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So let me get this straight. Gender identity is about young people's true self and absolutely nothing to do with mental health ... but if they don't get 'treatment' they will commit suicide.

This stuff is giving me whiplash.

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Agree Petula, the logic is absurd!

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Dear Mr Lane,

I was just listening to a recent pod cast with the wonderful Stella O’Malley bemoaning the lack of media interest in this scandal. Your name sprang to mind as a noble exception. Please accept my sincere thanks for your courage and tenacity in tackling this hydra headed issue.

Jennifer O’Brien

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Thanks Jennifer. B

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Definitely asleep at the wheel. Police should do a road side drug test with the Oz health department clearly under the ACON influence. Oh right, Police too taken the gender lobby 💰under the table as part of the reputation extortion racket. “We’re not homophobic, officer.” Promise. 🙄

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Yes, it was painful to watch Health Department officials the other day in parliament trying to explain reproduction without using the term woman.

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Step one of unravelling this whole thing has to be the decoupling of the T from the LGB. People and institutions are so scared to question anything T for fear of seeming homophobic (and yet the T agenda is as homophobic as anything)

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Quote from the RCH website:

“The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) Gender Service aims to improve the physical and mental health outcomes of children and adolescents who are trans or gender diverse”.

The challenge for practitioners treating young folk with an experimental hormonal and surgical cocktail is to ensure that they ‘do no harm’, and that’s some challenge!

The long-term outcome of the protocols is unknown, ergo the possibility exists that the aim to improve the physical and mental health of children and adolescents may actually further damage them.

The history of modern medicine is littered with flawed therapeutic interventions initiated by well-meaning highly qualified practitioners.

A few standout examples:

• The ‘Pelvic Mesh Sling’ surgical procedure was introduced in the US in 1998 to treat female pelvic prolapse. Globally three to four million women had the mesh surgically implanted.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) was the exclusive distributor for the device in Australia, providing a strong endorsement of its efficacy and safety.

Unfortunately, after some time it became apparent that there was a downside, a dreadful & often irreversible downside. Debilitating complications included:

Chronic pelvic pain, mesh migration into the vagina, incontinence, UTI’s, perforations, dyspareunia and autoimmune conditions.

The device damaged the lives of more than 130,000 women in Australia and the U.S and lawsuits have resulted in a payout total of some US$8 billion.

• The thalidomide disaster of 50’s and 60’s hardly needs a revisit.

• Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz pioneered the infamous frontal lobotomy procedure for treating refractile psychiatric conditions. From the late 1940’s through the late sixties some 100,000 of these grotesque procedures were performed globally leaving many in a vegetative state. Ironically Egas shared the 1949 Nobel prize in Medicine for pioneering this ‘breakthrough procedure’.

The misery resulting from flawed medical interventions is enhanced by the fact that there is invariably a significant delay prior to the red flags appearing (as in the cases cited above), thereby prolonging the intervention and increasing the damaged caseload.

. . . . It seems reasonable to assume that the future will see a slow trickle of iatrogenic disasters promoted by highly qualified and dedicated practitioners convinced that they ‘have the answer’.

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Well said, and if we look at the history of psychiatry, there are more scandals than just lobotomy, including the refusal to acknowledge the debilitating, disfiguring neurotoxic side effects of anti-psychotic drugs, previously called major tranquilisers, and one potentially rapidly fatal adverse effect--neuroleptic malignant syndrome. The psychiatric establishment denied the existence of this latter effect for at two decades, resulting in an estimated 80,000 preventable deaths from 1960 to 1980 in the US, according to journalist and author Robert Whittaker.

Whittaker's books on this subject: "Mad In America" and "Anatomy of an Epidemic" are essential reading. They show that we've been here before--the wildly positive spruiking of unproven treatments by medical and allied health professional bodies, politicians and the media despite mounting evidence of harm. We can also see the way, historically, vulnerable populations are targeted for experimental "treatments" whose use is based on unproven theories. Today it's gay/autistic/traumatised kids. In other cases it's been prisoners, poor people, people of colour etc. e.g the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. If we look back to the sixties we can study the appalling damage done to psychiatric patients by Dr Ewen Cameron in Canada, who dreamed of being awarded the Nobel Prize for curing schizophrenia while his work (and that going on in many other institutions worldwide) was funded by the CIA.

The CIA was at the time researching "mind control" techniques, which could be more accurately viewed as mind destruction techniques, under the MK Ultra Project. These brain damaging "treatments" (including the use of massive amounts of drugs, near-continual electroshock therapy, and the liberal use of psychedelics etc.) destroyed many lives, including that of the great African American singer and activist Paul Robeson.

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It’s very insightful to see how we can make ourselves believe anything, as do the clinicians and therapists who genuinely believe they’re helping children and adolescents stay alive and thrive by giving them puberty blockers. One of NZ’s most prolific puberty blocker dispensers seemed to indicate in a recent news article that it was necessary to do this due to the lack of mental health services available to distressed teens.

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Yes, I think the impulse to do something when confronted with a child’s distress is understandable & especially so when you are seen & see yourself as an expert & a person with good intentions.

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I've experienced a few mic-drop moments since getting interested in this issue - but this one! Wow!

'The RCH guideline was considered for inclusion in the online portal Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines run by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) but did not qualify.

'An NHMRC spokeswoman said: “At the screening stage it was determined that the [RCH] guideline did not include a funding statement, an evidence base for the recommendations or information about conflict of interest, and that it would not meet the portal selection criteria, so a full assessment was not carried out.”'

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Excellent piece, Bernard. Once the gender madness house comes finally tumbling down, how will Australian institutions (health professional bodies, politicians, the media—especially the ABC) justify willingly reverting to a provincial 1960s mentality characterised by an attitude of "if it doesn't happen here, its not really happening"?

The parental consent justification—along with the unconscionable push to dispense even with this and just let kids consent—in no way exonerates clinicians for administering harmful, non evidence-based experimental procedures to minors. Parents consented to lobotomies for their kids back in the 60s and 70s, that being (as Vincent points out above) the great "lifesaving" treatment of the day, celebrated by the psychiatric bodies, politicians and the media alike. A treatment based on a crazy theory which was readily seen to be harming the recipients and which ultimately wrecked the lives of an estimated 50,000 people.

It's up to society (all of us) to ensure clinicians and oversight bodies genuinely interrogate whether a a branch of medicine and its procedures are truly evidence-based, ethically justifiable and necessary. Pushing this responsibility onto stressed, coerced parents (who are faced with potential state abduction of their child if they don't "affirm" their kid's gender beliefs) and confused kids who are told by health professionals they "will commit suicide" if they don't transition is an abnegation of medicine's duty to serve humankind. Gender medicine as it stands violates practically every point of the Nuremberg Code.

Please follow our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WatchfulWaitingOz We seek to raise public awareness and build solidarity to stand up against this medical scandal and demand a public inquiry.

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