Australia’s controversial child gender transition clinics must be closed following yesterday’s revelation that the author of their practice standards, Dr Michelle Telfer, gave what a judge described as “misleading evidence” in the case of a gender-confused 12-year-old boy.
“How much more evidence of the shonky and harmful practices of LGBTIQA+ child gender clinics do politicians need before they act,” Family First National Director Lyle Shelton said.
The Australian newspaper had a court suppression order lifted allowing Dr Telfer to be named as the previously anonymous witness excoriated by Family Court Justice Andrew Strum in his April judgement.
The case involved a boy who thought he was a girl and it came before the court because the father was seeking to prevent the mother taking him to a child gender clinic for possible irreversible gender change treatment.
Justice Strum sided with the father in possible contravention of Victoria’s anti-conversion therapy laws which prevent anyone dissuading a child from accessing LGBTIQA+ gender treatment.
In seeking to discredit the UK’s Cass Review, which led to the shuttering of child gender clinics and the banning of puberty blockers, Telfer equated Cass to Nazi-like oppression of trans people.
Strum was not amused and said that characterisation had “no place whatsoever in the independent evidence that should be expected of such an expert”.
Justice Strum said the court was “not concerned ‘in what the community thinks’ or ideologies, but only what, on the evidence, is in the child’s best interests”.
“Ideology has no place in the application by courts of the law, and certainly not in the determination by courts exercising jurisdiction under the (Family Law Act) of what is in a child’s best interests,” he wrote.
Family First is renewing its long-standing call for Australia’s network of child gender clinics to be closed and is now calling for the sacking of Dr Telfer from her role as the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital’s chief of medicine.
She is also the author of the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, which are based on the discredited World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines.
“If the UK can close its child gender transition clinic, the Tavistock Centre in London, and uphold a ban on puberty blockers, why can’t Australia?”, Mr Shelton said.
“The UK has some of the most woke politicians in the Anglosphere yet even they understand the importance of protecting children from experimental LGBTIQA+ child-gender treatments.”
The Telfer revelation comes after a Cairns child gender clinic was found to be injecting children with puberty blockers without parental consent, forcing the Crisafulli Government to instigate a pause on their prescription.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has announced a nation-wide review of the so-called gender affirmation model but his heart is not in it and it is on the go slow.
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