The Gender Resistance Gathers Pace in Australia

A new coalition of experts and organisations have joined forces to challenge the debunked affirmation-only model of gender medicine.

Jillian Spencer, child and adolescent psychiatrist

As a young girl, Jillian Spencer’s mother had cancer – a soft tissue sarcoma in her foot and received chemotherapy and an experimental treatment using ultra high frequency microwave radiation (UHFMR) using a ‘Tronado’ machine by Perth oncologist, Dr John Holt. Spencer said:

“I remember her being very sad and scared before these Tronado treatments, they made her very hot - essentially, she was being cooked.”

Following a review of the treatment by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) that included patient records and the Tronado machine’s workings (used to deliver the UHFMR), Dr. Holt was found to have fabricated research results. This experimental radiation treatment was proven to show no therapeutic benefit, and in some cases, evidence of harm.

Jillian’s early experiences inspired her to become a child and adolescent psychiatrist who dedicated the last 20 years of her life to helping young people overcome their challenges and thrive.

Dr. Jillian Spencer worked at the Queensland Children’s Hospital (QCH) that follows the Australian Standards of Care ‘affirmation-only’ model that puts a child on a path of social transition (change of name, pronouns and clothing) and moves to puberty blockade, cross sex hormones and surgeries.

Dr Spencer was also aware of the growing evidence of harm exposed by multiple European systematic reviews in Finland, Denmark, Sweden as well as the U.K. Cass review commissioned by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS).

All of the reviews led to countries abandoning the ‘affirmation-only’ model where children were fast-tracked to medicalisation - Dr. Spencer was concerned that children presenting with gender distress at the QCH and who were offered a single pathway were not being given the psychological, social and developmental assessments necessary to explore the full range of factors contributing to their gender distress.

Witnessing her own mother suffer under a harmful, pseudo-scientific treatment made Spencer acutely aware of the ethical duty of medical professionals to adhere to the principles of evidence-based medicine and their oath to “Do No Harm.”

After speaking out, QCH placed Dr. Spencer on leave awaiting a hearing in the administrative industrial tribunal on multiple fronts including discrimination, whistleblower protections, and unfair dismissal under Queensland law.

Australia Gives the Cass Review the Middle Finger

The landmark four-year 2024 U.K. Cass Review and its commissioned systematic reviews by the University of York team concluded that gender medicine was built on sand – there was ‘weak’ and ‘poor’ evidence of benefit and emerging data regarding long-term harm. Over the past 18 months, the U.K. many European countries and more than 20 U.S. states have severely restricted the medicalisation of youth.

One of the Cass systematic reviews focused on the guidelines for the Standards of Care (SOC) for gender dysphoria reviewed 23 international and national guidelines for youth gender medicine using the AGREE II tool which scores areas like methodological rigour and editorial independence on a scale of 1–100%.

The Australian SOCs developed under Dr. Michelle Telfer, Director of Gender Services at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) scored 19 out of 100 for its lack of rigour and 25 out of 100 for its lack of editorial independence. While the combined rating across a range of factors for Australia’s SOCs was a mere 43 out of 100 falling into the category - not recommended for practice.

Any ordinary reader, but especially medical or health professionals and politicians would expect an immediate pause to Australia’s gender medical practice following these damning results post-Cass. Yet Australian practitioners, peak bodies, politicians and the mainstream media dismissed the Cass review within 24 hours as inapplicable to Australia.

This is an extraordinary response from both the political class but also a medical profession defending an experimental field of medicine practiced on young children and vulnerable youth with life-altering consequences.

The Coalition Advancing Scientific Care

The failure of the Cass Review to shift the conversation mobilised a group of medical and legal experts to launch a new organisation - the Coalition for Advancing Scientific Care (CASC) to coordinate efforts of all those challenging the affirmation-only medical model for gender medicine.

A CASC spokesperson said the Cass Review findings were:

… ignored by Australian health authorities, who made the astonishing claim that it had no relevance to Australia. Other international developments, such as the publication of the WPATH files, court cases, heartbreaking stories from detransitioners who, while still minors, had taken puberty blockers, cross sex hormones or had surgeries such as mastectomies and later regretted it, reputable research studies pointing out the experimental and risky nature of gender-affirming care, and the lack of scientific evidence to support its administering to minors have not led to a change to Australia’s healthcare policy or practice in this area. This only makes us more determined to bring about change.

When asked about what CASC hopes to achieve, the spokesperson said:

Our theory of change starts with educating more Australians about the reality that gender medicine takes physical healthy children or adolescents and puts them at risk of sexual dysfunction and sterility, and of becoming medicalised for life. No child or adolescent can consent to that, and no parent should be put under pressure to on their behalf.

We need to help Australians understand that gender medicine is a child protection issue rather than it being seen as just a culture wars issue, or a diversity and inclusion issue. This will help drive a momentum for change.

We should not have to wait for courts to decide negligence and malpractice lawsuits brought by devastated detransitioners against negligent doctors and government health departments in the years ahead before we act.

Gathering the Allies

The CASC team set about organising a conference before they knew if anyone would turn up. Any public event challenging trans ideology is met with violent opposition and coordinated efforts by trans activists to force venues to cancel meetings and threaten the livelihoods of public speakers. Despite the fact that the conference was promoted by word of mouth it was a sell out with more than 200 experts including health practitioners, lawyers, educators, parents, detransitioners and members of the LGB community from across Australia and New Zealand.

The CASC inaugural conference was held in Adelaide on October 17-18 with international speakers including Riittakerttu Kaltiala who leads Finland’s national gender clinic along with Australian experts including Dr. Roberto D’Angelo - Psychiatrist, Alison Clayton - Paediatrician, Dylan Wilson - Consultant Psychiatrist, Patrick Clarke – Psychiatrist and Belle Lane - Barrister.

Gender Medicine Isn’t Science - it isn’t even medicine

Dr. Helen Joyce, Director of Advocacy at the U.K. human rights charity, Sex Matters and author of the Times bestseller, Trans, When Ideology Meets Reality who has been on an extended tour in Australia and New Zealand was invited to speak at the at the CASC conference as the keynote speaker.

Joyce argued that gender medicine follows a similar pattern as the many historical medical scandals including the ‘four humours treatment’ and recent medical scandals such as false memory syndrome, hysteria, multiple personalities and frontal lobotomies. All of these treatments, presented as groundbreaking at the time, were based on a false premise.

The false premise of the ‘four humours theory’ was that healthy functioning depends on the balance of four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile), and that most diseases are caused by an imbalance of these can be corrected by bloodletting, purging, leeching, cupping, enemas etc.

During the course of the four humours treatment, thousands of patients died from side effects including blood loss, sepsis, kidney failure, poisoning and bladder necrosis. The discovery of the scientific method finally established that diseases are caused by pathogens, genetic factors, physiological malfunctions and not by an excess or deficiency of imaginary fluids after which medicine required more rigorous and evidence-based diagnosis.

The four humours treatment practised for over 1,500 years as ‘lifesaving’.

In gender medicine, the false premise is the assertion that a child can be born in the wrong body - a metaphysical claim treated as a self-evident truth rather than a hypothesis requiring rigorous proof. This premise itself relies on the belief that humans have a ‘gender identity’ that may be misaligned with their sex as male or female.

But ‘gender identity’ lacks any biological markers and cannot be verified, measured or validated by tests, observation or comparisons between healthy versus unhealthy functioning.

Evidence-based medicine starts by understanding what healthy functioning is and compares this will unhealthy functioning that is established through observation, measurement or testing. For example, diagnosing flu requires observing symptoms including fever, chills, sweats, runny nose, headache, sore throat.

Compare this model with that of a child or young person who attends the gender clinic; the child makes a subjective claim of having an innate gender identity that is misaligned with their biological sex and causes them distress. The mismatch is the diagnosis.

But gender identity is a phenomenological concept that exists outside of human biology.

What evidence do the gender doctors provide for the existence of ‘body misalignment’? Where does the distress originate from? What factors increase or decrease the distress? And what scale is used to measure the degree of distress to meet a threshold before medicalisation?

Joyce describes current gender medicine as “tooth fairy science” – a hypothesis based on a false premise. Gender doctors perform the rituals of medicine - they make appointments, they do consultations that diagnosis, give out prescriptions, do blood tests and refer to other specialists like surgeons but it’s all an empty ritual without a true diagnosis of what is being treated.

In choosing to bypass differential diagnosis, ignore desistance rates, and reframe any calls for caution as ‘cruelty’ gender doctors have become modern lobotomists driven by ideological zeal masquerading as medicine.

Joyce argues the onus should be on the doctors to present a coherent case for treatment weighed against outcomes, benefits and risks. Doing so, would turn gender medicine on its head.

So why the Resistance?

Continuing to ignore the mounting evidence of harm is a profound ethical inversion of evidence-based medicine and a dereliction of Australia’s medical and political leadership.

Unlike the U.K.’s national health service, Australia’s federal system allows both politicians and doctors to kick the can down the road - hoping that when the music stops someone else will be blamed.

Australia’s Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler commissioned a national review of gender medicine yet at the same time said that state health ministers must make their own decision regarding puberty blockers that underscores the failure of national leadership in this matter.

This is where CASC comes in as it seeks to challenge the current intransigence in Australia to the risks and harms associated with paediatric gender medicine. Please visit the website at www.casc.ltd for more information.

Follow Jillian Spencer on X @ Jilliantweeting and Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender

You can also join Helen Joyce’s Substack at: www.thehelenjoyce.com