects her to follow through or not but what a mess. Imagine if the 10yo sib of a teen with a severe disability said "yes of course you can live with me when we grow up" a court would handle it very differently.

Despite the fact you need to be 18 to vote, drink, smoke, have a tattoo or buy a can of spray paint. More importantly you need to be 18 to have your genitally pierced. How does that square with allowing CSH?

https://yac.net.au/legal-info/when-can-i/

This.

And flippantly acknowledging that there are likely to be many children who regret their decisions in the future adds to how sad this is.

As does:

"Justice Tree in his judgment said the parent who opposed treatment “unduly emphasised” the risks in order to further their case"

It must be heartbreaking for that parent to have flagged the risks and this is the conclusion from the court. How can high risks of infertility, cardiac failure, womb atrophy/cancer, incontinence and more be batted off in this way?

😢

And in this case "the surrogate" might be Ash's sister. Who agreed to this at 10 years old and her offer has now been mentioned by the judge in court and reported in public as something positive for her sibling. The judge doesn't seem to have considered the effects of all this on her and goodness knows what kind of pressure it all puts on her future as a woman.

Imagine allowing that kind of responsibility on a TEN year old little girl to continue. That HER eggs can be harvested if her sibling’s fertility is affected by treatment.

The flippant comments made by the judge should not go unchallenged. The idea that even if he was unable to conceive, there is always the prospect of adoption and surrogacy. Underestimating the impact of possible future regret and grief at not being able to conceive. And no thought to possible harms to the surrogate and baby.

OMG it's an upside down world when the Cass Review is assumed to be politicised and WPATH is scientific. That poor child.

Blimey, the judge is a heavily biased ideologue, by the sound of things. At the very least, saying that WPATH has the best care model and that the Cass report should be dismissed as politically motivated shows ignorance of the facts.

Horrific.

Justice Tree relied heavily on the evidence of a gender clinician who was a witness for the Independent Children’s Lawyer, known to the court as Dr O.
Dr O favoured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidelines as “by far the best available guidance at this time, and … informed by decades of expert clinician experience”.
Justice Tree agreed, giving the guidelines – as well as the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines and state government policy – “great weight, because they are models of care arrived at by consensus of the relevant professional bodies”.
He said the Cass Review, a landmark probe that recommended “extreme caution” be taken when prescribing hormones to children, was undertaken “in a vexed environment”.
“I do not overlook that there may have been an overt political imperative behind the Cass Review – which was, after all, initiated by the UK executive government,” he said.
“Particularly the then UK prime minister is on record of having publicly said on 5 October 2023 – whilst the Cass Review was being finalised: ‘And we shouldn’t be bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman’.”

We do live in a post-truth world. Poor Ash.

''During the hearing, the court was told Ash and his 10-year-old sister, known as Lee, made a pact that Lee would harvest her eggs to ensure Ash could have children if the transition affected his fertility in the long term.''

OK so this more than anything to me demonstrates that the 16 yr old is not fit to make own decisions about their health if they are prepared to make a pact with their TEN year old sister to harvest her eggs to utilise. Who would put such a question to a little child, the 10 year old cannot possibly comprehend the rigours of egg harvesting let alone the ethics. Foul.

Ash is 16 years old. This would normally thought to be old enough to make medical decisions.

I just came on MN to post this! Very frustrating.