'Gender voodoo'
A doctor-turned-politician warns that gender medicine has substituted mere opinion for hard evidence
An Australian politician trained in paediatrics has declared medicalised gender change for minors to be lacking in evidence, a breach of the rule “First, do no harm,” and “a blot on the medical profession.”
Dr David Gillespie, who spent 33 years in medical practice before he entered federal politics as a National Party member, said he had been “flabbergasted” to be in Australia’s parliament when “eminent doctors and professors” whom he had thought “sensible people” declared their support for “gender-affirming care.”
He was speaking this morning in Canberra at the Parliament House launch of a book titled Devastated: How gender ideology is tearing Australian families apart, edited by Kirralie Smith from the group Binary.
The book includes accounts by parents who oppose what they see as the harmful medicalisation of their children, as well as a practitioner’s take by former professor of psychology Dr Dianna Kenny, a critic of the gender-affirming treatment approach.
Dr Gillespie welcomed “the current groundswell against bad policy, unevidenced medical therapy, [and] the removal of parental rights in favour of voodoo gender theory.”
“It is really a societal nightmare, and we’ve got to keep fighting back.”
He contrasted the bad old days of “leeches and cupping” with the rise of evidence-based medicine, double-blind controlled trials and placebos—“all the things that we built our profession on, but then, all of a sudden, for this particular subset [of paediatric gender medicine], it’s all thrown out the window.”
“It's really a blot on the medical profession… I just didn’t realise how far advanced it got.
“[I don’t understand] why New South Wales Health and other state health departments haven’t responded like the grown ups in the UK, and even in Holland, which is very progressive, and in Scandinavia.”
The UK ran the world’s most comprehensive review of youth gender care led by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass; routine use of puberty blockers is now prohibited. The Dutch parliament has urged investigation of paediatric gender medicine; and Sweden has restricted puberty blockers.
State health departments in Australia run gender-affirming clinics in public children’s hospitals, have ignored independent systematic reviews overseas showing the evidence base to be very weak, and the local relevance of April’s Cass report has been minimised by Australia’s health authorities and gender medicine lobby.
Dr Gillespie suggested the failure of Australia’s health bureaucracy to take heed of the shift to caution in Europe might be explained by “a psychological resistance—once people attach themselves to a treatment or a theory—to unpick their mind.”1
“There’s a resistance to a counterfactual argument, and people have an emotional linkage to what they’ve decided. It’s almost like [a rethink amounts to] admitting that you’ve been really bloody stupid, and how did you manage to do that?
“But in an issue as important as this, [Australia’s health officials] have to open their eyes to it.”
Dr Gillespie traced the rise of paediatric gender medicine to “activist gender ideology-infected Dutch clinics.” The puberty blocker-driven model rebadged in the US as gender-affirming care is also called the “Dutch protocol” because it was pioneered in the Netherlands.
This model, Dr Gillespie said, represented “opinion-based medicine, not evidence-based medicine” but had been “sold as fact” to the UK Tavistock clinic, the world’s largest paediatric gender service. The Tavistock was shut down after litigation and adverse findings by regulators.
Queering the sex binary
In Dr Gillespie’s view, the “post-modern deconstruction” of time-honoured institutions sought to destabilise biological sex.
“So if you can turn over, you know, what is a male, what is a female … and it’s arbitrary—boy, that is a powerful, socially destructive policy.”
He said the Gillard government’s “humble little change” to the Sex Discrimination Act—a 2013 amendment imported the idea of “gender identities” unmoored from biological sex—had given “legal substance” to this deconstruction.
“The legal profession is now totally confused and they feel they’re going to get harangued if they speak out against it.”
Dr Gillespie advised those campaigning for reform of gender medicine to try to persuade legislators, although he stressed they had “only so much bandwidth” and many policy areas to focus on.
“If you’re not here, in the [parliamentary] building where the nation’s kitchen ingredients [are put together] you end up being on the menu. So, having a presence in the building counts.”
Video: The story of Eldur Smári Kristinsson in Iceland shows how gender medicine can loom large in national politics
Turbulent teens
Dr Gillespie had paediatric experience at Sydney’s Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children and took a diploma in child health in the UK after working for the National Health Service there.
At today’s book launch in Canberra, he declared his lack of formal qualifications in psychiatry or psychology, but said there was a long tradition of expert awareness of the confusion of young people as they experienced “the turbulent rise of hormones” and went through puberty.
“It’s a normal part of our evolution that some kids identify [out of their birth sex] in this dysphoric period, or just because they’re going through working out who they are,” he said.
“[For most of them] dysphoria fades. There’s a period of denial, then anger—it’s like death and dying in the stages that have been described. But they come to terms with what nature gave them: their biological sex.”
Dr Gillespie said he thought some of these young people caught up in gender confusion were same-sex attracted—“it’s just the way nature made them.”
“[In their dysphoric phase] they were just confused and trying to justify their same-sex attraction by changing their [gender].
“It’s so confused, this thing, and one of the guiding philosophies when you study medicine is First, do no harm.”
While medical authorities appearing before federal parliament were dismissing concerns about gender clinics, Dr Gillespie as an MP representing regional NSW said he was “suddenly getting distressed letters from family members who had children who were being taken down a [gender] rabbit hole at only 14 or 15 [years old].”
“I’ve had family friends who have had their teenage children basically groomed, taken off into, like, a little sect,” he said.
“They’ve been given all the information of what to say to a doctor, where you go, who’s a friendly person, who’ll sign you over [for treatment].
“They’re actively recruiting confused kids, as well as kids [with] untreated depression and unrecognised autism spectrum disorder.”
He said he had heard first-hand accounts of transgender regret and “the horrible side effects of the hormones.”
He rejected as “absolute rubbish” the claim by gender activists that distressed minors were “all going to go and kill themselves if we don’t block their adolescence [with hormone suppression drugs known as puberty blockers].”
I have added three paragraphs to the original article in order to include Dr Gillespie’s attempt to answer why NSW Health and other Australian health departments have ignored the emerging international shift to caution on paediatric gender medicine.
The phrase evidence-based medicine (EBM) was coined by Gordon Guyatt, Professor of Medicine, McMaster university, and globally acknowledged as the lead authority in this defining demand for ensuring that ‘experimental’ medical interventions must provide ‘evidence’, that they are safe and effective.
Guyatt has famously stated that “When there’s been a rigorous systematic review of the evidence and the bottom line is ‘we don’t know’ then anybody who then claims they do know is not being evidence based.”
The ‘Affirmative’ model of addressing gender dysphoria is NOT evidence based!
I think people have mistaken the grooming target in these situations. Normally you would imagine children are being groomed, but the child is unhappy with bullying and puberty related confusions already. They will tend to respond to anything they are told which helps.
The real grooming has been institutional - of medical practitioners, politicians, parents and teachers. The groomer establishes the threat and guilt that the child will die, that only groomers understand the problem, and only they can address the solution, contrary advice is hostile, and that they operate within a charitable context, and only they should provide mentoring with children.
It’s quite startling because in any other context, the people involved would be in prison - imaging groups of people online teaching children to wear inappropriate clothing, discussing sexual feelings, being told not to talk to their parents, receiving sexually orientated gifts from organizations, and asks to adopt sexually inappropriate behaviors and language - and record them and share them.
A child wearing assless leather chaps or a ball gag on camera is just as wrong as a child wearing binders, or a fake penis, or an underwear tuck, a bra.