Good on you, Women Speak Tasmania! This is what we like to see: alert ABC News listeners/viewers/readers who recognise censorship and poor judgment when they see it.
Last month, an outfit called Environmental Progress leaked documents from the internal chatboard of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH is a largely US-based organisation that wields enormous influence within the gender healthcare field at a global level – its Standards of Care constitute the most widespread protocol used by professionals working with transgender-identifying people.
The leaked chatboard conversations very clearly demonstrate, as journalist Bernard Lane puts it, that while ‘dogmatic in public, the gender doctors of WPATH identify as troubled and unsure in their more candid moments’. The files reveal:
- clinicians discussing patients receiving irreversible treatments who seem very unlikely to be able to receive informed consent – including some who are very young, and others who have serious mental-health disorders
- some conversations that suggest the clinicians themselves don’t know the long-term effects of treatments
- other conversations in which it seems clinicians do know that cross-sex hormones or surgeries are likely to cause serious harm, but advocate for those treatments nonetheless
Like Women Speak Tasmania, we haven’t found any report on this WPATH leak anywhere on the ABC. (We stand to be corrected.)
Was this leak newsworthy? Lots of mainstream media outlets thought so. Like The Guardian, The Economist, The Telegraph, The New York Post, the Washington Post, and The National Post (Canada).
And was this leak relevant to Australia? Sure was! AusPATH – the peak organisation here for gender doctors and such – is deeply entangled with WPATH. The AusPATH president admits that there’s ‘a lot of overlap’ between the WPATH Standards of Care and the Australian Standards of Care endorsed by AusPATH. Which is hardly surprising, given that AusPATH grew out of Australian attendance at the 2009 WPATH conference in Norway. AusPATH documents are peppered with references to WPATH showing AusPATH regards it as an authority.
So it’s deplorable that the ABC just ignored this development. Why did they do so? Well, we’ve already had a go at outlining why the ABC won’t broadcast or publish info that calls into question the tenets of gender-identity ideology. So we won’t bang on about it again this time. But we will emphasise that this self-censorship is depriving the Australian public not just of relevant information, but of responsible and professional analysis of events.
The WPATH files provide a case in point: Is the leakage of the WPATH files the eruption of ‘the biggest medical scandal in living memory, or likely ever’, as Women Speak Tasmania – and others – assert? Do the files indeed reveal ‘widespread medical malpractice’, as the leakers – and others – claim? Not everybody thinks so, even among those who agree that the files don’t show WPATH in a good light, or that the revelations are disturbing. If the WPATH leakage didn’t make the news – pipped at the post by a tale of a leaky bathroom and 249 other items – we would’ve liked – and expected! – to have at least heard something about it from those eminent experts Norman Swan and Tegan Taylor of The Health Report on Radio National. But even their voices have been silent. Or silenced.