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Ollie Parks's avatar

Trans activists and allies should welcome a parliamentary inquiry into youth gender medicine and gender clinics.

If, as activists claim, current medical standards and practices are safe, effective and ethical, they should embrace an inquiry because it will ratify the current approach and silence critics.

If activists and allies are sincere about their oft-stated concern for people's health and welfare, they should embrace any recommendations the parliamentary inquiry might make for changes and improvements to standards and practices in gender clinics. Wouldn't it be better for gender clinics to take the time and make the effort to screen would-be patients so that only true trans people are medicalised than to uncritically accept every person who's fallen for trans indoctrination only to see many of them them detransition, perahaps as whistle blowers, years later? Also, prompt compliance with reforms might provide gender clinics with a safe harbour against subsequent litigation by former patients.

Unfortunately, there's almost always a very large gap between what the players in today's trans industrial complex should do and what they actually do. Far from embracing either of the reasonable propositions above, activists are - as usual - resorting to falsehoods, half truths, distraction and hypocrisy to derail the proposed inquiry. It is likely that trans activists somewhere are also seeking to cancel and censor proponents of the parliamentary inquiry.

What's undisputably false is that the inquiry would be an attack on "the LGBTQ community." First, the concept an "LGBT community" is an anti-democratic political fiction that allows activists to claim to speak for a group of people who would never elect them as their leaders. In addition to the excellent points Mr. Lane has made about the growing fault line between lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, on the one hand, the trans and queer social constructs on the other, gay men are under pressure from some on the TQ side of the divide (and even from other gay men) to accept female-to-male transexuals in all-male spaces, including on-line erotic spaces. Sorry, ladies, facial hair, a deeper voice and - in the best case scenario - fake male genitalia do not a gay man make.

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Vincent Keane's avatar

“I can only answer that in good faith we thought it was a good idea.”

The AMA's marketing of the Intravaginal Sling (IVS) Tunneller device as an "Australian medical design breakthrough" to treat incontinence and prolapse, despite women's reports of complications in Western Australian public hospital trials from as early as 1989, was "a long way from our proudest hour", said current AMA president Dr Michael Gannon.

The Australian Medical Association (often referred to as ‘the peak professional body for doctors in Australia’) acted as exclusive distributor of an Australian-invented pelvic mesh device use for the treatment of pelvic prolapse in women, a not uncommon problem following pregnancy.

It was first used in Australia in 1998.

The device did not undergo any formal clinical trial and resulted in a litany of irreversible complications including dyspareunia, intractable pain, incontinence, systemic autoimmune conditions and invasion of the vaginal well.

Following withdrawal TGA of the device billions of dollars in litigation were paid out.

“I can only answer that in good faith the AMA thought it was a good product. History will not judge that decision kindly”. Dr Gannon, the then head of the AMA stated (Dr Gannon is a West Australian specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist).

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