The ABC's True Believers

The Four Corners episode on gender medicine

Tonight on Four Corners, our ABC are trying to mimic balanced reporting on the scandal in the Australian public hospital system. If you are unaware, Australian public health has been bullied by activist into ideologically based treatment of children with gender distress and doctors are starting to blow whistles.  The mythology of a gender soul that can be affirmed with body modification and mass social gaslighting has injected itself into public hospitals, schools and urban mythology very quickly in Australia.

The Four Corners program is being produced by Patricia Karvelas, a relentless advocate for gender soul mythology. Today Karvelas has given us a snippet into the programme with a 3000 word essay on the issue, that does raise some of the issues that “our side” have been putting forward, albeit shrouded in the characteristic language of activism. 

Karavelas frames the story as a controversy about the one hospital that does seem to have rejected the affirmation method and will not transition children, Sydney’s Westmead hospital.

Karavelas does mention “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”, but calls it a “theory” that gender dysphoria can be caused by peer influence and social media, and that it is “contested”, most notably by the Australian Psychological Society.  Medical associations are becoming publicly divided in Australia over the “gender issue”.  

We saw this on the weekend when the Endocrine Society of Australia (ESA) responded to an article in the Australian about dissent among endocrinologists to the affirmation model of treatment of gender dysphoria, with an embarrassingly post on Twitter. The post by the ESA not only includes the trans flag but shows a snapshot of the Australian’s journalists email advising them of the story, where she uses the traditional greeting “Dear sirs”.  The ESA criticised journalist Natasha Robinson with hashtags #WomenInStem #Newscorp, maybe thinking they would attract the support of anti Newscorp activist, feminist and trans activists.

Unfortunately, the post didn’t go as expected and the ESA had to hide comments on their post before turning comments off altogether. The retweets of the post show a story of unhappy backlash to the childish flippancy on the issue of halting healthy puberty in children and encouraging males to feed infants from their nipples.   No wonder Karevelas has announced she is leaving Twitter for Threads.

Neither Karevelas, the ESA or The Australian Psychological Society have raised any alternative credible theory to social contagion as an explanation for the massive rise in gender dysphoria in adolescent girls. The only theory I have heard is activists claiming that the increase is because of societal acceptance for the transgender soul.  The logical problems with this, given the cohort identifying as “transgender”, are too extensive to cover here. The story itself does mention that research by Westmead indicates that the cohort identifying as “transgender” have extraordinary high rates of co-morbidity including family trauma, the likelihood that children with an authentic gender soul being disproportionately born in families where they are subject to trauma is unlikely.  If the trauma was because their gender soul was being rejected by hateful families we would still see a proportionate number of children coming from accepting families “coming out”.

Karvelas uses an example of a child suiciding (who was a patient of Westmead) in the story in a sickeningly unethical way. The story implied that the female child who identified as a boy, took her own life because she wasn’t able to have her puberty stopped, something that Karvelas is grossly unqualified to judge.  The story indicates that the doctors had made the eating disorder the priority, but includes quotes from the child’s social worker and grandmother that strongly suggest that the life-saving factor that was denied was puberty suppressants.

For a journalist of the national broadcaster to make this assessment is grossly negligent.  The message to young people is that the stopping of puberty is lifesaving for girls who don’t want puberty to change her body, and that suicide is a logical action in this case.  I can’t believe they allow this to be published on the taxpayer dollar.  

The horrible truth is that if rapid onset gender dysphoria is legitimate, then the ABC and Karavelas herself have been actively participating in a social hysteria and moral panic that is leading to the completely unnecessary sterilisation and bodily mutilation of young people, disproportionately girls and disproportionately lesbians.

For me, it has taken some courage to accept that our society is again targeting homosexuals for medical intervention in order to make them heterosexual.  This has also included some honesty about the misogyny and homophobia that is present in my own religion, evangelical Christianity, because one of the key players in the rise of affirmation psychiatry in Queensland is of the same religious persuasion as I am. 

Dr Stephen Stathis, will be interviewed on Four Corners tonight and he has been a key player in the establishment of gender clinics in Queensland.  Rumours abound that Stathis has been actively blocking an inquiry into the practices of these clinics and how they have seen Queensland become so enthusiastic in embracing the medical intervention of gender non-conforming children. 

Stathis, in a video I analysed on a podcast with Kit Kowalski, outlined his own contradictory theory about the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, part of which his complete disregarding of “sexuality” as a factor in the gender non-conforming child.

Not talking about sexuality in children is very legitimate in context, and I have myself said that children don’t have a sexuality.  But of all the places we should disregard the future sexuality of a child, gender medicine is not one of them.  The reality is that gender non-conformity in children is the only pre-indicator of homosexuality we know about. This does not mean that gender non-conforming children will later identify as homosexual, but if you don’t talk to children about sexuality and you only talk to them about gender, as Stathis insists we do, you are disproportionately targeting children who will later identify as homosexual with completely wrong information about the distress they are feeling.  The message that its OK to be homosexual, will not come from the office of Dr Stephen Stathis.

Anyway I wanted to write these thoughts before the Four Corners program tonight and Kit and I will be giving an analysis of the program on the Dollhouse this coming week.