On the Front Page of the Weekend Australian today

[NotYourCisterinAus]

There's article headlined "Doctor scrutiny of gender clinic reveals legal, safety fears".

It's a long article behind a paywall, so if has an archive link, please share! Meanwhile, quoting some of the pertinent bits:

"Senior physicians at the NSW Children's Hospital Westmead have studied the physical and mental health of 79 patients in a rare academic study of the outcomes of children who presented with gender distress and gender dysphoria. The findings cast doubt on the scientific basis of the gender-affirming approach followed by the nation's other children's hospitals.

In an open access academic paper, CHW psychiatrists, endocrinologists and other physicians, and a senior medical ethics expert, called for a "much more nuanced and complex approach" as analysis revealed 88 per cent of children presenting at Westmead's gender clinic had at leas one co-morbid mental health condition, with more than 50 per cent diagnosed with behavioural disorders or autism. One in five children who consulted the clinic with gender-related distress had these feeling resolved, and almost one in 10 with a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, some who had taken puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, later discontinued transitioning...

One of the central justifications for gender-affirming medicine - that it alleviated psychological distress - was not borne out in the experience of the young people studied, with 44 out of 50 patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria reporting ongoing mental health concerns four to nine years after presentation at the gender clinic, many after transitioning...

The study comes as the approach of doctors practising gender-affirming medicine comes under scrutiny in court, as parents seeking to block prescription of puberty blockers to their children call expert witnesses to challenge the evidence."

There's also a half-page (broadsheet, 8 columns) on the Tavistock, and a brief article about a detransitioner who had undergone a "chest masculinisation surgery, i.e. a double mastectomy ("Elizabeth's chest surgery was a disaster, with her right nipple graft "chronically leaking a watery fluid, while voids in her scarred left nipple graft accumulated a smelly past that had to be regularly squeezed out".")

There's also an editorial and a feature article in the "Inquirer" section of the paper. With luck this will help start a conversation in Australia.

Wow.

I mean ultimately we all want the same thing at the end of the day dont we?

And that is for everyone to receive the best care possible which has been proven through all appropriate channels to be the most effective /have the nest outcomes.

The only reason to shut down/obstruct research and/or refuse to discuss to be able to target what went wrong where and how best to avoid in the future , is if you know that its not going to result in what you want to hear.

Of all the treatment options available for anything and everything else , never has one patients choice of not having surgery/taking medication been used to explain why its offensive that someone else chose differently. Until gender affirming care. Where treatment must validate everyone else.

I hope this does lead to more discussion and research in Australia because care cant improve/move on until everything both positive and negative can be openly discussed.

This is the study, I presume:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26344041211010777

A section from the abstract that serves as quite a good summary:

“The developmental stories told by the children and their families highlighted high rates of adverse childhood experiences, with family conflict (65.8%), parental mental illness (63.3%), loss of important figures via separation (59.5%), and bullying (54.4%) being most common. A history of maltreatment was also common (39.2%). Key challenges faced by the clinicians included the following: the effects of increasingly dominant, polarized discourses on daily clinical practice; issues pertaining to patient and clinician safety (including pressures to abandon the holistic [biopsychosocial] model); the difficulties of untangling gender dysphoria from comorbid factors such as anxiety, depression, and sexual abuse; and the factual uncertainties present in the currently available literature on longitudinal outcomes.”

I have only skimmed it for now, but it gives an interesting insight into how difficult it is to treat these children in the current climate, where the children to a huge extent, as well as the parents in many cases, arrive at the clinic with strong expectations about what will happen and the pathway they want to follow, which makes it incredibly difficult for the medics to do their job.

No, it’s this study:

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/10/2/314

There may be a later study? Just checked the dates on the one I shared and it’s from 2021, though the number of children (79) is the same.

Here's an archived copy of the news report: archive.ph/DMT87

The Royal Children’s Hospital and Associate Professor Telfer, director of the RCH Gender Service, declined to respond to questions surrounding the standards of care, the evidence base underpinning the gender-affirmative model, risk of regret among patients and potential harms of drug treatments.

AusPATH president Clara Tuck Meng Soo did not respond to a request for comment.

Shocking, but not surprising.

I am so pleased that the ideology is crumbling in the face of the evidence.

Good to see that this awful medical experimentation on children is finally being called out world wide.

Michelle Telfer should be in jail. An ideologue who did permanent life-changing experiments on vulnerable children with absolutely no evidence base at all.

Thanks for this OP and all the links.

There has seemed a stark difference between the Victorian clinics and the NSW clinics.

I agree that Michelle Tefler is ideologistic. So too seems Dr Ada Cheung. I wonder if that has a lot to do with it.

The CHW doctors have raised concerns that “many unknowns remain” regarding the long-term effects of puberty blockers, which are described by the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne as “reversible in their effects”. International evidence is in fact casting greater doubt on whether the effects of these medications are reversible. Endocrine reviews of the CHW patient cohort documented side-effects in 23 of the 49 young people prescribed puberty blockers, including low bone density, hot flushes, weight gain and anxiety. The CHW doctors raised concerns about long-term effects on patients’ sexual function in adulthood.

Fuck.

Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne as “reversible in their effects”.

I am desperate for the conversation to happen here in Australia. Anyone who dares disagree with the mainstream view is utterly vilified. And often devastatingly publicly.
I am so glad the science is proving that this awful experiment on vulnerable children is a disaster.

I thought this was interesting from the study.

Of note, despite their use in practice, no drugs have been approved by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) or subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for the treatment of gender dysphoria. All such prescriptions are therefore “off-label”.

Hopefully Australia is beginning to wake up to this nightmare that has been damaging children and stomping on women’s rights/safety/lives.

It can’t come soon enough.

When trying to get treatment/therapy for a 7 year old with ASD, some of the first questions are ‘what is their gender’ and ‘what pronouns are preferred’ - ffs, the child is 7!

Victoria seems to have embraced the gender woo. I wonder how Victoria's "anti conversion therapy" laws have influenced how doctors treat their gender distressed patients at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne?

These same doubts and information releases keep coming up, don't they? Country after country, time after time, and it only ever inches in one direction.

And yet somehow, despite that it's a slow growing cloud over the safety and wellbeing of a hell of a lot of children, it's still like wading through treacle in any proper research and studies happening or any action being taken to protect children while all this is figured out.

Which strongly smacks of political capture over child safeguarding and normal practice. Which has been plainly being discussed for... well. Going on for a decade now without anything much changing.

Is the RCH still the sole beneficiary of the massive Good Friday Appeal telethon? It was a bit like Red Nose Day here andbused to raise millions every year.

If so, I hope that people stop supporting it.

andbused = and used

Every time I read these articles I both feel huge relief that light is being shone on the subject and pain for all those who've been let down and in some cases coerced onto an unevidenced and potentially damaging course of treatment.

'...they appeared to have politicised healthcare, which directly threatens the welfare of children'

'...at the end of this court case I felt it was a form of child abuse'

Dr Clara Soo, president of AusPATH

insightplus.mja.com.au/2021/6/one-doctors-journey-to-welcome-her-gender-home/

'I knew that I was a girl when I was about 3–4 years old. I definitely knew that I was not one of the boys – I didn’t like rough physical games and from a very young age, the boys all treated me as if I was different to them. I can remember when I was 7 years old and in Year 1 at primary school being told to walk like a boy. I was bewildered because I didn’t know that I wasn’t walking like a boy and I didn’t know how I was supposed to change my walk.'

...

'One of my patients had talked to me about the impostor syndrome and for a long time after I started my transition, I felt that way: that my female appearance was a performance I put on every day. I frequently asked myself if I was just fooling society and myself.'

I know it is a small study numbers wise, but that 9% keeps showing up in reviews from around the world in regard to 'detransition' after treatment numbers.

I have so far seen in in the European study that followed up after 10 years - 8.3% for females and 8.8% for males from well before the massive increase in female detransitioners. There was that South West England GP review that identified 9 -10% detransitioners.

And now this one. Not one of these reviews was to identify detransition rates, and yet, the numbers have been consistent. Uncomfortably consistent for many activists I suspect.

I wonder what number of sterilised patients they think is acceptable collateral.

I don't know Arabella. Because every time we ask any activist poster what is the number of children and teenagers they see has being acceptable collateral there is no answer. We would all still be sitting waiting in our chairs together if we hadn't abandoned our posts.

Crickets. Tumbleweed.

Usually with a kicker of 'you are disgusting to be so concerned about other people's sex lives'. I think I have come across that two or three times in the past two weeks on MN.