Australian Family Court Allows Cross Sex Hormones for Teen

[NotYourCisterinAus]

https://archive.is/y7tNF

Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall in frustration.

Agreed.

It is written slightly ambiguously but
I read it as a subordinate clause where the journalist is giving additional information about the Cass Report.

If they were meant to be his words, the sentence only works if he also used the word "landmark" when/if quoting from it. Given his views on it politically, and its apparent irrelevance versus Australian medical documents, it seems unlikely that he would have done so.

s://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FedCFamC1F/2024/777.html?context=1;query=Ash;mask_path=au/cases/cth/FedCFamC1F

Link to November hearing ( I hope)

@spannasaurus thank you. Not an easy read.

Two thought from me, firstly what a heart breaking situation for everyone involved.

Secondly this section from the judge
“As much as I might like some kind of God-like power, my task as a judge is not to resolve political disputes, and certainly not ones which seem to have presently polarised large parts of the world. Rather my job, as mundane as it might seem, is to figure out where I think the best interests of the particular child or children under consideration lie. It is not my role to determine if the Cass Review is sound or flawed, nor if, as a general proposition, gender affirmation of adolescents by medicalised intervention is wise or not. In the instant case, because his parents cannot agree, my task is simply to decide what to do about Ash on the unique facts of his life. This is no test case, and it will not establish any general precedent, no matter what I decide.“

This is not a moron, or deserving of some of the comments on this thread. As I have maintained this is a professional assessing all the evidence and making a decision.

The word 'landmark' doesn't appear in the judgment.

@OldCrone Seriously ! “extreme caution” does appear along with confirmation Cass was admitted into evidence along with Bell vTavistock.

This is where the "extreme caution" is quoted from (including the quotation marks)
It's the only time the judge uses the phrase extreme caution

“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”.”

As far as I can see "extreme caution " and "in a vexed environment " is quoting the judge, the rest of the paragraph is not.

I disagree. It's only "in a vexed environment " which is a direct quote from the judge. "Extreme caution" is a quote from the Cass review. The clause "a landmark probe that recommended “extreme caution” be taken when prescribing hormones to children" has been added by the article's author to explain what the Cass review is for those who are unfamiliar with it, with an added comment from the author ("landmark probe") who obviously thinks it's an important document.

Isn’t it interesting how everyone’s focus is on two words.

The whole judgement contains extreme caution as follows (in context):

[COUNSEL FOR THE RESPONDENT:] So do you agree that extreme caution should be used in the recommendation or use of cross-sex hormones, for the treatment of gender dysphoria for children under 18?---
[DR O:] I actually think that the way in which they’re used in Australia could be
characterised as extreme caution, considering that it requires
multidisciplinary assessment, many sessions, an extended period of time, an
extended period of clear and stable identity and wishes for treatment. That
approach is considered conservative. Waiting until over !8 is considered –
sorry, waiting until over !6 is considered conservative by the standards of
many other countries, United States and Germany in particular.

Recommendation 8: (from Cass review)
NHS England should review the policy on masculinising/feminising hormones. The option to provide masculinising/feminising hormones from age 16 is available, but the Review would recommend extreme caution. There should be a clear clinical rationale for providing hormones at this stage rather than waiting until an individual reaches 18.

Ironically, subject to whatever “extreme caution” means, and absent health being a matter of national, as distinct from state, administration, those recommendations seem to actually largely reflect the State Health
Department position, as Dr O noted in their cross-examination (Transcript "8 June 2024, p."033 lines 20–28, quoted at ["30] above).

One use is a direct quote from Cass, the question and response relate to Cass as does the fourth.

My position when quoting this was the quote from the judgement originated from Cass implying Cass was accepted as evidence. Obviously we now know Cass was accepted as evidence so a grammatical debate becomes irrelevant.

What is interesting is the judge concludes about Cass “.. those recommendations seem to actually largely reflect the State Health Department position ..”

Completely agree with you. The Justice is anything but a "moron", and in fact his comments are quite sensitive all teenagers' position. He is a judge in the Family Court, after all, and that requires a different mindset.

The judge's mind-set is predicated as much on his judgment of the Cass Review and its implied political bias as it is about anything else.

He also cherry picks the U.S - and now Germany - where child gender transition has few safeguards and is out of control, rather than using the examples of Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy etc

I do hope the parents of this child come back and hold him accountable in the inevitable future.

My position when quoting this was the quote from the judgement originated from Cass implying Cass was accepted as evidence. Obviously we now know Cass was accepted as evidence so a grammatical debate becomes irrelevant.

Fair enough. But I'll come back to it in a mo....

I've been thinking a fair bit about this thread as it feels close to the bone for me (even though we're not at a stage where my daughter is actively gender questioning again, she could be again in future... and we're grappling with a wider support system that has significant gaps and risks, which is geared up to see her puberty distress as a gender identity issue) and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that you are right @Harassedevictee that the judge reached the only judgement that he could have done. It's the medical profession and wider social/education support system in Australia that has failed here, not the court system.

I can imagine a similar situation playing out years ago where the consensus of medical opinion in the UK was that lobotomies were the correct course of treatment for depression/undiagnosed autism and a parent fighting in court with medical evidence from another country that suggested otherwise. The court has limited powers and needs to ultimately defer towards medical consensus within its own country. Whether the judge is activist, neutral, ignorant, "GC" or anything in between shouldn't impact the outcome.

However, it's utterly heartbreaking that the parent who is advocating for a better medical understanding and approach is being sidelined by seemingly the whole of the wider system. I read the judgement and have been thinking about their situation lots. Reading between the lines (the sister's self-harm was dismissed as not relevant to the case, which does make sense as far as a court decision on a medical issue for a different child goes), this is a family where there is some form of trauma impacting both the children. My daughter had a mental health breakdown in October 2022 and I have experienced first hand the ripple effect that that one person's trauma (most notably her violence) had on everyone in the household. Her own trauma stemmed from sustained bullying. She told me that girls were weak and she wanted to be stronger to fight the bullies. She also hates her developing breasts, hates her changing body and is getting lots of messages from school and elsewhere that her love of football and practical clothing might mean that she's not actually a girl. I'm having to fight hard for my daughter's autism-related puberty distress not to be conflated with gender identity and luckily we have some professionals who are listening and applying critical thinking. However, my head is right in the jaws of the shark because a) there are other professionals who have influence who seem to be somewhat... activist... and b) the wider system is geared up to assume I'm a risk to my child if I don't unquestionably support the idea that she might be trapped in the wrong body. I don't believe we all have a gender identity but I accept that others do and I fully understand that some believers feel distressed that their (perceived) inner gendered soul does not match their physical body. However, I don't want a support system (medical professionals, social workers etc) that sees parents who are concerned about the medical risk of transition and the one-way ticket risk of social transition as a safeguarding risk to their child.

I'm lucky. Despite some very questionable actions by certain professionals who should be supporting us, I'm having difficult but positive conversations with others and the direction of travel seems to be positive. By contrast, this parent in Australia is fighting an unwinnable battle. Nobody will listen. Nobody is joining up the dots and this family is being failed. Ash is being failed. I can only imagine the emotional strength it took for that parent to fight this case, knowing that everything was stacked against them. I hope they have the strength to keep advocating for their child but I would fully understand if they don't, and need instead to reluctantly accept the situation and grieve.

And finally.... re the grammar: to me it's clear that the journalist was the one calling the Cass Report a "landmark response". It's very much in contrast with the judge referring to it as political. I interpret that as a small awakening in the media that something is wrong in Australia's medical understanding. Until this changes, Ash is one of many who will continue to fall victim to this awful, international medical scandal.

Edited to tag who I was responding to.

To add:

If this case had followed the route of Bell v Tavistock and the more recent case of child Q (I tagged this earlier in the thread) the course of action from the court should have been to defer back to the a medical opinion. And the outcome for Ash would have been the same. The difference for child Q in the UK is that the medical profession is beginning to turn a corner. Child Q has a much greater chance that cross-sex hormones won't be the outcome while under 18. And as things continue to unfold, an increasingly greater chance that adult gender services may also conclude the same thing.

@Harassedevictee I'm not sure if it's fruitful to keep going back and forth over this, but I'm sorry if I've upset you. You feel I've put words in your mouth.
@OldCrone asked what Ash was being prescribed testosterone injections for. Your answer was "Mental health."
Your answer actually surprised me, it's not what I was expecting to hear, and so I seized on your answer and wanted to hear more from you.
Australia officially uses the ICD-11 in healthcare (though there is lots of use of DSM-whatever-they're-up-to in psychiatry). There is no mental health condition that gets treated with testosterone. I guess you might be saying that an untreated sexual health condition might lead to mental illness, but as things stand your suggestion that Ash needs treatment for Mental health is all speculation. Gender incongruence disorders /=/ mental health disorders any more.
I believe that things have gone very wrong in medicine, both in Australia and at the WHO, when it comes to all the trans stuff. I think I've had my head in the sand a bit about the situation here in Australia. It's easy to just look away, and read about the U.K. situation on here.

It's a really bad situation, I think, for young people like Ash. In that sense this judge is just a cog in the wheels of a very big machine. But, like @BonfireLady this case has stayed with me, and lead me to think alot about what I do next.

@BonfireLady thank you for your very considered reply.

I am aware when posting for some it is more personal. I am sorry you are going through this and I hope you continue to navigate through the challenging situation.

I want to minimise the number of children who receive PB, cross sex hormones and surgery. The tide is turning and in some countries, like the US, the lawsuits will be epic. Amputation the breasts of healthy 13 year olds is horrific.

Thankfully the UK seems to be returning to sanity, but Australia is behind the curve. This is why I was advocating for a judge to be involved for every child before prescribing PB/cross sex hormones. The process before getting in front of a judge delays the potential prescription, and as in this case Ash started out wanting PB, but had thankfully gone through puberty so was looking at the next step by the time a decision was reached. As the judge points out by the time Ash actually gets a prescription they will nearly be 18.

You are quite right the judge is operating with information from so called experts, and this was my point. The fact the NHS ever used the WPATH guidance is appalling, and the same goes for Australian Heath Care. That is where the fault lies not with the judge.

I agree that in the UK we are heading in the right direction. However, as much as I want it, I regretfully can see a tiny number of children being prescribed PB/cross sex hormones but if they are decided by a judge it would mean a very thorough process had been followed.

We cannot totally turn the tide back, there have always been children and adults with gender dysphoria/incongruence and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. It does not mean ignoring reality and the sooner we draw a definitive line between sex and gender the better. The widening of the trans umbrella to include primarily men with paraphillia’s has done more harm to not just this tiny group but to children as a whole.

WRT the article, grammar is not my strong point and after reading the judgement I had no intention of returning to it nor to point out. However, a poster had to make the point, which I found unbelievable after reading such a heartbreaking judgement.

@TheCourseOfTheRiverChanged thank you.

As the judgement shows psychiatric interventions were seen as a key part in assessing Ash’s capability and how deep their gender dysphoria was. It was also seen as a possible treatment. Nowhere in the judgement did anyone say Ash could change their sex, sex was treated as real and immutable. Something most, if not all of us, on this thread agree with.

How professions name and label medical conditions change. For example, the NHS only adopted Downs Syndrome as the medical name in the 1970s. When I was growing up a very different word was used.

The fact remains some people believe they should be the opposite sex and as of now it is called gender incongruence and (bizarrely) classed as Sexual Health. The reality is it does impact a persons mental health, the question is which come first mental health or gender incongruence is up for debate. Baroness Cass found several pathways into gender incongruence and I can understand a CSA victim wanting to disassociate from their body due to trauma. To say there is no mental heath aspect would not be logical.

What we should have, but don’t, is high quality data. I have said before this is negligence on the part of medical professionals. I can’t think of another branch of medical science where we didn’t have the data. There have been times the data existed but was ignored but this is forgetting basic principles.

We cannot totally turn the tide back, there have always been children and adults with gender dysphoria/incongruence and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

Yes, but we need to change the knee jerk activist-created expectation that "dignity and respect" means some form of transitioning even if it's only social.

There have always been adults/children who believe higher powers speak to them

There have always been adults/children who believe a shadowy powerful enemy is out to get them

There have always been adults/children who believe in magical spells

There have always been adults/children who believe they are spiritually linked to certain animals

There have always been adults/children who believe the colour of their skin or hair or their country of birth makes them a superior type of human

Some of these beliefs society judges to be harmful so actively challenges. Some of these beliefs society judges to be harmless and accomodates. But for none of them does society attempt to rearrange itself to pretend that the belief is actually true.

Nowhere in the judgement did anyone say Ash could change their sex, sex was treated as real and immutable.

I'm not so sure about that. The judge seems to think that people can change sex. From the judgment:

170.In saying all this, 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. 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."

This comment seems to me to suggest that the judge is critical of Rishi Sunak for saying that people can't change sex. Is another interpretation possible?

@FlirtsWithRhinos Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect it’s part of being a civilised society. The fact some groups in society seem to have mis-appropriated this or think it doesn’t apply to them must be challenged.

This is far wider than the topic under discussion and I won’t shy away from using it. Consent is about dignity and respect, it appears we have c250,000 girls being subjected to CSA, if they were treated with dignity and respect by the perpetrators, police, social services, apparently most adults who came into contact with them would we have that number? It seems only a few adults did treat them with dignity and respect - why so few?

Dignity and respect is about accepting a child or adult may have thoughts and feelings that are their experience and listening to them. This is not just around gender. I agree with Baroness Cass that affirmation is not a neutral act, but neither is not allowing children and adults to explore who they are. You don’t have to let go of reality, you don’t have to prescribe drugs or surgery but you do respect their right to have a different opinion.

We cannot totally turn the tide back, there have always been children and adults with gender dysphoria/incongruence and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. It does not mean ignoring reality and the sooner we draw a definitive line between sex and gender the better. The widening of the trans umbrella to include primarily men with paraphillia’s has done more harm to not just this tiny group but to children as a whole.

Transactivists have been pushing for this widening of the trans umbrella for at least 30 years. There's a graphic in this article from 1994.

The Trans Umbrella Is Older Than You Think – Women Speak Scotland

@OldCrone you are clearly struggling with your own situation. I am respectful of that so will step back.

And do you think what I said contradicts that? If so you have misunderstood me, please reread my post.

But "listening to them" and "exploring who they are" cannot mean accepting they really are in some meaningful way more akin to the opposite sex then others of their sex and requiring that society accommodates that identity within the boundaries of the opposite sex, any more than we would think it acceptable to accomodate someone who feels a genuine kinship/alignment to an animal or a folkloric race by pretending to believe they actually are closer to actual lion or a mermaid than other people and treating them differently to others on that basis.

Because sex is not a feature of the mind it is a feature of the body. And for society to accept, even just pretend to accept to be kind, that sex is in any way determined by how you think not simply your body, we are on a very slippery slope into bringing back all the old fashioned sexist ideas about women.

How do you interpret the Judge's comment about the UK Prime Minister? I cannot see that it could be read in any other way than OldCrone did.

You must be confusing me with another poster. I'm not personally affected by this.

I said we need to separate sex and gender. Doing this allows us to be honest with everyone that sex is real and immutable. Sex discrimination is clear. Where do I disagree with you on sex?

I accept that not everyone agrees with separating gender/gender identity from sex, but I do. I respect your right to disagree why can’t you respect my view.

My rationale is by separating gender/gender identity it allows the concepts to be defined as a belief and treated as such in law. Not believing in gender/gender identity would obviously be valid, in the same way as not believing in other religions and beliefs. But believers and non-believers should both be treated with dignity and respect and not be subject to discrimination.

How you define gender/gender identity is for the lawmakers, difficult and I expect controversial but not impossible. I respect people’s right to believe in gender/gender identity.

I am very concerned by the direction of travel regarding sex stereotypes and sex based rights as we seem to be going backwards. Separating sex and gender may help.