“Please don’t look away. I ask you: how many harmed young people is acceptable collateral?” Judith Hunter pleaded with MPs at a forum held in NSW Parliament last week.
Her 17-year-old daughter was suffering from bipolar disorder, autism, anxiety and depression when she announced to the family that she identified as a male.
The family resisted the transition because there had been no history of gender dysphoria but were labelled as bigots by the treating hospital.
When their daughter’s signs of regret began to manifest in suicidal tendencies, Judith found it almost impossible to get mental health support, with the gender clinic responsible for her daughter’s transition declaring that it was not an emergency ward.
Judith’s plea was made at a forum hosted by Unheard Voices, a chance for MPs to hear from and ask honest questions about the provision of gender-affirming treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children experiencing gender dysphoria, in advance of parliamentary debates on conversion therapy, sex self-identification, medical consent for children and more.
Addressing the MPs in the room, Judith called for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the use of “irreversible hormones and surgeries [as] a fix to mental distress.”
“We are the ones who will be picking up the pieces of our children’s lives long after the trans activists have deserted the regretters; long after the medical professionals causing this harm have retired or relocated or disappeared; and long after the people who cheered this scandal go to ground and pretend they didn’t know,” she said.
“But I can’t pretend because I know. And now you can’t say that you don’t know either.”
Judith also had some strong words for those schools that promote Wear It Purple Day, noting that some of the ambassadors featured on the Wear It Purple site were also texting her daughter encouraging her to cut ties with the family and pursue a transgender lifestyle.
“Why are high schools promoting such harm to teenage girls?” she asked.
Following Hunter’s compelling talk, the forum heard the story of Jay Langadinos, one of those vulnerable teenage girls placed on the transgender conveyor-belt.
“I was fast-tracked onto hormones without a psychological evaluation and without being encouraged to explore whether deeper issues were contributing to the decision to take this path,” she said.
Langadinos went on to have a full hysterectomy and double mastectomy, only to regret it several years later.
Now 31 and in a period of “detransition,” Langadinos warned those gathered of the risks to so many youth today.
“Vulnerable young people with mental health issues are being caught up by the trans craze,” she said.
“It is imperative that people receive the care that they need rather than being put on a path of medicalisation.”
“There is nothing more painful than having to grieve parts of yourself that you lost through unnecessary surgery … Psychological issues cannot be solved by removing physical parts of the body.”
The forum also heard from Dr Jillian Spencer, the Queensland child psychiatrist who was stood down from the Queensland Children’s Hospital after “politely asking whether it was usual for the gender clinic to provide cross-sex hormones to 14-year-olds rather than waiting until they were 16.”
She explained that her concern was that post-pubescent boys are usually infertile one year after being given the female hormone estrogen and that no research has been done as to how quickly within the first year this infertility occurs.
Dr Spencer said that Queensland was now in a position “where the government’s political belief that affirming children is a positive act is enacted through the public hospital system where clinicians are mandated to provide treatment that isn’t evidence-based,” describing this as “a nightmare for parents.”
This sentiment was echoed by Dr Andrew Amos, an academic psychiatrist who has also served as the Director of Training for Queensland Health at an event held in NSW Parliament House last week.
Amos boldly claimed that “the gender-affirming care model is inserting a political agenda disguised as a medical protocol and it puts patients at risk.”
The forum also heard from Dr John Whitehall, Professor of Paediatrics at Western Sydney University, as well as lawyer Mark Sneddon, the Executive Director of the Institute for Civil Society.
Catholic gender and sexuality speaker James Parker also told the forum how the proposed conversion therapy ban in NSW would make it more difficult for parents, counsellors and clinicians to protect young people from being pushed through gender affirmative care.