Australia: Gone is protection by the Family Court for children confused over gender

Jan 17, 2018 by Jill

by John Whitehall, MercatorNet:

On November 30, the Full Court of the Family Court of Australia abrogated its responsibility for the approval of the administration of cross sex hormones to children suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’.

It surrendered that responsibility to small groups of protagonists in various children’s hospitals in Australia who promote a medical pathway of ‘therapy’ in which the appearances of the natal sex of the child are subsumed in a chemical and even surgical attempt to approximate features of the opposite sex. As seven hundred confused children are reported to have sought help from protagonists at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, alone, in recent years, the number of Australian children at risk from massive intervention in their brains and bodies is enormous.

This epidemic of gender dysphoria is a major problem of public health.

How common is the problem?

Childhood gender dysphoria is described as the distress associated with persistent, insistent and resistant identification by a child with the gender of the opposite sex. No one knows why this occurs: there is no proven biological or psychological cause. It is not a new phenomenon. Rare cases are on record from years past.

But now children are reported to be suffering in numbers which are increasing exponentially every year. Protagonists argue that, in the past, the phenomenon was hidden by social attitudes but that, now, access to the internet is providing confidence for children and parents to declare membership in the ranks of the ‘gender fluid’.

Its rarity, however, was confirmed for me, a paediatrician of over 50 years experience, when I polled 28 of my colleagues and found only 12 cases could be re-called from a total experience of 931 years. In 10 of these cases there was severe mental co-morbidity: the other 2 were associated with severe sexual abuse.

Read here