The Federal Health Minister Mark Butler announced he'd asked the National Health and Medical Research Council to review the current "Australian standards of care and treatment guidelines for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents in Australia, and to develop new national guidelines." This comes after the Queensland government's ban on the use of puberty blockers and sex hormones for young people in its public clinics.
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00:00We're talking about the care of people, young people, with gender dysphoria and gender dysphoria
00:07is where somebody is psychologically distressed and unhappy because the gender they feel they
00:15have is not the sex that they were assigned to when they were born.
00:20And it can be really major and cause lots of trauma to that person's life.
00:25And we're talking about two different kinds of treatment.
00:28There's a lot of focus on puberty blockers.
00:31Puberty blockers are actually not the main story here.
00:35It's actually quite rare for a child to get puberty blockers.
00:38This is where the child that qualifies for puberty blockers is often a boy and they've
00:45identified as a girl since early, as long as their parents can remember.
00:51And then when the secondary characteristics, as puberty starts and they start to look more
00:56like a boy, they get very distressed.
00:59And after a lot of consultation with the parents and assessment and so on, a small proportion
01:05of boys get the, well, it could be a girl as well, get puberty blockers which stop puberty
01:11going any further in terms of the secondary sex characteristics.
01:15The bigger, and so it's a tiny number, although people get worked up about it, the bigger
01:20issue is sex hormones in adolescence.
01:23And this is often in girls.
01:26And the thing here is it is complicated because girls often go through a period of gender
01:31fluidity.
01:32It seems to be a part of development of adolescent girls and questioning their sexual identity,
01:38not necessarily gender dysphoria.
01:41And so they need to be, but their social media gets wrapped up in this and they see other
01:45people having sex hormones and so on.
01:47And so this is a really complicated thing to assess and you need a sophisticated multidisciplinary
01:51clinic for both situations to assess it.
01:54And in fact, most of these girls don't go on to end up on sex hormones.
01:59They actually, they'll actually resolve or they'll identify as non-binary, queer or what
02:06have you, and are happy with, or relatively happy with that identity for themselves.
02:13Now Queensland government has just banned puberty blockers and sex hormones in under 18 in public
02:19clinics in Queensland.
02:22The excuse they've used is there was an alleged problem in one of the services in Cairns.
02:27The West Australian opposition has said that they'll ban these drugs and it's become a
02:32political issue internationally.
02:34Internationally, hugely controversial, especially in the UK.
02:37Yeah, because there was this report by a paediatrician called Hilary Cass and the Cass report argued
02:43that there was no evidence that these drugs benefited kids.
02:48And in fact, the evidence was not as certain as the Cass report made out, or as people's
02:54interpretation of the Cass report was made out, but it ended up in banning these treatments.
02:59Now the problem in Australia is that you've got the Queensland government banning them
03:05on the basis of a problem in one clinic, when they've actually got a world-class clinic
03:09in Brisbane.
03:10We also have a world-class clinic in Perth, they're two of the best clinics along with
03:14Melbourne.
03:15Sydney's been a bit rocky.
03:18These clinics, particularly the Perth clinic, have been following these kids closely and
03:22they find that the kids who decide, for example, to have puberty blockers, they don't have
03:29regrets.
03:30Very few of them back out as time goes on and so on.
03:33And it seems to do them good.
03:35The problem nationally is you get one state doing this, another state doing that, lots
03:39of political conflict.
03:41What's the science?
03:42And that's why the ministers asked the National Health and Medical Research Council, our peak
03:46health research body, to look at these guidelines.
03:50What does the science say and come up with new guidelines that could be applied across
03:53the country?
03:54Because the other problem we've got is some of this is happening in the private sector
03:58and there's anecdotal reports that GPs are giving these drugs out, which is far beyond
04:05their scope of practice.
04:07And so we need a national view of what's going on so that parents know what to expect.