The last week of January saw big action in Australian kid-transing. On Tuesday 28th, the Queensland government announced it was going to conduct an independent review into puberty blockers, and meanwhile stop putting any more kids on them. Then on Friday 31st, the federal government announced they were going to do a review too – a far more sedate affair, which won’t be reporting back, even in an interim way, till the middle of next year.
And who did Aunty designate to tackle these important developments? Why, Pats Karvelas, of course; she does practically everything else in ABC current affairs, why wouldn’t she do this too? Especially when she showed herself to be such an adept kid-transing promoter in the episode of Four Corners she was allowed to host in 2023.
On 28th January, Pats devoted over 8 minutes of Afternoon Briefing to the Queensland review announcement; on 31st January, she spent nearly 14 minutes on the federal government announcement. But, in true Karvelas style, her coverage was more striking for who she didn’t talk to, and what she didn’t tell us, than for who or what she did.
Who would’ve been an obvious person for Pats to speak to about the Queensland announcement? Dr Jillian Spencer, right? A child and adolescent psychiatrist with over 20 years experience, who knows the Queensland Children’s Gender Service inside and out. But no, of course not, that’s not who Pats turned to. Instead we were treated to the inane views of Anna Brown, CEO of enthusiastic kid-transer lobby Equality Australia, who made the bold assertion that the Cass Review – which has led to the banning of puberty blockers in the UK – ‘just doesn’t apply in Australia’. Well, that’s not what Professor Philip Morris, President of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, thinks, but Pats didn’t go into that, of course.
Brown also told us – several times – that there’d already been a review of Queensland’s gender clinics ‘only last year’, which found that its practices were ‘safe and evidence-based’.
Neither Brown nor Pats told us that the 2024 review was limited to testing whether the QCGS adhered to the current clinical guidelines, and didn’t actually scrutinise the adequacy of the guidelines themselves.
Other things neither Brown nor Pats managed to mention in their eight-minute gabfest:
- There are serious concerns about the possible long-term effects of puberty blockers on bone density, cognition, and sexual function
- Non-drug forms of treatment (eg psychiatric and psychological treatment, and counselling) are still available to gender-dysphoric youth in Queensland.
- It’s not just the UK that’s turned against puberty blockers – so have France, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
The 31st January broadcast on the announcement of the federal government review gave us more of the same. No critic of the medicalised gender-affirmation model got a go. Instead we got Eloise Brook of AusPATH, which is just as much of a kid-transing zealot as Equality Australia, and was part of the frenzied cabal that tried to get the ABC program Media Watch hauled over the coals for daring to run a segment about the sacking of Julie Szego from The Age for her coverage of transgender issues.
And later in the program Pats had a cosy chat with Anna Cody, the mistitled Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the mistitled Australian Human Rights Commission, which has intervened in Tickle v Giggle to back Tickle against Giggle, and knocked back the Lesbian Action Group’s application for an exemption so lesbians could run public events without the presence of men-who-say-they’re-lesbians.
At least there was one bit where SBS journalist Anna Henderson was able to correct Pats (and guest Mark Kenny) when they intimated that the opposition to puberty blockers was coming from the conservative side of politics: ‘It’s not just a Coalition vs Labor issue,’ Henderson rightly pointed out. ‘There are strongly-held views within the Labor Party as well.’
This was after Pats had referred to an open letter calling for the federal government to launch a public inquiry into puberty blockers as being ‘signed by people like Tony Abbott’. In fact the letter in question was signed by over 100 public figures, including loads of medical heavies – there’s an OAM and an AM amongst them, and a few profs. Among the signatories there are also three detransitioners, and heaps of academics. And yes, there are politician signatories too, and they are mostly from the Liberal Party; but not all of them. And then there are the feminists: It’d sure astonish Susan Hawthorne of Spinifex Press, or Anna Kerr of the Feminist Legal Clinic, to find themselves described as ‘people like Tony Abbott’!
But the most intriguing thing Pats didn’t tell us about the federal government’s announcement is probably something she didn’t know. She was so set on presenting the federal government announcement as the result of ‘pressure’ from ‘people like Tony Abbott’ that she missed the hints – provided to her by Eloise Brook and Anna Cody – that the initiative for the federal government review came from quite a different quarter, namely the kid-transer lobby itself.
Ged Kearney, Assistant Health Minister, spilled the beans on this on Twitter and Instagram, revealing that the idea for the review came from an approach to the government made ‘recently’ by AusPATH and Transcend, another kid-transer lobby group. She also revealed that AusPATH and Transcend would be consulted ‘very closely’ during the review. This all came as a bit of a surprise to critics of the medicalised gender-affirming treatment approach, with Professor Patrick Parkinson – one such critic – commenting that there was ‘a vast gulf’ between what the Health Minister had announced the review was to do, and what Kearney had said about it.
Kearney’s revelations suggest the whole point of the federal review – apart from taking the steam out of a possible Coalition attack in the forthcoming election campaign – may be to deliver a further victory to the kid-transer lobby by introducing GP-level prescription of puberty blockers, or even over-the-counter accessibility. This is something Brook alluded to obliquely in his interview with Pats, when he spoke about there being ‘other ways, or ways outside of the really overstretched clinics’; and about how ‘our children and young people’ are ‘incredibly capable of making those decisions themselves’; and about leaving ‘tertiary institutes and those clinics’ to deal just with ‘more complex cases’. Pats, however, didn’t twig. Or perhaps deliberately decided not to pursue.
Kearney’s tweet was published at 4:22pm on 31st January; at that point in time Pats was already on air, 22 minutes into her program, though she had yet to speak to Eloise Brook or any of her other interlocutors about the health minister’s announcement. It certainly would’ve been a more interesting program if she’d drilled down on Brook about AusPATH’s influence on the government plan, and just what the kid-transer lobby expects to get out of it; but Pats being Pats, she probably wouldn’t have, even if she’d been aware of Kearney’s revelations.
She wouldn’t have wanted to jeopardise her chances of hosting an ACON/AWEI event one day.