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.

@BettyFilous remember the article is extracts from the judges summing up, The full evidence may or may not show an understanding of the fuller risks. I would hope these were also discussed with Ash.

Finally, I don’t think anyone should be given PB but can see why in this case a 16 year old has been granted the right to take them.

It's not PB, it is Cross Sex Hormones. At 16.

@thirdfiddle People calling Cass biased are trying to discredit the report because they don't like what it says. That's a political act too. Not the report itself.

Even those who disagree with the recommendation for clinical trials?

“It is likely that most Australians would now think the lack of direct genetic connection between a child and their parent is irrelevant. Likewise there remains the prospect of adoption and surrogacy.” Quote from the judge in the linked article.

I disagree. As an Australian I think most still value a direct genetic connection between child and parent. As for adoption, what adoption? There’s almost none here. Very rarely are babies available for adoption. Almost never. There aren’t agreements in place between Australia and many other countries to allow adoption. Even if there is it’s insanely expensive.

Sorry. Thanks for the correction.

It appears that a mysterious medical expert (at least I hope that Dr is referring to medical expertise) had a big effect on the judge's decision. Never a good thing when the expert is allowed to be anonymous. Quote from the article below. My bold for emphasis.

'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.'

Pity that no-one was pointing out the pitfalls of WPATH.

The Australian treatment guidelines that are referred to were developed by the RCH Melbourne. They’re the wokest of woke in Victoria, and especially RCH Melbourne for gender identity in children. They’re not exactly politically neutral.

From almost everything the judge said, I would have expected him to come to the opposite conclusion. Absolute madness!

Don't be ridiculous.

Humans aren't fully mature until 25 years old. As a 30 year old with two kids who wanted to be sterilised I had to have the third degree about whether I was old enough/maybe I'd want more kids etc etc.

I wonder what happens if Ash's ten year old sister later decides she wants to be a trans man too?

The judge is clearly a moron.

Why isn't Ash freezing her own eggs if she thinks she might want children some day?

Well, I suppose that's one way out for her. Even her family couldn't really challenge that 😥

Don't quite the 25 year old stuff. It is not true. It is based on misunderstanding of scientific research.

Good point. If Ash is too young to harvest their own eggs, then maybe Ash needs to delay cross-sex hormones until that is possible.

@Harassedevictee The facts are that Cass is political. It was a response by the government of the day to a toxic debate.

And yet most conclusions of the Cass review have been accepted not only by the Conservative "government of the day" which commissioned the review but also by the subsequent Labour government, and by the SNP government in Scotland however unwillingly from a political point of view .

The fact that Baroness Cass is a woman of integrity and highly experienced means she conducted a medical/data driven independent review does not change that. There are GC people who feel the review was not neutral so both sides of the debate are not 100% happy - in my view usually a good sign.

The Cass review was executed without political interference in its research process, its recommendations or its publication. Its conclusions were based on all the evidence including international evidence. And all the evidence reviews commissioned for the Cass review and conducted by York University were published in full, as well as the final report and recommendations.

This is unlike the evidence review that WPATH conducted, where all but two of several reviews commissioned by WPATH from Johns Hopkins university were suppressed by WPATH. The judge could have found about that since there are lawsuits going on in the US courts over the suppressed reviews. That's law not medicine.

(See for example www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj.q2227.full.pdf www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj.q2227.full.pdf]]]] )

The Cass review made many conclusions and I agree with most of them. When I don't agee (I still don't see how don't see how a clinical trial of puberty bvlockers could be conducted in an ethical way) my disagreement does not mean that she was not "neutral".

None of this justfies a judge dismissing the findings of Cass review. I'm glad you raised it though, because this "it was political" argument confuses people.

@NotYourCisterinAus I was clear Baroness Cass conducted an independent review I.e. free from political interference.

However, commissioning of the Cass Review was political and it has been used politically by both sides of the argument and by politicians of all parties.

Judges make decisions on the evidence presented, which in relation to Cass appears to include the political climate around the review which changed considerably between its commissioning and outcome.

It is not clear what evidence was submitted about WPATH. A judge is not permitted to do the research you suggest and should not be criticised if the evidence was lacking.

Did the judge dismiss Cass or did he decide the experts evidence in relation to WPATH was more compelling, particularly when coupled with the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines?

It seems to be rather simplistic to say it is not true. It is just that that it is not an exact 25 and it is not all changes to the brain.

It is known that there are other parts of the brain that develop throughout life and others that develop in adulthood largely independent of age. "Maturity" is a difficult concept to define (though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist) and a number of different features of brains will contribute to it. However, as I understand it, scientific evidence suggests that parts of the brain that deals with learning/higher level thinking develop throughout childhood and into the early 20s, and sometimes beyond. While it isn't the whole story, the idea that brains mature at 25 is a (in my view, very useful) rule of thumb to reflect this finding.

You are wrong. The researchers who did the original research are so alarmed at how it is being misunderstood they wrote a follow up scientific paper explaining why what you are saying is wrong.

Brains have plasticity. They develop throughout our life. There is no time of maturity. Simply that there are periods where brains make more connections, and where connections are pared back more.

There are small changes detected about 25 years old. We have no idea if these changes translate into real life behaviour. We do know people can have significant brain damage in parts of the brain that nominally align with certain functions, and yet be unaffected. Brain research and understanding is very much in its infancy.

@MerryMaker so the Scottish Government sentencing guidelines that allowed a rapist to escape a custodial sentence because he was under 25 are based on really flawed science.

That is so concerning,

Who do I donate to here in Aus (esp Qld) to work against this insanity?

The family court here has a rep for overreach in other areas (recent setting aside of a binding financial agreement in a separation case) and this just makes me even more worried.

Because this gender cult isn't part of daily discourse here, I think few are aware of the slow, quiet creep of this neo religion into the authorities.

There is some more information about this case from earlier this year (names were changed).

https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/a-childs-fertility-pact

The judge was also involved in another case several years earlier re teenagers accessing hormones.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lanesainty/this-trans-teen-was-the-first-kid-from-townsville-to-start-t

Thank you Just. Lots more detail there.

Can you post some links to the research you're referring to?

Why make a statement like this? This is a judge you're dismissing here. You may not like his actions, but to call him a moron? 😳