Statement by Family First National Director LYLE SHELTON
Family First condemns the Australian Human Rights Commission’s decision to nominate Dr Michelle Telfer for a Human Rights Medal.
This is an insult to every Australian child harmed, and every family devastated, by the experimental “gender-affirming” medical model that Dr Telfer has championed.
The model of rushing confused young people toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries has now been thoroughly discredited by the landmark UK Cass Review.
That exhaustive, evidence-based report found there was “remarkably weak evidence” for medicalised gender treatment in minors and warned that the practice had caused “significant harm” to vulnerable children.
The Cass Review’s findings have led to the closure of the Tavistock Clinic and the banning of puberty blockers for minors in the United Kingdom.
Yet here in Australia, the very doctor whose activism helped embed this failed model into our health system is being celebrated as a “human rights” hero. This turns the concept of human rights on its head.
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.
Dr Telfer’s child gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne has been caught out referring girls under 18 for double mastectomies.
Dr Telfer’s credibility has also been questioned by the courts. In a tragic Family Court case concerning a gender-distressed 12-year-old boy, Justice Andrew Strum described Dr Telfer’s evidence as “misleading”, later declaring it was in the public interest to lift a suppression order so she could be named.
For the Human Rights Commission to honour a figure whose testimony has been called into question by the Family Court, and whose model of care has been condemned by one of the world’s most comprehensive medical reviews, is an extraordinary act of ideological blindness.
The Human Rights Commission’s decision shows just how captured our taxpayer-funded bureaucracy has become by radical LGBTIQ gender theory.
Powerful taxpayer-funded bodies like the AHRC put pressure on mainstream families who want their children protected from radical LGBTIQA+ gender fluid ideology.
This has not been a good week for the AHRC with its Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody siding with biological males over girls’ and women’s sex-based rights.
Cody, who is paid $400,000 per year, told a Senate hearing she did not know what a biological male was.
Family First renews its calls for the AHRC to be abolished along with its state-based counterparts.
Family First candidates Deepa Mathew (SA), Bernie Finn and Jane Foreman (VIC), and Lyle Shelton (NSW) are standing at up-coming state elections to take the pressure off families by fighting this ideological nonsense until every Australian family is safe from it.
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